An Artist's Nightmare depicts the story of a professional theatre artist's return to his roots after a quarter century of a successful career in the big city. With his family in tow and a big dream to help rejuvenate a lackluster old automobile town, he forgot one thing: small town mentality. From the moment he opens his performing arts center in this provincial capital city, the theatre artist is dumbstruck by the mean-spirited rejection he receives at every turn. Local academic theatre persons ridicule his resume of real world experience, local directors dismiss his offers to collaborate, and the local media ignore his shows and exclude his work from local theatre awards while hypocritically treating his work with an odd discrimination that never gets explained. Fortunately he's good. And he survives the slim odds to succeed by finding students and families that believe in his work. An Artist's Nightmare is a thirty minute play-let that explores broad questions about the arts and community through the eyes of two local small town women; it is designed to provoke thought and ask larger universal questions regarding how the arts are played out in a provincial setting especially when mixing with the real world experience of an artist who has been to the heights of professional international experience.

In These five critical essays, Mark Ruhala gives us a look into a lens that magnifies the essential problems with aspects of our dysfunctioning society. He examines how children develop through schooling/education and how the performing arts make a huge difference in a child's life by living the experiences of an artist. He mockingly portrays the old kingdoms of yore against the same governing we use currently and the reflection of today's banker kings is obvious. The idea of self-control as a sign of maturity and of healthy raising of children, Mr. Ruhala shows that brain science backs this once common sense approach to working with children. In his exploration of how the arts are effected by the infusing of competitions so ubiquitous presently, Ruhala makes clear that we are moving away from the arts and creating a new hybrid that is subjective hierarchy covering the true and honest expression that only the arts can deliver to us. His final attack is on the health care idiocy and the phoney idea that reforming the current system will make any real changes in our health. True lifelong health must come from a different paradigm and Ruhala points the direction. These essays are meant to open the reader's mind to think in new ways and examine more closely the conditioned, accepted without reason ways we conduct our society today.

Serious comic relief for a WORLD OUT OF ORDER: ) From the Big Bang to the Big Bank to the Big Bust Serious comic relief... WORLD OUT OF ORDER: ( Z tells the story of Mankind's ascent to the top of the food chain and beyond. From the Big Bang to the Big Bank to the Big Bust of 2008, Z has fresh insights and a unique perspective on world events, old and new. While the rest of the slaves to the economy are busy with protecting their "stuff" the banks are printing money, out of thin air (as always) and giving it to themselves and then lending it out to the failing companies like GM, with interest Meanwhile the media and the rest of the population are asleep at the wheel where their automatic pilot is in full gear. Lulled into submission with gadgets and screens, Americans are ignorant of the truth of the Federal Reserve and the Money Power that dominates our lives in secretive and infiltrated ways. Folks have been led to believe this truth is not the truth by calling it a conspiracy, and the media, bought and owned by these financial elite, keep the official doctrine alive and well. With sarcastic and often scathingly black humor Z tells a story not told in our schools, universities, or anywhere in popular culture. Fear not, it is not pessimistic; rather it is hopeful in its final analyses of how mankind can overcome this present pitiful state of man destroying himself and his home. The solutions lie in the minds of the individual and the collective understanding of the interconnectedness of all things.

Nirvana Joe's - A New Play Nirvana Joe's is a one act play that convincingly portrays the open mindedness of youth to subvert an attempted rape while turning it into a relationship of love; a three way relationship. From the opening scene of two college freshman females surprisingly enjoying a night of lusty sexual fun, to the end of that same scene in which they are attacked by a rapist (another freshman but male) who breaks into their room, it is clear that this play will take a unique journey. The four scenes of the hour long play follow this relationship in freshman, sophomore, and junior years, while the fourth scene is their 10th anniversary eight years later. Nirvana Joe's explores relevant issues of today's campus life of university students, including the value of a college education itself in today's world, to more social issues like sexual mores, interpersonal relationships, and the hidden, untold costs of deceitful actions that we all commit without much awareness - what we might call "little white lies." While these three characters take an unconventional path, they land definitely as part of the conventional yuppie, upper middle class of America. This dichotomy is rife with persuasive realities that illustrate the possibility of this kind of happy menage-a-trois relationship in our world where money matters. The fact that it might end up a larger, happier relationship is almost too much to bear. But at Nirvana Joe's strange things happen.