220 People. One Microphone. Zero Regrets.
On community, vulnerability hangovers, and the magic of scrappy imperfect art. If you've ever shown up fully, weirdly, as yourself and then spent the next morning second guessing every single moment,
Here’s what I want to remind you about creativity: it requires a commitment to your own bizarre instincts.
Was leading 220 people in a spontaneous rendition of The Lonely Goatherd objectively strange? Absolutely. But for those three minutes we created something that existed nowhere else in the universe. Just us, yodeling like idiots in a tiny little theater.
That’s magic. Even if it’s messy magic.
The Tightrope
Last night I performed for 220 members of my community. Not some anonymous crowd. My people. And there’s a stark difference between playing to strangers and prancing around with a microphone and lights in front of people who sort of know you as the woman in town who is an actress and produces her own concerts. Cringe. 😬
But it went really well. And I want to resist the urge to say oh it was no biggie, this is just what I do. Because no. It was hard work.
The memorization. The ticket sales. The rehearsal with the band. Working out charts. Doing new material on the fly. Having my daughter perform with me. Nine voice students. An audience singalong. And let me just say, it is a tightrope walk trying to channel your most authentic self while maintaining professional quality while keeping things buoyant enough that nobody feels the weight of your anxiety that you only had one rehearsal with the band because anything more is too expensive.
Whew. That was a long sentence. The concert felt a little like that too.
The Morning After
And then, because this is how the human brain works, I woke up to the vulnerability hangover.
That voice: that bit dragged, right? Everyone noticed when the mic cut out. They’re definitely in group chats right now dissecting how full of myself I am.
I’ve been around this psychic merry-go-round enough times to recognize it for the carnival ride it is. After two decades of this I know when something worked. This worked. It was scrappy, but it worked.
Part of me desperately wants to justify all of it. To explain why I do this. But that’s just my ego trying to control how others perceive me. And I’m not interested in being someone so stuck in what others think that they stay put until they cease to exist.
The Kintsugi Argument
It’s easy to get caught up in producing work that, as Henry Oliver from The Common Reader puts it, leads people to pretend to enjoy art for social reasons.
But I think what we actually need is the unpolished kind. The Kintsugi kind. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, silver, or platinum lacquer, emphasizing the beauty of the imperfection rather than hiding it. The history of the object made visible rather than erased.
It helps us to see someone standing in the spotlight, slightly terrified, doing it anyway. The unfiltered human, not another airbrushed performance run through a filter, autotuned, carefully charted to look spontaneous.
I’m guilty of that too sometimes. We all are.
So yes, I may have forgotten the second verse. Forgot to bring my readers out for the singalong. Couldn’t read my set list because the font was too small. Kicked over a water bottle. Forgot the order of things.
But I showed up.
Fully.
Weirdly.
As myself.
And you know what I’m thinking? That’s the whole point
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