The Art of Asking

by Amanda Palmer

  I used to be the tight one

  The perfect fit

  Funny how those compliments can

  Make you feel so full of it

  I can shuffle, cut, and deal

  But I can’t draw a hand

  I can’t draw a lot of things

  I hope you understand

  I’m not exceptionally shy

  But I’ve never had a man

  That I could look straight in the eye

  And tell my secret plans

  I can take a vow

  And I can wear a ring

  And I can make you promises but

  They won’t mean a thing

  Can’t you just do it for me, I’ll pay you well

  Fuck, I’ll pay you anything if you could end this

  Can’t you just fix it for me, it’s gone berserk,

  Fuck, I’ll give you anything if

  You can make the damn thing work

  Can’t you just fix it for me, I’ll pay you well,

  Fuck, I’ll pay you anything

  If you can end this

  Hello, I love you won’t you tell me your name?

  Hello, I’m good for nothing

  will you

  love

  me

  just

  the

  same

  —from The Dresden Dolls, 2003

  I was twenty-two, I’d just graduated from college, and I really, really didn’t want to get a job.

  Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t lazy. I wanted to work. But I had no desire to get a JOB job.

  Growing up as an über-emotional teenage songwriter and theater nerd, I faced a bewildering and bottomless chasm between what I wanted to become—a Real Artist—and how one actually, well…becomed it. Though I worshipped daily at the altar of MTV, I didn’t know any famous musicians, so I couldn’t ask them how they had becomed. I didn’t even know any non-famous musicians. All the adults I’d ever encountered—my parents, my friends’ parents—all had “grown-up” jobs: mysterious, complicated, white-collar jobs, jobs in tall buildings, jobs that involved computers, jobs about which I understood absolutely nothing and in which I had no interest.

  When people asked me What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up, I’d lie and try to just give them the most impressive answer I could think of: A lawyer! A doctor! An architect! An astronaut! A veterinarian! (I liked my cat. I figured I qualified.)

  The truth just sounded too stupid. I wanted to be a Rock Star. Not a pop star. A ROCK STAR. An artistic one, a cool one. Like Prince. Like Janis Joplin. Like Patti Smith. Like the dudes in The Cure. The ones who looked like they Lived Their Art. I loved playing the piano, I loved writing songs, and I knew that if I had any choice in the matter, THAT’S the job I wanted.

  But I had no clue how anybody got such a job, or what being a wage-earning artist meant in practical terms. I’d barely caught a glimpse of a working artist in his or her natural habitat until I attended my first rock concert at the age of eleven and saw that Cyndi Lauper was a real person. Until that moment, I had been suspicious that Cyndi Lauper, Prince, and Madonna were, in fact, being convincingly played by actors.

  Furthermore, the liberal arts education that my parents had generously broken their backs to be able to afford, because they considered it a crucial necessity for “survival in the real world,” had done a shocking amount of nothing to prepare me for the cold truth of my chosen career path.

  Not that college was all impractical theory or wasted time, and I harbor no regrets. I learned how to hand-develop my own film in a darkroom. I learned the basics of theatrical lighting design. I studied Chaucer, John Cage, postmodern performance art, post-WWII German experimental filmmakers and Post-Apocalyptic/Eschatological Beliefs Throughout A Variety Of World Religions And Fictional Genres. I even learned—not in the classroom, of course—how to construct a potato cannon that could shoot as far as 250 feet (the distance to the rival dorm across the street) using a long piece of PVC piping, and a bottle of Aqua Net extra-hold hairspray. (And a potato.)

  I also learned over those four years that a diet of hummus, cookies, and cereal makes you fat, that it’s impossible to tap a keg unless it’s been properly chilled, and that DJ-ing a college radio show from three to five in the morning doesn’t expand your social circle one iota. And that heroin kills people.

  But I did not learn how to be a rock star, or, for that matter, an employable, wage-earning bohemian; Wesleyan University did not offer any practical courses in that department. And there didn’t seem to be anybody hanging around that I could ask.

  Now I was done, I had the degree, I’d made my family happy. And after enrolling, panicking, and quickly withdrawing from a full-ride scholarship to get my master’s degree in “anything I wanted” at Heidelberg University (I’d figured out, by that point, that academia was making me miserable, and drunk), I flew home to Boston from Germany with two giant suitcases and no real plan about how to Start My Real Life.

  I considered my situation:

  I knew I wanted to be a musician.

  I knew I didn’t want a Real Job.

  I knew I had pay for food and a place to live.

  I took a barista job, rented a room in a dilapidated share house in Somerville, Massachusetts, and decided I’d be a statue.

  Toscanini’s Ice Cream, where I worked as a sorbet-scooping espresso puller along with a motley bunch of twentysomethings, was a local operation with three Cambridge locations owned and lovingly managed by an incredible guy named Gus Rancatore. A humble press quote permanently etched into the front window of the store read:

  “THE BEST ICE CREAM IN THE WORLD”—THE NEW YORK TIMES.

  The baristas were assured four shifts a week at $9.50 an hour plus tips, which was enough to live on, and everyone who worked there ate a lot of ice cream, which was free to the employees.

  My expenses included rent ($350 a month), food other than ice cream (I could survive on about $100 a month), and the extras: cigarettes, beer, records, bike repairs, and occasionally, clothes. I’d never had expensive taste and bought most of my wardrobe at the dollar-a-pound section of a used clothing store in Cambridge called The Garment District, which is where I found The Dress.

  Building the statue was easy: I poked around the vintage shops trying to spot an inspiring, long-sleeved, high-necked, monochromatic costume fit for a statue, and found an antique bridal gown that fit the bill and cost only $29. PERFECT, I thought. I’d be a bride. All white. Easy. Sorrowful. Mysterious. Coy. Compelling. WISTFUL! How could anyone hate a bride?

  I also bought some white face paint, a full-length lace veil, and a pair of long, white opera gloves. Then I went to the wig shop and completed my ensemble with a black Bettie-Page-style bob. I bought a glass vase from a thrift shop and spray-painted it white on the sidewalk outside of my apartment.

  I started the next day.

  I decided it would be perfect to hand out flowers as little tokens of gratitude, but I didn’t know exactly how many I would need. I certainly wasn’t going to buy flowers when they were growing freely all up and down the Charles River—I had spent the last of my savings on the getup and was pretty much broke.

  So I took an hour-long amble along the banks of the river that flowed gracefully alongside the Harvard dorms, feeling very entrepreneurial, resourceful, and bohemian, picking any flower with an actual blossom that looked presentable until I had about fifty. I harvested three stray milk crates from an alleyway, ducked into the employees-only bathroom in the basement of Toscanini’s, and donned my costume.

  Then, heart slamming, I ventured into the main intersection of Harvard Square. Please picture this moment: I was walking on a standard city sidewalk, on a hot summer day, in a bridal gown with my face painted white, carrying three milk crates, wearing a black wig and clompy, black German combat boots. I got stares.

  I selected a relatively well-trafficked spot on the brick sidewalk in front of the subway station, arranged my milk crates in a pyramid, covered the
crate-pedestal with a spare white skirt, clambered atop, straightened my back, raised my spray-painted vase full of wildflowers in the air, and…stood still.

  The first few moments up there were terrifying.

  I felt stupid, actually.

  Vulnerable. Silly.

  It was lucky that I was covered in white face paint—my face burned bright red beneath it for the first ten minutes, I could feel it.

  The sheer absurdity of what I was doing was not lost on me.

  You’re painted white and standing on a box.

  You’re painted white and standing on a box.

  You are painted white and you are STANDING ON A BOX.

  You are so full of shit.

  My mantra of masochism broke the minute the first few people curiously wandered up to me. A small crowd formed at a respectful distance and a five-year-old boy approached me, wide-eyed. Into the empty hat at my feet, he cautiously placed the dollar his mother had given him.

  I jerked my arms alive, as if in shock, dramatically hovered my hand above my white-painted vase, gazed at him, then selected and silently handed him one of the flowers.

  He shrieked with delight.

  It worked.

  Then somebody else put a dollar in.

  Then another.

  Then another.

  At the end of an hour, the bouquet of flowers was gone.

  I climbed down. I schlepped my crates back to Toscanini’s, stashed them furtively in the basement, said hi to my co-workers, slipped behind the counter to make myself an iced coffee with a scoop of free hazelnut ice cream, and sat down at one of the little metal tables outside the shop to count my hat. There was some loose change, but mostly bills. Someone had thrown in a five.

  I had made $38 in an hour. On a good tip day at the store, I made $75. In six hours.

  I washed my face in the bathroom and walked back to the center of the Square, with the wad of dollar bills in my pocket.

  Right at the intersection of Mass Ave and JFK Street, it hit me. I stopped short, stunned by the realization of what had just happened:

  I can do this as a job.

  I can do this every day that it’s warm and not rainy.

  If I just made thirty-eight dollars in an hour, I can work three hours and make about a hundred dollars in a day.

  I don’t have to scoop ice cream anymore.

  I can make my own schedule.

  I don’t have to have a boss.

  Nobody can ever fire me.

  I WILL NEVER HAVE TO HAVE A REAL JOB AGAIN.

  And technically?

  I never really did.

  I had dipped my toe into the living statuary experience before, albeit briefly. While drinking seriously, studying casually, and waitressing part-time at a beer garden (free beer!) during a year abroad in a sleepy little German town called Regensburg, I’d decided to try supplementing my income with a beta-version of The Bride: a trippy, white-faced, wheel-of-fortune ballerina statue I named Princess Roulette. I stood frozen in the center of a chalk pie chart I drew in the cobblestoned town square. I’d divided it up into eight sections, each with its own little prop or basket, and I’d wait for a stranger to place a coin in my hat, at which point I’d close my eyes, spin in a circle, and land with a jerk, pointing at a random space. I’d then mechanically proffer up a small gift (an exotic coin, a candy, an antique key), unless, of course, I’d landed in one of the “suicide” spots, in which case I mimed a clownish mini-tragedy, killing myself with a variety of prop weapons. I would spin, stop, open my eyes, trudge slowly over to the waiting bottle of poison while looking incredibly somber, wipe an imaginary tear from my eye, pick up the bottle, drink its invisible contents, and then fall to the cobblestones, gagging and twitching. (I also had a toy gun.) Once I had achieved full corpse pose, I would hope for applause, get up, dust off my glittery tutu, and jauntily return to my frozen position in the center.

  It was whimsical but grisly, sort of Harold and Maude meets Marcel Marceau. The Germans didn’t quite know how to react.

  One landing spot was neither gift nor suicide: it was the “tea set,” which was supposed to be a jackpot of sorts. If I landed there, I’d grab the hand of my victim, whom I would wordlessly invite to sit on the ground to enjoy an imaginary cup of mime-tea using a vintage collection of cracked cups and saucers I’d bought at a flea market. I assumed that this activity would be utterly thrilling to every passerby. I was sorely disappointed by the fact that not every German took me up on my theatrical offer to enjoy a cup of mime-tea. What gave?

  It never occurred to me that staging my own comic suicide with different props in the middle of a small-town plaza and inviting strangers to sit on the ground probably wasn’t the most effective way to win the hearts and deutsche marks of Bavarian families out on their Sunday strolls.

  Princess Roulette quickly taught me a lot about the practicalities and economics of being a living statue/performance artist, and a little bit about Germans. The biggest takeaways:

  1- It is not profitable to give someone a Thing that cost you two deutsche marks if the person you are giving it to only gives you fifty pfennigs.

  2- If you are Performing an Action in exchange for Money, and each Action takes two minutes, and obnoxious eight-year-old Bavarian boys are putting ten-pfennig coins in your basket one after the other while people with real deutsche marks look on with amusement, you are not Maximizing your Performance Time.

  3- Germans wearing nice clothes do not like to sit on the ground.

  Although I performed as Princess Roulette only four or five times, I quickly learned that the relationship between a street performer and the street audience is a delicate one, one that adheres to a different contract than the one that exists between the stage performer and the ticket-buying audience. There’s a much greater element of risk and trust on both sides.

  I learned this the hard way on my very first day, when a friendly-looking man in his thirties walked by with his toddler daughter. Parents out on walks with their curious children are a godsend to street performers; they take great pleasure in supplying their kids with hat money and watching as their offspring experience a spontaneous, magical, and fully supervised interaction-with-a-stranger.

  This one, however, went a bit pear-shaped. The dad put a coin into my hat and I began spinning. As I opened my eyes, I saw that the little girl had wandered over to one of my roulette baskets and had helped herself to a huge handful of my gift candy. Upon seeing this, I was at a loss. This child was stealing my candy. I had never anticipated this problem. After considering, briefly, what the correct action was for my character, I looked the little three-year-old girl straight in the eye and, breaking my mime-silence, pretended to cry. Quietly, but committedly, I emitted a high-pitched, but measured, anguished whine of agony over the loss of my candy.

  This was not the correct thing to do.

  The little girl proceeded to burst into ACTUAL tears and let forth her own (far less measured) wail, and for a split second, our collective, pack-like moan of anguish in that little town square in Germany sounded like some kind of epic, Wagnerian cry of broken, senseless human loss and suffering…

  WHY??

  I stood frozen, in shock, as the horrified father scooped his emotionally assaulted daughter into his arms and flashed me that universally heartbreaking glare that says, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY CHILD?

  I felt really guilty, like I’d scarred this child for life and drained the joy out of any future trust-based interactions she might have with any street performers, actors, mimes, or human beings.

  I also felt—and this was a new emotion—like a bad artist.

  In that moment, something seismic shifted. I’d been viewing my role on the street as a performance artist who would share the gift of her weird, arty impulses with the amenable public. I’d grown up an experimental theater kid, writing, directing, and acting in my own surreal and morbid plays on school stages. I wasn’t an entertainer—I was making art, dammit. And though I
wasn’t afraid to disturb people, I never wanted to hurt them.

  This interaction made me realize that working in The Street wasn’t like working in the theater. The Street is different: nobody’s buying a ticket, nobody’s choosing to be there. On the street, artists succeed or fail by virtue of their raw ability to create a show in unexpected circumstances, to thoroughly entertain an audience that did not expect to be one, and to make random people care for a few minutes. The passersby are trusting you to give them something valuable in exchange for their time and attention, and (possibly) their dollars. Something skilled, unexpected, delightful, impressive, something moving. With few exceptions, they’re not giving you a dollar to confront and disturb them.

  That dad and his little girl didn’t want theater.

  They didn’t want to be provoked.

  They wanted to be entertained.

  But they also wanted something more. They wanted connection.

  It dawned on me, standing there in my white face paint and tutu, that I was effectively working in a service position: A strange combination of court jester, cocktail hostess, and minister. A strange, coin-operated jukebox of basic, kind, human encounters.

  I learned a lesson on my first day of Bride-ing: standing on a plastic milk crate becomes REALLY uncomfortable after a few minutes as you sink slowly into the middle. It’s hell on your knees.

  I would stand with my combat-boot-clad feet locked in place for half an hour, until the position became intolerable and I had to move. I would wait until I was between crowds, and then imperceptibly shift my weight from foot to foot, finding a new part of the crate to stand on. A few days later, I figured out that I could solve this problem by capping the milk crate with a square of hard plywood.

  In my mute, frozen state, time and space took on a fascinating new quality, measured from one liberated movement to another, and I created an internal spoken dialogue with the world around me. I figured that if I said things loud enough in my head, the message would shoot out through my eyes.