Hi.
I’d blink my eyes a bit, and regard my new human friend, while they regarded me.
As they dropped money in my hat, I would lock my eyes onto theirs, and think:
Thank you.
*blink*
Here. Take a flower.
*blink*
And if I was in a particularly good mood:
I love you.
*blink*
What I hadn’t anticipated was the sudden, powerful encounters with people—especially lonely people who looked like they hadn’t connected with anyone in ages. I was amazed by the intimate moments of prolonged eye contact happening on the busy city sidewalk as traffic whizzed by, as sirens blared, as street vendors hawked their wares and activists thrust flyers at every passerby, as bedraggled transients tried to sell the local homeless community newspaper to rushing commuters…where more than a second or two of a direct, silent gaze between strangers is usually verboten.
My eyes would say:
Thank you. I see you.
And their eyes would say:
Nobody ever sees me.
Thank you.
Late one night at a yoga retreat a few years ago, a teacher asked a group of us to try to remember the first instance in our childhoods when we noticed that things were, for lack of a more clinical term, “not okay.” My answer was so quick to come and so deeply revealing that it made me laugh out loud. It is, in fact, my earliest intact memory. I was three.
There was a tall wooden staircase in our home, and one day I toppled all the way from the second floor to the first. I sharply remember that Am I going to die? slow-motion panic as I tumbled head over heels in a bouncing, cartoon blur. I was uninjured, but the fall had been traumatizing, and I ran, weeping and discombobulated, into the kitchen to recount the epic incident to my family.
Here’s what I remember.1 The kitchen was full of people: my mother, probably my stepfather, maybe my three older siblings, maybe some other random adults.
And none of them believed me.
They thought I was making it up. Trying to get attention. Exaggerating. Dramatizing.
And there I was, thirty-two years old, at a yoga retreat, desperately trying to find myself, and realizing that everything I’d been doing in my life, artistically, could be summed up like this:
PLEASE BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL. NO REALLY, IT HAPPENED. IT HURT.
And I sat there and laughed and laughed.
And cried. And laughed. At myself.
It was so embarrassing.
I laughed thinking about all the ridiculous stunts I’d pulled as an introverted, angry, punk teenager, dressing like an outlandish freak but being too insecure and afraid to talk to anybody. I laughed thinking about myself as an antisocial college senior who plonked her naked-and-covered-in-stage-blood body onto different spots around campus pretending to be dead as part of her postmodern performance art thesis, attempting to elicit some sort of reaction from the other students.
PLEASE. BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL. IT HURTS.
I laughed at the canon of heart-wrenching piano songs I’d written as a teenager, which added up to one screaming, pounding, screaming, pounding manifesto with a single, unified theme:
PLEASE. BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL.
I laughed thinking about the hundreds of hours I’d spent standing on a box, gazing silently and wistfully at passersby, handing them flowers in exchange for money. I laughed thinking about working in strip clubs during that same period, gyrating to Nick Cave and staring into the eyes of lonely, drunken strangers, challenging them to look into my soul instead of my crotch:
PLEASE. BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL.
I laughed thinking about all the nights I’d howled on concert hall stages, screaming those same old teenage songs at the top of my lungs, as aggressively and honestly and believably as I possibly could, to the point that I lost my voice almost every single night for a year and had to get surgery to cut away the rough, red nodes that had grown on my vocal cords as a result of too much yelling:
PLEASE. BELIEVE ME.
I laughed thinking about every single artist I knew—every writer, every actor, every filmmaker, every crazed motherfucker who had decided to forgo a life of predictable income, upward mobility, and simple tax returns, and instead pursued a life in which they made their living trying to somehow turn their dot-connecting brains inside out and show the results to the world—and how, maybe, it all boiled down to one thing:
BELIEVE ME.
Believe me.
I’m real.
Here’s the thing: all of us come from some place of wanting to be seen, understood, accepted, connected.
Every single one of us wants to be believed.
Artists are often just…louder about it.
At that same yoga retreat, we stood and faced each other in pairs, really looking at each other from a close distance. We were told to simply BE with the other person, maintaining eye contact, with no social gestures like laughing, smiling, or winking to put ourselves at ease.
Grown women and men cried. Really and truly sobbed.
When we were finished with the exercise, we talked about how it had felt. The thread echoed again and again: many people had never felt so seen by another person. Seen without walls, without judgment…just seen, acknowledged, accepted. The experience was—for so many—painfully rare.
Even cynical people got caught up in the romance of The Bride. People have a Thing with Brides.
I suppose I banked on this when I bought the dress. Who could hate a BRIDE?
There’s something magical, pure, beautiful. The virgin. The holy. The hopeful. Whatever.
I spent a lot of time on that box enjoying the irony of the fact that I was a bride for a living, stuck in this dress, while philosophically I knew I didn’t want to get married. Ever.
All my parents, stepparents, and exes-of-stepparents, the whole lot of them, looked crazy to me. Why keep getting married and divorced, people? Why not just DATE?
I would not make their mistake. Even if I was in love.
I wanted to be free. Unfettered.
Marriage always looked like hell to me.
When a stranger put money into the hat, I would try to emanate an immense amount of gratitude for this savior who had momentarily freed me from my frozen pose. I wouldn’t look at the donor immediately. I would be coy. I would look at the sky. I would look at the crowd. I would look at the street. I would look at my vase. And then, once I had selected the perfect flower with as much graceful fluidity as possible, I would finally gaze at my new friend, never smiling with my mouth but always with my eyes, and lean my body forward ever so slightly, holding out the flower delicately clutched between my thumb and forefinger.
This always reminded me of the act of communion: that small, quiet, intimate moment when the priest proffers the wafer, intimately instructing you to ingest the body of Christ. (I was pretty bored in church as a kid, but I always loved that ritual. I also liked the singing bits.)
So, a dollar into the hat. I would gaze lovingly at my new human friend, my head filling up with a little silent monologue that sounded something like this:
The body of Christ, the cup of salvation.
Regard this holy flower, human friend.
Take it, it’s for you. A gift from my heart.
Oh, you want a picture? Okay! We can take a picture.
I’ll just hold this flower and wait while your girlfriend gets out her camera.
The body of Christ, the cup of salvation. The flower of patience.
Oh. I see your girlfriend’s camera batteries are dead.
Now your other friend is getting his camera out.
This is all fine. Because I am the picture of Zen and in the moment.
The body of Christ, the cup of salvation, the flower of forgiveness.
So come to me, human friend! Nuzzle into the folds of my white gown, we will pose together. With love.
Oh, new human friend, your friend with the camera is dr
unk, isn’t he?
May he find peace. May he find solace. May he find the shutter button.
Okay. Now you finally have your picture and you have high-fived your drunken friend.
Now please take this flower I have been holding out to you. My sacrament.
The body of Christ, the cup of salvation, the flower of oneness and joy and…
HEY.
Why are you walking away?
I have a flower for you!
A gift! A holy token of love!
The body of Christ!!
TAKE THE FUCKING FLOWER.
For real, dude…you don’t want my flower?
Jesus okay fine.
I will just hang my head in sorrowful shame for all that is wrong with the world.
As he walked away, I would hang my head in sorrowful shame for all that was wrong with the world.
And if I was, by my own estimation, nailing my job, everybody watching this interaction on the sidewalk would shout after the dude, as he walked away with his drunk friend and girlfriend:
HEY! HEY YOU!! SHE’S GOT A FLOWER FOR YOU!!! TAKE THE FLOWER!!!!
The dude would usually bend to the peer pressure and come back to take it. But not always.
Sometimes I just had to let him go.
Girls, for the record, almost always took the flower. The ones who refused? Sometimes they seemed to think they were doing me a favor by rejecting the flower, gesturing:
No, no! I couldn’t possibly! Keep it for someone else!
But they didn’t understand that they were breaking my heart. Gifting them my flower—my holy little token—was what made me feel like an artist, someone with something to offer, instead of a charity case.
Over the years, though, I got used to it, and instead of taking it personally, I began to understand:
Sometimes people just don’t want the flower.
Sometimes you have to let them walk away.
Joshua Bell, a world-class violinist, teamed up with the Washington Post for a social experiment in which he played his $3.5 million Stradivarius one morning in the L’Enfant Plaza subway station in Washington, DC. During his performance, which ran about forty-five minutes, seven people stopped to listen for a minute or more, twenty-seven contributed money, and he made a total of $32 (not counting the $20 thrown in his hat by the one woman who recognized him). More than a thousand people had walked by him without stopping.
In the aftermath, it was easy for many people to shake their heads at the perceived shame of it all: how could music so valuable—some of these same people might be paying as much as $150 a ticket to watch him play the same program at the local symphony hall the following night—become so worthless on the street?
But if you watch the hidden camera footage of the stunt, and note the time of day (morning rush hour) and the demographics (busy government employees on their way to work), it starts to make more sense. Those mindless barbarians who had no idea what they were witnessing were commuters on their way to work who couldn’t afford to stop at that exact moment to appreciate art. Certain art hungers for context. We can’t blame these passersby; we can simply applaud and feel gratitude for the few people who slowed and cocked their heads, heard the voice of god speaking via Bach speaking via Josh Bell’s Stradivarius, and feel joy and hope that a few folks actually threw in a dollar or two.
As for me, it took a few months of hardcore statue work to really find my footing and develop this sense of deep gratitude for the sliver of the population, however small, that was willing to tune their head frequencies to the Art Channel for a moment, interrupting their march to work.
That ongoing sense of appreciation shaped my constitution in a fundamental way. I didn’t just feel a fleeting sense of thanks for each generous person who stopped; I had been hammered into a gratitude-shaped vessel and would never take for granted those willing to slow down and connect.
There is a certain sense of indiscriminate gratitude that is essential to hone if you’re going to survive in the arts. You can’t really afford to be choosy about your audience, nor about how they wish to repay you for your art. In cash? In help? In kindness?
Each of these currencies possesses a distinct value. Dita Von Teese, a star in the contemporary burlesque scene, once recounted something she’d learned in her early days stripping in LA. Her colleagues—bleach-blond dancers with fake tans, Brazilian wax jobs, and neon bikinis—would strip bare naked for an audience of fifty guys in the club and be tipped a dollar by each guy. Dita would take the stage wearing satin gloves, a corset, and a tutu, and do a sultry striptease down to her underwear, confounding the crowd. And then, though forty-nine guys would ignore her, one would tip her fifty dollars.
That man, Dita said, was her audience.
This is exactly what I learned standing on the box, then while playing in bars in my first band, and, later, when I turned to crowdfunding. It was essential to feel thankful for the few who stopped to watch or listen, instead of wasting energy on resenting the majority who passed me by.
Feeling gratitude was a skill I honed on the street and dragged along with me into the music industry. I never aimed to please everyone who walked by, or everyone listening to the radio. All I needed was…some people. Enough people. Enough to make it worth coming back the next day, enough to make rent and put food on the table. And enough so I could keep making art.
It is an interesting thing, a white-painted face. It’s a historically rich signifier, the onion layer of clown-white cream covering the skin like a paper-thin mask, a universal invitation from one human being to another that says:
Staring at my face and making eye contact is acceptable and encouraged.
Only now do I realize why it made so much sense to keep the white face paint as I transitioned from being a statue to being in a rock band. Our Weimar-cabaret-inspired makeup was a signature of The Dresden Dolls. Often mocked (especially by the other plaid-clad indie Boston bands who referred to us as “the gay mime band”), often misunderstood (by the journalists who asked what our alter egos, à la Ziggy Stardust or Alice Cooper, were supposed to “represent”), and often seen reproduced on the faces of our hardcore fans as a symbol of solidarity, the white face paint functioned as a freak flag.
I liked giving permission to people to look at my face. Not so much because I wanted them to LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME, but because I wanted them to feel invited to meet my gaze and share a moment. And I knew the game worked. I knew that, having invited them into my face like a host invites a guest into a kitchen, I would be equally invited to look back into theirs. Then we could see each other. And in that place lies the magic.
I see you.
BELIEVE ME.
Ask any great actor: sometimes the mask is the tool that lets you get at the truth.
There is something about silence.
One night in a candlelit restaurant in San Francisco, shortly after we got married, I asked Neil if we could just write each other notes during the whole meal. In real time, like texting, but with pens and paper.
The waiter thought we were slightly strange, but by the end of the meal we’d shared a degree of intimate information that we probably wouldn’t have if we’d just been sitting there chatting. And we could illustrate our points with pie charts and cartoons. And we really enjoyed our food, because we weren’t literally talking through it.
The couple next to us asked what we were doing, and when we told them, they ordered a pad of paper and two pens from the waiter.
One of the things I loved best about The Bride was how, though she was silent, she could make it possible for people to talk to one another.
I was a ready-made conversation piece. And nothing delighted me more than to see people with nothing in common chatting about The Bride the way they’d chat about an ambulance pulling up, or a flash thunderstorm.
Excuse me, is that a person?
Dude, is that a real person?
Wow, is that a real statue?
Oh, look! W
hat does he do when you give him money?
There are ingredients that create safe space for communion. It would make me absolutely beam with joy when I saw strangers giving each other money, saying:
Wait, hey! Take this dollar, put it in her hat! You gotta see this! That’s a real person!
It gave me faith in humanity. Even if they thought I was in drag.
Anthony was my best friend.
I’ve been trying, since I was a kid, to explain to people exactly WHAT he was to me when I was growing up. He wasn’t quite my guru, wasn’t quite my parent, wasn’t quite my teacher.
I usually attempted to describe him by mumbling something that included the word “mentor,” but I mostly found myself satisfied with this run-on portrait: Anthony met me when I was nine and taught me everything I know about love and knows me better than anybody and we still talk almost every single day even if I’m touring in Japan.
He loved telling the story of one of our first interactions, soon after he moved in next door to my parents’ house on the quiet road where I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts.
It was a winter night, after a big snowfall in our little suburban neighborhood, and he and his wife, Laura, were throwing a dinner party. I ambled across my lawn over to his and started pelting their window with snowballs. I thought it was funny. He did, too, sort of.
He came to the door.
I want a snowball fight, I said.
I can’t, he said. But I’ll get you back later.
And he returned to the dinner party, back into the warmth and fire and wine of the adult world behind him.
Then, according to the story, I returned about twenty minutes later, and started pelting their giant picture window with snowballs a second time.
He came to the door again.
What the hell?
You said you’d get me later, I said. I’m here to get gotten.
Amanda, it’s been twenty minutes, he said. I meant later…like…tomorrow.
I don’t actually remember this happening, but I know the story by heart, because he’s told it so many times. I also don’t remember the first time I hugged him, but he tells that story, too.
The Art of Asking Page 4