He could have been anyone.
After my TED talk, I started discussing some of the finer points of my experience as a street performer on my blog, and I was surprised at the number of people who said in the comments: Before I saw your talk, I always thought of street performers as beggars. But now I see them as artists, so I always give them money.
Reading things like this broke and burst my heart at the same time, and pierced the core of the very issue I was trying to grapple with in the talk itself. If the mentality was so easily shifted, how could this be taken from the street to the Internet, where so many artists I knew were struggling to accept the legitimacy of their own calls for help?
I opened a discussion on my blog, one that I’d already seen reflected in the crowdfunding hall of mirrors over the past few years:
What was the difference between asking and begging?
A lot of people related their experience with their own local buskers: they saw their tips into the hat not as charity but as payment for a service.
If asking is a collaboration, begging is a less-connected demand: Begging can’t provide value to the giver; by definition, it offers no exchange. Here are the words that the blog commenters used over and over when trying to describe begging:
Manipulation, desperation, base, animal, last-ditch, manipulative, guilt, shame.
The key words that kept appearing in relation to asking:
Dignity, collaboration, exchange, vulnerability, reciprocity, mutual respect, comfort, love.
The top-voted comment on the blog, from a reader named Marko Fančović, nails it:
Asking is like courtship; begging, you are already naked and panting.
Asking is an act of intimacy and trust. Begging is a function of fear, desperation, or weakness. Those who must beg demand our help; those who ask have faith in our capacity for love and in our desire to share with one another.
On the street or on the Internet, this is what makes authentically engaging an audience, from one human being to another, such an integral part of asking.
Honest communication engenders mutual respect, and that mutual respect makes askers out of beggars.
People would put all sorts of weird shit in the hat. I never knew what I was going to find at the end of the day in addition to the collection of coins and bills; it was a little like opening up a fucked-up Christmas stocking. Every random gift made me giddy; people would throw in hand-scrawled thank-you notes on the backs of ATM receipts, little drawings they’d done while watching me, sticks of gum, phone numbers, photographs they’d taken of me, fruit, rocks, hand-woven bracelets, badly rolled joints, love poems.
Gus wasn’t my only patron in those early days; I had a whole collection. I became a kind of street-performing institution, and the locals had even given me a name: The Eight-Foot Bride, which I took as a compliment since I barely cleared seven foot six atop the milk crates.
There was the guy who managed a sandwich shop on the other side of the square, who loved The Eight-Foot Bride. One day I came in to get a burrito in between statue-ing shifts. My white face (I didn’t bother to remove my makeup between shows) was a dead giveaway. He asked me, full of excitement:
OOH! Are you the statue girl??
Yep. I’m the statue girl.
Your burritos are free forever. What you do is incredible.
You’re kidding.
The free burritos saved me at least $40 a week in food costs.
There was the guy who owned the old-fashioned tobacco shop next to Toscanini’s, which had a hidden balcony lined with tables reserved for chess players to rent for $2 an hour. He let me sit there without paying during my breaks, out of the sun, drinking my free coffee and musing in my journal, without being stared at or asked by any passing strangers why I was covered in makeup.
There was the florist. After my first day up on the box, I realized that the routine of picking flowers by the side of the river wouldn’t be very sustainable (and I didn’t want to single-handedly clean out Cambridge of flora), so I wandered into the local flower shop. I was faced with a puzzle: what kind of flower was pretty and substantial enough to give away, easy enough to hold, and not too expensive? I settled on daisy poms—which are sort of like daisies but not so willowy, and way cheaper. The shop was run by a mother-and-son team, and after buying flowers in there for a few consecutive days, I felt like I was a good enough customer to ask the son:
Do you maybe have any flowers you don’t…need? Like—any seconds or irregulars? Slightly banged up flowers that maybe you can’t sell…?
What do you need them for? he asked.
Well, it’s kind of weird. I’m a statue. I give them away when I move, to people who give me money.
He smiled.
Oh, you’re THAT girl.
He took me down to the basement and showed me a huge bucket of yesterday’s flowers, which were starting to just barely brown at the edges.
Knock yourself out, statue girl. Pick what you want. I’ll give you a great price.
After that, every few days, I’d walk to the florist and patiently wait for him to deal with whatever real customers he had. Then he’d examine his current daisy pom situation and give me the ones that were too wilted to sell but still fit for a street performer—for about a third of the regular price. Some days there just weren’t any rejects, but he’d still hand me a few bunches and make up a cheap price. He liked helping me. Sometimes he would throw in a few slightly wilting roses, and I’d make those the centerpiece of my bouquet for each show—saving a rose for the very last person who gave me a dollar, as a little floral finale.
People yelled abuse at me occasionally—sometimes from the sidewalk, sometimes from passing traffic.
The most common insults hurled my way included, but weren’t limited to (and it really helps to imagine these in a Boston accent, as that’s usually how they came packaged):
Nice costume, ya fuckin’ reetahd!
Hey baby, I’ll marry your ass!
Get off the sidewalk, freak!
What is this, Halloween? Hahahaha!!!
A very eighties-flavored insult was used a few times:
Get a life!
And then there was this one, shouted from a passing car:
GET A JOB!
Of all the insults hurled in my direction, GET A JOB hurt the most. It was an affront. I took it personally.
I had a job. I was doing my job. I mean, sure. It was a weird job. And a job I’d created out of thin air with no permission from a higher authority. But I was working, and people were paying me. Didn’t that make it a job? And, I would think as my face burned with resentment, I was making a consistent income, which made the GET A JOB insult hurt even more.
I’m making plenty of money. Maybe more than you, asshole, I’d think, all hurt and defensive.
Brené Brown, a social scientist and TED speaker who has researched shame, worthiness, courage, and vulnerability, recently published a book called Daring Greatly, which I fortuitously picked up at a Boston bookstore when I was just beginning to write this book. I was so blown away by the commonalities between our books that I twittered her, praising her work and asking her if she would give me a foreword for this book.3 She writes:
The perception that vulnerability is weakness is the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous. When we spend our lives pushing away and protecting ourselves from feeling vulnerable or from being perceived as too emotional, we feel contempt when others are less capable or willing to mask feelings, suck it up, and soldier on. We’ve come to the point where, rather than respecting and appreciating the courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgment and criticism.
Following this logic, we can assume that the likelihood of someone yelling GET A JOB from their passing car is indirectly proportionate to their own crippling fear about getting up on the figurative box themselves.
Or to strip it down to its essence:
Hate is fear.
I broke up with Joseph.
My boyfriend Jonah would stop by sometimes to watch me statue-ing. He played the cello.
I loved giving flowers to people I loved.
I’d saved $400 to buy a ticket to go on a vacation with him and his family, and I’d given him the cash to book my flight along with theirs. But then we started breaking up, and we decided that I shouldn’t go in the middle of our off-again-on-again drama; it would be too awkward.
I’d had a good day of Bride-ing: some nice guy had hand-folded me an origami crane, which I had tucked in the folds of my dress, Jonah had come by to blow me an on-again kiss and say hello, and it had rained but only for about two minutes, so I didn’t get too wet. I went down the stairs to the basement of Toscanini’s to sit on the dark brick floor and count my hat for the day, and to my astonishment, there was a wad of cash wound up in a rubber band. I ran upstairs and grabbed the shop telephone and called Jonah.
You’re never going to believe this but somebody put FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS in my hat today.
Oh, Amanda, he said.
What? It’s amazing! Can you believe someone cared that much?
Oh, Amanda.
What?
Oh…Amanda.
WHAT?
Lewis Hyde published a beautiful dot-connecting book in 1983 called The Gift, which tackles the elusive subject of what Hyde calls “the commerce of the creative spirit.”
He explains the term “Indian Giver,” which most people consider an insult: someone who offers a gift and then wants to take it back. But the origin of the term—coined by the Puritans—speaks volumes. A Native American tribal chief would welcome an Englishman into his lodge and, as a friendly gesture, share a pipe of tobacco with his guest, then offer the pipe itself as a gift. The pipe, a valuable little object, is—to the chief—a symbolic peace offering that is continually regifted from tribe to tribe, never really “belonging” to anybody. The Englishman doesn’t understand this, is simply delighted with his new property, and is therefore completely confused when the next tribal leader comes to his house a few months later, and, after they share a smoke, looks expectantly at his host to gift him the pipe. The Englishman can’t understand why anyone would be so rude to expect to be given this thing that belongs to him.
Hyde concludes:
The opposite of “Indian giver” would be something like “white man keeper”…that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation…The Indian giver (or the original one, at any rate) understood a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept…The only essential is this:
The gift must always move.
And then there was Lee.
I was going crazy in my crappy Somerville share house; my roommate and I were ready to kill each other. I wanted, secretly, to start some kind of freaky art commune, but I had about $300 to my name and no idea where to start. Instead, I stumbled into one that already existed when Rob Chalfen, my local coffee-shop friend who boasted Cambridge’s largest collections of New Directions paperbacks and old-time jazz on vinyl, invited me to his friend’s going-away party at a commune-collective across the river in Boston proper. He knew I was art-house hunting and thought I might be able to finagle my way in the door.
The Cloud Club is a four-story brick townhouse wrapped protectively in a winding vine of leafy wisteria, the root of which is as wide as a human torso and curves smack across the huge oak front door, hanging low enough that you have to duck under to get inside.
I walked up a winding, rickety staircase into a hallway covered with faded mirrors, surreal drawings, and blinking Christmas lights. Empty gilded frames and upside-down paintings hung at odd angles. A crowd was gathered in a cozy, low-lit kitchen warmed by a wood-burning fireplace with fixtures from the 1890s. All around me were the clinking of glasses, the lighting of cigarettes, and the buzzing conversation of musicians, filmmakers, sex workers, activists, and painters.
On the top floor, in a room brimming over with antlers, plants, swords, and old hooked rugs, the party was in full swing. Guests used a huge tree situated in the middle of the room to climb up to a bedroom loft capped with a handmade glass geodesic dome; a sliding door led to a roof covered with discarded sinks and rotting sculptures that overlooked the glittering Boston night skyline. And the crown jewel: in the corner of the room was a rickety spinet piano. I took a deep breath. I was home.
Rob introduced me to Annie-the-writer, the woman who was going away, and I mentioned to her that I was looking to rent an apartment. Was this one available?
Go talk to Lee. She laughed. It might be.
I passed through a hallway of billowing, spiraling, white plaster shapes hand-sculpted onto the walls, and through a set of double doors that looked like they had been repurposed from a fin de siècle Parisian bar. I was so in love with this house already, I wanted to kiss every floorboard and mismatched doorknob. I grew up in a collapsing Colonial fixer-upper that my parents spent the entirety of my childhood trying to make heatable and habitable. This place felt as familiar to me as my own fingers.
I knocked tentatively, went in through the door, and there, engulfed in a cave-like room stuffed with anthropomorphic sculptures and piles of spiral notebooks, was Lee, seated on one of his own hand-carved chairs, writing a little sign on a piece of yellowed paper that said, “Room for Rent, Market Price or DISCOUNT FOR VISIONARY ARTISTS.” Clearly he was planning on taking it down to the party and posting it on Annie’s door. He looked like Gandalf in a cowboy hat, with a kindly smile, a flowered shirt, a huge, white beard, and the kind of rugged, careful hands that had done a lot of heavy lifting and intricate craftsmanship.
WAIT, I said.
Yes? he said, looking up and smiling.
DON’T WRITE THAT SIGN.
Why not? he asked.
I’M HERE. I’M MOVING IN.
At this, he giggled, took my phone number, and told me to come back tomorrow.
We’ll see, he said.
Lee didn’t just accept tenants off the bat, even when they came referred by friends. You had to show up with luggage, hang out and chat with him for some unspecified period of time, and then, only after you had passed what my future housemates would come to refer to as the “mystery aesthetic” test, would you be allowed to consider yourself an official member of the household.
I showed up the next day with two boxes of clothes, a toothbrush, and a pile of books, determined never to leave. It worked.
Back in the 1970s, Lee had created the Cloud Club because he wanted an art family around him. He didn’t have any money back in those days. He’d been living out of his van (painted, he likes reminding us, with images from Alice in Wonderland—and the van after that was covered with Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine) and needed to borrow the down payment for the house—about $9,000—from his friend Brian, who had the money.
Brian and Lee are both over seventy now, and still great friends. That $9,000 loan was the seed for a house that’s now been called home by more than a hundred different artists over the past forty years, with Lee in the role of magical landlord-trickster-conductor. His favorite place to be is in any corner, hidden from view, where he can capture things happening on video. Lee is an outsider artist in his own right, a self-taught architect, painter, and sculptor: the Cloud Club is his art, and we get to live in it.
There are about eight of us living there at any given time, and we all have our own little apartments with our own kitchens and bathrooms. Mostly, nobody leaves their doors locked. We share a car, we share the washer and dryer and take turns buying laundry detergent, we share the back garden. My housemate Mali, who’s a singer, is the one with the green thumb—she plants kale and distributes it around the house.
Since he started the Cloud Club, Lee has deliberately charged his tenants about a third of the market value rent for each apartment. He not only allows, he encourages the musicians in the house, and our friends’ bands, and our friends�
�� bands’ drummers’ poet girlfriends, to use the communal space for parties, meetings, and concerts. He never charges anyone for that; instead, he takes an extreme glee in seeing the space used and filled with life. He films the goings-on and uploads them to YouTube. He wants to feel things happening. He makes enough money to cover the expenses.
People like Lee have a different relationship with the spotlight: they not only prefer playing a support role, they thrive doing it, taking pleasure in holding the light for others to run around in. Lee’s like a combination Art Butler (he’ll often surprise me with a plate of fruit while I’m in the middle of composing) and all-purpose fixer-upper resource (if you ask him, he’ll teach you all about plumbing, soldering, or wiring. I never ask). At his core, he loves to feel useful to all of his tenants, and he beams with pride when he sees our art succeed. His patronage can come in strange, unpredictable forms (No, Lee, I don’t need seventy reams of pink paper that you just found in the dumpster. Why did you put them in my kitchen?).
But beyond the cheap rent, eccentric space, and reams of paper, Lee’s gift to me, and the never-ending parade of art tenants that he houses, is bigger, deeper, harder to see. The Cloud Club, in all its artistic, ramshackle glory, is his version of the offered flower, his gift to the world—and anybody who lived there or who walks under the front vine and in through the creaky, salvaged front door feels that gift. Lee himself is an introvert (he even calls himself a “hermit”), but the house speaks for him: it is, itself, the container he’s created so that we might all have a moment of real connection with one another.
I broke up with Jonah.
My boyfriend Blake would stop by sometimes to watch me statue-ing. He was an undergrad at MIT with a passion for painting and who doted on his dorm-room collection of huge saltwater aquariums filled with clown fish. He also had an octopus.
Blake graduated and landed a job as a full-time engineer, and the salary was hefty, but it didn’t leave him any time to make art, so he quit and decided to commit to his painting.
The Art of Asking Page 6