I finally told Neil I’d marry him on New Year’s Day of 2010, as we took a pause from a long late-morning walk. I was nursing a brutal hangover, having played a New Year’s Eve show the night before with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall and consumed two bottles of champagne over the course of the evening: the first out of nervousness, the second out of triumph. We’d had brunch with my dad, his wife, and my half brother—they’d all come to town for the show—and I was now staggering down Newbury Street in Boston, trying not to project my breakfast smoothie onto the sidewalk.
Neil was holding my hand, casting no judgment.
No patronizing you shouldn’t have drunk so much, darling.
No chiding well, this is what you get for not having any dinner last night.
My head was plenty busy casting those judgments upon itself. He was just being sweet and helpful, holding my arm as I lurched towards a lamppost to get my balance and resist puking.
I realized, in that moment, that I wasn’t afraid to, quite literally, lean on him.
As if
perhaps
maybe
possibly
I wasn’t afraid to ask for his help.
He went down on one knee, in the snow. He didn’t have a ring, so he took out a Sharpie from his jacket and drew one on my finger.
At least I’d never lose it.
I loved being the center of attention when I was a kid, and I still do.
Sometimes it made wonderful things happen, like when I convinced the neighborhood girls to enact an a cappella production of Fiddler on the Roof on my back porch. (I played Tevye, obviously.) Sometimes it made terrible things happen, like when I wore a bra to school, Madonna-style, on the outside of my dress and got sent to the principal’s office. (The principal delivered a lecture that I would absolutely kill to have a recording of, just to be able to use the line you think you’re so special, Amanda, but you are not special in my techno-remix of “Creep” by Radiohead.)
As I moved through my life as a statue and later as a musician, I started to understand.
There’s a difference between wanting to be looked at and wanting to be seen.
When you are looked at, your eyes can stay blissfully closed. You suck energy, you steal the spotlight. When you are seen, your eyes must be open, as you are seeing and recognizing your witness. You accept energy and you generate energy. You create light.
One is exhibitionism, the other is connection.
Not everybody wants to be looked at.
Everybody wants to be seen.
Following the success of my TED talk, Microsoft called. They were offering to fly me to Seattle to speak to a group of women who worked there (apparently a whopping 16 percent of the employees at Microsoft were female).
I asked the speaker coordinator what I would be speaking about.
Whatever you want, she said.
I started to panic—I had no idea what I’d talk about. Crowdsourcing? Music? Surely I could wax poetic for a half hour about something. But these women were smart.
The Fraud Police were paying me a call.
For two months, I avoided coming up with an idea worth Microsoft-ing.
The night before the talk, I was pacing frantically around Jason Webley’s Seattle houseboat, still having written nothing, when it occurred to me: my mother. She’d been retired for a decade, but she’d worked as a freelancer for almost forty years, applying her math-whiz brain to the emerging field of computer programming.
Growing up, I had no idea what she actually did all day after she threw her heels in a bag and drove her car into rush-hour traffic. Whenever she started to explain to me what her job entailed, the words blurred into a wall of noise.
I hadn’t called my mother in a while. But now I had something to ask her. I needed her.
She talked for two hours straight while I furiously scribbled notes about what it was like for her to be one of the only female computer programmers at various companies around Boston in the sixties and seventies. I poured myself a glass of wine. On the other end of the phone, on the opposite side of the country, so did my mom. For the first time, in earnest, it was like we were drinking together. I listened to her stories about the sexism, the judgment, the weird harassment.
She told me a story about the guy she programmed with who got fired for looking at too much porn on his office computer.
In nineteen seventy??
Oh no no no. This was way later, when we were working on a Y2K conversion. There was Internet porn by then.
I couldn’t believe my mother had just said the words “Internet porn.”
I wanted more stories.
Well, you had to work harder than the men just to keep the job, she said matter-of-factly. And, she said, you know…you had to be perfect.
The way she said it hit a nerve.
Perfect? What kind of perfect?
Well, if a guy messed up a project, there was always another job waiting for him. But a woman? Forget it! You’d never get a job in that town again. And Boston was a small town. There were only a few of us. The men all stuck together.
She told me the story of the accountant, Jerry, who paid all the male freelancers on time but kept withholding her paycheck, claiming offhandedly that she “had a husband” and probably didn’t need the money as badly as the men did. She asked nicely for months, persistently, and still it didn’t arrive. One day she called him up (at 6:02, she said, when I knew the switchboard operator had gone home for the day and I would get him directly). She said, Hi Jerry! Just wondering when you’re going to be able to process that check! It’s eight weeks late. And when Jerry made some grumblings about how they would send it out as soon as possible, my mother said, What are you having for dinner tonight, Jerry? Jerry said, Excuse me? My mother said, I need that money to buy groceries to feed my family. If you don’t cut my check, I’m coming to your house for dinner tonight. And I don’t like salmon. And I don’t like peas. The check was on her desk the next day.
I’d never known any of this stuff. But then again, I’d never asked. As we were wrapping up our two-hour conversation and were well into our second (third?) glasses of wine, she said, You know, Amanda, one thing always bothered me. Something you said when you were a teenager.
Oh, no. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. I was a terrible teenager, an explosion of hormones and nihilism.
Um…what?
She can do this imitation of me as a teenager that makes me want to crawl under a table. She did it now.
You said: “MOM, I’m a REAL ARTIST. You’re NOT.”
Oh, god.
Then she added, more kindly, You know you, Amanda, you were being a typical teenager.
I winced, and felt my neck tighten and my teeth grit down into mother-fight-or-flight mode.
She continued, But you know. You would say, “I’m an ARTIST…fuck you, Mom! What do you know?! You’re just a computer programmer.”
I had to admit…I could totally imagine myself saying that as a teenager. Maybe not the “fuck you, Mom” part. But still.
And then my mother said something that absolutely demolished my defensiveness. I don’t think, in all the years I’ve known her, that I’ve ever heard her sound more vulnerable.
You know, Amanda, it always bothered me. You can’t see my art, but…I’m one of the best artists I know. It’s just…nobody could ever see the beautiful things I made. Because you couldn’t hang them in a gallery.
Then there was a pause.
I took in a deep breath.
God, Mom. Sorry.
And she laughed and her voice turned cheerful again.
Oh, don’t worry, sweetie. You were thirteen.
As I related this story the next morning to a small theater filled with two hundred Women Of Microsoft, I added a confession. In all my rock-and-roll years of running around, supporting people, advocating for women, giving all these strangers and fans permission to “embrace their inner fucking artist,” to express themselves fully,
to look at their work and lives as beautiful, unique creative acts, I’d somehow excluded my own mother.
And maybe, by extension, a lot of other people. I looked out at the Women Of Microsoft, seeing present-day versions of my 1970s programmer mother. Maybe they all felt thoroughly misunderstood by their own bitchy, teenage wannabe-poet daughters. Who knew?
So I thought about all the things she’d told me over the phone, I said to the room, and I thought about her work that I couldn’t possibly comprehend, about the actual creative work she had done. All that delicate, handmade programming she did into the dead of night to switch one platform to another on some critical company deadline, how outside of the box she would venture to fix a problem…and how insanely proud she felt when it worked, and the true…beauty of that. And the sadness, too, because nobody ever, you know, clapped for her at the end of the night.
As I looked up into the audience, I saw that three or four women were sniffling and dabbing their eyes. My own throat tightened up.
She couldn’t hang her work on a wall. I can. I do my art in public. People applaud. My mom never really got that…and she’s retired now.
After the talk, I hugged a handful of the Women Of Microsoft, got back in my rental car, turned the radio up to eleven, and peeled out of the office park.
Take that, Fraud Police.
I called Anthony and told him that Neil and I had gotten engaged.
ENGAGED?
Yeah.
You’re not joking? You’re going to get married?
Yeah.
He was silent, then said, softly, You didn’t talk about it with me.
No, I said.
Anthony didn’t say anything.
I didn’t need to, I said. You’ve already told me everything I need to know.
Ah, that’s the perfect answer, beauty. Now go have your life. I’ll be here.
I gradually lined up a great band of musicians to help me make my next record: Jherek Bischoff, a bassist and composer/arranger who had toured with Jason Webley; Michael McQuilken, a drummer and theater director who had toured with Jason Webley; and Chad Raines, who’d never heard of Jason Webley—he was sound designer, and a keyboard/guitar-playing friend of Michael’s from the Yale School of Drama. (We briefly considered calling the new lineup Amanda Palmer and the Yale School of Drama, while toying around with possible band names one night, but then someone on Twitter suggested Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra. It seemed fitting, given the crowdsourcing and everything. We took it.)
My public song-delivery system, post-label, had been experimental up to this point, and I was deliberately saving my best material until I was ready to go to the fanbase for help with a full-length, brand-new record, to be released with grand fanfare. I didn’t want to just release this album into the Internet abyss with a blog post; I wanted it to feel bigger and realer, but without a label, my options were limited. After thinking about it long and hard, and strategizing with my office staff, we decided to use Kickstarter. We’d already used it a few times for smaller projects, and the fans seemed to understand, even love, it. Kickstarter also had its own little ecosystem of supporters, and I’d met and liked the guys who ran the company. My staff and I cooked up a schedule. I decided I would take the band into the studio, record all the songs using the last of my cash, then launch the Kickstarter to pay myself back. If we timed things perfectly, it should work out without a hitch. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
Neil and I eloped in our friends’ living room in San Francisco, and used their children as impromptu flower girls and ring bearers. It happened suddenly. We had been trying and failing for months to solve the impossible puzzle of how to throw a Wedding The Right Way. We’d been looking forward to a simple dinner party with our friends, but called ahead to ask if they wouldn’t mind hosting a wedding before dinner. I brought three outfit possibilities in a bag, and let the kids pick. They chose the old Eight-Foot Bride dress. I’d made sure to wash it first. Jason Webley came along to officiate the ceremony with a poem, I wrote up some vows sitting in the upstairs bathroom, and everybody got tipsy and ate pie.
Someone had seen on Twitter that we were in San Francisco, and had offered us a free tango lesson. We showed up at her house the morning of our elopement. Neil was panic-stricken, and I wasn’t sure whether the panic was brought on by the impromptu wedding plan or the impromptu tango lesson.
I CAN’T DANCE, he kept insisting. I DON’T DANCE.
We didn’t tell our volunteer tango instructor that we were getting married in a few hours.
She gave me a pair of tango shoes. I had never tangoed. She positioned us chest to chest, put on a record, and waved her hands around, examining us from all angles, giving us directions.
No, no, no, Neil…you need to GRAB her…this is a dance about trust, and control!! It’s a whole dance about the difficulty of love!…Good!…Yes!…She needs to feel you leading…and Amanda, Jesus, relax…let him lead…trust him…you keep trying to lead and you’re messing him up…STOP TRYING TO CONTROL THE DANCE! Foot BACK!!! GOOD! Now…trade!
I didn’t tell her why I was crying.
The Bride never spoke a word. I learned from her.
There is a difference between simply “being able to ask” and “asking gracefully.”
Sometimes asking gracefully means saying less.
Or saying nothing.
You can move your mouth to ask, but what is the rest of your body saying? What is the message behind the words? Everybody knows how it feels to be asked in a way that creates discomfort, whether the asker is a drunk homeless person on a street corner or the naked person in bed beside you.
Can we have sex? It’s been a month.
Could you spare any change?
Both can be asked with a sense of trust and graciousness, or with a sense of force and gracelessness.
Anthony once told me: It isn’t what you say to people, it’s more important what you do with them. It’s less important what you do with them than the way you’re with them.
You trust people too much, Amanda.
I always figured it was GOOD to trust people too much. Better than the other way around. Right?
One of my favorite ninja gigs of all time was on Hermosa Beach in Los Angeles. I was staying at my cousins Katherine and Robert’s cottage-like house a few blocks from the ocean, and I was beside myself to discover that Robert, age eighty-seven, could not only play the ukulele, he could shred the ukulele. He was like the HENDRIX of the ukulele, and better yet, he knew kinky songs from the Prohibition era about booze and women.
I twittered the next morning that I would play on the beach that afternoon, joined by my ukulele-shredding cousin, and requested people come dressed for a group photo shoot.
My request was granted, hundreds of Angelenos converged in all sorts of costumes, and after I’d played for about two hours (and cousin Robert slammed out a few songs on his old, splintered ukulele), I tried something new. I told people that the gig was, of course, free of charge, but if they felt moved they could toss money in my ukulele case (a wonderfully shabby antique trumpet case I found in the trash, and that also serves as a really handy purse, which is nice, because I don’t do purses). I left the case wide-open on the sand, tossed my treasured kimono down next to it, and gave my ukulele to a volunteer guardian. As the evening wore on I chatted, signed random things, hugged people, and took pictures. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the first person drop a few dollars in the ukulele case.
When I finally went back up the beach to the case, the last of the revelers were packing up their blankets. What I saw was shocking.
My ukulele case was filled with offerings—about $400 in rumpled bills (including a few twenties), flowers, love notes, and loose change. But that wasn’t what shocked me.
What shocked me was this: in my flakiness, I had left my cell phone, keys, and wallet right in the case, in plain view.
And nobody had taken them.
So. Right around the time
of my insomniac meltdown as the sun rose and the sheep mourned before that Scotland family wedding party, I had also been battling a nasty urinary tract infection. By the day after the party (which went fine, by the way) it had morphed its evil, sneaky way into a full-blown kidney infection. I found an emergency health clinic in the rural Scottish Highlands to treat me.
Before the nurse gave me the extra-high-powered antibiotics I’d been prescribed, she asked, was I allergic to anything?
Nope.
Was I pregnant?
Not a chance.
Taking any other medications?
Well…I wanted to make a joke about how she might want to refer me to a psychiatric professional, because I felt like I was losing my fucking mind, but she looked so nice and Scottish and helpful.
She handed the antibiotics over.
They worked. The kidney infection cleared up within a few days, which was good: we’d rented a big place in Edinburgh for a month to accommodate a ton of houseguests, plus Neil’s kids, plus my band. I had a string of shows booked, and a bunch of rehearsing to do to start prepping the Kickstarter recording. We’d been looking forward to this monthlong working vacation for a while, anticipating a nonstop parade of dinner parties, theater outings, and spontaneous fringe-festival adventures.
But I wasn’t in the mood for fun. My body hurt, my soul hurt, my skin was breaking out, and I’d been listlessly staying in bed. That wasn’t like me. That night before the family wedding party had frightened me, and I couldn’t shake the crazy-feeling. One afternoon, while Neil was off doing press and all our guests were off at fun fringe activities, I didn’t have rehearsal and decided to peel myself out of bed and go for a jog. It was a frigid, foggy day, the type you keep thinking just shouldn’t happen in the month of August (no matter how many times you’ve been to Scotland). I stepped outside, bundled in running gear, a sweater, and a scarf, and started to run. I felt the life force slowly oozing back into me. I looked like shit, I felt like shit, but goddammit, I had left the house. I took a deep breath, looking at the beauty of the old Scottish architecture, and felt my mood finally lifting.
The Art of Asking Page 20