Nobody got naked. Instead, Neil and I painted a mural on a bedroom wall belonging to the unborn baby incubating in the belly of the Kickstarter backer, Chanie. We created a surreal scene featuring a moon-man playing the piano and a killer rabbit in a hot-air balloon while Chanie and her husband sat on the floor of the empty nursery, chatting with us about bad films, sibling feuds, and local politics. Then we took them out for Indian food.
I delivered the second art-sitting in Perth. The backer’s name was Yana, and it wasn’t until I met her at my public concert the night before that I realized I knew her from Twitter. We’d been casually communicating for years…and I realized she’d brought food backstage to a show a few years before.
Yana’s hard to miss. She was born with achondroplasia. In her late twenties, she’s four foot six inches tall, and she’s undergone ten operations to lengthen her arm and leg bones. After she gave me a tour of her folks’ cozy suburban Australian house and the backyard jungle where she’d adventured as a kid, we all sat down for a home-cooked feast, during which I chatted happily with her younger brother Sebastian and her French mum and British dad about everything from homesickness to the new Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott (nobody was a fan). I felt very at home; they were such a loving, warm family. And I was so impressed by Yana, how confident, self-possessed, and funny she was. She’d studied music business in college but was working shifts in a hospital, and she seemed determined to not let her condition get in the way of her happiness—she exuded positivity.
After the family meal, Yana bundled up a canvas, blankets, and brushes into boxes that I helped carry across a street and a soccer field. She had it all planned out: she wanted to pose nude in the park where she’d played as a child. I told her that if we got arrested, it would probably be the most cred-building event in my life since I was jailed in Amsterdam for doing a ninja gig in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yana wasn’t a natural exhibitionist, but as soon we settled into a shady gazebo near the playground with nobody around, she took a deep breath and shed her clothes. I picked up a paintbrush.
Her body was a beautiful landscape of snow-white skin, her legs and arms covered in constellations of scars from her surgeries. As I focused on sketching her outline, I felt a quiet, profound sense of honor. I’m an amateur painter, and completing a passable likeness took two hours, which included a couple of close calls in the indecent exposure department. One old man wandered over to us and asked us what we were doing, as Yana dived under the blanket.
We’re art students, I lied earnestly.
Yana shared the stories of her life: about how she was constantly ill as a result of her condition, and about Jeff, her best friend, who had turned her on to my music years ago.
We were both hospital babies, she told me. We never had to justify ourselves to each other.
Jeff had died the month I launched my Kickstarter. Yana had bought the art-sitting as a sort of parting gift to his memory. I didn’t ask where she got the money.
Everybody always looks at me, she mused, as another passerby wandered too close and she grabbed the blanket… but never for the reasons I want.
I kept messing up her eyebrow.
Everybody I know, I said, especially the performers, has such a complicated relationship with being looked at. But seriously, I cannot imagine what yours is like.
It’s hard, said Yana.
I erased and redrew, thinking about how we judge one another. Was I trying to make her more beautiful? I shook off the thought and kept trying to get her left eyebrow to at least look like an eyebrow.
I’d sold thirty-four Kickstarter house parties for $5,000 each—anywhere in the world—and promised to deliver within eighteen months. I laid out some guidelines, having already sold and successfully delivered a handful of them as part of my Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under record. No more than fifty people. They could happen anywhere (outdoors, indoors, anywhere in the world, and I’d pay my way there) but they couldn’t be publicly promoted shows. The package included about $1,000 worth of merchandise as well: the vinyl, the high-end art books, the record player, and so on.
Very few people could afford the price tag of the party, so only about five parties were sold to single individuals; the rest were impressive efforts of community trust. Facebook groups started, volunteers coordinated to pool funds, find locations, and whip the parties into shape. From South Africa to Israel to Canada to Germany to Australia, total strangers trusted one another. When I showed up at the parties, there were often three hosts: the person who volunteered their house, the person who volunteered to throw down the five grand and trust that forty-nine people would kick in $100 each, and the person who dealt with potluck logistics. These hosts often became friends with one another through the very act of combining their efforts. It was an innovation in collectivist fandom that I’d never seen before.
Eric, my manager, wears about eighteen different hats—including making himself personally available on email and Twitter to thousands of fans who had questions about the Kickstarter. He was in charge of being the liaison for all thirty-four house party contacts. He juggled my travel schedule, along with my booking agent, to make sure I could hit all thirty-five cities while I toured—hopefully not having to zigzag or backtrack too much. It was an exercise in organizational Zen. (At the time this book goes to print, I’ve delivered thirty-three. The last one, in South Africa, remains undelivered. They’ve been really understanding…they’ve even uploaded a song-video to YouTube about how much they’re looking forward to it.)
Delivering the house parties felt like cresting a peak of crowdsurfing or couchsurfing. As I bounced back and forth on a regular basis between playing for a crowd of 1,500 in a standing-room-only theater one night and fifty people in a living room the next, I realized what the difference really meant.
An official show in a club or a theater is repetitive work: soundchecks, dressing rooms, testing lights. The environment is set up to do business, not art: security checkpoints; cash registers ringing open and slamming closed; bored bartenders loudly scooping ice into drinks, waiting for you to finish your screaming and swearing so they can clock out.
At a house party, everybody improvises and cobbles together a space; there’s nobody who doesn’t want to be there. Dogs and kids run freely, curfews don’t exist, strangers become real friends under the magical umbrella of a unique, shared experience. The music is important—I always play for at least an hour or two—but it isn’t the absolute center of the evening. Nor am I, the so-called star, the center. I slink back and watch as people warm to and bond with each other.
Throughout the post-Kickstarter year I got better and better at the house parties, which took place in cleared-out wheat barns in rural Germany, illegal basement speakeasies in London, suburban backyard barbecues all over the States, the UK, and Australia. Something surprising happened every night, and I started to enjoy the feeling of absolute uncertainty. No matter what happened, I twittered, instagrammed, and blogged the results. The crowd followed along.
The Tel Aviv house party featured a pole dancer and a rendition of one of my songs sung in Hebrew by the entire group—they’d all rehearsed a translation. On a remote hillside in Oslo, the whole party engaged in a game where everybody took turns drawing on an easel provided by the host, and one by one described the best and worst things about the various Nordic towns they hailed from. I got a pretty thorough education in Norwegian-Swedish rivalry that night, along with a great massage from a bearded man who, hours later, set up a DJ tent and blasted music into the dawn as the fire pit died down.
At a party in Nashville, a girl asked her parents’ permission to graffiti the outside walls of their guest house; fifty people attacked the huge structure with spray-paint cans. A few weeks later, a house party in Chicago picked up the theme and we spray-painted an entire garage.
I fell into the crowd at every event, talked late into the night over wines and beers, and freely discussed what was on my
mind. I got pulled aside a lot, told a lot of dark stories, held (and was held by) a lot of people. Arriving at a house party in the carpeted basement rec room of a family home in Ashburn, Virginia, I asked my party host if there wasn’t, perhaps, a giant closet available. I explained to the fans that I’d played a show at Lincoln Center in New York City the night before and been soundly clocked on the head by a metal lighting rig pole that hadn’t been securely fastened, that I’d sustained a minor concussion and was going to need a cuddle—preferably a horizontal one. We dragged a futon into a giant walk-in closet, which was stocked with three racks of theatrical dresses and costumes.
A bunch of musicians had brought their instruments along to my party, so after taking requests for an hour or so, I invited them all to join me in some impromptu Nirvana covers—moshing included. I then announced I was hitting the closet, leaving the party to happily rage in my wake. I figured it’d take about two hours to get quiet time with everyone if they joined me in the closet one at a time. I misjudged: I was in there for four hours—but, man, I heard some stories. It was like Spoon River Anthology live. By the end of the night I had heard about two impending divorces, about the deepest fears of a nine-year-old girl (the child of one of the guests), and about losses secretly mourned: the deaths, the cancers, the miscarriages, the abortions, all the secrets they carried beneath the sheen of the dancing and mayhem outside the closet.
I arrived one night at a remote house in the woods, a few hours outside San Francisco, filled with high school kids and their parents. Bill was the dad who’d organized the party, and he welcomed me and my friend Whitney, who had driven me to the party, like long-lost family members into the already-jubilant festivities. Home-cooked food abounded, homemade beer flowed, and everyone sat together on the living room floor, playing instruments and sharing songs. In the kitchen, Whitney and I agreed that we were experiencing a classic case of Family Envy. How was it possible that all these seventeen-year-olds wanted to HANG OUT with their parents?
I took my plate of cake and fruit outside onto the porch, smelling the redwood trees and watching the kids take turns igniting a ten-foot-tall metal sculpture that blew fire out the top. I talked with Bill, the Perfect Dad.
His teenage daughter had died the year before. He showed me her paintings. He told me the party was for her, in a way; it was a celebration of her life. Later in the night, I played a song called “Lost”—which was on the Kickstarter record the party had helped to fund—on the living room piano while the entire gathering, young and old, linked arms and formed a kick line, singing along. I couldn’t believe they all knew the words.
It all felt so real.
The Kickstarter album had taken a few months to record; Jherek, Chad, Michael, and I spent a solid month in Melbourne between practice rooms and a recording studio bringing my preciously hoarded songs to life in full-band color. Only one song was recorded on solo piano (“The Bed Song,” which took at least two dozen takes to get right); the rest were awash with accompaniment, created by all three members of the band, who brought their sounds and structural ideas to the table. Michael programmed the drum loops. Chad spent hours finding the right synthesizer sounds. Jherek created beautiful string-and-horns arrangements for five of the songs and we hired local musicians to come into the studio for a few days. We twittered for a glockenspiel at one point. I named the album Theater Is Evil, which I changed to Theatre Is Evil (the British spelling) by a popular demand that arose the day I announced the album title on Twitter, and the Brits and Americans took up arms against one another. No bloodshed was necessary: they took a vote, and the British won.
A few weeks before the album was officially released in stores and hit the fans’ mailboxes, the whole band and road crew of five embarked on a mini-tour to deliver the Kickstarter art parties we had sold, which were backer-only events limited to two hundred and fifty people held in strange little galleries, pop-up art spaces, and small clubs. The community would commune, the band would play a special acoustic set, and the original album art would be displayed on the walls. I’d hired about thirty-five painters, sculptors, and photographers—mostly friends of mine—to create work inspired by the lyrics of the songs. Every artist was paid $500 per piece of artwork, and we shipped all the art to the parties, which were held in New York, Berlin, LA, San Francisco, Boston, and London. We put together a variety of gift bags for the attending backers that included blindfolds, surprise CDs, custom stationery, and in most cities, a locally purchased used book. The morning of every art party gig I popped into a used bookstore, buying about three hundred used books (it felt like a giant supermarket sweep) and hauling them over to the venue.
A few days before the first art party, I got the random idea to let the fans draw on me—I’m never sure where these ideas come from—and texted my assistant, SuperKate, to buy a package of markers to pass around. Washable if you can find them, but maybe do some tests. I’ll probably be sweaty, it’s summer.
The people in those rooms were my fan-family, I had faith in them. They’d trusted me to deliver an album, and letting them draw on my naked body was a gesture to show that I trusted them right back. At a couple of the parties, I prepared to strip but decided not to if the winds in the room just didn’t feel quite safe enough. We tried different drawing utensils on different nights: one of the first nights was kind of a disaster since we could only find tiny, cheap drugstore markers that didn’t write well on clammy flesh. Everybody tried their best to draw on me, but it mostly felt like being stabbed by fifty pointy little forks. We all had a sense of humor about it. One night we used paintbrushes. Another night we tried finger painting. That was interesting.
Every one of those nights—with my arms wide, closing my eyes and letting the fans draw on my body—felt like a final exam in trust.
There was that feeling again, the same one I’d had standing in front of Felix and Michelle’s doorbell at midnight: an electrifying combination of fear and a tenacious, underlying trust that refused to take no for an answer.
It reminded me of the shiver you get in the split second after leaving the edge of a diving board, knowing that your every pore is about to experience a shocking, full-body sensual assault: you brace…with joy. Nakedness with strangers is such a powerful feeling, even when—especially when—there’s no sex involved. I squeezed my eyes shut, outstretched my arms, much like I had done as The Bride, and felt every vulnerable inch of flesh exposed to the room. Every paintbrush, finger, or marker that touched my skin—even if it hurt or was shockingly cold—felt like a loving caress. Some people didn’t dare venture away from my arms; some happily drew designs right on my tits and outlined my pubic triangle with flowers. I laughed and allowed them to decorate with abandon.
It was a question to the crowd, really, in the form of my own naked body.
I trust you this much.
Should I?
Show me.
I took a short break from touring to do some yoga. There was barely any cell service at the retreat, but I walked up a hill one day to wave my phone at the sky and download a few days’ worth of text messages. One was from Anthony.
He’d been to a doctor, he said.
They’d misdiagnosed him up to now.
It was cancer.
Bad cancer. Leukemia.
They’ve given me six months, tops, he texted.
It’s over, beauty.
My head stopped working.
I walked down the hill. The yoga teacher, Nigel, and one of my other new British yoga friends, Max, were sitting on a stone wall, laughing in the sun. Max was playing a Spanish song on his guitar.
They could see my eyes were red and beckoned me over. I didn’t want to avoid them. I wanted to tell them. But how could I explain this? They barely knew me, let alone knew who Anthony was and what he meant to me. They’d probably think I was being a drama queen. They probably wouldn’t believe me.
I just got a text…I said. I think my best friend is going to die.
&nbs
p; I looked at them, and they looked at me. They saw me.
Nigel reached his hands out and held me. The sobs came from the bottom of my gut. I stood there, rocking in Nigel’s arms, so happy that these two strangers—of all people—were the ones I’d encountered.
We stood there for a few minutes, saying nothing, while I cried into Nigel’s neck and then calmed down. Max offered to play me a song on guitar, and I sat on the wall, holding Nigel’s hand and losing myself in the sound. Then the reality of it would hit me again.
Anthony is going to die.
I had to leave.
I was barely able to think. I walked to the pay phone in the retreat office and called Neil collect.
Anthony just texted. The doctors told him he’s going to die in six months, Neil. I have to get home. Fast.
Oh god. My love, I’m sorry.
I need your help. I have no cell service here, just the pay phone. Can you help me? Can you help me change my ticket?
Yes, yes of course I will. And you mean…He hesitated. You’re fine to let me pay for it?
Of course, I said. It’s fine…I’ll pay you back.
I’d rather you didn’t pay me back, Amanda. Just let it go. I love you. Now let me hang up and see if I can book you a flight. When do you want to leave?
First thing in the morning, the earliest flight you can get. I love you, too. Neil?
Yes?
I’m sorry, I said. Thank you. Thank you for helping me. I’m sorry.
Amanda, he said, listen to me. I want to help. I know how much Anthony means to you. I want desperately to help. All you have to do is ask.
I hung up the phone and packed my bags, feeling blank and blurry. The next morning, before leaving for the airport at sunrise, I walked off the retreat property, into the woods, to find a stick.
The trip back to Boston took about twenty-six hours—a bus ride, a ferry, two planes. When I got to the first airport, I walked catatonically into a news shop and bought a blank journal, sat down at the gate, and started writing. Everything I could think of that Anthony had ever told me, every piece of advice, every stupid skit we’d made up together, every memory, no matter how small. I boarded the plane and kept writing, unable to stop.
The Art of Asking Page 25