Life Is Like a Musical

by Tim Federle

  Walk three blocks before you unload, however far that means to you. Better, ask yourself what you’d like people to be saying about you if you screwed up or missed the mark. Aim to be that person. And if you can be critical and careful, good-humored but not God-awful, you win the ultimate prize: being one of the good guys. The world can never use enough of those.

  39 FORGIVE YOURSELF FOR A BAD PERFORMANCE

  Don’t let a bad performance tarnish an otherwise good day. In the name of humility you can edge into a weird kind of narcissism—and that goes doubly for all you perfectionists out there. A single fluke does not define you. This is a lesson I wish I’d known when I was beginning my professional career as a dancer.

  I grew up a lot when I turned twenty. I was performing full time, having skipped college for a shot at the gypsy life—and I got it. Every musical theater dancer dreams of appearing in A Chorus Line, the iconic Michael Bennett musical from the seventies that stars dancers as dancers, talking and crying about what it’s like to go from show to show. At twenty, I packed my duffel bag and headed to St. Louis for the summer to play the role of Mark in A Chorus Line—notable because he’s both the youngest character onstage and also one of the few people who actually gets “cast” in the fictional show within the show. That means I had to dance like hell, be a standout from moment number one, project to the audience: Look at me dancing my ass off over here. Aren’t I the best one up here? No pressure, kid.

  You can imagine my frustration when, only three minutes into our first preview, I badly botched a piece of famous choreography—a turning sequence in the show’s legendary “audition scene” for which I was placed downstage, front and center, for what felt like all of Missouri to see me suck. I stumbled, fell, landed flat on my ego. It ruined my day, and very nearly the rest of the summer, this nagging suspicion that I’d been found out—that I was a faker and not truly talented. (Ah, the drama of being twenty.)

  I shared all of this with my boyfriend at the time, and how humiliated I felt. He didn’t blink, and instead said, “Wait till you get to Radio City; you do so many shows there’s no time to worry about mistakes.” And he was dead right.

  The Christmas season after that summer in St. Louis, I donned ten costumes over five shows a day to entertain the masses at Rockefeller Center. And you know what? I messed up all the time, tripping over my own tired feet. But I kept dancing, and I learned to trust the trend of my talent—that, more often than not, I did a perfectly good show and occasionally a pretty flawless one. You only get that experience when you get a lot of experience, slogging it out thirty-five Christmas pageants a week. Wisdom means knowing, over the long haul, that you’re pretty all right.

  Forgive yourself when you screw up. Develop a sense of humor that allows you to snort-giggle before anyone else can. Find the funny in your mistakes, and then gently but seriously try to figure out if you are truly error-prone or just occasionally unlucky—which is also known as being human.

  When a toddler falls, she gets right back up. When a dancer falls, we hold our breath, cross our fingers, and hope he does, too. We root for him. Whenever possible, offer yourself that same care. You’re worth it.

  40 PUT ON A HAPPY FACE

  There’s no people like show people, who smile when they are low… if they’re being paid for it. But there’s actual wisdom in forced merriment. Allow me to talk science for a moment. This will only hurt a bit.

  There are studies (a lot of ’em, and they’re bookmarked on my laptop because they comfort me!) confirming that you can trick your body into thinking you’re in a relatively okay mood simply by putting on a happy face. There’s apparently a stress-relieving chemical that’s released when you grin like an idiot, whether you feel like grinning (or looking like an idiot) or not. Show-people know that, whether you’re in a grin-and-share-it mind-set or not, if the number calls for a cheeseball smile, you deliver. Anytime I had to perform an upbeat tap dance, even if I clomped through it, utterly uninspired, I’d leave the stage feeling… pretty neutral, actually. All the beaming seemed to bounce off the audience and back at me. You might try it sometime. There are worse things than neutral some days.

  This is firmly not about smiling for other people—or pretending “Everything’s okay, I swear!” all the time. Smiling, when you’d rather be sulking, is more about doing a force-restart on the complicated wiring of your own hard drive. And, hey, if you end up getting a reputation as being pretty upbeat along the way, that’s cool, too.

  When I was in middle school, I had a truly eccentric theater teacher named Jill (I believe she owned a different silk scarf for every day of the year), who gave me a nonfiction book about stagecraft that I devoured in one sitting. It was called Theater of the Oppressed, a fitting title for a teenage boy who felt the entire world was judging him. Written by famed Brazilian theater maker Augusto Boal, who staged guerrilla shows in the streets, the book contained a famous saying: “Have the courage to be happy.” I needed that at fifteen. I need it now, too, sometimes.

  The inertia of good luck seems to follow people who, more or less, appear to be enjoying themselves. Notice how the world around you is full of two types of costars. The ones who, just like vivid musical theater characters, believe their best days are ahead (“Maybe this time!” as the song goes)—or, alternatively, behind them (“I’m losing my mind”).

  Back to science. Set a timer. Smile for thirty seconds. Even if it’s by yourself, with tears streaming down your face, in the dark. You can trick your brain into mild, temporary elation by putting on a happy face. The powerful thing about being a guy who generally goes with the flow and shines through life is that, when the going gets rough and you need to speak up, people take notice. It’s the opposite of the boy who cried wolf. You become the boy who is so agreeable that when you say, “No, this isn’t right,” people listen.

  Many highly regarded actors can only figure out their performances from the outside in—they’ve got to put on the 1940s costume gloves to truly understand how their character breathes and feels. So why shouldn’t you occasionally play the part of someone who’s braver than you might actually be?

  Don’t put on a happy face for anybody but yourself. And, for pity’s sake, certainly not for any construction worker on the street telling you to smile. (Just take this book and throw it at that guy’s head.) But try this technique sometime during a low-grade fever of a day. And if you can’t muster a grin, then write a gratitude note to somebody or force yourself to take a dance class.

  Or just go with the stormy feelings, after all, and blast the Spring Awakening cast album so your breakdown has a soundtrack. Then wake up and try to find that happy face again tomorrow.

  41 RECONNECT WITH YOUR INNER THEATER KID

  Our childhoods were probably pretty different. Maybe bliss, for you, did not involve blasting the Evita cast album (don’t call it a soundtrack) while acting out the title role, despite your not being Argentinian, or female, or a dictator. Regardless, I’m willing to bet that you had some activity that kept you occupied hour after hour when you were around eight years old. And I’d bet even more that you’ve lost touch with that thing. That spark. That obsession. Here’s the good news: That “theater kid” still lives inside you—you just have to access him again.

  I’m not choosing the age eight arbitrarily. There was a study done stating that the person you were in about second grade—her quirky pastimes and fantasies for the future—was a strong indicator of who you were genuinely meant to be, once you got a couple feet taller. For a lot of us, it was the age when our daydreams went from generic (“I’d like to be playing hopscotch on the playground right now”) to specific (“I’d like to play Belle in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway before I’m twenty”).

  But for too many of us, these elementary school years were also a time when others started raising an eyebrow at our youthful passions. And thus, by third grade, we began living our lives for the adults around us. That’s a hard habit to break—especially wh
en you grew up getting a gold sticker for being “good,” even at stuff you didn’t care much for. Being good is the opposite of being brilliant. I’d rather get a red X any day.

  A lot of people say they got into theater because it offered an escape, a chance to at last be somebody else. I got into the theater because it was the one place I could actually be myself, warts and wigs and all. Your own inner theater kid—whoever that kid was—is a north star back toward a place in your life where you got lost in your imagination.

  What made time stand still for you? Who were you, back when no one was looking? These questions are not rhetorical. They are, in fact, a directive. A clarion call to get back in touch with an authentic part of yourself.

  For me to reliably get into a “flow,” it was a toss-up between staging complicated routines in my parents’ basement or working on my childhood comic strip, which I called The Weird Way (my own take on The Far Side). At some point, I guarantee you an adult informed me I had to pick one—be a choreographer or be a cartoonist. Worse, I was probably told I should pick a more practical adult ambition (as if there’s anything particularly practical about slaving away in a cubicle for forty years).

  But you don’t have to pick a single major in life, and your inner kid knew that from the start. Your inner kid was likely dead set on growing up to be a professional veterinarian-astronaut-lawyer-hula-hooper, back when she didn’t know “better.” Go back and find some of that mad scientist sparkle you had before you started editing yourself. Or, rather, before an adult taught you to sand down your most interesting edges.

  Because I write theater-themed novels for children, sometimes I have the joy of popping into a school for the day as its guest author, and signing a lot of books. I like to have a dialogue with the kids, above anything else. Invariably, when I ask a class of second graders, “Who here considers themselves a writer?” every last hand pops up. It’s adorable. It’s true, too—second graders can spin a yarn, man. But when I’m touring with my novel for teens, and I ask the same question, basically… no hands go up. By senior year in high school, we’ve all been so beaten over the head with the supposed merits of topic sentences and the proper usage of semicolons that we’ve forgotten how to tell an actual story. But every second graders knows how to—they just start spouting. The more rules we pile onto ourselves, the less of a chance we have at striking true inspiration. It’s hard to innovate when you’re so busy being polite.

  If you find yourself trying to figure out what kind of adult you should be, think back to what your younger self paid attention to. There’s wisdom in who you were, back before you knew you had to be somebody.

  42 TAKE THE NOTE

  Musicals are living organisms, whose performances change, stretch, and… let’s say “grow,” from night to night, whether you want them to or not. Along with the blessing of this most immediate art form comes its own curse. Over the course of a show’s (hopefully long) run, actors begin taking tremendously thoughtful if misguided pauses during soliloquies, dancers start straying from their onstage marks, and shows basically tend to grow lethargic faster than you can say “Wednesday matinee audience.”

  Early on I learned, the hard way, to just “take the note”—that if my dance captain tells me my energy is lagging in a production number or that I’m doing some new, weird thing with my arms, just to say thank-you and not offer an excuse or explanation. Nobody much cares, not really; they’ve got twenty other dancers to monitor and give notes to on any given night.

  But when I first began receiving performance feedback—“Tim, you were a beat behind in the entire ‘Nutcracker’ sequence last night,” I was told once, at Radio City—it was impossible for my loose lips not to sputter, and explain: “I had a minor earache and could barely hear the music, and, and, and…!” You get the drift.

  Luckily, I had a sensitive enough superior who took me aside one day, gently squeezed my shoulder in the manner that says, You’re a young, adorable idiot, and explained that I never again had to offer a long-winded monologue on why something went wrong, unless he specifically asked. Just, ya know, take the friggin note. (I nodded, and he released my shoulder.)

  I’ve passed that lesson along to every kid I’ve ever coached on Broadway. Kids are always easier to motivate and notate, by the way, as they generally have fewer hang-ups and fears. They just go for it, and if you tell them you expect them to just “take the note,” they nod and go, “Okay!” Refreshing! But people aren’t born like this. You’ve got to model the behavior.

  If you find yourself in the position of offering feedback, critiques, advice, or all-out criticism, particularly if it’s directed one-on-one, consider preempting the first “note session” with a version of the following: “Look,” you’ll say, “it’s my job to offer you insights into your performance, and thus I will occasionally be riding you to alter certain things about the way you go about your job. There will be times this sucks for both of us, but one thing I can promise you is: I will do my best to never make it personal. Like, at all. It’s just literally my gig, just as it’s your gig to occasionally be annoyed by me doing my gig.” (By now he’ll be nodding and laughing and going, “Totally, totally, all good,” but don’t stop.)

  You’ll continue: “The one thing I’ll ask, just in the interest of time, is that you simply take the note. Just nod, or say the note back to me in your own words, or let me know you’ve got it in some way unique to you, and we’ll be cool. What you never have to do is explain why—unless I ask. As in, why something was late, or sloppy, or why your work has gotten unfocused. Unless there’s something going on in your life that I need to know—and that’s fine, I’m open to whatever—don’t worry about offering excuses. Just take the note. We good?” And then he’ll be like, “Totally, totally, all good,” again, and you can fist-bump and keep walking.

  When you’re on the receiving end of feedback in your own life, resist the impulse to get defensive. When you give an excuse as to how something got off track—other than in cases of an actual mixup or systemic confusion—you can’t help but get into a fight. But when you nod and say, “Thanks, I’ll remember that and work on it,” an amazing thing happens. The energy behind any possible confrontation disappears, poof, just like that. Nearly always, it ain’t that deep.

  By the way, these same principles applied when I began receiving editorial comments on my books. If your editor sees room for improvement in your work, she’s usually onto something. It’s her job to keep you in line. And to cut your adverbs. Ruthlessly.

  43 LIVE IN A SUITCASE

  If you’ve ever packed a bag for longer than a weekend, you know the challenge of boiling down the essentials. Once you get past a toothbrush, a couple changes of clothes, and a travel-size bottle of Jose Cuervo, what’s left? What matters? When you learn to live in a suitcase, you also learn what counts—from possessions to, of course, people.

  In my mid-twenties I got hired to be the original dance captain on the first national tour of Spamalot. Huge opportunity, right? It was an A-list production, with sit-down stints for months at a time in Toronto, Boston, Washington, D.C., and more. But going on the road means you can’t take your whole life with you—I had to cram six months into three bags. Brutal! By the end of that tour, I’d changed my views on “stuff” considerably—and valued how few of my physical trappings I actually needed to feel whole.

  Living a streamlined lifestyle is easier than ever these days: From photo albums to paperback books to an actual Rolodex that I used to pack (!), nearly everything I stuffed into my third duffel bag would be on my phone now. (With the exception of my lucky teddy bear, who went everywhere with me, and which no app can replace. Ever.) Everything else from back home, from posters I’d bought at IKEA to a pair of turquoise candlesticks my grandma had given me, had been left in storage when I sublet my New York City studio. By the time I returned home, I was strangely overwhelmed with how much… well, junk was there to greet me. (Sorry, Grandma. Still have those candleholders!) I
ended up donating five garbage bags of bric-a-brac in order to clear out my own space and make it more hotel-like. (To this day, I miss turndown service and mini-shampoos. And free HBO.)

  Now, keep in mind, the Manhattan apartment I came home to was the approximate size of most kitchens in Cincinnati, so any extra space I could carve out wasn’t just a premium—it was a luxury. Still, clearing away clutter to make room for the good stuff—like, ya know, other people, and room to think—is what breathing easy is all about, no matter how much square footage you call your own.

  So, how can you customize your own space? More important, how can you keep what matters, and whittle down the rest? I’m not suggesting you downsize to a tote bag. Populating your home with mementos that bring to mind happy times and actual accomplishments is a must. And distilling your essentials to the real stuff isn’t all that complicated nowadays. When you cut the cable cord and lose the exercise bike (which has, more recently, been used as a sweater drier on laundry day), what you’re left with is… surprise, yourself! And aren’t you sort of great?

  The most valuable thing about you is your voice—and I don’t mean for singing. You are made up of your thoughts, which become actions. And though the clothes on your back bring comfort and reflect status, they aren’t there when the lights go off at night. When you’re in the dark, in a hotel room, or your new boyfriend’s apartment for the first time, or your own childhood bedroom on a holiday visit home, what you’re left with is the way you feel about you. Learning to live in a suitcase means figuring out what’s unique about yourself, and not the trappings that sometimes obscure what you’re really about.

  44 GO ON “VOCAL REST”