Truesday: Staging The... Uh, Stage.
*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors
Last week I stressed the whole “stage” thing. You know, that it’s all important to seize la dia and shit, and that you only live once, yadah-yadah-yadah. And yeah, for serious, it’s important as hell to take your stage. I can’t stress that enough. Voyeurism holds the benefits of safety and anonymity, but you’ll eventually develop a full-on disassociative disorder if you don’t participate in shit every now and again.
So if the moment presents itself, you’ve GOT to put yourself out there: all awkward yet cleverly confident (though you’ll probably never see it that way because you’re your worst critic), burning your eyes in the bright lights of the moment every now and again. Just to remind yourself how human you are, if nothing else.
But there’s more than one cliché which can be applied to stage situations. Sure, you should definitely take that stage, and take it with a vengeance. Bully it. Headlock it and make it cry.
Or take it to a nice steak dinner and then make out with it using extra tongue. Honey or vinegar, whichever’s your flavor of the moment. Or rather: whichever does the job.
However, not all stages are built the same. A random karaoke stage at a bar, when you’ve already slammed right through tipsy and gone headlong into racist-joke-inventing* drunk? Well that’s a gimme-stage. You have to fight NOT to hop up there for a good ol' reputation ruinin’. It’s the simplest of mathematics.
But if you’ve been invited up on that stage, with plenty of lead-time, you should definitely do a little more work to prepare yourself for all that you’ll encounter. If you can prep-up, then you shouldn’t just wing it. Take advantage of the facilities they offer. Research a little. Get yourself in gear and ready, because it’s no longer about bucking-up and calming your unreasonable fears of embarrassment. Now, with a scheduled stage appearance, those fears are actually pretty reasonable and should be minded somewhat (but again: not so much that you talk yourself out of it), but the real opportunity is that you’ve the chance to truly impress yourself.
Holy shit. A chance to prove to yourself that you are indeed alive? How often does THAT happen without involving trains or ships crashing into things, combined with you dreaming of saving babies (or hot chicks, depending) from devil fires or explosions and shit? Not often.
Not often enough, anyway.
Never let an opportunity to impress yourself slip through your fingers. Never mistake it for something else, for something more mundane. Because even if you hop up there, grand plan in hand, and STILL fail miserably, at least you can say that you’re more comfortable with failure than you were prior! Shit yeah!
Who couldn’t use a little well-intended humbling, eh? I know I always can. Or so I’m regularly told.
Just don’t let it go too far. Don’t let the pressure ruin what could be a good time, even if it does turn toward sour. Because it’s all in your head, anyway. There’s no way for you to know how you’re affecting others (not in any real sense), which means you’re really up there to say something to yourself.
So if you’ve got the time, then make sure you choose your staged words wisely, because if you don’t, eventually you’ll stop bothering to listen to yourself. I don’t know which ring of hell that particular fate might exist in, but it’s GOT to be down there somewhere near the inventor of the elephant foot footstool.
And that dude sucks something awful.
* not promoting this, but I'm just sayin'.
[And if any of those who read this column were at Coldtowne Theatre this last Saturday and witnessed me tell my ridiculous stories, I sincerely thank you for coming out. I wasn’t sure how they’d use my stories, so I brought a small arsenal of the things and just hoped that I’d pick the right ones from my brain. It was absolutely fascinating to watch them work. Seriously, my hat is off to those improv junkies.
That shit’s mad-impressive-pressure-awesome. And what they’re doing for the cultural development of our fair city shouldn’t go unnoticed.
Damn. It’s like I’m an investor there or some shit…]
