Life happens before, during and after art-making
I was there for the Story Grand Slam. A grand slam is an annual competition where the monthly winners of a story slam get together to compete once more.
I checked in with the show's producers, said hello to the other storytellers, and then went for a walk to keep rehearsing my piece.
I walked loops around the building while I listened to an audio version of the story I was performing that night.
I felt like an old-timey movie star.
But not the ones you are thinking of.
It was more like the ones discovering what slapstick on black and white looked like, specifically the slip-on-the-banana trick.
I felt my body contort in weird ways and lose its balance.
Luckily, I caught myself and didn't fall.
Unluckily, it wasn't a banana but a giant dog turd—or at least I hope it came from a dog but it was too big to tell.
I was minutes away from the biggest performance in my life, and I had just smeared shit all over my shoes.
I did the only thing I could.
I approached a patch of grass and started cleaning my shoe while I kept mentally rehearsing my story.
The thing is that it wasn't the only thing that happened that night.
For some weird reason, before leaving my daughters with the babysitter, I decided I would make them ube mochi pancakes.
I had never done it before, but I thought it would be a good idea to do it the night I was performing while taking care of them by myself. My wife had already left since she was having dinner with her family before the show.
Here is some culinary advice: never work with mochi.
It is a nightmare.
Whenever I work with mochi, I regret all of my life's decisions.
The first time I was making mochi ice cream. I had gotten a set from my wife, and I was so excited to use it and get into the habit of making this frozen morsel often. I had this image where I would spread the dough on my dining table and work it from there. So, I did. I spread the dough on the table for two minutes. Then I spent three hours trying to pull the sticky flour from it.
There has to be a better way to do it. I just have not found it.
The great thing about me as a father is that I have parental retrograde amnesia. I forget my setbacks, and I move on with life.
It's a grand way to live life unless you don't remember that you should never work with mochi.
A few days before making the pancakes, I was walking through the store, and my daughter and I saw a bag of pancake mix that said Ube mochi. I thought, "Well, that sounds fun!"
It was mochi, which we like, and ube, or sweet potato, which probably meant that it was purple (my daughter's favorite color) and sweet.
Now, why I decided to experiment with that the day before my biggest performance, I will never know.
It probably has to do with my daughter having a full meltdown about staying with the babysitter. We almost never leave our daughters. There is always one of us with them, and even though they really like their babysitter, and ask me constantly when she is coming back. My oldest wasn't into the idea that day.
The list of things that happened before the "banana" slip can go on. The things that happened after it and before my turn can go on.
Then, the moment to perform comes, and you must get up and do it. And nothing else mattes.
Here is my moment.
The thing about consuming art in its many forms is that it gives you the illusion of completion. A piece seems completed, and you see it at the peak of creation. But that illusion leads to the delusion of artmaking being a neat and clean process.
If I didn't tell you this, you would've thought I have all the time in the world to practice, that this is what I do full-time, that it just comes naturally to me, or that I don't have the kind of messy, chaotic life that comes with having kids.
This was my most rehearsed performance, and almost everything imaginable happened between the moment I knew I was going to perform and this performance.
I just kept going back to it and kept working on it.
It won't be different for you. Life will happen to you. There is no way around it. If you want to create art, art that is relatable, well, you have to live a life, and if you are out there living, you will, too, indubitably, slip on a banana. But more likely, dog shit.
You can count on it.
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