By Paul Ford, Co-founder, Postlight
A few weeks ago my playwright friend Matthew Freeman wrote to me:
As is customary for a neglected friend, the first thing you will hear from me after a very long time is a request for a favor.
I’m doing a theater piece called “This Is Normal” at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg. First performance is this coming week. The piece has no words and I’m casting only people who are not actors. All you do is sit on the stage for 10 minutes silently. That’s kind of it.
I’m curious if you’d be up for being one of the participants?
If there’s one thing about me, it’s that I tend to say yes to things. If there’s a second thing about me, it’s that I’m good at sitting.
Sure, I could do the 24th! Sounds terrifying!
Matt’s response:
It is! You’ll hate it!
But you know what? I went and did it and I really did hate it. I started dreading it the moment I said “yes.” Then about three days before going on stage I felt steadily horrified. People were going to judge me and I could say nothing. And they were going to find me severely wanting. But then, on Saturday at noon, when I got there and saw the little black box theater stage with the card table and chair—suddenly I hated the idea most of all. Until I got on stage, when the real hatred began.
Despite being ashamed of the pudding-bear way I look, and in general finding myself insufferable, I’m on stage a lot. For example, last year I did a nerdy art/tech thing with Miranda July (who is actually famous as opposed to XML-famous) that was stressful and felt high-stakes. She coached me on how to speak and intone before we went on stage, and we presented some new work to a star-dotted (“studded” would be a reach) audience at the New Museum. Or: Two weeks ago I was on stage at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in front of a thousand or so graphic designers, with all that entails. I was a tiny part of the 99u conference, which was the best-run event I’ve ever experienced.
About seven minutes before I went on at Alice Tully (itself the most lovely and professional environment in which I have ever presented), I was ushered to a backstage room with grand pianos and some snacks to prepare myself physically and spiritually, and I sat down to change my shoes. At which point the little folding chair under me exploded — rivets shot out with a plang — and I fell on the ground with my socked feet in the air. And was helped up by a kind and very concerned emcee. My watchword is dignity.
As you do more things in front of people, even as a self-doubt-fueled pudding-bear, you learn to let the velocity of the event carry you along. I leave the beta-blockers and Clonazepam at home and fall back on my little pre-talk rituals: Brooks Brothers’ shirt, change out of sneakers into black leather shoes, brush teeth, glue down cowlick, will myself to cease sweating. Then along comes the fellow to fiddle a battery pack onto my waist, and I raise my arms like I’m going through security, so he can clip the mic. Drink a half-glass of water, and stand passively in the wings until someone says “Okay, go!”
You don’t amble but stride out. And make sure to take 10 or 20 seconds or so to just read the room and adjust to the lights, to move your head around. Let people get used to you. And, finally, bring the thinkfluence: Click the clicker and give them that historical-factual razzle and that synergistic “what if this, but this” dazzle, and self-deprecate the audience into empathy while slyly demonstrating your very handy cognitive framework. Give it some heart too, because what the hell, life is meaningful. Be as genuine as circumstances permit!
That’s my 20 minutes of thought-leader shuffle. Or rather, 19 minutes, to keep the schedule perfect—at which I say a grateful thank you and smile warmly at the applause (sometimes enthused, always polite), and stride right off, to make room for the next influencer. Maybe I said something useful and re-usable; maybe someone will get in touch six months later and ask, “should I hire your company?” The system works.
After the talk, heading home, I’ll check Twitter, where some Dutch guy will have written, “He was not the worst.” At some level this is better than being told I was not the best. I just keep going, and like I said, I do enough of it.
At the little Brick theater, formerly an auto garage, we’d been asked not to watch the others perform in this carnival of silent judgment. So I waited in the dark, until I heard my name.
I walked the 15 feet to the stage in forced good spirits. With the stage lights in my eyes the small audience registered only as outlines. “THIS IS FINE,” I thought, like the cartoon dog in the fire. But actually I was captured by fear.
After I made it to the stage I couldn’t will myself to turn around. Instead, I drank a glass of water and stared at the rear curtain. This was a terrible idea, I thought. I truly regret doing it. On the stage (roughly living-room-sized) there was a brick outdent—maybe some sort of chimney-thing? So I went for it; I took the chair provided and put it behind the outdent in order to feel at least partially obscured.
I sat and looked at the ground. It was black with little tape markers so real actors could hit their marks. People were out there. Hating me. Seeing every bad decision rendered in my fleshy countenance.
Well, I thought, they paid to see me. Other people’s money is very motivating. I pulled the chair out and put it behind the tiny folding table. There was a Brita pitcher so I read the word “Brita.” Brita, I thought. Brita Brita Brita Brita.
As my eyes adjusted I counted maybe ten people—only ten for all this anxiety!—in the audience who’d paid $20 each to be here. Somehow that was worse than a thousand. $200 ÷ 5 performers meant I needed to deliver $40 of aggregate audience value over my ten minutes. $4 per audience-member. How do you give someone $4 worth of entertainment when you can’t sing a little song and shuffle a shuffle?
This was a terrible idea, I thought. I truly regret doing it. I drink water now? I guess? I drank some water. It was good to hydrate for an audience.
Are my legs in a good place?
I moved my legs.
I wonder who that is, that shape of a person there.
Are my hands in a good place? I’m tapping. Should I continue tapping?
Why am I doing art again? I promised myself after the New Museum thing I wouldn’t do any more art. I have children. I should be somewhere with a wiffle bat. Wiffling.
If I were in the audience I would cough. Why don’t they cough? Can one of you monsters cough, for God’s sake?
I could throw up. But Freeman said “no performing.”
This was a terrible idea.
I truly regret doing it.
I’m going to look at that one bright light up there. I’m going to stare at it. The spotlight, they call it? Yes you moron the spotlight. What in God’s name is wrong with you. What else would it be called? The skybulb? There it is. I’m in the spotlight. I’m going towards the spotlight.
What do they think of me?
Okay screw it. Let’s put the chin out a little, just poke it forward. There you go. Into the light. Eyes up. Small smile. Hopeful. Give them something to see. Radiate positivity. If you can’t see them they can at least see that you’re hopeful. That there’s something good coming in this world. Let them know that you want to be here with them. Let’s get a little more smile in there. Relax those shoulders. There you go, buckaroo! That’s right! Let that spotlight bathe your face. Look up. We’re going somewhere! We’re doing art together. And for once in your life you’re actually here in the freaking mo—
— “Thank you, Paul,” said the narrator.
That was it. I walked out (no one clapped, which, fair), and for the next half hour I sat in the quiet dark, as three more people took their turns. I peeked through the curtain a few times. One person was lying down. Another was just sitting there.
At the end we took our curtain call, and bowed. The lights came up and each person received $20 in a white envelope.
After a little while I went home. No one posted about it on Twitter.
On Monday, I was talking about this, and Rich asked, “Did you have any insight? Any epiphanies?”
“I was surprised at my stage fright,” I said. “I thought I’d miss my phone, but more than that I missed the opportunity to just…speak.”
Banter is the technology that gave us Slack and Twitter. Without banter, iOS and Android would be pointless. And when I talk, I have control. What this experience did is make me think through the number of defensive systems that I have around me related to speaking, and how utterly they failed in silence: My little pre-talk rituals, my ability to make a joke, echoed by the sound of laughter and the murmurs of recognition from an audience—all of these collapsed. As a writer and speaker, and a seller of services, I rely on self-deprecation, knowing exchanges, changes in tone, a whole lot of rhetorical jazz-hands stuff that can help sail an idea across a sea of people (or, if I’m not careful, be used to obscure a lack of substance). I don’t have tools for silence and never thought to make them.
Since Saturday afternoon I’ve been wandering around looking at all the ways we fill the quiet: Sonos playing, white noise generators, headphones, whistling, chit-chat, finger-taps, notification pings. And ambient sounds: Passing cars, the clunk of the ice-maker, the heater turning on in the winter or the AC in the summer. Every night at sunset my apartment settles a little as the girders cool and there’s a single big pohnk. These noises pace my life.
One idea I had, as I listened—it’s not the greatest idea but here it is—is that one reason we are always on our phones at the party, or walking along with headphones in (or playing some noisy little game on the train, or in the car with the radio turned up)—is not just because we crave distraction, or because we’re addicted to the stimulus, which are often the diagnoses provided by op-ed writers. Rather, we need those sounds because we are exposed and feel vulnerable, and a little afraid, and when we are out in the world the sounds and signals soothe us, make us feel at home, and let us know that we are safe.
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Postlight uses design and engineering to meet big challenges. I’m a co-founder and the other co-founder is Richard Ziade. If you need us, get in touch.
