When It All Goes Wrong
EPISODE 066: WHEN IT ALL GOES WRONG
Life is never a straight line. You never get into comedy, for example, thinking you'll nearly burn down the venue or bleed out on stage (keep listening) so when the unexpected happens you're left with a choice: keep going? Quit? What do you do when it all goes wrong, when you're trying to make something beautiful but the pieces are nothing but ugly? Let's talk about it.
Prefer to Listen Elsewhere?
Listen on iTunes | Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher
Do me a favour? Would you take a moment and give this show a rating and review in iTunes.
Want More? A Beautiful Anarchy is published 3 out of 4 weeks. On those fourth weeks you can still get your fix through On The Make, my monthly missive about the creative life. Subscribe now and I’ll make sure you don’t miss a thing, and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscribed listener and send them a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Enough years ago now that time has deadened some of the sharper pangs of this memory, I was cutting my teeth as a comedian, magician and juggler. While I would go on to do a one-man show as The Rubber Chicken Guy, I initially had a partner. Troy and I worked hard to string together a 45-minute show we were proud of, despite a constant nagging feeling that we really had no idea what we were doing. We were learning our craft, as both jugglers and entertainers, just two kids with a crazy dream, and we would take any gig we were given, hoping every exposure to a crowd would smooth off some of the rough edges.
It was because of that desire to take any gig we were offered that we found ourselves behind the boards at an ice rink, preparing to do a short show for 15 minutes between the first and second periods of a hockey game. Since we'd be in the middle of a very large, very non-flammable ice-rink we had decided it was the perfect time to do a show with fire, swapping out our usual juggling clubs and machetes for antics involving flaming torches. "What could possibly go wrong?" I thought.
Ignore for a moment the very obvious foreshadowing present in what I just said. There's another piece of information you need in order to guess where this is heading, and to answer the question you might already be asking yourself: what's this got to do with you and your creative life? I'm David duChemin, and this is episode of 066 of A Beautiful Anarchy. Let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
The gig I'm describing had come up rather suddenly and I had given the guy who booked us one condition since we weren't getting paid and since the rider on my contract didn't yet specify anything so fancy as a bowl of green M&Ms in my change room. I had asked for only one simple thing. "I need a coffee can, or something similar," I had said. "I need it to re-fuel our torches," I explained. And he promised he'd come through.
What he handed me, on arrival at the rink and only a few moments before we were told we'd be going on early, was a styrofoam coffee cup. There are so many ways in which a metal coffee can is not the same as a styrofoam coffee cup. Capacity is one. Colour is another, I suppose, though it's of much less importance to what was about to happen than, oh, say, the difference in how those two receptacles might, or might not, resist heat or flame.
Try not to get ahead of me here, but it's hard not to see, especially in hindsight, how putting hot torches into a small, slowly melting styrofoam cup filled with kerosene might seem like a bad idea. As our short show went on, each time I put a torch into the cup it seemed to lose just a little bit more of its will to live, slowly melting into itself, until one of the torches–which the footage of the performance showed so much more clearly than I saw at the time–went into the cup with a lick of flame still on it. The cup of fuel caught fire, and me being more fool than firefighter, stepped on the cup, sending flames across the ice and igniting, however briefly, my shoes. I maintain to this day that the situation was fully under control. Or it was until the hockey players decided to save the day, jumped the boards and skated out to extinguish the flames. There's a way of stopping dramatically in hockey skates that sends out a spray of ice, and I suspect these guys were just so excited to finally find a real-world application for this hard-earned skill that they forgot whatever lessons they might, at some point, have learned about putting out fuel fires with water, the first of which is: don't do it.
There was so little fuel left in that cup that, had these guys refrained from playing the hero, we might have salvaged the whole thing, might just have convinced everyone it was all part of the act. It was so close to resolving itself that I think had it all ended there I might have been able to put the whole thing behind me, but there's always that one guy that wrecks it for everyone else, isn't there? In this case it was the guy who just couldn't let that last lick of fire die out on its own, just had to reach for the nearest water bottle and douse the flames. Except it wasn't a water bottle and the litre of kerosene he poured from that bottle onto the dying flame, so small you could barely see it, well I think it surprised him as much as his heroic stupidity had surprised me. He dropped that fuel bottle into the resulting conflagration and skated back behind the boards. They all did. Just skated off leaving Troy and me standing in the middle of the rink beside a fire that would have done me proud on a Friday night under a starry sky with a bag of marshmallows, rather than centre-stage with my best friend in an ice rink under the stunned gaze of 300 hockey fans.
I remember throwing my hands in the air in resignation, walking off the cold ice and into the hot anger of the rink manager, and later back to my dorm, nauseated by the shame and the fear that I'd never perform again. I locked the juggling stuff away for a while, hidden in a box, out of sight, along with the melted plastic fuel bottle, which I later threw out and now wish so much that I had kept as a trophy of one of the hardest moments I ever faced in front of a crowd. A reminder that things often go sideways. They go wrong in ways that are unexpected and painful, and if we are wise we won't let them sideline us for long, though I think it's helpful to remember that it's not usually these events that sideline us but how we choose to react to them. Had I never gone back to comedy, a possibility I considered long and hard, I couldn't have blamed the fiasco at the hockey rink for what would never have been, the fault would lie in my response and the choice to choose surrender over resilience.
I laugh about the incident at the rink now. It's much easier to do that almost 30 years later, when I'm looking back and it's only one memory among many in a successful career with only a handful of truly disastrous performances. I had another in which I needed a volunteer from the audience to cut a piece of rope with a pair of scissors, and in her enthusiasm she cut deeply into my fingers, and I stood there trying to catch the pooling blood in my hand while asking for a bandage, and so convinced was the audience that this was all just part of the act that they just sat there laughing and applauding and waiting to see what crazy thing I would do next. I laugh about that one too, though at the time I wasn't so sure I wanted to ever get back on stage.
Other things are harder to move on from, less pregnant with the possibility that "one day we'll laugh about this." There are moments in life when we falter, either from a misstep of our own or because somewhere deep under our feet the ground shifts, and our steps fail us.
I'm not sure why this particular sermon feels like the right one at this moment. It could be all the time I've spent looking back recently, as I always do at this time of year, just grateful to be alive after an accident ten years ago that should have killed or paralyzed me. It could be the long year we've all had, and continue to have, and from which it might take many of us years to recover. It's probably also the many emails I've been getting lately expressing the fear that some vital part of us, some crucial piece has snapped or just worn out or gone missing during this pandemic, and I've heard in some of these emails the unmistakable sound that hope makes when it struggles for breath.
When I had my accident in Italy in 2011, after a series of questionable decisions, I fell from a 30 foot wall, crumpling into a ball on the concrete below. 2 hours later I was lying in a hospital in Pisa, all my clothes cut from my body except for my Blundstone boots, which for reasons I still struggle to understand, they chose not to cut but to pull off my shattered feet while I howled at them and felt the tears pooling in my ears. I was cathetered and x-rayed, my broken pelvis stabilized and casts put on both feet and one of my hands before the doctor told me what was going on. "Well," he said, "you have broken both feet very badly. You will never walk the same again, and will always walk with a limp. But," he said, "you will limp with both feet, so it won't look like a limp."
Ten years later, I don't walk the same. I limp, somedays worse than others. And he was right, it doesn't always look like a limp. I'm not sure what it does look like. A strut? A bit of a screwed up saunter, perhaps? Maybe a sashay with a side of "what the hell happened to you?" Why am I telling you all this? I think what I'm fumbling around trying to say is that things change, and often very quickly. Life is string of constant changes and once in a while those changes hit us from behind with such force it knocks us clear out of our shoes and leaves us wondering what the hell just happened and it's natural to lick our wounds and look for someone to blame, or to give up, and I thought perhaps it might help to be reminded that these exact moments are our biggest opportunity for creativity, and in which our creativity is never more needed.
More than just the way we make our art, creativity teaches us to bounce when we hit the pavement. It is in learning to be creative that we learn to find possibility and hope where they are not immediately obvious. It is in our creativity that we find resilience. It is here we learn to have courage in the face of change and uncertainty, and here where we learn to bounce. And though we rarely bounce back to where we were so much as we bounce forward or sideways into something new, we do bounce. Or we can. I thinking bouncing–like our everyday efforts at creativity–requires that we surrender some of our rigidity. It requires adaptability, maybe a certain elasticity if not in our bodies then certainly in our thinking. It requires a willingness to embrace change and adapt to what is, rather than wishing for what was, and to make something of it. I think that's what it means to be creative. To make something of it.
There is something fundamentally redemptive about creativity. Making something great of something that is painful and difficult. Choosing to make something beautiful from pieces that on their own are ugly. Making meaning from that which feels, on its own, meaningless. These are responses we choose in order to change what is dark into what is light.
The human race may be many things, but unable to adapt we are not. We are, or can be, profoundly resilient. Resilience is not denial. It is not emerging unscathed. Nor is it simply bouncing back. Resilience is bouncing higher, further, and often with a wildly different trajectory than we could ever have planned. It's growth. It is not optimism, wishful thinking, or the naive belief that everything will be OK, but the belief that we can make something meaningful and even beautiful of it, no matter how meaningless and ugly the pieces we're left with when it does all wrong. To make something of it is our fundamental creative capacity, a redemptive impulse in which we find our resilience, and from which, with raw materials that are hard, painful, and truly ugly, we might find the courage to make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0