Interviews. I’m not a big fan. Why? Because I want to see the inside of a person; I want to feel what they feel. And interviews rarely portray anything beyond the few simple questions. But there is one question that seems to come up and seems to elicit the same response from any great who responds, one question that actually hits me. The question: what would you do if you weren’t … you (okay, the interviewer invariably says something like a musician, a rock star)? The response: a variation on, I don’t know, or I never thought about anything else, or “something creative”, or … “pushing broom”. And that tells me something. It tells me that despite the odds, and what are the odds of making it, that they never, ever, never, ever stopped. They played to an audience of one, then to an audience of two, then to an audience of twenty, then in a club, then as a back-up band, then … a headliner. They made paper flyers and posted the flyers themselves. They wrote songs on buses, in hotel rooms, in bathrooms, in those moments when they woke up and couldn’t sleep, sometimes using every effort to stay quiet so that their spouse or lover didn’t wake up. They worked. They worked really hard. And you know the crazy part, the part that really hits me? They didn’t listen to the voice inside that says only one in a million make it. They made that voice tell them you are the one in a million. There was no other option.
Yesterday, I talked to my brother, a regular conversation, except he told me he had been to the football game on Friday night at the high school where his son attends, the same high school my brother and I attended many decades ago. He said the game was sad because it was the last game for the seniors, so they were all crying. I told him I remembered that one, my last high school football game. It was in a city some miles away. We took a bus to get there. It was raining, almost snowing, and a bitterly cold November Friday night. I was a baton twirler, one of four. Our uniforms were sparkly body suits and these little tennies, no tights, nothing to keep us warm. I wore my hair up, with curls and more sparkles. We had warm-up outfits to wear when it was cold, but never did we go on the field wearing them because I felt it was part of the performance to have the sparkly outfit. Nobody wanted to see us perform in warm-ups, nobody, not even the people who actually want us to be warm, least of all … me. So, against the protestations of the director, I decided “no warm-ups, not even in the sleet, not on this, our last game”. Yesterday, I told my brother of that decision I made then, just like it was actually made yesterday, of how we performed for the 30 or so minutes on that field in the normal, sparkly outfit, how there was no way my/our last time on a football field in that capacity, this childhood dream I was living of being a twirler for major high school, would be in anything other than that sparkly outfit that had come to define me. My brother said “I remember that night, it was really cold, we (his friends) were all huddled under plastic”. But I remember it… more because it wasn’t just my last game, it was the last time, at least in that capacity, I got to … I don’t what the words are… go for it?
Not being actually done with my sparkly, dance stuff, I skate. I’ve been back and forth with that for most of my life starting on a homemade rink my father built for me as girl. Skaters get up in the dark, work in the cold, fall down and tell people that doesn’t hurt. Most of us are trained, and the trainers often push. Once I overheard a coach say to her student, a student who was trying to break a barrier, the first triple jump: do you want it? The skater said, yes. Everyone around heard that coach’s question, and most of us thought inside ourselves, yes — indeed, a resounding yes. But there was more. The coach wasn’t satisfied with the “yes”, after all, we all … want it, and wanting it, frankly, isn’t enough. To get there, really there, like champion-there, requires a belief, forget belief, knowledge, that this is all that will be, that there isn’t anything else that will do. So, the coach’s next question: how bad? There is no answer to that. There are no words. There are only actions. And the only action that matters is to … go for it!
How bad did the rock stars want it? They wanted it bad enough to ‘wear the sparkly outfit in the freezing cold’ times a thousand. I think that’s why I thought of that yesterday, so that I could remember that one moment … and relate, just a little bit. Indeed, I feel like I’ve been sitting a bit, disbelieving too much, not wanting to write at all, letting some set-backs really affect me, so perhaps I remembered to both relate and … to push me beyond the fear because, truth be told, my memory of Friday night so many years ago, was that I was never cold, not once down there on the almost-frozen grass field, not once was I cold. I just wanted. I wanted it … bad. Rock stars answered the question of how bad by doing — doing like there was nothing else (only in that world, there isn’t a finite end, like the last game), and that’s the flip side of the interviewers question, what else? They did this work of theirs like there wasn’t anything else. They never walked away. They never put it up. They were never satisfied with just some level and never pushing past it. They performed to an audience of one, like it was a million, in the cold, wearing their sparkles, okay not sparkles, rock-star-pants but you know what I mean. Then, they performed to an audience of two, like it was a million in those same pants, then to twenty, then as a back-up band, … then as the headliner, when by then the rock-star-pants made total sense. After all, nobody wants to see them in something other than those pants — a point I completely understand. And by then, they didn’t question. They knew they were one in a million, they knew that wanting it bad … was enough.
To me they are a lesson. To me that answer, indeed the question which begs that answer, says it all. Perhaps that’s even why rock stars exist, to make us see that such success translates to anything, that if you have a dream, no matter what it is, no matter how improbable, no matter how many people would leave their warms-ups on because it’s cold, you … do it, and I mean … really do it. All we have to do is answer the question, in the same way they did.
How bad?