The Readiness Is All -- So YIP to It!!

"I find bad poetry to be extremely motivating...."

Thus quoth our beloved Mary Crisman, of YIP Podcast fame, in response to my eager plea for a new podcast (her pod-partner, Tammy, had informed us that the long-awaited cast was ready, but that Mary was "holding it hostage").

Drastic measures were necessary.

I warned Mary that I "once wrote Karim Nagi a limerick for his birthday and he has never fully recovered..."

To which Brave Ms. Mary replied: "Bring. It. On."

That was in April.

I toyed with a few ideas for a week or so, glanced through RhymeZone for some ideas ... Nothing "clicked" and I put it in the back of my mind and secretly hoped the YIP ladies would forget the offer altogether...

Back in High School I'd learned a bunch of Shakespearean sonnets for a contest and got hooked on iambic pentameter. So I tried my hand writing them and found I had a knack with rhyme and meter.

I'd write them as gifts for friends, or random silly stuff -- which went over much better than my usual overwrought musings.

But somewhere in my late twenties I pretty much stopped writing.

Each year, I wrote less stuff -- bits and pieces now and then, an occasional poem, a monologue or short play or two. I'm not sure whether this was because my main focus had switched to performing, or that I had started to lose confidence in my writing ability.

In '96, I took a class in writing a solo show and hated everything that came out of me -- the writing, the way I performed it. To this day I have never watched the showcase performance video.

There was a lot happening with me emotionally and psychologically at that time, but the bottom line was that my standards were getting higher and higher -- way beyond what I was able to produce. So I found myself mercilessly crushing even the beginnings of any idea that flickered in my mind.

And this thinking seeped into other areas of creativity: I increasingly doubted my ability to act, improvise, or even do stand-up comedy.

In other words, wanting to create good art demolished my ability to create any art. And since I was too afraid to suck, I stopped.

There is an excellent talk by Ira Glass that is variously referred to "The Gap" or "On Taste" that addresses this kind of creative block, where he says:

For the first couple of years, what you're making isn't that good ...but your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making ... is still sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past that point ... they quit. 

So he advises anyone who is stuck at that phase to just crash on through and create a lot of work, and remember:  "It takes a while .... and you just have to fight your way through that." And even though Ira himself was still finding his feet on This American Life at that time, I had heard similar advice from other artists.

But at that point I didn't know if I wanted to write or act or go back to comedy.

So I started to bellydance.

And it was in dance, and with encouragement from various teachers and fellow students whom I admired, that I found myself moved by the music and the juicy bellydance moves, that I couldn't help but dance!

And second, I began first to develop a tolerance for "The Gap", and for not caring so much if I was "good" yet.

Ranya Renée, photo by Lina Jang

Ranya Renée, who is most responsible for transforming me into a professional dancer, challenged us:  "Dare to be boring!"

In her Performance Prep workshop series, she encouraged us to come from a place of feeling, not worrying so much about how we looked but focusing on connecting to the music.

And, most importantly, she helped us lose our fear of sucking.

"Because sometimes," she'd grin, "You have to let yourself suck if you want succeed!" We groaned, but the message was clear: Work hard, do your best, but don't get stressed if you're not as good as you want to be.

You'll get there.

And slowly, the paralysis melted ... I began to take Dancemeditation classes, where Dunya encouraged us to connect writing to dance. I felt awful and awkward ... but I wrote.

And then I started blogging ... then writing and performing some comedy again ... even doing a little Shakespeare now and then.

And I took classes in comedy, sketch writing ... and creating a solo show.

So here it was April 2014, I had every reason to be confident in my writing abilities.

And once again I was stuck.

Months went by. Then in late June the YIP Podcast thread on Facebook picked up again. Other listeners started griping:

Where was the darned podcast?!?!?

Mary quipped, "I'd like to blame my glacial pace on Carol's blatant refusal to furnish me with a bad poem...."

She promised the next YIP would be forthcoming, regardless of my poetic lapse. But as I read through the chain of endearingly silly comments, I started feeling inspired.

After all, this was YIP Podcast for crissakes -- the best, funniest, most appreciative audience around -- specifically asking for a bad poem.

Yes -- BAD!

Laughing, I sat down around 11pm on June 24 and, in about a half-hour, banged out fourteen lines of perfect iambic pentameter Fakespeare silliness:

O why hast thou forsaken us, dear YIP
When but a snip or quip would surely sate
Our thirst for podcast YIPpage?? Yet your grip
Still fiercely holds the treasured aural bait!
You tempt and tease your audience too much
Dear YIPsters -- we grow barb'rous at your gate
And rain upon you thund'rous cries--as such
Demand that you RELEASE THE YIP, lest Fate
Confound you with a YIP-borne curse so dire
That all the goddesses of YIP would weep
To plead on your behalf; but we require
The long awaited YIP held in your keep
     And thus will not relent till it is freed.
     For once released, the YIP brings joy, indeed!

A few days later, I read it to my parents who got a kick out of it, and remarked that it was strange took such a short time to write. "Sometimes it can take days or weeks to finish a poem," I said. "Even though it's only fourteen lines, it's kind of like a puzzle. It can take a while to fit it all together."

"Well, maybe you had been working on it all along," my father said. "Like with any problem. You focus on it a bit, and then walk away for however much time is necessary. Then a while later the solution comes to you all at once."

This, I think, is true, not only with this bit of poetic silliness, but with what I had experienced for years as a "blocked artist; perhaps it wasn't simply that I was "blocked" -- that I could have pushed through it with a blast of willed confidence -- but rather that I wasn't ready.

But I was getting ready ... slowly.

As I focused on developing more external aspects of my personal and creative life -- on the craft and technique of dance, the basics of joke writing, improvisation skills -- my unconscious was gradually assembling larger works which emerged quickly once they and I were ready.

To quote Shakespeare's Hamlet: "The readiness is all."

And while that context had more to do with fatedness, I prefer to think in terms of patience and trust: First -- try to sit down and do the work. If I can't work, then I don't force it. I'll do other things. Or do nothing for a while.

But I continue to listen, and trust that whatever I'm trying to create is brewing.

And once it's ready -- and I'm ready -- it will let me know.....

Life Imitating This American Life (or Quit It, Ira Glass, You're Freaking Me Out)

It's Friday, October 5th around 10pm.  My chosen listening for my commute to and from work is the recent podcast of This American Life, "Send a Message."

The opener describes the bizarre coincidence of Kepler's translations of Galileo's coded messages.

In a nutshell, as host Ira Glass describes, "[Here was] a guy ... [Galileo, who] would send a message that he probably hopes will never be decoded. And then it gets decoded, but incorrectly. And then the wrong message turns out to be right not once but two times."

(For details, you're just going to have to listen to the episode, or read the transcript.... it is too weird and arcane to get into here.)

The next story, the show's Act One -- The Motherhood of the Travelling Pants, delved into weirder synchronicities, as a family recounts its generations-old tradition of sending either a pair of little-boy pants or a little-girl dress to the next expectant mother. And, with a statistically brain-breaking level of accuracy, the sender (usually the last person who bore a child) correctly predicts the sex of the newborn.

This is put to an astonishing test when one prior mother can't decide which to send -- so she sends both the dress and the pants to the next mother. And the new mother has... wait for it... fraternal twins!!

So here it is, 10pm and I'm  on my way home after having stayed late at the office to put the finishing touches on my solo show. And I am up to the next segment, Act Two -- Message in a Bottle -- told by stand-up comic and musician Dave Hill -- which, as one would expect from a stand-up, contains its share of playful crudity.

He begins bemoaning the current edge-lessness of our recently sanitized  city:

I understand that there was a time in New York when you could walk down the street, and just crack open a beer, and just suck it down, and throw the bottle on the ground. [LAUGHTER] And you might get, like, a little raped, or whatever. [LAUGHTER] But it didn't matter. It was like a give and take. You took the good with the bad. And everyone was fine with it. And now you can't really get away with any of that stuff. But you can get a really nice brunch at a lot of places. Just go with your friends, free refills on mimosas. It's great for everybody.

And this is true. As a native of this town, I remember all too well the crack dealers prowling the corners of Lafayette and Bond (on my way to do stand-up, myself, at the First Amendment Comedy Club), and I remember vaulting over mats of sleeping homeless on my way to class at NYU.

And I have seen my share of exposed body parts and those parts' various secretions. 

But I have never had an experience quite like what followed that evening on the downtown B train.

So, as I am listening to this segment, where Mr. Hill describes putting a rather harmless piece of refuse on top of  one of those large black garbage bins that can be found at the edges of many subway platforms. This apparently disturbs a homeless guy sleeping near the bin:

And he's like this sleeping giant, just like, [GROWLING SOUNDS]. And he gets up. And his bones are creaking. And his hair is, like, all crazy all over the place. And he looks at me. And he just starts yelling. And he's like, back up! Back up! 

Hill fails to back up.

At that moment, a B train pulls in. Now, I always get on at the last door of the last car because I need the rear exit of my stop. And I usually sit in one of the forward-facing window seats of the back-most cluster of the B's R68 cars.

But there'ss a homeless guy huddled up in the backward-facing seat of the rearmost cluster, so I move to the next cluster up and sit facing backwards (which I usually never do on an empty car since I prefer to face forwards).

So I am sitting there, directly behind the homeless guy, spacing out a little with my eyes gazing towards the floor, and Dave Hill continues on:

And then he goes, back up or I'll throw this bottle of piss on you! And then from out of nowhere, like a ninja, all of a sudden he's got this Gatorade bottle.  And it's a huge Gatorade bottle. ... Only, instead of being full of delicious and refreshing Gatorade, it's full of pee, of urine.

And at the very moment Hill says this:

And before he even finishes his sentence, he cocks his arm back and just launches it at me. ... His aim was incredible. It was just coming right at me. The first blow nails me right in the head.

I begin to notice some liquid travelling down the center of the car towards me.

Now, liquid in a subway car is not that big a deal. People still drink all kinds of beverages (even though you are not supposed to have open containers anymore) and they slop them cavalierly whenever and wherever they please.

But this liquid is special. It isn't spilled-soda liquid -- a single, localized hit -- this liquid keeps on coming. I trace my eyes along the widening rivulet, following it towards the back of the car and I see ... wait for it... a full Bethesda Fountain emerging from the lap of the homeless guy. It is arcing its perfect parabola towards the center of the car.

Now, as I mentioned, I have seen a lot of stuff -- but I have never seen this -- a full-blown, unrepentant micturition right into the center of a subway car.

It takes me at least 20 seconds to wrap my mind around what I'm seeing, as Hill goes on:

It's going down my back and down my jacket. And it's soaking my pants. It soaks through my pants, soaks my underwear. He had effectively wet my pants with his pee.

And I'm realizing, "Hey this is a crazy-assed coincidence!" And then I think, "Hey maybe I should take a picture of this..." But he's been at it for at least 30 seconds, so I figure it's probably all over and I continue to listen to the podcast.

Because if you figure if your opponent's first move in a confrontation is to just drench you in his own pee, like, what's next? At the very least, he's got a couple more bottles of pee back there, you figure.

The pee fountain continues full force, and finally I decide that yes I will photograph this insane event, but the moment I get my phone out the car stops and the people sitting in front of me get up and block the last few moments of the geyser.

So it's all over.

I move to the next backward facing seat hoping get a good shot of the urine starburst on the floor and its watery trail through the car -- which is shown here -- as well as the homeless guy himself, who huddled back to sleep the moment he was done.

And in a testament to the fact that neither New York nor New Yorkers have lost our edge, another passenger continued to sit blithely just a few feet from the homeless guy all through the urination episode (see his feet at the right of the photo). 

Yes, Dave, this motherf*cking town is back!!