Learning a new instrument

Development of my summer reading program, Les Voyages Fantastique, is really starting to take shape.
I started out with a germ of an idea, based on a particular telling style, and some stories I'd like to tell. It really wasn't cohesive until I decided on a Kipling story to do - How the Whale got his Throat, and with that, the whole idea gelled into an order of stories that I can connect into one continuous telling:
Fool of the World/Six Men Who Travelled the World, How the Whale Got his Throat, and Baron Munchausen's ride on a Cannon Ball.
I have framed the whole thing very nicely, told in the first person, in my usual, physical style, but I've yet to figure out an ending.

I have also picked up a fife, to bring the music with a proper military-march style. It took me about two days just to get a sound out of the thing, I had no idea it would be so tough to play, but I finally got some music out of it. Here's one of my first attempts:

Afraid to be wrong

One of the problems with writing this blog is that if I let too much time go between posts so much cool stuff happens that I would like to write about that I can't possibly write it all. Then there's the anxiety - of all the cool stuff that's happened in the intervening time which should I write about? I don't know, I want to write about it all, to catch up, but sometimes we have to let some things go. Even the really cool stuff (but it's all really cool stuff).

-------

Recently I helped my wife at a Tastefully Simple Home Party. While I helped out in the kitchen, and the adults taste-tested in the living room, a half-dozen kids between five and seven played in the front room. As soon as my duties were finished, I joined them.

I asked them if they'd like to hear a story - they said yes, and I gave them the goods. Everyone had fun and some of the parents joined to listen.

But then it happened, one of the kids asked me to tell a story about all of them, and a vampire princess! I was like a deer in the headlights.

I perform stories - I research stories from various source materials, modify and elaborate, cutting and editing, working on character voices and personalities, and adding music, until I have a completed work of performance art. But, I don't make up stories on the fly about vampire princesses.

"But", I say to myself, "you're a professional storyteller, what do you mean you can't come up with a story about six kids and a vampire princess that's good enough to entertain a five year old? You're some kind of lame storyteller."

Then, because I couldn't come up with anything, the kids started telling me stories - and they were amazing. I heard five stories that night, two of them were totally workable into performance pieces.

That night I stayed awake trying to figure the whole thing out.

I couldn't come up with a story because I didn't know how - or rather I had forgotten how. When I was a kid I made up stories just like these kids. How is it that I know so much more about language, story structure and performance art, and I have all these life experiences to draw upon and I can't make up stories anymore?

More than likely it's because I was afraid to be wrong, to be less than perfect. I just stunned myself into silence.

Don't get me wrong, I write stories all the time, but just like a performance piece I spend a great deal of time crafting them before calling them done. The stories these kids told were done the instant they left their mouths - that takes guts!

I'm currently reading Sir Ken Robinson's the Element, and he talks about this sort of thing, saying kids aren't afraid to try new things, they don't know that they can be wrong, so they create totally original works without effort. Ken says, "If you're not prepared to be wrong you'll never create anything original."

I thought back about the way the kids came up with these amazing stories. They just sort of meandered (kind of like this post), "this happened and then this happened", and, "oh yeah, I forgot to tell you this happened before that!" They didn't know the beginning, middle and end, they only knew what just happened, and then something else happened - just like real life. And they weren't afraid to come up with something completely outlandish.
In the weeks since I've just started making up stories whenever the mood strikes me. And, I have been completely pleased with myself, even when I turn out a total piece of weird garbage, it's just so much fun to create something so wildly out there. And I've even come up with a few pieces I can use.

Library of the Human Imagination

Jay Walker has his Library of the Human Imagination, I have my studio.
Sure, it's a studio, I have microphones and digital recording interfaces, but I keep all that stuff in an old armoire; mostly my studio is all about being inspirational.
One of my favorite places in the world is the campus at UCSD. One of the reasons I love it so much is because they have so many  things there simply because they're thought-provoking - things like talking trees and teddy bears made out of boulders, they designed the whole place to elicit lofty thinking, which of course makes sense in that it's an institution of higher learning.
I built my studio based on that same philosophy. It's a place to inpire my thoughts and imagination, to record my performances, and to give me a good place to pace while I'm thinking.
Because it's supposed to inspire my thoughts, I'm all the time adding things to my collection of artifacts.
My latest addition is a display of two velociraptor skeletons, locked in combat. Unlike Jay Walker, I don't have a real raptor skeleton, mine are plywood 3-D models. I placed them on a shelf above the door and illuminated them with LED Christmas lights. I think they're pretty cool.

Project Development

I've already booked a showing of my Summer Reading Program for 2012: Les Voyages Fantastique. Which got me thinking - I better send out my postcards, libraries seem to be booking the summer pretty early.
And besides getting the postcards out, I'd better write the show.
I'm trying a new creativity technique to develop this show. Recently I read about a thing called a Mood Board.
I am very adamant about consistency in my programs. The music, the stories and the in-between patter, it all needs to follow a consistent theme and flow nicely from one thing to the next. In Les Voyages Fantastique, my idea is to develop several stories, people them with the same characters, and link them all into a single forty-five minute monologue. In as much as I'm taking material from various sources - Andrew Lang, the Grimms, Baron Munchausen and Hollywood; I want a consistent feel through out the entire program.

This is where the mood board comes in. You paste pictures, drawings, colors, textures and ideas, things that develop the look and feel of a project onto a big board. Whenever you start designing an aspect of a project you refer to the mood board for direction. If you need inspiration on your project, refer to the mood board. If you find something that adds to the look and feel of the project, add it to your mood board.
Now, this is a storytelling project, which is a language art, and besides body language and presentation style, there isn't a visual design component - but there is.
I see the stories in my head, and I tell you what I see, and when you hear my words you see the story in your head. I want to portray the story in a specific way, to describe a particular look and feel. Not only does this color the way I tell the stories, but it also steers me in deciding which stories to tell.

I started the board with the flying ship that I drew from Ed Emberley's Big Purple Drawing Book. The ship has a specific look and feel - the colors are purple, gray and black, the textures are reminiscent of a Jim Shore sculpture, the shapes are whimsical and exaggerated, together these items describe a specific kind of story and a specific style of telling.
I chose the name Les Voyages Fantastique with Jules Verne in mind, but I look at what I have and Jules Verne doesn't fit. The project started with the Fool of the World and the Flying Ship and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. With that in minds, coupled with the colors and textures of my flying ship, there is another Frenchman whose work does fit the project - George Millies, so I added his moon to the board.

I've added drawings, textures, colors and pictures to the board, but I've also discarded things: I started to add the "Daring Escape" picture from my King Kong cards, because this is about adventure, but it didn't work. The colors are bold and the action it describes is nail-biting, it simply doesn't work here. Instead I added a picture of a Victorian-era soldier riding a zebra - this definitely fit the feel of the project.

I have six months to write the program, which might seem like  a lot of time, but a project like this could easily get away if not cared for. The mood board is definitely a tool that will inspire me and keep me on a path to a really great show. I already get the sense that it's a tool I will use again.

MC Show

I've got a big MC gig tomorrow. Over the last couple of years I've been getting a lot of opportunities to MC at music festivals, but this one is very different.

First of all, it's bitter-sweet, this particular hootenanny is because a good friend died. I think, should I be more solemn, or my own bigger-than-life self? But, Allen was a fan, and he liked my over-the-top self, so I think the theme (for me anyway) is to thine own self be true, he would've wanted it that way.

Secondly it's a rush - fifteen performers in four hours - whew!

The weird thing about MCing is that you have to tell someone else's story - many people's stories.  And it's tough, it takes a lot of research and a lot of practice.

In the end, it's a lot of fun, I don't call myself an MC, I call myself a host. I think it's my job, to not only intro the performers, but to keep the audience hot during the break, and that's where the fun is. Kind of like Johnny Carson.

I won the lottery

People win the lottery all the time. In fact, I won the lottery...

As a working performer I get hit with a lot of things saying: "You should be listed in our web directory, all the big bookers book from our directory."

In my day job I'm a business software engineer, I write software that records people's voices, analyzes the spoken sounds into digital computer commands and uses those commands to operate complex financial back-end systems (it's actually a lot more complicated than it sounds), and I recognize the difference between an anecdotal analysis and real numbers.

Whenever I get a request to join a web directory I ask for real numbers:
"So, you want me to pay fifty dollars a year to be listed in your directory. On average, how many bookings a year do your clients receive, as a result of being listed in your directory?"
"I got my last three gigs through the directory."
"That's anecdotal. I'm making an investment, I need to know what my possible ROI is going to be before I can give you my money - fifty dollars is a lot of money to a performer."
"But, I got my last three gigs through the directory."
"Let me put this another way. Considering my time investment, advertising and supplies, I need to work three gigs to repay that fifty dollars. If you have X number of people using your directory then I need to know if three times X gigs a year are being booked through your directory."
"I got three gigs through the directory."
"Did the average performer listed on your directory get three gigs?"
"I don't know."

When the California State Lottery started the smallest prize a person could win was five dollars. I don't know what the smallest prize is today because I haven't played since I won. At the time, the chance of winning a prize, any prize, was one in fifty-six. I played for sixty-one weeks in a row and won five dollars.
 
When the subject of conversation invariably turns towards cloud-talk (you know: "what I would do if I won the lottery?"), I regularly tell people, "I won the lottery."
"You did, then why are you still working?"
"Nobility."
 
You see, I did win the lottery, but it cost me sixty-one dollars to win five, not a very good ROI. Then at least I knew the facts: that the odds of winning the big prize were one in thirteen-million, and the odds of winning any prize were one in fifty-six, and I still came out behind the odds.

The fact that I won the lottery, and that many people win the liottery, is anecdotal, it's meaningless. What's meaningful is statistics.
 
You see, being listed in a directory may or may not be a good thing, but who knows? Maybe everyone is booking through your super-cool directory; but you don't know that, and that means I'm buying a pig in a poke and I don't even know what  a poke is.
My work as a performer is just that: work. I have to treat it like a business and that means being logical with my investments. I would shell out money left and right to be listed in directories if they could tell me what kind of results others are getting.

(---Warning, this is not an endorsement of any web service, It's simply a statement of fact ---)
I should mention that ConcertsInYourHome.com actually offers you a guarantee. They can't give you real numbers either, but they do say that if you honestly put your back into it, build and promote a proper profile, and you don't get a gig, then they'll give you your money back - that seems pretty fair considering a lack of statistics.


I did play the lottery one more time. I once got a fortune cookie that literally said I would win money in a lottery, so I ran down to the store and played the numbers on the back of the fortune - I lost.

Les Voyages Fantastique

I make no secret of the fact that my storytelling is inspired by the movies. Where other performers talk about how they grew up in houses filled with musicians or yarnspinners, I grew up at the foot of a black and white TV with a bad vertical hold that brought me all the UHF goodness of the Monster Movies of the 30s and 40s. Plus, there was the Spring Valley Cinema, home of the fifty-cent double feature and all the great low-budget movies of the seventies and eighties.
Recently I read the Fool of the World and the Flying Ship in Andrew Lang's Yellow Fairy book. I decided I wanted to tell the story, but it needed to be punch up a bit. I remembered my eighties movies and that the opening story in Terry Gilliam's Adventure of Baron Munchausen was not actually a Munchausen story, but was indeed the Fool of the World.
Then it hit me - I looked back a few years in my idea book - there was a note from January 2009 entitled: Indana Munchausen. The idea was to tell first-person adventure stories that are a mix of Indiana Jones and Baron Munchausen.
I started toying around with the idea again in the vein of the Fool of the World instead of Indiana Jones. I like flying ships, and they look good on advertising. So I dug into my vast collection of Ed Emberley books.
I grew up drawing from Ed Emberley books. I was never patient enough to develop my drawing skills, but I can follow directions, so Ed Emberley gives me all I need.
There it was, in the Big Purple Drawing Book, the most difficult Ed Emberly drawing ever, the Sea Hawk. I had never drawn the Sea Hawk, it took me three attempts in pencil before I could get it to fit on a single page. And then, when I finished, to make it into a flying ship I still had to attach two more sheets of paper, and then I had to scan it in three passes.
But now that it's complete it's a beauty to behold and will become the centerpiece image for my summer program: Les Voyages Fantastique, classic adventures told in the Munchausen style.