When she came out, she was short and beautiful and wearing pajamas and she was real. I've noticed that Amanda can look so different in various photos. "Who Killed Amanda Palmer?" Amanda looks quite different from "Dresden Dolls" Amanda, who looks unlike "Theater is Evil" Amanda. And I noticed that today, at some angles she'd look like one version of herself, and at another angle, a different one. And sometimes, she didn't look like any version I knew. She just looked like... herself. That's when it hit me. This was a person. A person who gets up, gets dressed, and has a life; and part of that life is creating the art that means so much to me. That art didn't come from on-high, from some mythical, unknowable place. It came from this woman, who decided to visit my town, to play songs for us, and tell us her stories.
It was not unlike what Amanda herself talked about, that she when writing her own book she came to the realization that every book she had ever read had been created by a real, live person. It was the same thing for me. This woman standing not ten feet from me wrote the songs that got me through the hardest times in my life. But, it wasn't a song that helped me, it was this person. She pulled out her ukulele, THAT UKULELE RIGHT THERE, and created those songs, and gifted them to us. And now she's here, playing them again, right here, for all of us.
The simplest facts are sometimes the hardest to accept. And these "discoveries" of mine are even more ironic because Amanda Palmer is one of the most open and deeply connected performers out there. She shares so much of her life with her fans. That's one of the reasons her fans are so rabidly dedicated to her, because of that personal connection. But although I've been one of those rabid fans, I've always shied away from that connection. Sure, I'd watch it through the filter of the Internet, see it happening live, but I always felt it was Not For Me. No one else ever made me feel that way, it was something I decided on my own. I was like "that guy" at the party, standing awkwardly alone, and if someone would ever ask, Wouldn't you have more fun talking to people? I'd say, No, no I was having fun just watching. And I guess I was. But maybe it didn't have to be that way.
And yet, when I got in the signing line, and (a little too quickly for my sweaty-palmed liking) was ushered forward to kneel before the majesty of Amanda Fucking Palmer in a blanket fort, all of my discoveries and epiphanies melted away and I was star-struck and dumb at the feet of The Author and The Rock Star and The Artist. It was all a blur. I don't know what I said, if I said anything. Photographic evidence shows me looking like I was about to awkwardly propose marriage or something. But she signed my book, smiled at me, and I walked away.
Oh well.
I don't regret any of it. Yes, I was terrified. Yes, I was certain everyone, including AFP, had seen me and thought, "What a weirdo." But then I realized that there were 500 people in line, and that despite her gift of intimacy with her fans, I was just one of a massive, strange, and wonderful horde that descended on her that day. And then I remembered that it wasn't some inhuman machine of a An Author or Rock Star down there. It was a woman, an endlessly kind and loving woman, inviting 500 strangers into her blanket fort, and taking the chance that some of us might short circuit and hyperventilate.
Six hours later, she was still there, staying for every single person that came to see her. This is because she is an amazing human being. Its statistically probable that at least a few other people also got stage fright, and behaved like Troy Barnes meeting LeVar Burton. That comforts me.
Seeing Amanda Palmer hit me at just the right time, when I need to feel like an artist more than ever. Reading her amazing book, The Art of Asking, helps me nurse that feeling. So, check out her book, support an artist and be nice to each other, okay?
PS: I also bought a ridiculous pair of sunglasses I will be wearing every day from now on.
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