Small Fame
Laugh, and the world laughs with you
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Solitude
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Our episode aired again, two weeks ago.
I know this because every day, people have been talking in low tones about ten feet from me,
“Ask!”
“No, you ask!”
“It’s her!”
“It’s not her!”
I know this, because people I have never met have been walking up to me and saying,
“Saw you the other night!”
and
“Hey, was that you crying on TV?”
Yes.
Yes, it was.
And I have a prepared answer, which is, “Thanks! Noted Canadian Financier is a terrific partner, we love working with him!”
They remember that I cried, and Series Bad Guy yelled at me, and sometimes they even remember that we won. We won! We won a giant chunk of money to build our dream show, an indoor theatrical circus that tours to big venues and shows up in the season ticket brochure and keeps us all employed for forty weeks a year!
And for a while, that dream became real. We built the show. I bought an Olympic-size trampoline and a 24-foot box truck and a lot more insurance. The cast learned their lines and their acts and we got a couple of standing ovations and put up a website and got an agent.
But then the economy tanked. And we realized we cost as much as Stomp, but no-one wants to book an eighteen-thousand-dollar show they’ve never heard of, and the price can’t drop unless a single gig becomes a tour and conserves on travel. We got tired of having to completely re-rehearse the show from scratch every time we got a gig, and after six gigs in three years we came to an amicable dissolution with our agent.
We’re still working. Separately. Small shows, festivals, solos and duos and trios at corporate events. Making a living doing what we love, as we all say. But it’s not The Big Show.
And I’m still trapped in time, that episode from 2009 where I get yelled at and then I cry and then I win.
I win.
And for the audience, the story ends there, and I’m that girl from Reality Show, that girl who cried on TV two weeks ago, that girl who’s crying on TV still.
I want to explode, I want to say, “Stop asking me!” or, “We failed, OK?”
I can’t.
I can’t be ungrateful that they recognize and remember, that they are happy for me and happy to feel like they know me. Happy to come to the smaller show I’m doing now and enjoy it.
And in the end, isn’t recognition what I want? Money can be made a lot of places. Art can be made in a room alone. But if someone said to me, you will be fed and housed and clothed and supplied and have all the time you need but you can never, never sign your name, I would turn them down. I would forage scraps from the garbage and write in the corner between French fry basket grease immersions and send my work out into the world, proclaim I made that.
That’s what I do. I sign my name and take a bow and sometimes cry in front of millions of at-home viewers. And the price of public victory is (sometimes) private defeat.
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whipchick has just been pitched to yet another network as a reality show host. You think she'd learn...