Dare To Be Heard, Part II

This is part 2 of yesterday's post, excerpted from my 2000 book, How Much Joy Can You Stand? (Ballantine) which I'm about to re-release on the Net as a free ebook. (Watch for details here.)

I will never forget the first time I performed my cabaret act -- a two-woman show in which my partner and I wrote and sang all our own music. For months and months we'd worked on the act, composing, harmonizing, writing lyrics, choreographing moves, all the while convinced that what we were doing was good but strange. No one in their right mind was actually going to like this stuff, though we might get some polite applause. In fact, we only kept going because we were having fun.

Then, our opening night rolled around. As we stood on the stage singing our first number, a curious thing happened. People began to smile. They nodded, and sat up a little straighter as if they were actually listening, and then a miracle occurred: they laughed. All of them. Loudly, even. The audience got the first joke in the lyrics, then another, and another. They laughed in places I hadn't even anticipated. Like some fantastic flying machine lumbering into that sacred moment of lift-off, the act was working. At that moment, I fully understood the impact of what my partner and I had created and it shocked me. I was someone worth listening to. People actually wanted to hear what I had to say.

The common disposition among us is a painful sort of shyness. People get embarrassed when called forth to be themselves for even a millisecond in front of others. The core belief is that since nothing I say matters to anyone, I will end up looking like a dork. This is the precise feeling that keeps people from feeding their dreams.

Oddly enough, that sniggering voice of doubt never really goes away. Years go by and you get somewhat used to it, as you learn to test the waters more and more, and eventually the voice slides from an obnoxious bellow into more of a background drone. Witness the famous acceptance speech Sally Fields made on winning her second Oscar: "I guess you really do like me, don't you?" Observe the fact that Truman Capote was once quoted as saying he'd never written anything he thought was really  good. Not even "Breakfast At Tiffany's." Jane Austen wrote of her work, "I think I may boast to myself to be with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress."

Can you relate?

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