It was well after midnight. Danny O’Hare and I stood alone on a makeshift stage in a vaulted stone cellar in Edinburgh’s Old Town. In front of us was a hip, young crowd.

A hip, young, Scottish crowd. A group infamous for boisterous vocal disapproval of acts not to their liking.

When they came to this late-night Fringe sampler, were they expecting a dude with a grey beard and a puppet with orange fur? Equally important — were the dude and the puppet expecting them?

The emcee opened the show, and killed. At one point he sang “You’re Just Too Good to Be True,” and the crowd joined in a full-throated singalong of the chorus:

“EYEEEELUVAHYOUOOOBAYAYBEEE!!!”

So I had to live up to that. Then the emcee, that charming and talented bastard, introduced us. Danny and I stepped up to the mic, and I said:

I know what you’re thinking. “Finally! A middle-aged man with a puppet.”

There were a few laughs, and I launched Danny into our excerpt from the show. It was his opening song, a tune covered by Frank Sinatra, and first made popular by Rudy Vallee. Yeah, I had chosen the perfect song for an audience of 20-somethings.^[1]

When I started singing, every head in the place snapped up. And not in a good way. Conversation stopped. Eyes locked on me, like deer sensing wolves.

Or like wolves, sensing deer. And I was the deer.

What happened next? Did I survive? And if so, how?

Well, spoiler: I lived. And it was easier than you might think, once I remembered that the fastest way through the forest is through the forest.

I’ll tell you what I mean by that, after the news.

What‘s going on?

• My apologies for the late posting. This issue has been written in the following locations:
  • At home,
  • On a transcontinental flight,
  • In Fort Lauderdale, Florida (a few hours before our hotel was evacuated due to a burst pipe),
  • On the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Cunard Lines Queen Victoria (including a crossing through the Bermuda Triangle),
  • And finally posted via the miracle of satellite WiFi.

I’ve heard of remote work, but this is ridiculous! [waggles eyebrows].

• Also, satellite WiFi, while miraculous, is a slow miracle, so I’m not able to gather up a Fun Facts to know and share section for you this week. If you’ve come across an amazing, interesting, or beautiful link this week, how about you share it in the comments? Thanks!

Singing past the abyss

When the suddenly alert eyes of that audience locked in on me, I said to myself, “So this is it. This is how I die.” And I realized there was only one thing I could do now. One action that had the only real chance of getting me through the next three minutes unscathed (or at least a survivable level of scathed):

I had to commit to the bit.

So I kept singing. I puppeteered my brains out. At one point, I even yodeled. I made no apologies for being a guy with a lounge singing puppet. I luxuriated in it.

And the weirdest thing happened. The audience watched me closely for a second, as I waited for them to strike. And then they all seemed to say, “Oh, cool! We don’t need to pay attention to this.” Conversations restarted. People got up to buy another round. It felt like the audience somehow appreciated that I wasn’t going to take up their attention, and were happy to have the breather.

I sang to a room filled with convivial indifference. And when I finished — lamely, because the bit was supposed to end with some crowd work, and the venue’s microphones wouldn’t allow it, so I had to come up with a punchline in the moment — everyone looked up and gave me a genuinely warm round of applause. Smiles all around.

“Oh, look! The old dude didn’t die! Well, done old dude.”

I have definitely had bigger ovations and more attentive audiences. But somehow walking out of that teeming stone warren unharmed felt like victory.

I was on a strange new type of performance/survival high as I strode into the night. I had taken a taxi to get to the venue. But I walked the whole way back, by myself, at 1:30 in the morning. It was the opposite of the Walk of Shame.

Maybe “the bit” is you

Unsurprisingly, it was a Scot who managed to give my after-midnight experience a unique perspective I hadn’t thought of.

A few days after the show closed, Mari and I were in an Italian restaurant in London, and a woman our age and her mother were at the table next to us. They were lovely people, and we struck up a conversation. Them being Scottish and us having been where we had just been, the conversation naturally turned to the Fringe. At one point, I ended up telling the story of my “survival” of the midnight audience. And the older woman just nodded along like it all made perfect sense to her. And then she told me:

“Oh, you know what that was? You weren’t putting on airs. You were being genuine. You were being yourself.”

I had always thought of “commitment” as an act of strength – standing steadfast against adversity, like a lighthouse. And now here’s this woman telling me that commitment can also be an act of vulnerability. That I had shared a part of myself – a part of my self — with the audience. And even if the song wasn’t to their taste, they appreciated the act of vulnerability, the commitment.

And now it starts to echo

Alert readers will note that the Maybe “the bit” is you heading above is similar to last week’s You are the secret sauce. Am I just reusing the same themes? Did I get that lazy? Did the Bermuda Triangle have a real effect on my primitive Earth intellect? Or are the various themes of The Edinburgh Cycle just naturally intertwined, like how Douglas Fir roots reach out and hold each other in a network of shared support?

Yeah, that last one. In fact, they intertwine and reinforce each other so much, that one of the hard parts of putting this series together was deciding the order of the posts, and what specific info would first be discussed where. And “Commit to the bit” was always going to be the capper.

When I think about, it was a solid line of commits that got me to Edinburgh:

• I Finessed Dunning-Kruger to give me the gumption to make that first commitment to do “a show at the Fringe.”
• I Gathered Restrictions to help me prune the shaggy idea of “a show at the Fringe” into a more manageable shrubbery.
• I listened to my Shoulder Devils to commit big to the idea — to not just jump in and out like some sort of performance cold plunge, but to build something with a little substance and be there.
• And on their brilliant advice, I went for a Good Bad Idea. Again, more commitment. And more risk — with more reward.

And of course, my costars and their spouses all made their own sets of nested commitments — to the show, to themselves, to each other. And, in an act of generosity that still astounds, to me. And I to them.

So when the time came to commit to the bit of singing to a possibly hostile audience, it wasn’t hard at all — I had committed to so much, and received so much, just to be there. It would have been silly (and in a weird way, more work) to not just dive in and do my best.

Over to you

But first, an anecdote!

I was lucky enough to meet Lincoln Child, the author of the wildly successful Reacher series, at an event for the King County Library system. He’s an eloquent speaker, and a charming guy.

As he signed a Reacher book for me, I mentioned how Mari and I were so glad to hear him speak because we almost had to miss the event. He looked up from the book and said to me, “Well, it wouldn’t have been the same without you.”

Like I said, charming guy. And that phrase resonated with me long after our short meeting. On the one hand, it seemed like a casual pleasantry. But on the other hand, it was inarguably true. It wouldn’t have been the same without me. It wouldn’t have been the same without any of the people at the event.

So things certainly wouldn’t be the same without you. You may never get to know what would be missing without you, but it’s something. And it matters.

Just remember to commit to the bit. And like that lady in the Italian restaurant pointed out, the bit is you.

Until we talk again, I remain,

Your pal,

Jamie

1. Please read that last sentence in this voice. ↩︎