Since the beginning of February, I've been spending my Friday evenings practicing accordion for the Shadow Heart Puppet Show. I'm going to be playing about 90 minutes of music, which works out to be 29 songs, something I haven't done for years.
I'm to the stage of preparation where I have to finalize my song choices, cutting the songs I don't want to present and putting the winners in order. As I go through my selections, I realize that they're almost all waltzes. This makes sense. I love waltzes. When I pick up my accordions, waltzes are what I want to play.
But my mind goes back to this dumb anti-waltz comment someone made six years ago. Did you know there are people out there hating on waltzes? Unfortunately, there are. At the time, Zach and I were playing a lot with a puppeteer whose big thing was to invite us to perform with him in places where no one wanted us. He always acted like, no, it's going to be great, I have a friend there, he's really going to dig you guys. We got thrown out of the Worthington Arts Festival and the Ohio State Fair going along with this guy's antics. I have no idea why we kept showing up to these sketchy non-gigs.
One weekend he was selling stuff at the Don Scott Antique Show and invited us to come play at his booth. We hadn't been to that event before, and by his description I guess I imagined a kind of carnival environment where folks were putting on little shows at every booth. Instead, it was just people sitting at tables selling antiques in giant rooms. We set up, we played, it was awkward, we persisted. (This sentence transcends this moment and describes great chunks of my life. I should get it tattooed on me.)
The puppeteer was adamant that we go play at the booth of a friend of his who was set up in another building. He was sure the guy would love it because he was a musician who used to be in REO Speedwagon. If you've heard Zach and me play, you know the connection to REO Speedwagon is, well, subtle at best. But at the puppeteers encouragement, we went.
The REO Speedwagon guy was cranky as hell and didn't seem all that psyched to see the puppeteer or us, but he had the kind of wife who spends a lot of time smoothing things over. She did a kind of, "Oh, what fun, honey, sure, let's have them play," act while he scowled. I should mention that no one else was playing any music at all. It was definitely not a carnival. After we had been through a few songs, the friendly wife, paddling to keep the water from sinking the boat, said, "He wants to know if you have anything to play that's not a waltz?" (He did not want to know that. As a woman who has occasionally mediated between cranky men and the rest of the world, I know a feminine translation when I see one.)
Here's the thing about being an artist: the gig requires you to set all your insecurities aside, go out into the world, and display this thing you've spent an insane amount of time for other people to witness and judge. It sucks. Well, when they love you, it's kind of awesome. But you're in such a vulnerable state that, if they have any complaint at all about you, it lodges itself firmly in your brain and becomes the reason why you should never do anything creative again ever.
That moment at a festival at sunset with two gay men stopped to kiss in front of our act because we reminded them of Paris? That takes up almost no real estate in my head compared to the discomfort with too many waltzes, even though it was one of my favorite moments in my performing life.
But during the pandemic, when my relationship to performing and art shifted quite a bit, I made a promise to myself that I would remove the word "should" from my artistic vocabulary. I decided that, as an artist, I would only ever do exactly what I wanted to do, and say a firm no to everything else, no matter what. As I put my set list together tonight, I tell the cranky REO Speedwagon guy in mind head that both "Time for Me To Fly" and "Keep On Loving You" would have been better in three-quarter time, and I force myself to stay true to my waltz-loving self. Of 29 songs, 18 will be waltzes, and it will be Paris all night long.
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