The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

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I was twenty-two, I’d just graduated from college, and I really, really didn’t want to get a job.

Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t lazy. I wanted to work. But I had no desire to get a JOB job.

Growing up as an über-emotional teenage songwriter and theater nerd, I faced a bewildering and bottomless chasm between what I wanted to become—a Real Artist—and how one actually, well… becomed it. Though I worshipped daily at the altar of MTV, I didn’t know any famous musicians, so I couldn’t ask them how they had becomed. I didn’t even know any non-famous musicians. All the adults I’d ever encountered—my parents, my friends’ parents—all had “grown-up” jobs: mysterious, complicated, white-collar jobs, jobs in tall buildings, jobs that involved computers, jobs about which I understood absolutely nothing and in which I had no interest.

When people asked me What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up, I’d lie and try to just give them the most impressive answer I could think of: A lawyer! A doctor! An architect! An astronaut! A veterinarian! (I liked my cat. I figured I qualified.)

The truth just sounded too stupid. I wanted to be a Rock Star. Not a pop star. A ROCK STAR. An artistic one, a cool one. Like Prince. Like Janis Joplin. Like Patti Smith. Like the dudes in The Cure. The ones who looked like they Lived Their Art. I loved playing the piano, I loved writing songs, and I knew that if I had any choice in the matter, THAT’S the job I wanted.

But I had no clue how anybody got such a job, or what being a wage-earning artist meant in practical terms. I’d barely caught a glimpse of a working artist in his or her natural habitat until I attended my first rock concert at the age of eleven and saw that Cyndi Lauper was a real person. Until that moment, I had been suspicious that Cyndi Lauper, Prince, and Madonna were, in fact, being convincingly played by actors.

Furthermore, the liberal arts education that my parents had generously broken their backs to be able to afford, because they considered it a crucial necessity for “survival in the real world,” had done a shocking amount of nothing to prepare me for the cold truth of my chosen career path.

Not that college was all impractical theory or wasted time, and I harbor no regrets. I learned how to hand-develop my own film in a darkroom. I learned the basics of theatrical lighting design. I studied Chaucer, John Cage, postmodern performance art, post-WWII German experimental filmmakers and Post-Apocalyptic/Eschatological Beliefs Throughout A Variety Of World Religions And Fictional Genres. I even learned—not in the classroom, of course—how to construct a potato cannon that could shoot as far as 250 feet (the distance to the rival dorm across the street) using a long piece of PVC piping, and a bottle of Aqua Net extra-hold hairspray. (And a potato.)

I also learned over those four years that a diet of hummus, cookies, and cereal makes you fat, that it’s impossible to tap a keg unless it’s been properly chilled, and that DJ-ing a college radio show from three to five in the morning doesn’t expand your social circle one iota. And that heroin kills people.

But I did not learn how to be a rock star, or, for that matter, an employable, wage-earning bohemian; Wesleyan University did not offer any practical courses in that department. And there didn’t seem to be anybody hanging around that I could ask.

Now I was done, I had the degree, I’d made my family happy. And after enrolling, panicking, and quickly withdrawing from a full-ride scholarship to get my master’s degree in “anything I wanted” at Heidelberg University (I’d figured out, by that point, that academia was making me miserable, and drunk), I flew home to Boston from Germany with two giant suitcases and no real plan about how to Start My Real Life.

I considered my situation:

I knew I wanted to be a musician.

I knew I didn’t want a Real Job.

I knew I had pay for food and a place to live.

I took a barista job, rented a room in a dilapidated share house in Somerville, Massachusetts, and decided I’d be a statue.

Toscanini’s Ice Cream, where I worked as a sorbet-scooping espresso puller along with a motley bunch of twentysomethings, was a local operation with three Cambridge locations owned and lovingly managed by an incredible guy named Gus Rancatore. A humble press quote permanently etched into the front window of the store read:

“THE BEST ICE CREAM IN THE WORLD”—THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The baristas were assured four shifts a week at $9.50 an hour plus tips, which was enough to live on, and everyone who worked there ate a lot of ice cream, which was free to the employees.

My expenses included rent ($350 a month), food other than ice cream (I could survive on about $100 a month), and the extras: cigarettes, beer, records, bike repairs, and occasionally, clothes. I’d never had expensive taste and bought most of my wardrobe at the dollar-a-pound section of a used clothing store in Cambridge called The Garment District, which is where I found The Dress.

Building the statue was easy: I poked around the vintage shops trying to spot an inspiring, long-sleeved, high-necked, monochromatic costume fit for a statue, and found an antique bridal gown that fit the bill and cost only $29. PERFECT, I thought. I’d be a bride. All white. Easy. Sorrowful. Mysterious. Coy. Compelling. WISTFUL! How could anyone hate a bride?

I also bought some white face paint, a full-length lace veil, and a pair of long, white opera gloves. Then I went to the wig shop and completed my ensemble with a black Bettie-Page-style bob. I bought a glass vase from a thrift shop and spray-painted it white on the sidewalk outside of my apartment.

I started the next day.

I decided it would be perfect to hand out flowers as little tokens of gratitude, but I didn’t know exactly how many I would need. I certainly wasn’t going to buy flowers when they were growing freely all up and down the Charles River—I had spent the last of my savings on the getup and was pretty much broke.

So I took an hour-long amble along the banks of the river that flowed gracefully alongside the Harvard dorms, feeling very entrepreneurial, resourceful, and bohemian, picking any flower with an actual blossom that looked presentable until I had about fifty. I harvested three stray milk crates from an alleyway, ducked into the employees-only bathroom in the basement of Toscanini’s, and donned my costume.

Then, heart slamming, I ventured into the main intersection of Harvard Square. Please picture this moment: I was walking on a standard city sidewalk, on a hot summer day, in a bridal gown with my face painted white, carrying three milk crates, wearing a black wig and clompy, black German combat boots. I got stares.

I selected a relatively well-trafficked spot on the brick sidewalk in front of the subway station, arranged my milk crates in a pyramid, covered the crate-pedestal with a spare white skirt, clambered atop, straightened my back, raised my spray-painted vase full of wildflowers in the air, and… stood still.

The first few moments up there were terrifying.

I felt stupid, actually.

Vulnerable. Silly.

It was lucky that I was covered in white face paint—my face burned bright red beneath it for the first ten minutes, I could feel it.

The sheer absurdity of what I was doing was not lost on me.

You’re painted white and standing on a box.

You’re painted white and standing on a box.

You are painted white and you are STANDING ON A BOX.

You are so full of shit.

My mantra of masochism broke the minute the first few people curiously wandered up to me. A small crowd formed at a respectful distance and a five-year-old boy approached me, wide-eyed. Into the empty hat at my feet, he cautiously placed the dollar his mother had given him.

I jerked my arms alive, as if in shock, dramatically hovered my hand above my white-painted vase, gazed at him, then selected and silently handed him one of the flowers.

He shrieked with delight.

It worked.

Then somebody else put a dollar in.

Then another.

Then another.

At the end of an hour, the bouquet of flowers was gone.

I climbed down. I schlepped my crates back to Toscanini’s, stashed them furtively in the basement, said hi to my co-workers, slipped behind the counter to make myself an iced coffee with a scoop of free hazelnut ice cream, and sat down at one of the little metal tables outside the shop to count my hat. There was some loose change, but mostly bills. Someone had thrown in a five.

I had made $38 in an hour. On a good tip day at the store, I made $75. In six hours.

I washed my face in the bathroom and walked back to the center of the Square, with the wad of dollar bills in my pocket.

Right at the intersection of Mass Ave and JFK Street, it hit me. I stopped short, stunned by the realization of what had just happened:

I can do this as a job.

I can do this every day that it’s warm and not rainy.

If I just made thirty-eight dollars in an hour, I can work three hours and make about a hundred dollars in a day.

I don’t have to scoop ice cream anymore.

I can make my own schedule.

I don’t have to have a boss.

Nobody can ever fire me.

I WILL NEVER HAVE TO HAVE A REAL JOB AGAIN.

And technically?

I never really did.

I had dipped my toe into the living statuary experience before, albeit briefly. While drinking seriously, studying casually, and waitressing part-time at a beer garden (free beer!) during a year abroad in a sleepy little German town called Regensburg, I’d decided to try supplementing my income with a beta-version of The Bride: a trippy, white-faced, wheel-of-fortune ballerina statue I named Princess Roulette. I stood frozen in the center of a chalk pie chart I drew in the cobblestoned town square. I’d divided it up into eight sections, each with its own little prop or basket, and I’d wait for a stranger to place a coin in my hat, at which point I’d close my eyes, spin in a circle, and land with a jerk, pointing at a random space. I’d then mechanically proffer up a small gift (an exotic coin, a candy, an antique key), unless, of course, I’d landed in one of the “suicide” spots, in which case I mimed a clownish mini-tragedy, killing myself with a variety of prop weapons. I would spin, stop, open my eyes, trudge slowly over to the waiting bottle of poison while looking incredibly somber, wipe an imaginary tear from my eye, pick up the bottle, drink its invisible contents, and then fall to the cobblestones, gagging and twitching. (I also had a toy gun.) Once I had achieved full corpse pose, I would hope for applause, get up, dust off my glittery tutu, and jauntily return to my frozen position in the center.

It was whimsical but grisly, sort of Harold and Maude meets Marcel Marceau. The Germans didn’t quite know how to react.

One landing spot was neither gift nor suicide: it was the “tea set,” which was supposed to be a jackpot of sorts. If I landed there, I’d grab the hand of my victim, whom I would wordlessly invite to sit on the ground to enjoy an imaginary cup of mime-tea using a vintage collection of cracked cups and saucers I’d bought at a flea market. I assumed that this activity would be utterly thrilling to every passerby. I was sorely disappointed by the fact that not every German took me up on my theatrical offer to enjoy a cup of mime-tea. What gave?

It never occurred to me that staging my own comic suicide with different props in the middle of a small-town plaza and inviting strangers to sit on the ground probably wasn’t the most effective way to win the hearts and deutsche marks of Bavarian families out on their Sunday strolls.

Princess Roulette quickly taught me a lot about the practicalities and economics of being a living statue/performance artist, and a little bit about Germans. The biggest takeaways:

Although I performed as Princess Roulette only four or five times, I quickly learned that the relationship between a street performer and the street audience is a delicate one, one that adheres to a different contract than the one that exists between the stage performer and the ticket-buying audience. There’s a much greater element of risk and trust on both sides.

I learned this the hard way on my very first day, when a friendly-looking man in his thirties walked by with his toddler daughter. Parents out on walks with their curious children are a godsend to street performers; they take great pleasure in supplying their kids with hat money and watching as their offspring experience a spontaneous, magical, and fully supervised interaction-with-a-stranger.

This one, however, went a bit pear-shaped. The dad put a coin into my hat and I began spinning. As I opened my eyes, I saw that the little girl had wandered over to one of my roulette baskets and had helped herself to a huge handful of my gift candy. Upon seeing this, I was at a loss. This child was stealing my candy. I had never anticipated this problem. After considering, briefly, what the correct action was for my character, I looked the little three-year-old girl straight in the eye and, breaking my mime-silence, pretended to cry. Quietly, but committedly, I emitted a high-pitched, but measured, anguished whine of agony over the loss of my candy.

This was not the correct thing to do.

The little girl proceeded to burst into ACTUAL tears and let forth her own (far less measured) wail, and for a split second, our collective, pack-like moan of anguish in that little town square in Germany sounded like some kind of epic, Wagnerian cry of broken, senseless human loss and suffering…

WHY??

I stood frozen, in shock, as the horrified father scooped his emotionally assaulted daughter into his arms and flashed me that universally heartbreaking glare that says, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY CHILD?

I felt really guilty, like I’d scarred this child for life and drained the joy out of any future trust-based interactions she might have with any street performers, actors, mimes, or human beings.

I also felt—and this was a new emotion—like a bad artist.

In that moment, something seismic shifted. I’d been viewing my role on the street as a performance artist who would share the gift of her weird, arty impulses with the amenable public. I’d grown up an experimental theater kid, writing, directing, and acting in my own surreal and morbid plays on school stages. I wasn’t an entertainer—I was making art, dammit. And though I wasn’t afraid to disturb people, I never wanted to hurt them.

This interaction made me realize that working in The Street wasn’t like working in the theater. The Street is different: nobody’s buying a ticket, nobody’s choosing to be there. On the street, artists succeed or fail by virtue of their raw ability to create a show in unexpected circumstances, to thoroughly entertain an audience that did not expect to be one, and to make random people care for a few minutes. The passersby are trusting you to give them something valuable in exchange for their time and attention, and (possibly) their dollars. Something skilled, unexpected, delightful, impressive, something moving. With few exceptions, they’re not giving you a dollar to confront and disturb them.

That dad and his little girl didn’t want theater.

They didn’t want to be provoked.

They wanted to be entertained.

But they also wanted something more. They wanted connection.

It dawned on me, standing there in my white face paint and tutu, that I was effectively working in a service position: A strange combination of court jester, cocktail hostess, and minister. A strange, coin-operated jukebox of basic, kind, human encounters.

I learned a lesson on my first day of Bride-ing: standing on a plastic milk crate becomes REALLY uncomfortable after a few minutes as you sink slowly into the middle. It’s hell on your knees.

I would stand with my combat-boot-clad feet locked in place for half an hour, until the position became intolerable and I had to move. I would wait until I was between crowds, and then imperceptibly shift my weight from foot to foot, finding a new part of the crate to stand on. A few days later, I figured out that I could solve this problem by capping the milk crate with a square of hard plywood.

In my mute, frozen state, time and space took on a fascinating new quality, measured from one liberated movement to another, and I created an internal spoken dialogue with the world around me. I figured that if I said things loud enough in my head, the message would shoot out through my eyes.

Hi.

I’d blink my eyes a bit, and regard my new human friend, while they regarded me.

As they dropped money in my hat, I would lock my eyes onto theirs, and think:

Thank you.

*blink*

Here. Take a flower.

*blink*

And if I was in a particularly good mood:

I love you.

*blink*

What I hadn’t anticipated was the sudden, powerful encounters with people—especially lonely people who looked like they hadn’t connected with anyone in ages. I was amazed by the intimate moments of prolonged eye contact happening on the busy city sidewalk as traffic whizzed by, as sirens blared, as street vendors hawked their wares and activists thrust flyers at every passerby, as bedraggled transients tried to sell the local homeless community newspaper to rushing commuters… where more than a second or two of a direct, silent gaze between strangers is usually verboten.

My eyes would say:

Thank you. I see you.

And their eyes would say:

Nobody ever sees me.

Thank you.

Late one night at a yoga retreat a few years ago, a teacher asked a group of us to try to remember the first instance in our childhoods when we noticed that things were, for lack of a more clinical term, “not okay.” My answer was so quick to come and so deeply revealing that it made me laugh out loud. It is, in fact, my earliest intact memory. I was three.

There was a tall wooden staircase in our home, and one day I toppled all the way from the second floor to the first. I sharply remember that Am I going to die? slow-motion panic as I tumbled head over heels in a bouncing, cartoon blur. I was uninjured, but the fall had been traumatizing, and I ran, weeping and discombobulated, into the kitchen to recount the epic incident to my family.

Here’s what I remember.[1] The kitchen was full of people: my mother, probably my stepfather, maybe my three older siblings, maybe some other random adults.

And none of them believed me.

They thought I was making it up. Trying to get attention. Exaggerating. Dramatizing.

And there I was, thirty-two years old, at a yoga retreat, desperately trying to find myself, and realizing that everything I’d been doing in my life, artistically, could be summed up like this:

PLEASE BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL. NO REALLY, IT HAPPENED. IT HURT.

And I sat there and laughed and laughed.

And cried. And laughed. At myself.

It was so embarrassing.

I laughed thinking about all the ridiculous stunts I’d pulled as an introverted, angry, punk teenager, dressing like an outlandish freak but being too insecure and afraid to talk to anybody. I laughed thinking about myself as an antisocial college senior who plonked her naked-and-covered-in-stage-blood body onto different spots around campus pretending to be dead as part of her postmodern performance art thesis, attempting to elicit some sort of reaction from the other students.

PLEASE. BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL. IT HURTS.

I laughed at the canon of heart-wrenching piano songs I’d written as a teenager, which added up to one screaming, pounding, screaming, pounding manifesto with a single, unified theme:

PLEASE. BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL.

I laughed thinking about the hundreds of hours I’d spent standing on a box, gazing silently and wistfully at passersby, handing them flowers in exchange for money. I laughed thinking about working in strip clubs during that same period, gyrating to Nick Cave and staring into the eyes of lonely, drunken strangers, challenging them to look into my soul instead of my crotch:

PLEASE. BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL.

I laughed thinking about all the nights I’d howled on concert hall stages, screaming those same old teenage songs at the top of my lungs, as aggressively and honestly and believably as I possibly could, to the point that I lost my voice almost every single night for a year and had to get surgery to cut away the rough, red nodes that had grown on my vocal cords as a result of too much yelling:

PLEASE. BELIEVE ME.

I laughed thinking about every single artist I knew—every writer, every actor, every filmmaker, every crazed motherfucker who had decided to forgo a life of predictable income, upward mobility, and simple tax returns, and instead pursued a life in which they made their living trying to somehow turn their dot-connecting brains inside out and show the results to the world—and how, maybe, it all boiled down to one thing:

BELIEVE ME.

Believe me.

I’m real.

Here’s the thing: all of us come from some place of wanting to be seen, understood, accepted, connected.

Every single one of us wants to be believed.

Artists are often just… louder about it.

At that same yoga retreat, we stood and faced each other in pairs, really looking at each other from a close distance. We were told to simply BE with the other person, maintaining eye contact, with no social gestures like laughing, smiling, or winking to put ourselves at ease.

Grown women and men cried. Really and truly sobbed.

When we were finished with the exercise, we talked about how it had felt. The thread echoed again and again: many people had never felt so seen by another person. Seen without walls, without judgment… just seen, acknowledged, accepted. The experience was—for so many—painfully rare.

Even cynical people got caught up in the romance of The Bride. People have a Thing with Brides.

I suppose I banked on this when I bought the dress. Who could hate a BRIDE?

There’s something magical, pure, beautiful. The virgin. The holy. The hopeful. Whatever.

I spent a lot of time on that box enjoying the irony of the fact that I was a bride for a living, stuck in this dress, while philosophically I knew I didn’t want to get married. Ever.

All my parents, stepparents, and exes-of-stepparents, the whole lot of them, looked crazy to me. Why keep getting married and divorced, people? Why not just DATE?

I would not make their mistake. Even if I was in love.

I wanted to be free. Unfettered.

Marriage always looked like hell to me.

When a stranger put money into the hat, I would try to emanate an immense amount of gratitude for this savior who had momentarily freed me from my frozen pose. I wouldn’t look at the donor immediately. I would be coy. I would look at the sky. I would look at the crowd. I would look at the street. I would look at my vase. And then, once I had selected the perfect flower with as much graceful fluidity as possible, I would finally gaze at my new friend, never smiling with my mouth but always with my eyes, and lean my body forward ever so slightly, holding out the flower delicately clutched between my thumb and forefinger.

This always reminded me of the act of communion: that small, quiet, intimate moment when the priest proffers the wafer, intimately instructing you to ingest the body of Christ. (I was pretty bored in church as a kid, but I always loved that ritual. I also liked the singing bits.)

So, a dollar into the hat. I would gaze lovingly at my new human friend, my head filling up with a little silent monologue that sounded something like this:

The body of Christ, the cup of salvation.

Regard this holy flower, human friend.

Take it, it’s for you. A gift from my heart.

Oh, you want a picture? Okay! We can take a picture.

I’ll just hold this flower and wait while your girlfriend gets out her camera.

The body of Christ, the cup of salvation. The flower of patience.

Oh. I see your girlfriend’s camera batteries are dead.

Now your other friend is getting his camera out.

This is all fine. Because I am the picture of Zen and in the moment.

The body of Christ, the cup of salvation, the flower of forgiveness.

So come to me, human friend! Nuzzle into the folds of my white gown, we will pose together. With love.

Oh, new human friend, your friend with the camera is drunk, isn’t he?

May he find peace. May he find solace. May he find the shutter button.

Okay. Now you finally have your picture and you have high-fived your drunken friend.

Now please take this flower I have been holding out to you. My sacrament.

The body of Christ, the cup of salvation, the flower of oneness and joy and…

HEY.

Why are you walking away?

I have a flower for you!

A gift! A holy token of love!

The body of Christ!!

TAKE THE FUCKING FLOWER.

For real, dude… you don’t want my flower?

Jesus okay fine.

I will just hang my head in sorrowful shame for all that is wrong with the world.

As he walked away, I would hang my head in sorrowful shame for all that was wrong with the world.

And if I was, by my own estimation, nailing my job, everybody watching this interaction on the sidewalk would shout after the dude, as he walked away with his drunk friend and girlfriend:

HEY! HEY YOU!! SHE’S GOT A FLOWER FOR YOU!!! TAKE THE FLOWER!!!!

The dude would usually bend to the peer pressure and come back to take it. But not always.

Sometimes I just had to let him go.

Girls, for the record, almost always took the flower. The ones who refused? Sometimes they seemed to think they were doing me a favor by rejecting the flower, gesturing:

No, no! I couldn’t possibly! Keep it for someone else!

But they didn’t understand that they were breaking my heart. Gifting them my flower—my holy little token—was what made me feel like an artist, someone with something to offer, instead of a charity case.

Over the years, though, I got used to it, and instead of taking it personally, I began to understand:

Sometimes people just don’t want the flower.

Sometimes you have to let them walk away.

Joshua Bell, a world-class violinist, teamed up with the Washington Post for a social experiment in which he played his $3.5 million Stradivarius one morning in the L’Enfant Plaza subway station in Washington, DC. During his performance, which ran about forty-five minutes, seven people stopped to listen for a minute or more, twenty-seven contributed money, and he made a total of $32 (not counting the $20 thrown in his hat by the one woman who recognized him). More than a thousand people had walked by him without stopping.

In the aftermath, it was easy for many people to shake their heads at the perceived shame of it all: how could music so valuable—some of these same people might be paying as much as $150 a ticket to watch him play the same program at the local symphony hall the following night—become so worthless on the street?

But if you watch the hidden camera footage of the stunt, and note the time of day (morning rush hour) and the demographics (busy government employees on their way to work), it starts to make more sense. Those mindless barbarians who had no idea what they were witnessing were commuters on their way to work who couldn’t afford to stop at that exact moment to appreciate art. Certain art hungers for context. We can’t blame these passersby; we can simply applaud and feel gratitude for the few people who slowed and cocked their heads, heard the voice of god speaking via Bach speaking via Josh Bell’s Stradivarius, and feel joy and hope that a few folks actually threw in a dollar or two.

As for me, it took a few months of hardcore statue work to really find my footing and develop this sense of deep gratitude for the sliver of the population, however small, that was willing to tune their head frequencies to the Art Channel for a moment, interrupting their march to work.

That ongoing sense of appreciation shaped my constitution in a fundamental way. I didn’t just feel a fleeting sense of thanks for each generous person who stopped; I had been hammered into a gratitude-shaped vessel and would never take for granted those willing to slow down and connect.

There is a certain sense of indiscriminate gratitude that is essential to hone if you’re going to survive in the arts. You can’t really afford to be choosy about your audience, nor about how they wish to repay you for your art. In cash? In help? In kindness?

Each of these currencies possesses a distinct value. Dita Von Teese, a star in the contemporary burlesque scene, once recounted something she’d learned in her early days stripping in LA. Her colleagues—bleach-blond dancers with fake tans, Brazilian wax jobs, and neon bikinis—would strip bare naked for an audience of fifty guys in the club and be tipped a dollar by each guy. Dita would take the stage wearing satin gloves, a corset, and a tutu, and do a sultry striptease down to her underwear, confounding the crowd. And then, though forty-nine guys would ignore her, one would tip her fifty dollars.

That man, Dita said, was her audience.

This is exactly what I learned standing on the box, then while playing in bars in my first band, and, later, when I turned to crowdfunding. It was essential to feel thankful for the few who stopped to watch or listen, instead of wasting energy on resenting the majority who passed me by.

Feeling gratitude was a skill I honed on the street and dragged along with me into the music industry. I never aimed to please everyone who walked by, or everyone listening to the radio. All I needed was… some people. Enough people. Enough to make it worth coming back the next day, enough to make rent and put food on the table. And enough so I could keep making art.

It is an interesting thing, a white-painted face. It’s a historically rich signifier, the onion layer of clown-white cream covering the skin like a paper-thin mask, a universal invitation from one human being to another that says:

Staring at my face and making eye contact is acceptable and encouraged.

Only now do I realize why it made so much sense to keep the white face paint as I transitioned from being a statue to being in a rock band. Our Weimar-cabaret-inspired makeup was a signature of The Dresden Dolls. Often mocked (especially by the other plaid-clad indie Boston bands who referred to us as “the gay mime band”), often misunderstood (by the journalists who asked what our alter egos, à la Ziggy Stardust or Alice Cooper, were supposed to “represent”), and often seen reproduced on the faces of our hardcore fans as a symbol of solidarity, the white face paint functioned as a freak flag.

I liked giving permission to people to look at my face. Not so much because I wanted them to LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME, but because I wanted them to feel invited to meet my gaze and share a moment. And I knew the game worked. I knew that, having invited them into my face like a host invites a guest into a kitchen, I would be equally invited to look back into theirs. Then we could see each other. And in that place lies the magic.

I see you.

BELIEVE ME.

Ask any great actor: sometimes the mask is the tool that lets you get at the truth.

There is something about silence.

One night in a candlelit restaurant in San Francisco, shortly after we got married, I asked Neil if we could just write each other notes during the whole meal. In real time, like texting, but with pens and paper.

The waiter thought we were slightly strange, but by the end of the meal we’d shared a degree of intimate information that we probably wouldn’t have if we’d just been sitting there chatting. And we could illustrate our points with pie charts and cartoons. And we really enjoyed our food, because we weren’t literally talking through it.

The couple next to us asked what we were doing, and when we told them, they ordered a pad of paper and two pens from the waiter.

One of the things I loved best about The Bride was how, though she was silent, she could make it possible for people to talk to one another.

I was a ready-made conversation piece. And nothing delighted me more than to see people with nothing in common chatting about The Bride the way they’d chat about an ambulance pulling up, or a flash thunderstorm.

Excuse me, is that a person?

Dude, is that a real person?

Wow, is that a real statue?

Oh, look! What does he do when you give him money?

There are ingredients that create safe space for communion. It would make me absolutely beam with joy when I saw strangers giving each other money, saying:

Wait, hey! Take this dollar, put it in her hat! You gotta see this! That’s a real person!

It gave me faith in humanity. Even if they thought I was in drag.

Anthony was my best friend.

I’ve been trying, since I was a kid, to explain to people exactly WHAT he was to me when I was growing up. He wasn’t quite my guru, wasn’t quite my parent, wasn’t quite my teacher.

I usually attempted to describe him by mumbling something that included the word “mentor,” but I mostly found myself satisfied with this run-on portrait: Anthony met me when I was nine and taught me everything I know about love and knows me better than anybody and we still talk almost every single day even if I’m touring in Japan.

He loved telling the story of one of our first interactions, soon after he moved in next door to my parents’ house on the quiet road where I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts.

It was a winter night, after a big snowfall in our little suburban neighborhood, and he and his wife, Laura, were throwing a dinner party. I ambled across my lawn over to his and started pelting their window with snowballs. I thought it was funny. He did, too, sort of.

He came to the door.

I want a snowball fight, I said.

I can’t, he said. But I’ll get you back later.

And he returned to the dinner party, back into the warmth and fire and wine of the adult world behind him.

Then, according to the story, I returned about twenty minutes later, and started pelting their giant picture window with snowballs a second time.

He came to the door again.

What the hell?

You said you’d get me later, I said. I’m here to get gotten.

Amanda, it’s been twenty minutes, he said. I meant later… like… tomorrow.

I don’t actually remember this happening, but I know the story by heart, because he’s told it so many times. I also don’t remember the first time I hugged him, but he tells that story, too.

I was thirteen, and our relationship had evolved from occasional next-door-neighbor snowball enemies to full-on pals. He claims we were standing in his driveway and something had happened that merited An Actual Hug.

But we had never hugged, and I was, according to him, interested in the idea, but wasn’t used to hugging. So I leaned my body against his, he says, like a slowly falling pine tree, letting my head rest on his chest while the rest of my body kept a terrified distance.

Anthony and Laura didn’t have children, and I was gradually spiritually adopted. Anthony was a professional therapist, and a good listener. I desperately needed someone to listen. And once I’d unloaded all my teenage pain on him, he knew the way to win my trust. He never told me what to do.

Instead, he told me stories.

Stories about his life, stories about Zen masters, stories about his grandfather.

Here’s one of my favorites.

Through the years, Anthony would tell me this one whenever I was suffering from particularly bad bouts of self-destructiveness. Those were pre-cell-phone days, and I used to call him from the dorm, from my squalid sublets, from boyfriends’ apartments, and collect from pay phones all over Europe the year I backpacked and studied abroad. I’d leave messages that filled his answering machine and mail him typewritten letters that were too long to stuff into an envelope without bursting the seams.

WHY DO I KEEP DOING THESE THINGS TO MYSELF? I’d ask him, moaning about my latest killer hangover, brush with death, lost wallet, or on-again-off-again relationship with the latest drug-abusing (but really good-looking) boyfriend.

I could hear him smiling through the phone.

Ah, beauty. Doesn’t hurt enough yet.

I’ve had a problem feeling real all my life.

I didn’t know until recently how absolutely universal that feeling is. For a long time, I thought I was alone. Psychologists have a term for it: imposter syndrome. But before I knew that phrase existed, I coined my own: The Fraud Police.

The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of “real” grown-ups who you believe—at some subconscious level—are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying:

We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.

I mentioned The Fraud Police during a commencement speech I recently gave at an arts college, and I asked the adults in the room, including the faculty, to raise their hands if they’d ever had this feeling. I don’t think a single hand stayed down.

People working in the arts engage in street combat with The Fraud Police on a daily basis, because much of our work is new and not readily or conventionally categorized. When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it.

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to art school, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

When you’ve “made it” in academia, you become a tenured professor. It’s official. Most of the time, though, “outside” appointment and approval (Congratulations! You’re an official Professor/CEO/President/etc.) in any field doesn’t necessarily silence The Fraud Police. In fact, outside approval can make The Fraud Police louder: it’s more like fighting them in high court instead of in a back alley with your fists. Along with all the layers of official titles and responsibilities come even deeper, scarier layers of oh fuck they’re gonna find me out.

I can imagine a seasoned brain surgeon, in the moment before that first incision, having that teeny moment where she thinks:

For real? I dropped my cell phone in a puddle this morning, couldn’t find my keys, can’t hold down a relationship, and here I am clutching a sharp knife about to cut someone’s head open. And they could die. Who is letting me do this? This is BULLSHIT.

Everybody out there is winging it to some degree, of this we can be pretty sure.

In both the art and the business worlds, the difference between the amateurs and the professionals is simple:

The professionals know they’re winging it.

The amateurs pretend they’re not.

On an average day, working two bouquets of flowers, I could make over a hundred dollars. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but it was certainly more than the $9.50 an hour I was earning at Toscanini’s.

The consistency of the income really did amaze me. If the weather held, I could count on making about $40 to $50 an hour from random people walking by and making random decisions to give me a random amount of money.

How was it possible that it was so predictable? That’s a question for the economists, I suppose. When I asked my Twitter followers about this, and the statisticians started weighing in about entropic probabilistic synchronicity, I gave up and settled on a simpler theory:

Given the opportunity, some small consistent portion of the population will happily pay for art.

Sometimes, up on the box, I would fall in love with people. Pretty often, come to think of it. It was easy, given how safe and swaddled I was up there in my cloud of pretty, white, untouchable stillness. No commitment. Just this, just now, just us.

Occasionally one of the more broken-looking homeless people of Harvard Square would approach me, drop a dollar in, and I would offer my flower. We’d look at each other, and sometimes their faces would crumple and tears would appear.

Hi.

I see you there.

I can’t believe you just gave me a dollar.

You probably need it more than me.

I’ve been watching you circle the plaza all day asking people for money and I hope to god you know that you and I are, in this moment, exactly the same.

I never felt guilty about those dollars, though, because there was such a beauty and humanity in the fact that these homeless people were, right along with the rich tourists, stopping to connect with me. They saw value in what I was doing. They saw the power and necessity of the human connection.

Was it fair? I don’t know. It felt fair.

There was something conspiratorial about it; their money felt symbolically valuable to me in a way that made me swell with pride—they approved of me, and their approval somehow meant more to me than anybody else’s.

I started to realize there was a subterranean financial ecosystem in Harvard Square involving all of us street freaks. I found it impossible to pass the other street performers—a revolving cast of puppeteers and musicians, jugglers and magicians—or the homeless folk, without giving them my own dollars, sometimes dollars from my own hat that I’d been given just minutes before. The gift circulated.

One day a really old, raggedy-looking Japanese guy watched me for a very long time.

He made himself a little perch on one of the cement benches across the sidewalk, surrounded by rolled-up sleeping bags and a colorless, tattered collection of garbage sacks, and sat there, looking at me with his weathered face. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. After about an hour, he dug into his pocket and fished out a dollar, and he shuffled over to me, put the dollar in my hat, and looked up.

Here’s your flower.

I see you.

His eyes narrowed, and he looked at my face, like he was looking for the answer to a question that I couldn’t hear him asking, and I just stared right back. And then he nodded slightly, took the flower, and shuffled away. I loved him.

The next day he came back and left a note in the hat.

He wanted to know if I would marry him.

I don’t know how he expected me to answer.

I never saw him again.

I wanted to be seen.

That was absolutely true. All performers—all humans—want to be seen; it’s a basic need. Even the shy ones who don’t want to be looked at.

But I also wanted, very much, to see.

I didn’t quite grasp this until I had been up on the box for a while. What I loved as much as, possibly even more than, being seen was sharing the gaze. Feeling connected.

I needed the two-way street, the exchange, the relationship, and the invitation to true intimacy that I got every so often from the eyes of my random street patrons. It didn’t always happen. But it happened enough to keep me up on the box.

And that’s why stripping, even though it often paid way better, when I tried my hand at it a few years later, just didn’t do it for me. I was being looked at. But I never felt seen. The strip joint was like Teflon to real emotional connection. There was physical intimacy galore: I witnessed hand jobs being given under tables,[2] and lots of legs and tits and more being covertly rubbed at the bar. I danced for endless hours, stark naked on a stage, and talked for even more hours with the loneliest men in the world while pretending to drink champagne. We strippers were experts in dumping our drinks back into ice buckets when the customers weren’t looking—it was a job skill you actually had to acquire working at The Glass Slipper. If I’d actually drank all the absurdly overpriced champagne (from which I earned a 15 percent cut) that was purchased for me on a good night by lonely men who wanted to chat, I would have consumed, in the course of my six-hour shift, enough to have brought me to a blood-alcohol level of approximately five-point-dead.

Sometimes I would get home and have a nice little breakdown, having no idea what to do with all the loneliness I’d collected. I tried to capture it in a lyric, years later, in a song called “Berlin” (my chosen stripper name):

Sometimes people would hold my gaze and try to give the flower back to The Bride, as if to somehow repay me for the flower I had just given them.

And I would gesture:

No no, it’s yours to keep.

A few times people came back to my spot, fifteen minutes later, to lay a whole store-bought bouquet at my feet. Some people would pick flowers or rhododendron stems from Harvard Yard and hand me their gift, and then I’d give them one of my flowers, and we’d keep trading, and it would all get really funny and confusing.

On a good day, I couldn’t tell who was giving what to whom.

Asking is, at its core, a collaboration.

The surgeon knows that her work is creative work. A machine can’t do it because it requires human delicacy and decision making. It can’t be done by an automaton because it requires critical thinking and a good dose of winging-it-ness. Her work requires a balance of self-confidence and collaboration, a blend of intuition and improvisation.

If the surgeon, while slicing that vulnerable brain, hits an unexpected bump in the process and needs to ask the person beside her for something essential—and quickly—she has absolutely no time to waste on questions like:

Do I deserve to ask for this help?

Is this person I’m asking really trustworthy?

Am I an asshole for having the power to ask in this moment?

She simply accepts her position, asks without shame, gets the right scalpel, and keeps cutting. Something larger is at stake. This holds true for firefighters, airline pilots, and lifeguards, but it also holds true for artists, scientists, teachers—for anyone, in any relationship.

Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with—rather than in competition with—the world.

Asking for help with shame says:

You have the power over me.

Asking with condescension says:

I have the power over you.

But asking for help with gratitude says:

We have the power to help each other.

Sometimes I had to sneeze. Statues should not sneeze. It became a dramatic internal activity: I’d spend an entire minute just concentrating on the feeling in my throat and nose, playing with the strange twilight zone of sneeze-not-sneeze.

And sometimes I’d just fucking sneeze. Nothing to be done.

It was a formidable Zen practice.

Sometimes a mosquito or a fly or a bee would land on my cheek, and we’d just sort of hang out together.

Sometimes the sun would beat down directly on my face and a bead of sweat would cling to the tip of my nose until it got fat enough to start dripping into the street.

Sometimes I’d have to wipe my nose because I had a cold. Or because it was cold.

I would be so freezing sometimes that I would hyperextend the dance of flower-giving and draw out the entire gesture arduously, so some poor person would wait there patiently for minutes while I enacted a bizarre-looking, overdramatic, avant-garde modern dance, trying to warm up my body.

This would culminate in the eventual giving of the flower and a climactic flourish in which, with my gloved hand, and as subtly as possible, I could also wipe away the long, graceful string of clear snot that was hanging out of my white-painted nose.

The art of asking can be learned, studied, perfected. The masters of asking, like the masters of painting and music, know that the field of asking is fundamentally improvisational. It thrives not in the creation of rules and etiquette but in the smashing of that etiquette.

Which is to say: there are no rules.

Or, rather, there are plenty of rules, but they ask, on bended knees, to be broken.

Gus, our boss at Toscanini’s Ice Cream, was a true patron of the arts—a perfect example of the sort of person who lives a life committed to the creativity of patronage, and expands the boundaries of what we are empowered to give one another.

He was a beloved local Celebrity Ice Cream Chef, obsessively passionate about music, culture, Cambridge politics, and new frontiers in frozen dessert making. He would devise, like an inspired mad scientist, ice creams and sorbets made out of pink peppercorns, basil, and beer.

Gus was an avid connector: He printed information about local dance companies on the store’s takeaway coffee cups. He gave away crates of ice cream to science activists from MIT. He provided ice-cream gift certificates to silent auctions to rebuild city parks. He was like an ice-cream Santa Claus. It was almost a rite of passage for a young indie musician in Boston to work at either Toscanini’s or Pearl Art & Craft (the other flexible-schedule job in Cambridge that didn’t consider it a customer service liability to rock a blue Mohawk behind the counter).

Even though I’d hit the jackpot with my newfound hundred-dollar-a-day street-performance career, I still needed a place to store my bridal rig. Carting it back and forth between my crappy apartment and the store would have been impossible. So I kept one weekly shift at the ice-cream shop, plucked up my courage, and casually asked Gus:

Um, do you mind if I keep my bride stuff in the basement? It’s just a couple of milk crates and some clothes and makeup and stuff.

Sure! said Gus, cheerfully. You can store the creepy bride down there. (That’s what he called her.) Don’t scare the customers.

The basement of Toscanini’s was an ancient, dank cave with a low-slung ceiling tangled in pipes and a brick-and-dirt floor, crammed with cardboard boxes containing cups, spoons, and napkins. There was a tiny employees-only bathroom and a huge walk-in freezer where the five-gallon ice-cream tubs were kept. (That walk-in freezer became a very handy subzero reverse-sauna after a long, hot day statue-ing in the sun, and I’d often freak the bejeezus out of employees who accidentally stumbled upon me hanging out in there, naked, when they came in to restock tubs of French Vanilla.)

I got the entire bridal transformation down to about nine minutes: I’d sit down on the toilet in the basement, powder-whiten my face, pull the wedding dress over my jeans and boots, tuck my hair into a wig cap, and arrange the veil atop my head with a mess of bobby pins. Then I’d pull on the long white gloves, gather up my crates and giant train of gown into my arms, ascend the basement stairs, exchange salutes with my co-workers behind the counter, and bask in the what-the-fuck expressions on the faces of the ice-cream customers as I passed through the shop like a Dickensian hallucination and headed out onto the street.

All I have to say is: thank Christ I didn’t work at Baskin-Robbins.

My boyfriend Joseph would stop by sometimes to watch me statue-ing. He was an actor.

He would hang back for a while, then ceremoniously put his dollar into the hat with a flourish, and look deep into my eyes while I dramatically picked out his flower. Then I would gesture to him, as the crowd watched, curious about this stranger who was getting extra attention. I would gesture to him to come closer, then coyly withhold my flower. People would laugh, and I would gesture to him to come right up to my face, then I’d kiss him, slowly, on the lips, and then tuck the flower in his hair.

The crowd always went wild with affectionate sounds. I loved that they didn’t know anything.

He could have been anyone.

After my TED talk, I started discussing some of the finer points of my experience as a street performer on my blog, and I was surprised at the number of people who said in the comments: Before I saw your talk, I always thought of street performers as beggars. But now I see them as artists, so I always give them money.

Reading things like this broke and burst my heart at the same time, and pierced the core of the very issue I was trying to grapple with in the talk itself. If the mentality was so easily shifted, how could this be taken from the street to the Internet, where so many artists I knew were struggling to accept the legitimacy of their own calls for help?

I opened a discussion on my blog, one that I’d already seen reflected in the crowdfunding hall of mirrors over the past few years:

What was the difference between asking and begging?

A lot of people related their experience with their own local buskers: they saw their tips into the hat not as charity but as payment for a service.

If asking is a collaboration, begging is a less-connected demand: Begging can’t provide value to the giver; by definition, it offers no exchange. Here are the words that the blog commenters used over and over when trying to describe begging:

Manipulation, desperation, base, animal, last-ditch, manipulative, guilt, shame.

The key words that kept appearing in relation to asking:

Dignity, collaboration, exchange, vulnerability, reciprocity, mutual respect, comfort, love.

The top-voted comment on the blog, from a reader named Marko Fančović, nails it:

Asking is like courtship; begging, you are already naked and panting.

Asking is an act of intimacy and trust. Begging is a function of fear, desperation, or weakness. Those who must beg demand our help; those who ask have faith in our capacity for love and in our desire to share with one another.

On the street or on the Internet, this is what makes authentically engaging an audience, from one human being to another, such an integral part of asking.

Honest communication engenders mutual respect, and that mutual respect makes askers out of beggars.

People would put all sorts of weird shit in the hat. I never knew what I was going to find at the end of the day in addition to the collection of coins and bills; it was a little like opening up a fucked-up Christmas stocking. Every random gift made me giddy; people would throw in hand-scrawled thank-you notes on the backs of ATM receipts, little drawings they’d done while watching me, sticks of gum, phone numbers, photographs they’d taken of me, fruit, rocks, hand-woven bracelets, badly rolled joints, love poems.

Gus wasn’t my only patron in those early days; I had a whole collection. I became a kind of street-performing institution, and the locals had even given me a name: The Eight-Foot Bride, which I took as a compliment since I barely cleared seven foot six atop the milk crates.

There was the guy who managed a sandwich shop on the other side of the square, who loved The Eight-Foot Bride. One day I came in to get a burrito in between statue-ing shifts. My white face (I didn’t bother to remove my makeup between shows) was a dead giveaway. He asked me, full of excitement:

OOH! Are you the statue girl??

Yep. I’m the statue girl.

Your burritos are free forever. What you do is incredible.

You’re kidding.

The free burritos saved me at least $40 a week in food costs.

There was the guy who owned the old-fashioned tobacco shop next to Toscanini’s, which had a hidden balcony lined with tables reserved for chess players to rent for $2 an hour. He let me sit there without paying during my breaks, out of the sun, drinking my free coffee and musing in my journal, without being stared at or asked by any passing strangers why I was covered in makeup.

There was the florist. After my first day up on the box, I realized that the routine of picking flowers by the side of the river wouldn’t be very sustainable (and I didn’t want to single-handedly clean out Cambridge of flora), so I wandered into the local flower shop. I was faced with a puzzle: what kind of flower was pretty and substantial enough to give away, easy enough to hold, and not too expensive? I settled on daisy poms—which are sort of like daisies but not so willowy, and way cheaper. The shop was run by a mother-and-son team, and after buying flowers in there for a few consecutive days, I felt like I was a good enough customer to ask the son:

Do you maybe have any flowers you don’t… need? Like—any seconds or irregulars? Slightly banged up flowers that maybe you can’t sell…?

What do you need them for? he asked.

Well, it’s kind of weird. I’m a statue. I give them away when I move, to people who give me money.

He smiled.

Oh, you’re THAT girl.

He took me down to the basement and showed me a huge bucket of yesterday’s flowers, which were starting to just barely brown at the edges.

Knock yourself out, statue girl. Pick what you want. I’ll give you a great price.

After that, every few days, I’d walk to the florist and patiently wait for him to deal with whatever real customers he had. Then he’d examine his current daisy pom situation and give me the ones that were too wilted to sell but still fit for a street performer—for about a third of the regular price. Some days there just weren’t any rejects, but he’d still hand me a few bunches and make up a cheap price. He liked helping me. Sometimes he would throw in a few slightly wilting roses, and I’d make those the centerpiece of my bouquet for each show—saving a rose for the very last person who gave me a dollar, as a little floral finale.

People yelled abuse at me occasionally—sometimes from the sidewalk, sometimes from passing traffic.

The most common insults hurled my way included, but weren’t limited to (and it really helps to imagine these in a Boston accent, as that’s usually how they came packaged):

Nice costume, ya fuckin’ reetahd!

Hey baby, I’ll marry your ass!

Get off the sidewalk, freak!

What is this, Halloween? Hahahaha!!!

A very eighties-flavored insult was used a few times:

Get a life!

And then there was this one, shouted from a passing car:

GET A JOB!

Of all the insults hurled in my direction, GET A JOB hurt the most. It was an affront. I took it personally.

I had a job. I was doing my job. I mean, sure. It was a weird job. And a job I’d created out of thin air with no permission from a higher authority. But I was working, and people were paying me. Didn’t that make it a job? And, I would think as my face burned with resentment, I was making a consistent income, which made the GET A JOB insult hurt even more.

I’m making plenty of money. Maybe more than you, asshole, I’d think, all hurt and defensive.

Brené Brown, a social scientist and TED speaker who has researched shame, worthiness, courage, and vulnerability, recently published a book called Daring Greatly, which I fortuitously picked up at a Boston bookstore when I was just beginning to write this book. I was so blown away by the commonalities between our books that I twittered her, praising her work and asking her if she would give me a foreword for this book.[3] She writes:

courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgment and criticism.

Following this logic, we can assume that the likelihood of someone yelling GET A JOB from their passing car is indirectly proportionate to their own crippling fear about getting up on the figurative box themselves.

Or to strip it down to its essence:

Hate is fear.

I broke up with Joseph.

My boyfriend Jonah would stop by sometimes to watch me statue-ing. He played the cello.

I loved giving flowers to people I loved.

I’d saved $400 to buy a ticket to go on a vacation with him and his family, and I’d given him the cash to book my flight along with theirs. But then we started breaking up, and we decided that I shouldn’t go in the middle of our off-again-on-again drama; it would be too awkward.

I’d had a good day of Bride-ing: some nice guy had hand-folded me an origami crane, which I had tucked in the folds of my dress, Jonah had come by to blow me an on-again kiss and say hello, and it had rained but only for about two minutes, so I didn’t get too wet. I went down the stairs to the basement of Toscanini’s to sit on the dark brick floor and count my hat for the day, and to my astonishment, there was a wad of cash wound up in a rubber band. I ran upstairs and grabbed the shop telephone and called Jonah.

You’re never going to believe this but somebody put FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS in my hat today.

Oh, Amanda, he said.

What? It’s amazing! Can you believe someone cared that much?

Oh, Amanda.

What?

Oh… Amanda.

WHAT?

Lewis Hyde published a beautiful dot-connecting book in 1983 called The Gift, which tackles the elusive subject of what Hyde calls “the commerce of the creative spirit.”

He explains the term “Indian Giver,” which most people consider an insult: someone who offers a gift and then wants to take it back. But the origin of the term—coined by the Puritans—speaks volumes. A Native American tribal chief would welcome an Englishman into his lodge and, as a friendly gesture, share a pipe of tobacco with his guest, then offer the pipe itself as a gift. The pipe, a valuable little object, is—to the chief—a symbolic peace offering that is continually regifted from tribe to tribe, never really “belonging” to anybody. The Englishman doesn’t understand this, is simply delighted with his new property, and is therefore completely confused when the next tribal leader comes to his house a few months later, and, after they share a smoke, looks expectantly at his host to gift him the pipe. The Englishman can’t understand why anyone would be so rude to expect to be given this thing that belongs to him.

Hyde concludes:

And then there was Lee.

I was going crazy in my crappy Somerville share house; my roommate and I were ready to kill each other. I wanted, secretly, to start some kind of freaky art commune, but I had about $300 to my name and no idea where to start. Instead, I stumbled into one that already existed when Rob Chalfen, my local coffee-shop friend who boasted Cambridge’s largest collections of New Directions paperbacks and old-time jazz on vinyl, invited me to his friend’s going-away party at a commune-collective across the river in Boston proper. He knew I was art-house hunting and thought I might be able to finagle my way in the door.

The Cloud Club is a four-story brick townhouse wrapped protectively in a winding vine of leafy wisteria, the root of which is as wide as a human torso and curves smack across the huge oak front door, hanging low enough that you have to duck under to get inside.

I walked up a winding, rickety staircase into a hallway covered with faded mirrors, surreal drawings, and blinking Christmas lights. Empty gilded frames and upside-down paintings hung at odd angles. A crowd was gathered in a cozy, low-lit kitchen warmed by a wood-burning fireplace with fixtures from the 1890s. All around me were the clinking of glasses, the lighting of cigarettes, and the buzzing conversation of musicians, filmmakers, sex workers, activists, and painters.

On the top floor, in a room brimming over with antlers, plants, swords, and old hooked rugs, the party was in full swing. Guests used a huge tree situated in the middle of the room to climb up to a bedroom loft capped with a handmade glass geodesic dome; a sliding door led to a roof covered with discarded sinks and rotting sculptures that overlooked the glittering Boston night skyline. And the crown jewel: in the corner of the room was a rickety spinet piano. I took a deep breath. I was home.

Rob introduced me to Annie-the-writer, the woman who was going away, and I mentioned to her that I was looking to rent an apartment. Was this one available?

Go talk to Lee. She laughed. It might be.

I passed through a hallway of billowing, spiraling, white plaster shapes hand-sculpted onto the walls, and through a set of double doors that looked like they had been repurposed from a fin de siècle Parisian bar. I was so in love with this house already, I wanted to kiss every floorboard and mismatched doorknob. I grew up in a collapsing Colonial fixer-upper that my parents spent the entirety of my childhood trying to make heatable and habitable. This place felt as familiar to me as my own fingers.

I knocked tentatively, went in through the door, and there, engulfed in a cave-like room stuffed with anthropomorphic sculptures and piles of spiral notebooks, was Lee, seated on one of his own hand-carved chairs, writing a little sign on a piece of yellowed paper that said, “Room for Rent, Market Price or DISCOUNT FOR VISIONARY ARTISTS.” Clearly he was planning on taking it down to the party and posting it on Annie’s door. He looked like Gandalf in a cowboy hat, with a kindly smile, a flowered shirt, a huge, white beard, and the kind of rugged, careful hands that had done a lot of heavy lifting and intricate craftsmanship.

WAIT, I said.

Yes? he said, looking up and smiling.

DON’T WRITE THAT SIGN.

Why not? he asked.

I’M HERE. I’M MOVING IN.

At this, he giggled, took my phone number, and told me to come back tomorrow.

We’ll see, he said.

Lee didn’t just accept tenants off the bat, even when they came referred by friends. You had to show up with luggage, hang out and chat with him for some unspecified period of time, and then, only after you had passed what my future housemates would come to refer to as the “mystery aesthetic” test, would you be allowed to consider yourself an official member of the household.

I showed up the next day with two boxes of clothes, a toothbrush, and a pile of books, determined never to leave. It worked.

Back in the 1970s, Lee had created the Cloud Club because he wanted an art family around him. He didn’t have any money back in those days. He’d been living out of his van (painted, he likes reminding us, with images from Alice in Wonderland—and the van after that was covered with Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine) and needed to borrow the down payment for the house—about $9,000—from his friend Brian, who had the money.

Brian and Lee are both over seventy now, and still great friends. That $9,000 loan was the seed for a house that’s now been called home by more than a hundred different artists over the past forty years, with Lee in the role of magical landlord-trickster-conductor. His favorite place to be is in any corner, hidden from view, where he can capture things happening on video. Lee is an outsider artist in his own right, a self-taught architect, painter, and sculptor: the Cloud Club is his art, and we get to live in it.

There are about eight of us living there at any given time, and we all have our own little apartments with our own kitchens and bathrooms. Mostly, nobody leaves their doors locked. We share a car, we share the washer and dryer and take turns buying laundry detergent, we share the back garden. My housemate Mali, who’s a singer, is the one with the green thumb—she plants kale and distributes it around the house.

Since he started the Cloud Club, Lee has deliberately charged his tenants about a third of the market value rent for each apartment. He not only allows, he encourages the musicians in the house, and our friends’ bands, and our friends’ bands’ drummers’ poet girlfriends, to use the communal space for parties, meetings, and concerts. He never charges anyone for that; instead, he takes an extreme glee in seeing the space used and filled with life. He films the goings-on and uploads them to YouTube. He wants to feel things happening. He makes enough money to cover the expenses.

People like Lee have a different relationship with the spotlight: they not only prefer playing a support role, they thrive doing it, taking pleasure in holding the light for others to run around in. Lee’s like a combination Art Butler (he’ll often surprise me with a plate of fruit while I’m in the middle of composing) and all-purpose fixer-upper resource (if you ask him, he’ll teach you all about plumbing, soldering, or wiring. I never ask). At his core, he loves to feel useful to all of his tenants, and he beams with pride when he sees our art succeed. His patronage can come in strange, unpredictable forms (No, Lee, I don’t need seventy reams of pink paper that you just found in the dumpster. Why did you put them in my kitchen?).

But beyond the cheap rent, eccentric space, and reams of paper, Lee’s gift to me, and the never-ending parade of art tenants that he houses, is bigger, deeper, harder to see. The Cloud Club, in all its artistic, ramshackle glory, is his version of the offered flower, his gift to the world—and anybody who lived there or who walks under the front vine and in through the creaky, salvaged front door feels that gift. Lee himself is an introvert (he even calls himself a “hermit”), but the house speaks for him: it is, itself, the container he’s created so that we might all have a moment of real connection with one another.

I broke up with Jonah.

My boyfriend Blake would stop by sometimes to watch me statue-ing. He was an undergrad at MIT with a passion for painting and who doted on his dorm-room collection of huge saltwater aquariums filled with clown fish. He also had an octopus.

Blake graduated and landed a job as a full-time engineer, and the salary was hefty, but it didn’t leave him any time to make art, so he quit and decided to commit to his painting.

But painting didn’t pay the rent. He needed something practical. So to make money, he became a living statue of a white-winged angel on the other side of Harvard Square.

He wore a long white robe and gloves, dyed his hair a shocking white blond, and engineered and constructed the giant wings himself, out of papier-mâché and feathers. They were beautiful.

Since The Bride was such a conspicuous freak, I felt loudly ignored by those who walked by me without a single glance. I didn’t take it personally. At least, I tried not to.

So many people were hurrying to school or racing to work, chatting with their partners and otherwise occupied. I was ignored by probably 99 percent of all those who passed me on that sidewalk over my five or six years of Bride-ing. Which amounts to being deliberately ignored—while actively “performing”—by, I dunno, a few million people. This is why I highly recommend street performing over attending a conservatory to any musician, especially if they’re going into rock and roll: it wears your ego down to stubbly little nubs and gives you performance balls of steel.

Sometimes it was just a bad day, and it felt like nobody, and I mean nobody, would stop. Who knows why.

When that happened, I’d start performing for my own amusement, letting the melancholy of loneliness wash over me, tilting my head to one side sadly, slumping my shoulders a bit, and raising my hands up to heaven in a pitifully grand gesture:

Why, god, has everyone forsaken me?

I could convince myself so thoroughly that none of humanity was any good that I actually let a few sincere tears stream down my face, letting the people briskly walking by me serve as unwitting universal examples of just how cold and cruel the world really was.

I took The Bride on the road. The costume fit in a rolling toolbox that I could also stand on, and I carried her—she paid my way, in fact—to Australia, to Key West, to Los Angeles, to Vegas, to New York, to Germany. Busking in different environments was hard because I’d gotten into such a cozy rhythm in Harvard Square; some cities were more hospitable than others. My first day in the center of the French Quarter in New Orleans, I was not only yelled at by the other, highly territorial street performers, but some random jerk came up behind me and whispered that he was going to set my veil on fire, and a few minutes later, a horse drawing a touristy carriage stopped right next to me and peed all over my dress.

My hands were usually raised, herald-like, to one side, or piously clasped to my heart, or palms up to the sky like a star-shaped ballerina… but they were never outstretched for money. If people put money directly into my hand, which they would often try to do, it always felt wrong and uncomfortable. My hat was out for money, but my hands were out for something bigger.

Madelein Du Plessis sent me this story in the blog comments:

Madelein’s realization: They all needed food. This kid wanted more than food.

He also wanted love.

Anthony made me feel real.

He was born in 1948, and he regaled me with tales from the sixties that made my heart ache to turn back the clock and live in a time when everybody hitchhiked and smoked hash while listening to Joni Mitchell on crackly vinyl records. Anthony’s stories drew pictures in my teenage mind of wild, vital human beings creating a new reality in an upheaved world, protesting a war, running around with feathers in their hair and knives in their boots, tearing down the system and trying to score as many girls, drugs, and adventures as they could. I was jealous.

Anthony was raised in Boston in a big Italian-American family who’d made their fortune in the liquor and real estate businesses. The combination of his calm, Buddhist approach to life (he taught and introduced me to yoga, meditation, and the general concept of mindfulness), and the fact that he was a martial arts expert, would arm me with pepper spray before I went on long trips alone, and displayed an arsenal of exotic self-defense weapons in the study above the office where he saw his patients, never struck me as strange.

In my Hollywood biopic, he’d be Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid, but played by Robert De Niro. In an overdramatic teenage flashback scene, I would confide in him that I’d been sexually assaulted by a boy from the high school. He would then narrow his eyes, make an Italian gesture in which he bit his folded tongue in half while wrinkling his nose, and say:

I’m going to find that guy and beat him to a pulp…

Then he’d put his hands in yoga prayer position over his heart, bow his head, and calmly add:

…with compassion.

We shared our stories on the phone, in long letters sometimes typewritten, sometimes handwritten, and eventually (once it existed) over email. Whenever we could, we connected in person, on long walks, over food, over coffee.

We made up absurd, fictional skits and scenarios about my lovers, our friends, our neighbors, ourselves. One of the skits starred a particularly skinny boyfriend of mine (who had a real-life penchant for wearing skirts) hitchhiking a ride on an eighteen-wheel truck to visit me in college and getting forcibly ejected from the passenger seat when the truck driver realizes he isn’t a girl, then being blown into the air by the blast of tailpipe exhaust as the truck pulls away, then magically being picked up by a passing breeze for a few hundred miles and floating through the metal grate above my basement dorm window, into the room, and onto my bed. We would tack on details of these skits over dozens of phone calls, making up absurd new characters, cracking each other up. We were ridiculous.

But as I got older, we shared more of the real things. Not just the entertaining stories, but the sad ones. The mean ones. The embarrassing ones. The scary ones. He told me his whole life, and I told him mine. Our love ran deep.

Anthony was also one of my patrons. He gifted me books on Buddhism and pocket knives. Occasionally, when he knew I was broke, he’d include a crisp hundred-dollar bill in a letter. When I was just out of college, surviving from statue paycheck to stripper paycheck, making my living in one-dollar bills, Anthony would sometimes front my rent money if I was tight on cash. I was once wiped out by a three-hundred-dollar speeding ticket I got on the Massachusetts Turnpike while racing to a gig as an artist’s model at a local art college. I had $250 in my bank account and my $350 rent was due. I borrowed the money from Anthony.

I swear I’ll pay you back, I promised.

I know you will, he answered. I would.

We used to talk about what would happen if he died. He’s more than twenty-five years older than me, and I worried about it. I once asked him, while we were lying on the adjacent couches of his study, what I should say at his funeral. Since I’d probably have to say something.

He gave this some thought. He said he’d like me to walk up to the front of the wake or memorial or whatever, carrying a stick.

What kind of stick?

Whatever kind of stick, he said. You know, a branch, a stick. A big one. One you can hold and everyone can see.

So you mean, like, a NATURAL stick. Not like… a martial arts stick. You mean like a…

WHATEVER kind of stick, he said, sounding annoyed. A stick from a tree. An ALL-PURPOSE stick. I’m trying to tell you something important here, clown.

Okay, I said, breathing out. You’re dead, I’m at the funeral. What do I do with the stick?

Don’t say anything, he told me. Just hold that sucker up in the air, break it in half, and throw it on the floor.

Everything breaks.

I had a hard time keeping boyfriends. They usually lasted about a year, then things would start to get real—or appear to start going in a potentially real direction—and I would flee in terror. But I wasn’t very good at being independent either. I couldn’t stand to spend the night alone and was a serial drunk-dialer of exes.

They all told me I had a fear of intimacy, but I vehemently disagreed; I craved intimacy like a crack addict.

The problem was that I craved intimacy to the same burning degree that I detested commitment.

Being a statue was such a perfect job.

I loved all the handwritten notes people took the time to write and leave in the hat.

You’re beautiful.

Thank you for changing my day.

I’ve been watching you for an hour.

I love you.

The Bride was so easy to love.

She was silent.

She was blank, harmless, beatific… just loving people and giving them flowers.

She was perfect.

Because… who knew?

She could be anything.

Anyone.

In real life, I was the furthest thing from quiet, and the furthest thing from perfect. I gabbed nonstop, dressed flamboyantly, dyed my hair purple and red and green, repeatedly crashed my bike into cars, started prying conversations with strangers, and hammered on a piano in my bedroom while screeching angry songs about my pain at maximum volume in my spare time.

There was one very sweet-looking guy in his forties or fifties who, for an entire statue summer, gave me a twenty-dollar bill every time he saw me. My peripheral vision was excellent, and I could usually see what size bill people were dropping in my hat—unless they were going out of their way to hide it.

Day after day, I came to recognize him, and even expect him, and eventually we shared a tiny smile every time he passed by. It was a sweet, silent, secret little relationship.

Towards the end of the summer, he kicked around one day until my flowers ran out, and shyly approached me—would I have a cup of coffee with him?

Sure, I said.

I figured I owed it to him. I was impressed he’d even asked.

I went back to the ice-cream shop, changed into my civilian clothes, and we sat together in an outdoor café and chatted about life. He was a chemical engineer, from MIT, and slightly sad. He was nervous, not easy to talk to. I told him about my life: about writing music, about my wonderful crazy art-housemates at the Cloud Club, about living in Germany, what it was like to be a statue. He told me about his failed marriage. Two flawed human beings, sitting at the Au Bon Pain, exchanging mundane details. He’d clearly fallen in a forlorn sort of love with The Bride. Meeting me must have been such a disappointment.

I walked away from our coffee date feeling like I’d broken something beautiful.

I wanted to stay anyone.

It was easier.

Even if The Bride was slow-moving, it sometimes felt like life happened at light speed; thirty little secret love affairs with passersby in just under seventy minutes, and all the heartache that goes along with it.

I’m in love.

Nobody loves me.

I’m in love.

Nobody loves me.

I’d stand there like a dry plant, passively waiting to be watered.

Any source of nourishment would do. It was so simple, really, like the entirety of the human condition distilled down to a single idea:

Feeling alone. And then, not.

Every pair of gazing eyes that locked with mine, a reminder:

Love still exists.

When Neil and I first met, long after my street-performing days were over, we were both in relationships with other people, and we didn’t find each other all that attractive. I thought he looked like a baggy-eyed, grumpy old man, and he thought I looked like a chubby little boy. (A photograph taken on the day we first met provides credible evidence.) I now think he’s smashingly handsome, and he calls me “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Ain’t love grand?

We were introduced over email by my friend Jason Webley, whom I’d met when we were both busking at an Australian festival—me as The Bride, him scream-singing over his pirate-y accordion songs. I was crashing in Jason’s houseboat in Seattle the week Neil posted one of Jason’s homemade stop-motion videos to his own blog, causing the view-counts to soar into the tens of thousands.

Do you know Neil Gaiman? Jason asked. We were working on a songwriting collaboration: a weird side-project record based completely on puns called Evelyn Evelyn, in which we wrote, played, and sang as conjoined twin sisters with the same first name.

Neil Gaiman. Doesn’t he write comics? Isn’t he the Sandman dude? I’d never read anything he’d written, but I’d definitely heard his name.

Yes, him! He posted my “Eleven Saints” video on his blog yesterday and it got like fifty thousand hits. I just wrote him a thank-you note and he wrote back ten minutes later. He seems really nice.

A few days later, Jason and I were working on a radio-play-style script for our album, a ten-minute spoken account of the fictional twins’ horrific upbringing (their mother died in childbirth, then came a stint in the circus and a string of unseemly guardians, etc.). We were having a blast writing it, coming up with absurd details, but we wanted to run the text by someone to make sure the storyline was clear. Jason suggested we ask Neil.

But isn’t he kinda famous? I asked. Why not? Go for it. Ask.

It couldn’t hurt. He asked. Neil said yes, took a look at the radio play, and suggested a few changes. I wrote him a thank-you note. He was in Ireland at that time, he said in his response, alone in a borrowed house trying to finish a book about a little boy who grows up in a graveyard, and he had been sick with the flu for a full week. A few days later, I emailed and asked him how he was getting on. And a few days after that, I emailed and asked him who he actually was. He started telling me about his life, his book, his flu, his divorce. I told him about my life, my career, my record label troubles.

I was slaving over a book for the fans at the time, a compilation of macabre photographs to go along with my new album Who Killed Amanda Palmer. I’d gotten excited about the concept, and already had five or six great dead/naked-Amanda photos (I was, of course, mining my past and including the pictures from my dead/naked-Amanda performance-art college thesis), but had been told by my label that they didn’t have any budget to add artwork to the CD packaging. Instead of fighting them, I decided to simply publish the photos separately, in a book, and sell it directly from my website as a companion to the record. I figured it would be fun—and useful—to get a famous writer to create clever captions for the photos. I asked Neil. He said yes. A few months later, he came to Boston to work on the book. He didn’t want to write captions, he said; the photos looked more like whole stories to him, which would take more time to write. And he wanted to meet the corpse in person.

On our first day together, we took a walk to the Public Garden to get to know each other a bit before we hunkered down to work on the book. I asked him how his life was unfolding, how it felt to be him, and I was surprised at how readily forthright he was; he seemed so shy and guarded at first glance. He was going through a rough time. Our week was friendly and platonic.

We finished the book and stayed in touch every so often, getting on with our real lives and respective relationships. I released my album and embarked on a long tour. A few months later, Neil and I both happened to be in New York on his birthday and agreed to meet up for coffee. I was flummoxed about what to give him for a birthday present. What does one get Neil Gaiman, Celebrated Writer Of Fantasy And Science Fiction Novels? A special pen? A fancy journal? A fossil of a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth? A map of a black hole?

The Bride.

It was perfect. When I’d told him about my years as The Bride, he’d been delighted, and emailed me a story he’d written years before about a male living statue who stalks a woman, writing her creepy letters that he mysteriously leaves in her apartment.

He was having lunch with his literary agent that day, and would be free at four o’clock, so I asked him to come to Washington Square Park when he was done. I told him I’d be reading on a bench. It was November, and cold, so I waited a bit before setting down a locally filched milk crate in front of an empty fountain, ducking behind a tree, and putting on my Bride getup for the first time in a few years, inhaling its familiar cakey smell of sweat and makeup, and feeling floaty. I stepped up on the box at ten minutes to four, figuring I wouldn’t have long to wait.

After twenty minutes, I started to shiver and kept wondering if I should give up, but I didn’t want to get down and ruin the surprise, and I’d already suffered too long to let it go. There was construction in the park. Maybe he couldn’t find me. A few people stopped to get a flower. After thirty minutes, my fingers went numb, then my hands went numb, then my legs and arms froze. After about an hour, he appeared, accompanied by a woman, and approached me cautiously.

…Amanda? Is that you?

The Bride stayed silent. I stared at him and cocked my head. This was weird. He had come with someone, and I felt like I was embarrassing him. I’d noticed he was easily embarrassed.

He put a dollar in my hat and I gave him a flower. I tried to make eye contact with him, and he smiled goofily while the woman stepped back and laughed at our little exchange. I hopped down. I still felt like I was embarrassing him.

Well, er, Amanda, this is Merrilee, my literary agent! Merrilee, this is Amanda, you know, the… rock star lady. With the dead naked book… and all that. Merrilee smiled at me.

I pushed the veil out of my face, reached out my numb, gloved fingers, and shook her hand.

Hi.

The uncomfortableness lasted a few more minutes before Neil and I walked off to a nearby café, where I told Neil I would buy him a birthday hot chocolate. I took off my wig and Neil helped me carry the three milk crates.

My god, you’re freezing, he said. Your teeth are chattering. He took off his overcoat and draped it over my shoulders.

I didn’t have any cash in my wallet, and the café was cash only. But I had made eight dollars doing The Bride, and I insisted on buying our hot chocolate with those crumpled-up bills, which I fished out of the can I’d used to collect them. The bill for two hot chocolates came to eleven dollars. Fucking New York. Apologizing, I hit Neil up for the rest of the money.

It’s okay, he said. What you did out there was wonderful.

Ah, thanks. Yeah. Sorry it got all fucked up. I should have planned the surprise better.

No, he said. It was perfect. I think it’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me, actually.

What? Really? I said.

Really. And I’ve decided something.

What’s that?

I’ve decided that I’m not going anywhere.

Sorry. What?

I’m not going anywhere, he repeated.

I don’t know what you mean, Neil.

I mean, he said, speaking more slowly, that I’m not. Going. Anywhere. Even if it takes years. I think I’ll stay right here.

Like… here at the corner table? I joked nervously. You mean you’re never going to leave Cafe Gitane ever? That sounds very Neil Gaiman-y.

No, he said, plainly. I’ll leave this café. But I won’t leave you. That’s what I mean. I’m not going anywhere.

Oh, I said. I see. I think.

And I couldn’t think of anything to say after that.

We were both still in other relationships, though it was no secret that they were both foundering.

We parted ways, and I walked down the street thinking:

Did what I think just happened actually happen? Does Neil Gaiman, Celebrated Writer Of Fantasy And Science Fiction Novels want to date me? God, he’s so much older than me, I thought, doing the math. Sixteen years. No way. That’s too much. And he’s famous. Which is kind of great but kind of not. And he’s so… awkward and… British… and… I don’t know. He’d hate me and my life and friends.

We have practically nothing in common, I reasoned. But still, there was something about him. He was so… what was he? He was so…

…kind.

Sometimes people—almost always men—would walk up to The Bride and, with dramatic ceremony that ranged from the corny to the sublimely tasteful, offer me their wedding rings.

I would clasp my heart, saying with my fluttering eyes:

For meeee?

And I would touch my fingers to my lips, speechless, shrug my shoulders upwards in extreme delight, smile slightly, take the ring, and slip it lovingly onto my gloved pinky.

Thank you for this beautiful wedding ring. I love you.

Then I’d go back to standing still.

Then things would get kind of awkward.

The person would want the wedding ring back.

So we’d stand there, staring at each other.

I’d shake my head.

A pause. A really nervous pause.

Then I’d reconsider, and remove the ring, and start to return it—much to the relief of my new human friend.

Then I’d change my mind.

This game could go on for a while if business was slow.

Despite the fact that the majority of passersby ignored me (and occasionally sent me into spirals of existential despair), I had come to have a sort of faith in the street, and in the general public, because they would instinctively protect me. I was truly vulnerable up there, but I felt a benevolent force field of human energy around me.

A few times some jerk would grab my money-filled hat and run away with it. But somebody always chased him (and it was always a him) down the street and grabbed the hat back and returned it, often feeling the need to apologize to me, as if to apologize for all of humanity.

I’d thank them with some flowers. They would take them. They understood.

One day, while I was surrounded by a small audience, a mentally ill guy approached me and started spitting and screaming at me in a foreign language. Things reached a whole new level of frightening when he reached up and grabbed my frozen, outstretched arm, trying to pull me off my pedestal. My feet were bound by the skirt beneath my dress. If I fell over, I couldn’t break my own fall.

I didn’t speak or scream, I just looked him right in the eye, as fiercely and imploringly as I could, thinking:

Please, oh god, please let go of me.

But he didn’t. Just as I was about to break character and wrestle myself free, someone from the crowd moved in and grabbed the guy, pulling him off me and dragging him a safe distance away. I didn’t break character. I watched the whole scene play out like a movie. The crowd applauded. I gave the Samaritan a flower, pressing my hands together, a gesture of heartfelt gratitude. Then I got back to work.

A teenage girl once whipped an apple at me from about twenty feet away, just barely missing my face and hitting my collarbone. I kept my balance while one of my friends, who happened to be watching, chased her for three blocks and set her straight.

Drunk people were always a pain in the ass. Friday and Saturday nights could be lucrative but intolerable. One night, a group of wasted frat boys walked by me and one of them stopped, looked up, grabbed me around my legs, and buried his face in my crotch, making drunkenly ecstatic “yummy” sounds.

I looked down and shook my head sadly.

What can you do?

People made me sad sometimes.

But mostly I just got sad if they didn’t want the flower.

One day I really got the shit scared out of me. I heard a car screech up onto the curb behind my pedestal, and a pair of hands grabbed me around the waist from behind. I heard a voice say,

GET HER!

And three people dressed in black, wearing ski masks, started to tie my hands together. Another snatched all my milk crates and money. They threw me in the back of a van and the driver revved the engine and pulled away, speeding down Mass Ave. One of the black-clad guys took his mask off, giggling uncontrollably: it was E. Stephen, one of my screwball artist pals, who constructed apocalyptic sculptures and devices out of found objects and dead animals. He kept jars of his own toenail clippings for use in future projects.

I sighed and looked at him, rolling my eyes.

Dude… I was WORKING.

I realize now that I felt chronically guilty about having chosen to be an artist. I didn’t understand this at the time; I just felt a consistent kind of inward torture, pulled towards a life in art while simultaneously feeling foolish for having made that choice. The Fraud Police ate away at me persistently through my twenties; the needling voices simmered below the surface and gnawed at my subconscious in an endless, grating loop:

When are you going to grow up, get a real job, and stop fucking around?

What makes you think you deserve to earn money playing your little songs to people?

What gives you the right to think people should give one shit about your art?

When are you going to stop being so selfish and start doing something USEFUL, like your Sister the Scientist?

If you take those questions and turn them into statements, they look like this:

Artists are not useful.

Grown-ups are not artists.

Artists do not deserve to make money from their art.

“Artist” is not a real job.

I’ve played in every venue imaginable over the last fifteen years, in fancy old theaters and shitty sports bars, in secret underground piano bars with capacities of forty people, to crowds of thousands in sports arenas.

But I maintain: no performing-art form can ever achieve the condition of The Eight-Foot Bride.

It was like breaking down a compound into its essential elements, then down to an atom, then down to an irreducible proton.

Such profound encounters—like the deeply moving exchanges I’d have with broken people who seemed to have found some sort of salvation in the accidental, beautiful moment of connection with a stranger painted white on a street corner—cannot happen on a safe stage with a curtain. Magical things can happen there, but not this. The moment of being able to say, unaccompanied by narrative:

Thank you… I see you.

In those moments I felt like a genie of compassion, able to pay attention to the hard-to-reach, hidden cracks of someone else’s life—as if I were a specially shaped human-emotion tool that could reach way under the bed of somebody’s dark heart and scrape out the caked-on blackness.

Just by seeing someone—really seeing them, and being seen in return—you enrealen each other.

What is possible on the sidewalk is unique. No song needed, no words, no lighting, no story, no ticket, no critic, no context.

It cannot get any simpler than a painted person on a box, a living human question mark, asking:

Love?

And a passing stranger, rattled out of the rhythm of a mundane existence, answering:

Yes.

Love.

It would rain, sometimes.

If I woke and saw the rain on a vaguely scheduled Statue Day, that meant a day off. I felt deeply in tune with nature—like my distant hunting-and-gathering forebears from ancient Scotland (or wherever my ancient forebears hunted and gathered). New England weather is known for its fickleness, and many days the rain would vanish as quickly as it came.

Sometimes I’d be up on the box when the rainclouds rolled in. I was usually happy to stay up there in the drizzle, but people were far less likely to stop. Trying to decide when to get down was always an interesting game I played with myself, and sometimes I’d just stay up there and get soaking wet, as some kind of random statement to the Performance Art Gods. I would fix my eyes downwards and watch the bricks on the sidewalk as they discolored with the rainwater, first a smattering of little specks, then lots of dark splotches, and eventually, they’d turn all-dark-red wet. The bridal costume, which I washed only occasionally in the Toscanini’s bathroom sink, would emit an odor that you could smell for miles around.

Sometimes waiting it out was worth it. The rain would come, then go, the sidewalk would dry and the sun would come out and dry me off, leaving only the faintest trace of Eau de Wet Bride.

Inviting my friends to watch The Bride was difficult, because there was never any set start or finish time. Just a noncommittal:

I’ll be Bride-ing in the Square today, probably around fourish.

Anthony came by one day and set up a chair at the café across the sidewalk, a good thirty feet away. I was so excited he’d come; he could finally see what I was doing. I connected with people especially deeply that day, because I knew he was watching. I wanted him to see the seeing.

He watched for a long time. After I was finished, we went out for a falafel at Café Algiers, and he reported the conversations he’d overheard.

This one guy, this regular chess-player type who says he’s there every day, says, “She is the Madonna of Harvard Square.”

I laughed.

Then the guy next to him says, “Yeah, and she’s Asian, I think she’s actually Korean.” And another guy leans over and whispers to me, “No word of a lie, she has combat boots on under that dress.”

I laughed again.

And another guy tells me, “I’m in love with her.”

Aww. You know, I said, I think even I’m in love with her. She’s… you know. She’s perfect.

I looked directly at him.

So you liked it? You really got it?

It was magnificent, clown. And I got behind you a couple times, so I could watch those faces, up close, of the people looking at you. I saw the love, the longing, all of it. I mean… it’s the most powerful and basic of all things. You were right. It’s the human encounter, all happening right there, beauty. And when that little kid came up, the scared one? Oof. I almost cried.

You almost cried? For real?

I almost cried, he said.

I WIN! I said.

You win. How do you feel?

LIKE A MILLION DOLLARS.

What you’re doing up there is art, my girl. You’re really doing it. I’m proud of you.

He paid the check. He always paid the check.

So I’d done it, sort of.

I felt like A Productive Member Of Society in my own weird way, a Real Artist.

But honestly? I didn’t want to be a statue. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be vulnerable. Not as a character, but as myself.

Facing the street as a statue had its challenges, but truthfully, it all felt like cheating, because I wasn’t actually showing myself. I was hiding behind a blank, white wall.

I loved the connecting. I loved the seeing. But it wasn’t enough. People loved The Bride because she was perfect and silent.

Anyone.

I wanted to be loved for my songwriting, the musical dot-connection I’d been privately plugging away at for years, which showed me for what I actually was.

Imperfect.

And very, very loud.