self-conscious

Oh… Holy Jesus in Jail.

I can’t think of anything I suck more at than small talk with complete strangers. It feels disingenuous, trite and completely without merit, therefore I loathe it.

small talk
noun:
polite (keyword), Conversation made about unimportant or uncontroversial matters, (why bother) especially as engaged in on social occasions. (Ugh, kill me now!)
“Propriety required that she face these people and make small talk.”

I want to blame it on the fact that I’m shy but we all know that would be a horrendous lie.
At gatherings, I can be gregarious, even bubbly IF I know the people (loving them makes me even better), and if I care about the topics being discussed.

See, that’s the thing about small talk with strangers at a soiree where you have not a rat’s ass of interest in what they have to say.

Case in point, a fancy car show.

Me: (said to one of the wives at lunch on day one of a two-day thingy) “So, what car did you drive here?” is what my mouth asked. My brain was screaming I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care! so loud that I couldn’t hear a word she said.

She, to be honest, looked as tragically bored as I felt. We were at a winery and I noticed she was drinking the Sauvignon Blanc so I gave her my sample. She handed me all of her red. All three samples. Well, I’ve slept with people for doing less. Needless to say, we became fast friends.

We sat in silence, like old friends do, sipping our wine, listening to the others prattle on. We had no need to talk. We had transcended small talk. Alcohol will do that if you let it. We did.

Later, back at the room, the prospect of a dinner with all of these same strangers loomed large. I opened the complimentary bottle of red and an equally classy bag of Pirate Booty. I stuffed my face without breathing, letting the puffed air covered in faux-white-cheese numb me out. I washed it down with a nice Shirah.

It was 4 p.m. and I was shit faced. I NEVER get shit faced. Most certainly NOT at 4 p.m. Dinner was scheduled for seven. Husband wanted to go down for cocktails at 6:30. Uh, oh.

I started drunk texting my tribe. What do I do? What do I say? How the hell did I polish off an entire bag of Booty? Help!

They were great. Very supportive. They only laughed at me a little. Ask the women what they’re reading. What’s on their nightstand. You’ll be able to comment on that, they suggested. SAVED! I thought. They’re right. I can do THAT.

Confidence renewed!

I proceeded to go and fix my face which meant reapplying pretty much everything I’d done that morning including picking my ubiquitous false lashes off of my upper lip and putting them back on my eyes where they belonged. Thank God I had two-plus hours to spare!

On the way down to cocktails, I was still a bit wobbly. Books. I’m a writer. I’ll ask what they’re reading, I reminded myself. I walked with all the conviction I could muster up to a table of wives. They barely looked at me. Tables of wives are a tough crowd. They are not for amateurs. I took a deep breath, handed my new BFF from lunch who was sitting with three others a glass of white wine as a bribe and was about to ask about books when one of them started to speak.

She was a gorgeous woman of about sixty-five in a stunning beige Valentino pantsuit. Her face contorted and she looked as if she were about to vomit as she whispered, “This is SO not my thing.”

Wait. What? Are we strangers telling each other the truth?

That’s when I lunged at her, practically sitting in her lap, hugging her in the most inappropriate and awkward way. “Ohmygodmeneither!” I did not whisper, “I love you!” They all nodded. We laughed, clinking glasses in an unspoken toast.

Then a magician appeared and did some card tricks. He finished by pulling an autographed ace of spades folded into the size of a postage stamp out of one of the wives wallet. I’m not kidding. You can’t make this shit up.

Okay…so, I have a theory. I think small talk is The Great Equalizer. Everyone dreads it and hardly anyone is good at it. Deep down people want to connect—just not that way. They want to talk about death, aliens, and magic. I really need to remember that the next time. And the nightstand question too.

How are you guys with the tiny talk? Are you good at it? If you are—please share your secrets.

Carry on,
xox

A few years back I was described by someone, a dancer in a production I was involved in, I can’t remember exactly who it was because professional dancers have a tendency to become a blur of spinning fabulousness when you’re around them—as “elegantly clumsy.’

I almost wept with joy. I felt it was one of the highest compliments I had ever been paid. Besides, I only heard the word elegant. After that entered my ears—they stopped listening.
I never heard the clumsy part.
Well, maybe I did.
I just have to say that considering the circumstances—clumsy was still a compliment.

Back as a young girl in the midst of tween-dom, I was stick figure thin; a gangly compilation of arms and legs, with giant blue eyes, braces, and a tiny tween brain. What I loved more than anything else was to put on shows. God, how I loved that! Dancing or roller-skating and lip-syncing to the latest movie soundtrack on our long, smooth concrete patio. Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand was my favorite.

I could sing. Sort of. At the time it was a volume over substance sort of thing.
The trouble was, I also fancied myself a graceful dancer. Not a ballerina exactly, I wasn’t quite that audacious. But thinking I was a dancer was still a reach considering the fact that when faced with choreography, even the most elementary dance steps, my left leg traveled right, and my right leg, which has always had a mind of its own, did its very own version of Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance.

While all of that was happening below my waist; my arms, hands, fingers, neck and head appeared disjointed, like a marionette, unattached from each other in any kind of biological way. They twisted and turned, undulating rhythmically, part Hawaiian Hula, part Aboriginal Fire Dance with a touch of Tai Chi and a sprinkling of Bob Fosse.

They moved to some internal melody that was completely unrelated to the music that was playing out loud.

Eyes closed, I can remember feeling at one with every note of every song. I had no idea how I appeared to those who were lucky enough to witness my spectacular moves. All I knew was that I was a dancer…until I heard the laughter.

I remember opening my eyes and thinking—actually consciously deciding—I can play up the funny—or I can be self-conscious—I chose to do both.

For the rest of my tweens, I played up the funny, because if you act like you’re IN on the joke, then they’re not laughing AT you—they’re laughing WITH you.

Once I reached high school and starting participating in Musical Theatre, not getting the dance steps wasn’t funny anymore. I became almost paralyzed with self-consciousness. Almost. As luck would have it, God giveth whilst He taketh away. That singing thing had gotten a lot better which allowed them to overlook my awkward dance free-stylings.

While the cast would dance their amazing Broadway-esq ensemble numbers, I was moved to a stationary platform where I was asked, told, to stand still and sing, or to move ONLY my hands in unison with the others. After numerous failed attempts to do exactly that, we all decided, for the sake of the show, that standing perfectly still or sitting on the side of the stage was preferable.

When I decided to re-join musical theater in my fifties, I discovered menopause had helped me to forget how much I sucked at dancing. It was only my feet, those two things below my knees with painted toes, that jogged my memory and saved that tiny shred of self-respect that had persevered since High School.

They did that by completely refusing to cooperate.

I could barely point my toes, and pointed toes are to dancers what lips are to singers.

After only an hour of dance rehearsal, my arches screamed in agony. Every toe was distorted into an arthritic looking charlie-horse. I hobbled around trying to walk off the pain, but my feet knew better. They were saving me from dance humiliation.

Blame it on us, they said.
So I did.
What choice did I have?

The powers-that-be lowered their expectations of my ability to “move”. ‘The old broad has shitty feet”, they muttered as they choreographed around me.

I’m okay with that, I thought, even though the moment I left the theatre—my feet behaved normally. It felt better than the fear of them get wind of the fact that I didn’t possess one lick of dance talent.

I had one of the leads in A Chorus Line, a show about dancers and their passion for dancing, where I was begged not to dance. “God, I’m a dancer, a dancer dances!”, I sang into the spotlight with all of the sincerity I could muster, as I stood nailed to the ground.

It’s called acting.

Eventually, I was cast as Velma in Chicago where they made me dance with a chair. I mean, how hard could THAT be?
It was Bob Fosse style, which means you’re actually making love to a chair.
On stage.
In public.

I couldn’t do it straight. So I made it funny. Sexy-funny if there’s such a thing. I may have just invented it.

Anyhow, they left it in the show, and it was after a run thru of that particular number that one of the dancers came up to me and whispered, “I like your style”.

“Oh, really? What style is that?”, I replied between gasps of air, as I poured buckets of sweat onto the stage.

“You’re elegantly clumsy”, he said with conviction, like he had just told Baryshnikov “Nice Jete”.

I will live off the fumes of that compliment until the day I die.

Carry on,
xox