Yet More On Live Performance

So we went to Dr. Presto's Magic Mansion this week, at the Three of Clubs in L.A., and watched a fellow juggle a pancake, and, yes, were uproariously entertained by doing so. No wonder so many religious traditions insist on direct experience for their mystical elements. A very dear friend many years ago introduced me to the quote--"mystics are the ultimate empiricists." So true, so true....

I can *tell* you about seeing the pancake-juggler, but really, that is a separate experience from seeing him yourself. The beloved recently noted that someone was telling a good story, just not very well. (The story was good, the telling was not.) Now to give my dad his due, he is a raconteur of the first water. He told a story once of seeing a myna bird in a hotel lobby that was a miracle of hilarity and wonder. And really, it really was not anything more than that he saw a myna bird on a perch behind the front desk.

This difference between the story (uhm, how to say, "what actually happened?") and the telling of a story is a fascinating one to me. I suppose the wide world of journalism is based on that.... I hardly know how to continue recording my thoughts at this point....

Well, go watch a live performance. Chat up strangers, who are bound to tell you amazing stories, simply because you are a stranger. People walk around brimming over with such stories of love and crime and loss and suffering and joy as to leave me flummoxed by the knowledge of them. The pretty young lady with the deeply tragic air just cannot get over how Daddy could be so horrible as to not pay for the leather interior for her car--my God what will her friends think? The comfortable looking matron in the Lyra-enhanced pantsuit did things while she was in the Peace Corps that she can only tell to strangers late at night when far from home, in the hopes of someday being able to sleep again. The mud-bespecked workman with the manners of a prince, the fellow in the expensive suit whose stinging bitterness about how the bagger on the new mower works seems a little out of proportion....

You get the idea. So anyways, go see Scott Nery generate such drama with pancakes as you could not imagine could be done.