The Usher

(& remembering how to write for fun again!)

I’m going through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron right now, which means recommitting to morning pages — three pages of longhand writing first thing in the morning. Usually, these pages are just a brain dump, some ranting, maybe a to-do list. But a few weeks ago, I saw David Sedaris, and something happened that I wrote about the next morning and have been thinking about ever since. I took it from my morning pages journal to my keyboard, edited it a little, and am posting it here. One of my goals with this round of The Artist’s Way is to remember to write for fun again. So here’s a little something just for fun.

---

Last night, I saw David Sedaris at the Eccles Theater. Brett was supposed to go with me, but he had a last minute trip to Austria with the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Team (tough life, huh?), so I took my friend Heather instead. It could have just been an Artist Date (Julia Cameron suggests a weekly solo outing to nurture your creative life), but I was so glad to have time with Heather. Also glad not to have an unused ticket to the event. Sedaris’s writing sounds as if it’s all stream of consciousness. It isn’t, of course. He was editing as he read. He had a pencil in his hand and crossed a few things out. Wrote a few things down. Nothing big, I assume. But still, constantly fine-tuning his work.

The usher at the door next to us (our seats were on the aisle) kept playing with a plastic wrapper. At first, I thought she was unwrapping a lot of cough drops, one after the other, and I could forgive her because that was less distracting than a coughing fit. But no. She only had the one wrapper. She was just rolling it back and forth between her fingers. Scrunching and unscrunching it in her palm. Letting the tiny crinkles echo through our corner of the theater. I’m sensitive to these noises. I often give people in theaters The Look when they aren’t being gold-star theater patrons. Screens receive death stares. Whispers better be inaudible to all but the receiver. Latecomers who make me rise from my seat get raised brows and a deep sigh as they shuffle past me with their phone flashlights out to find their seats. Theaters are one of the few places where I am not deserving of the “Nicest” title I earned as my senior moniker in high school. In most of my life, it still holds up. I take kindness pretty seriously. But I am a judgey theater person.

Not if you’re doing the right thing, of course. If you sit and applaud, keep your phone away, hold your partner’s hand, nod and smile and laugh with those around you at the APPROPRIATE times, I will probably strike up a conversation with you at intermission. Just last month, we were back in New York for fall break. Norah and I went to the matinee of Hell’s Kitchen, and the last song before intermission made me weep. As the curtain fell and most people started the speed shuffle toward the restroom I took a deep breath and looked for my person. There she was. Two rows back. Also weeping.

“I just need a minute to process that,” I told her, wiping tears from my cheeks.

“Me too, girl!,” she said, shaking her head and getting a tissue out of her purse. “That voice!”

“Mom, you’re so weird,” Norah said. In case it wasn’t already clear, Norah is almost a teenager. But what she didn’t say was, “Mom, you’re so disrespectful.” Because I didn’t wail and blow my nose into a tissue while sobbing through the last song of Act 1. I quietly let the tears stream down my face so as not to disrupt my fellow theater goers.

But this usher last night. Crinkling the wrapper. It wasn’t only me who noticed. Heather looked at me with wide eyes. The couple in front of us kept looking over at the usher. I craned my neck toward her every time Sedaris paused in his reading. We were all trying, desperately, to use the power of The Stare to get her to look our way so we could collectively shame her into stopping. But she didn’t look at any of us. My first-grade teacher tendencies started to kick in. I wanted to walk over to her and whisper, “I’ll hold this for you until the end of the show. If you’d still like to play with it, the bus ride back would be a great time, and I’ll have it for you then.”

But she’s the one who should have been confiscating items like this. It was her job to keep the theater a pleasant place for all involved! But then I clocked something. We were at a David Sedaris reading. Every time I looked at her, she had a straight face and cold eyes. No hint of humor as the audience in Eccles Theater roared with laughter. Maybe that small plastic wrapper was her weird protest to the Public Radio crowd. Maybe she saw that David Sedaris was being introduced by the local public radio station on a night she would be ushering and her heart sank. This guy? Who those NPR lovers think is so funny? And I’m going to have to stand there and listen to him for two hours? I’ll need my emotional support wrapper to get through this.

Dear reader, this is where my morning pages ended the day after the David Sedaris reading. That was two weeks ago. I don’t know what it says about me that I have thought about that usher almost every day since. But this morning, my thoughts toward her shifted. For years, I have tried to tell my children when someone is annoying them at school to think about what circumstances could be causing them to act that way. Did they not get enough sleep? Is their mom or dad sick? Is their big brother or sister bullying them? Did they get breakfast that day?

So my inner first-grade teacher came back again, and this morning, I started to wonder. What if that usher was totally unaware of what she was doing? Maybe her face was cold and unattached because she wasn’t there – instead, she was worried about a scary diagnosis she just received, or a partner not receiving a paycheck due to the government shutdown, or how they would provide Thanksgiving dinner this year due to either of those circumstances. Maybe she rolled that plastic in her hands because that is how she released her worry when she stopped moving her body to show people to their seats and had to be still. Maybe she didn’t laugh because she wasn’t listening to anything Sedaris said – couldn’t listen – because the worry in her own mind was too loud.

The first-grade teacher in me still wants to take the wrapper from her. Maybe with just a little more kindness, though. Put a hand on her shoulder. Invite her to take a breath, enter the room she’s in, try to laugh if she can – even for a moment. Let go of her grip. Ask for help.

Whether the crinkling disruption was deliberate or unintentional, she made me notice her. I hope she has a nice Thanksgiving. And I hope she finds a way to protest or release anxiety that doesn’t involve a small plastic wrapper.