Author Archives: oinsketta

Personal Manifesto — preview

From time to time, I’m told, it’s good to write a manifesto– a plan of action laying out the beliefs that animate it.  I’m going to do that, if you watch this space you will see it soon.  I hope you may even be inspired by it.  But today I have only a few minutes.  Somewhere I jotted a note the other day, I remember writing it down, and that it was a hook to a big part of the manifesto and my motivation.  Let me dig it up.

“I don’t want to see stubborn, opinionated, pandering televised idiots having false debates about reality and the most pressing questions of the future– help create smart citizens.”

I’m doing it, B.  I’ll get more into the details of this next time.  There is one other matter and then I have to jump into the shower, get ready to go.  

People, when they’re young, love to play.  Without play, what does a young person have?  Grim preparation for a life of unsatisfying drudgery.   Seems pretty clear, when put that way, that children should be encouraged to make discoveries during play time.  Got that one covered too.  And older people, we need to keep playing too.  You know what’s left if we don’t?  You know what’s left.

Last point.  You hear often from funny, successful people that feedback and support were key elements in their growth.  I hear it loud and clear, even as I am put to the test, over and over, to prove that even without much feedback or support — if you have enough belief in what you are doing and in your creative power to do it — amazing things can still be done.

Now go forth and play, my friends.

Eye Roll, please

I know how tedious stories of injustice are, and how depressing, especially here in America where we are by nature optimists.  You know, how many times can you hear about millions of indigent senior citizens being cut back from five Meals-on-wheels a week to four due to Sequestration, or the precocious little four year-old in Indiana whose mother can’t break it to him that he was lotteried out of Head Start next term, before you turn to the sports channel, or go shopping, or see what there is to snack on?

Or reading about some freshman  Congressman from Tennessee, let’s say, whose family owns a gigantic farm, and who gets a subsidy of $738 a day, (and, yes, some liberal prick actually took out a calculator and divided the average annual $269,000 farm subsidy this wealthy public servant gets into days…) while he advocates cutting the Food Stamp program that so many WalMart employees depend on?  (A more balanced, and almost incomprehensible, version of that story is here)

There’s a so-called debate in this country about values.  One side’s intellectuals cite the points made by a novelist who escaped from totalitarianism and had a lifelong hatred of “altruism” as though these strongly expressed opinions are slam dunk conclusions preempting any discussion of who deserves what.   The intellectuals of the other major party  dare not scream too loud at this, fundraising is a delicate art that must be constantly cultivated, and besides, most of the money in political campaigns is given by the top half of the 1%, and not all of them think that novelist Ayn Rand is an absurd source of moral, political and economic philosophy.

I may personally agree that it’s no sin for old people to cut back from five meals a week to four.  America has an obesity problem, you know?  I may agree that the brat in Indiana who wants to continue in Head Start when politicians have agreed to cut it across the board as part of their debate over who deserves what should stop whining, and so should his mother.  But if I do those things, I’m a bad person.  Really, think about it.  It’s only my opinion, but someone who justifies cutting food to the poor, on a philosophical theory about who deserves what, in a super-wealthy country where the wealthiest continue to grow wealthier while everyone else does not– bad person.

Of course, there is no law against being a bad person.  Nor about a bad person being an elected public servant, leaving office and working for an average of 1000% more in the private sector as a lobbyist.   And I know it sounds terrible when you use a number like 1000%, it’s really only ten times as much.  If you take the actual numbers, it doesn’t really look so bad at all.  The public servant makes, say, $120,000 a year to serve, that servant can make much more in the private sector, but they make a sacrifice in pay in order to serve the rest of us.  So is it so unfair that the public servant leaves office with contacts, entree and expertise and makes $1,200,000 as a lobbyist?  If you look at it like that, it hardly seems unfair.  Look at it this way, it’s like the person only made $660,000 a year for those two years, only $480,000 a year if you divide by three with two years of public service, hardly a top earner in the USA.

I know, I know, prepare the eye roll.  Here we go, I’m done now — and may we have…. an eye roll. 

The Minor Leagues

I’ve been wrestling with applying to TED talks, I have a few more days to wrestle, the deadline for this round is Friday.  You can only apply once in twelve months.  I’m told that TED, like everyone else, looks at stats– how much of a following you have on-line, in the world, how many clicks, how many click-throughs.  By that criteria, I’m already disqualified, with well under a hundred watching each of the kids’ animations made by my visionary program.  

On this blahg I get a few readers on a good day, not that I’d mention gratootskyblahg to TED.  I have a small group of followers who seem to be about 50% business people looking for customers.  I am supposed to be a business person, if I’m to be attractive to TED.  My great idea worth spreading must already be out in the world, being discussed to some extent.  Being seen by more than the few hundred who’ve visited this great site.

In the real world I can’t get people to answer my calls, yet.  I think I may be in a better position in six months, when many more people are talking about my great idea worth spreading.  Maybe I should wait to apply to TED then, when I’ve raised my profile.  It’s a shot in the dark either way, who knows?

I stumbled on the farm system for TED yesterday, TEDx.  These appear to be the minor leagues for TED, small stages where people who may think their ideas are worth talking about get to audition, give a little taste of their stuff.  I watched some of these with a sinking heart yesterday.  Several Muslim comics, I watched one after another, addressing audiences in places like Doha, Qatar.  The titles were things like A Kuwaiti, a Saudi and an Egyptian walk into an Iranian Bar, Muslims are Funny, Too, and We All Laugh.  I hope we all laugh, it’s the best hope we have.  I haven’t had a laugh in a while, I was ready, overdue, really.  So I turned hopefully to my young Muslim brothers.

I watched one, an earnest young Saudi guy talking about how he helped bring Stand-Up comedy to the Arabian Peninsula.  As he talked very seriously about comedy, and getting laughs, the camera panned the faces of his audience.  There were a few smiles to be seen as I waited for laughs.  Where are the laughs?  I kept thinking.  None there.  Went to the next one, and the one after that, I smiled, but nothing got a laugh out of me.  A few of these guys had charm, but they were walking a very careful line.  Those who walk such lines are generally not hilarious.

Go to the major league TED talks and you will almost always have something to laugh about as you are provoked by super-bright performers to think new thoughts.  These people are at ease and inspired, they speak easily to the crowd of 1,500.   I was at ease and inspired at my mother’s funeral, even funny, true, but it was a crowd who knew me, and my mother, and appreciated the irreverence, which was a tribute to, and in part attributable to, her.   Forget that little show.  

Forget IBM, TED’s main secret sponsor, forget IBM’s stunning info-mercials at the end of each minor league TEDx Talk.  Forget, as you hear IBM’s genius public relations firm spin out the wondrous story of IBM changing the world with amazing ideas, that at one time IBM’s amazing ideas included keeping track of people an organized government headed by a psychopath murdered by the millions.  

I am in a dark mood lately, no lie.   No laughs here.  Maybe next time.  In fact, remind me to tell you the one about the visionary data company and the visionary purifier of blood.  It’ll kill yuh.

Insomnia

It is a loss for me, having nobody, restless, like a phantom limb.   The illusions of connection in a world of illusion, never mind.  I suppose one should feel satisfied with a random cluck now and then.  The sun pries its way through the blinds.   Now the birds are out there, with all their idiotic opinions in the airless morning.  

Cancer

My mother, always a large and heavy woman, was, for the last few years of her life, almost gaunt.  She’d been a fat baby, there’s an oblong portrait of her as an infant, she’d had it blown up and put into a gilt frame.  In the photo her eyes are black, she looks like an apple cheeked glittering-eyed Italian bambina.  She was overweight for most of her adult life, but for the last few years, gaunt.  Cancer and the Widow’s Diet, as she called it, did that for her.

Her mother had died of cancer, a terrible, painful, wasting death we all watched up close.  When it was finally time for my grandmother to die, she couldn’t go.  Her eyes turned huge, and black, and she screamed.  My grandmother was not in there any more, just the will to live.  It was dreadful to see.

My grandfather was gone over a year when she died.  He had survived lung cancer and the removal of a lung.  This all happened when I was a baby, he lived until my 24th year.  Although an ideal weight for his body his whole life, he was terrified of living alone without his mate and started cutting down on his calories.  He went on a low salt special diet with his cancer-stricken wife, although there was no medical reason to do it.  There was no practical reason either, they had always prepared and eaten different food every meal anyway.  My grandmother used to scream at him that he was an idiot, that he should eat what he always ate.   He was stubborn.  He lost a couple of pounds, carried too many bottles of seltzer back on a bus one 90 degree, 90% humidity Miami Beach afternoon, had trouble catching his breath when he came into the apartment.  Died not long afterwards of a heart attack.  Not to say that cancer wouldn’t have killed him too, it had already tried and almost succeeded once.

My father felt like crap the last two years of his life.  Looked terrible, had no energy, went to a cardiologist, endocrinologist and a hematologist regularly.  They tried a B-12 shot, which didn’t do much good.  One day he woke from a nap, paralyzed and yellow.  In the emergency room there was no doubt among the doctors and nurses there, he was clearly in the final stages of undetected liver cancer.  He didn’t keep his appointment with the hematologist the following day, he had only one pressing appointment to keep after that.  He was dead six days later.

His parents, my grandparents on my father’s side, both died young of cancer.  My first cousin, Ann, died of cancer before the age of 40.  Another cousin, Emily, same thing, dead of cancer around 40.  Emily’s father, my father’s cousin Gene, now 85, fought cancer as valiantly as my mother had, for more than twenty years.  He plays tennis and feels good.  He’s a tough bird.  

About five years ago I had skin cancer removed from my nose and my arm.  A year or two later more cancer removed from my nose, a few millimeters from the first site.  “It’s a hot spot,” explained the dermatologist, taking another biopsy.

I’m not bragging about all this cancer, please understand.

But it’s the background, explaining, in part, why this call to my old friend tonight has been tormenting me so much.  Soft tissue sarcoma is rare, the exact kind he has is a rare form of soft tissue sarcoma.  They’ve been cutting at him, assured him they got the whole tumor when they removed a buttock and part of his leg, but cancer is a cunning little fucker and it made liars of the doctors and their assurances.  Nerves were removed from his leg, most of the sciatic nerve on one side, recently the foot on that leg stopped working.  The doctors gave no guarantee about the surgery helping.  It was a good thing about the no guarantee, because the surgery didn’t help.   Chemo, the only game left for him, has been hit or miss, largely miss.  They are blind men throwing darts at a theoretical dart board in a room with no floor.  

I found myself talking like a nattering fool after getting his frank update tonight, blindly changing the subject at one point, the way I’ve heard others talk to people with end-stage cancer.  Tap-dancing, self-conscious, trying to be sympathetic, and helpful while feeling helpless against a horrific futility.  So, nattering on about everything else.   It made me sick to hear people do it to my grandmother, my mother.  It was more sickening still to hear me doing it.  My friend gently interrupted, it was time to change the dressing on his latest surgery, get some sleep before his doctor’s appointment tomorrow.  He was hoping to feel up to a visit soon, but no guarantees, he has been feeling pretty shitty.

I walked in the humidity trying to hold on to my new habit of cultivating happiness.  Might as well have tried to hold a fart in my hands in the merciless New York City night.

Clean Livin’

My father, known for a dark sense of humor, would smilingly chirp “that’s what clean livin’ will do for you” when asked how he had accomplished whatever someone was remarking on.   (Note harbinger of premeditated hereditary puckishness to follow.)

The accomplishment in this case is a successful pitch to take the animation workshop to a new group of kids, for a price much closer to sustainable for the program than what we’d been paid by the PTA of a NYC public school where I had the initial lab and the initial rats, the creative group of experimental young monkeys, the rolling auditions for the best grown-ups.  In fact, 2.5 times more sustainable, by my back of the envelope calculations.

So though I’ve endured a few days of excessive stomach acid and general dyspepsia, I feel I’ve earned the right to chirp, in a calm echo of the old master of darkness “that’s what clean livin’ will do for you!”

Marketing 101

Among the several discreet skills the would-be smiling owner of a flourishing shop must master is Marketing.  Although there might appear to be a moral component that could hold a scrupulous person back, it ain’t necessarily so.

For example, which would you rather find on your plate?

a) a perfectly seasoned and prepared dinner of succulent beef; or

b) a plateful of the sliced flesh of a badly treated and cruelly slaughtered affectionate cow

Only a fool would try to market the product as (b).  Word to the wise, yo.

A Man Without A Smiling Face Should Not Open A Shop

Famous, and wise, Chinese proverb: a man without a smiling face should not open a shop.  It is very true, few people will continue to come into the shop of someone who is depressed or hostile.  Having nothing much to do with anything, I once had a less well-known piece of advice in a fortune cookie, perhaps no less profound:  laff alla time people think you crazy.

The mystery to me is how one keeps the smile on the face when the proverbial wolf is at the door, his cheeks full, ready to huff and puff and blow the whole thing to little pieces in the stink of wolf’s breath.

“My father had a great sense of humor, but he was such an unhappy man,” is something Kurt Vonnegut Jr. feared his children might say about him at the end.   Happiness is a talent like any other, I suppose, some people are good at it, some people not so good.  It is something worth cultivating– being grateful, and full of wonder, and optimistic.  Enjoying and appreciating the things and people you love.  There is a predisposition to melancholy, or pessimism, but happiness is probably like a muscle you can develop by constant use.   Let’s assume that happiness can be cultivated, for the moment. 

There are innate talents, sure, but the most exciting demonstrations of talent are given by those who love what they do and spend hours and hours doing it until they do it well.  Their love for the thing is expressed in the way they do it, and it’s an inspiring thing to see.  Many people have more innate drawing talent than I had as a boy, than I have now.  Few people, I think, love to draw as much as I always have.  Doing anything endlessly will make you better at it.  Not to say that some ability is not also involved, but the perpetual doing of a thing you love will make you better at it than someone who is able but doesn’t care.

“Oh, no,” you will say, “that’s not true.  There are geniuses who can do with little practice what a less talented person could not do in a lifetime.”    Well, let me entertain that dispiriting cavil for a second, before I get back to practicing my fucking shopkeeper’s smile in the mirror.

I met one person in my life who is, without any doubt or qualification, a genius.  We went to high school together, this very bright and original kid and I, and his musical talent was off the charts.  So much so that his destiny seemed clear at 15.  I could tell you a couple of great stories about this kid’s talent, and what he grew to compose, arrange, improvise, perform, the many instruments he plays virtuosically, but there could be no question, comparing him even to other great musicians, that his talent is of another level.  Frank Burrows is the guy’s name, you can look him up on youTube.

We had another friend, a prodigiously talented musician who, like Frank, played for hours a day and lived to play music.   These guys played together in bands, prodded each other’s musical growth and invention.  Both have their eccentricities, to be sure, and both endured traumatic childhoods.  As brilliant as David was, Frank was in an otherworldly category in terms of the grace with which he assimilated musical ideas that inspired him.  I have the feeling it always embarrassed Frank when I singled him out as a genius.  No offense intended, my man.

David taught me most of what I know of music theory and chord voicings on guitar.  He was an often brutal master, hard on himself and just as hard on me, though I had a small fraction of his talent.  There are some who consider me a decent musician now, but I am nowhere near being able, after playing for more than 40 years, to do what either of these guys was able to do in high school.  Anyway, David’s main pedagogic tools were derision, scorn, sarcasm and a certain ruthless pursuit of perfection that’s hard to describe.   I took abuse from him while I was learning, eventually learned that it is never a good idea to take abuse from anyone, no matter what else might come along with it.

I recall, years later, trying to fake some jazz with David who responded in his inimitable withering way that I would never be more than a journeyman.   I’d heard an echo of this comment from a keyboard player friend of mine who disparagingly told me “one thing for sure, you’ll never be a keyboard player.”  There are people I could fool in that regard, but apparently this chap is not among them.  I’m no virtuoso, but I can play a little piano when I need to.

Anyway, we fast forward a few decades.  I record a catchy little piano and acoustic guitar vamp, leaving lots of space.  I send it to Frank and to another fantastically talented musician friend and ask each of them to overdub some parts on it for a friend who is dying.   (I have another track to make for a friend who is currently dying of a rare and relentless disease, but that time the dying friend was a composite of people I’d lost, was losing and part of myself).  My friend Paul played a haunting and beautiful fretless guitar improvisation over the top, I can hear it in my head now as I type.  

Frank, to my great surprise and delight, spent probably forty hours producing a symphonic masterpiece out of the track.  He added a dozen or more parts, harmonized it in ten different ways, on twenty instruments, wrote a brilliant intro and an unforgettable outtro.  I told you above, the man is a genius, was born that way, but he’s also spent well beyond the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell prescribed for becoming a master.  To this day, I still can’t get over what Frank was able to create out of that simple two chord vamp.

I sent it to David, who was impressed with the composition.  And this brilliant composer and harsh teacher– and this is why I have rolled out this long, tedious story– emailed me to say he was unable to tell which of us, the genius or the journeyman, had played which of the several guitar or keyboard parts.  A moment of great, long-delayed satisfaction was had.

So the point is, even a hack, with enough love of something and enough dedication to practicing it, may eventually play a few notes that will be indistinguishable from notes struck by a genius.  

Similarly, this strained, cracking smile I am practicing now can be molded, with enough true desire to do so, into a sincere and radiant grin that will attract customers to my cobwebbed shop.   I am betting the shop on it, my friends.

Support Our Troops

Once in a while I get an email from an old friend, a patriotic and conservative woman, that shows some aspect of the military and asks people to forward it to support our troops.   We have, after a rancorous period, agreed to avoid discussion of politics, but once in a while she sends me one that provokes a response, which I try to make as measured and non-argumentative as possible.

The other day it was an email with three photos.  A small group of Marines in full dress uniform,  in the open cargo hold of a commercial airliner, draping an immaculate American flag over a coffin.  Above them were passengers looking out the windows.  The narration stated that they watched this in silent respect and waited for the coffin to be removed, showing respect for the troops in a long moment that none of them will ever forget.   It’s unclear from the photo how the passengers above could have possibly had a view of something that was happening inside a hatch in the round bottom of the plane while their small windows looked out on to the tarmac.

The second photo was of a woman on a mattress in front of the flag draped coffin of another Marine, her dead husband.  Her face was illuminated by a laptop that was playing her husband’s favorite music the night before his funeral.  The Marine honor guard standing at attention by the coffin stayed through the night, at the woman’s request, watching her sleep as the Marines honored their fallen comrade.

The third photo showed a military man pinning something to the tiny chest of a young boy who had recently lost his father in war.  Under that was a long piece about the majority of Americans silently supporting our troops and wearing blue every Friday to quietly and firmly show that support.  God was also brought in, and our faith in God and our love and respect for the young men who give their lives in defense of our liberty.

My first thought was to let it pass, just an email.  Then I wrote and sent this:

Sure, I’ll wear blue every Friday, but I’ve got to say, there’s something here that mystifies me.  These brave young men who are sent to fight and die in wars politicians cannot explain— how do we support them by honoring them in death exactly?

 
Are we to ask no questions about why they are placed in harm’s way in the first place?  Isn’t truly supporting our troops first and foremost  a matter of only asking them to sacrifice life and limb in defense of our country?  I realize some Americans made billions on the war in Iraq, and I suppose nobody can discount that, but how do we support our troops by sending them to die, suffer traumatic brain injuries, amputations, dozens of plastic surgeries to reconstruct destroyed faces, in aggressive “pre-emptive” wars of choice waged for dubious reasons at best?  Was a single American death in Vietnam justified?  In Iraq?
 
I really don’t get it.  How God could possibly be involved in this ritual sacrifice of honest American boys mystifies me too.  I wonder if “support our troops” would be the patriotic mantra if Obama sent some of America’s most idealistic and bravest young people to die somewhere for reasons he could not explain, beyond slogans like “freedom is on the march” or “smoke them out” or based on what turned out to be misinformation, cynical distortions of shaky intelligence or outright lies.  WMD?  uh, no.  Ties to Bin Laden?  uh, not really.   Freedom!
 
I hate Woodrow Wilson for drumming up American enthusiasm for the senseless slaughter that was WW I.   Beyond the fact that American bankers would have lost the equivalent of billions in today’s dollars had Germany won, no explanation for America’s entry to that war makes the slightest sense.  Do we honor the thousands slaughtered in that war by draping their coffins with flags and saying they died heroically defending American freedom?   Or do we honor our troops by making sure they never are called on to spill every drop of their blood defending the profits of banks, oil companies or defense contractors?  I vote for the latter way of supporting and honoring them.

The Unexpected Reward for Mild Sincerity

I have been running an animation workshop for children ages 7 to 11.   My plan, without any business experience, has been to scale up this successful experiment into a small but expanding business.  A modest income for me and a fair wage for a few assistants who I would groom to replace me as the business grows.  When adults see the workshop in action they are often amazed– the children are working independently and with great focus on any number of their own projects, a couple work at the computer editing, a few more wear headphones and record parts of the soundtrack.  Other kids collaborate at the camera stand, lighting and moving things that will become animation.  A couple of adults are casually interacting with the kids, but nobody seems to be in charge. “I love the way it challenges hierarchy,” commented one parent, an architect, a man more insightful than most.

At times singing bursts out, one kid starts singing some idiotic ditty and others chime in.  It sets my nerves on edge, sometimes, but I resist stifling them.  They are singing because they are happy, free, nobody is telling them to shut up.   They take me aside to tell me inappropriate jokes, on the sly, because I never act offended.  I don’t laugh, I nod and I agree with them that the joke is inappropriate, but I don’t censure or censor them.  They understand I will nix such things in the animation they produce, but my theory is to leave them as free to express themselves as possible in the workshop.  Creativity demands no less.

From time to time they’re wild.  Part of this is my fault– in my excitement over how quickly they took over the various tasks of the workshop I neglected to install the crucial shut-off switch that is necessary for every teaching situation with young students.  This switch is needed when they are wild– the reminder that they have to stop and calm down or there will be consequences they won’t like.  It’s a trade off, freedom and order, and without the line they cannot cross being firmly etched, things will sometimes tip over into chaos.

As they did the last few weeks.  Last week my strongest, most street-wise and no nonsense assistant was out.  I was left with only my young, sweet, talented, easily manipulated assistant. Things got out of hand.  Kids were yelling, running with scissors, calling out for me to press the TIME TO STOP AND CALM DOWN button, but it hadn’t been installed properly.  Idle threats and the sense that no adult is really in control make them even more wild in  pushing the limits.  The thing it took me a while to realize, when I was teaching a few decades back, is that children need this control from an adult when they are unable to control themselves.  They will push for it far beyond the limits of reason by acting nuts.  Nothing they were doing the other day succeeded in actually bringing things to a boil, though.   Eventually a seven year-old leaped at me from the chair at the camera stand, throwing his arms around my neck.  I turned to catch him as he launched himself.

Unbeknownst to me, and probably to him, he was clutching a 0.7 mm mechanical pencil, point up, as he flew at me.  The pencil’s sharp metal tip (which I later showed the kid is retractable and should be pulled in when not drawing with it) went into the skin of my neck and ripped a short tear upwards as I caught the kid in midair.  There wasn’t much blood, but enough to smear my fingers with, show the kid as I took him with my other hand and guided him into a corner.

“When you act like an out of control baby you get treated like one.  You have time out.  Do not move from this chair.”  I left my young assistant as the only adult in the room and walked down the hall to the sink where I washed off the gash and threw some cold water on my face for good measure.  The kid hadn’t moved from the chair, but he was fidgeting with some blocks that were nearby.

“Time out means no playing,” I said, pushing the box of blocks out of his reach.  I reminded him that there is something you say to someone after you accidentally hurt them.  He managed a sheepish, insincere apology, accompanied by a variation on the simian fear grin.  A few minutes later I set him to work cleaning up, and he did so without complaint.  When his mother came to pick him up and expressed horror at what he’d done, he was defiant, hit her and shoved past her.   I was too tired and disgusted to intervene, beyond calling after him with a rhetorical question as he rushed out the door: “You hit your mother?”

The whole incident left me in a foul mood.   There was absolutely no pain from the scratch and within a couple of days it healed without a trace.  But the incident left me with a certain bitterness.  The reward for my inexhaustible patience and this innovative program that allows kids to grow their little wings and fly is a kid slashing my neck?  Fuck this, fuck them, I thought.  The email from a parent who runs the program that was waiting for me when I got home did little to change my feelings.  She asked for an incident report and it was followed by a lecture about consequences for misbehaving children, like my tiny assailant, who has apparently been out of control in every one of the other after-school groups he attends.  Inquiring as to how I was after the slashing would have been a nice touch, regrettably it was neglected.

“Fuck her,” I recall thinking.  The next day I wrote her an email describing the chaotic situation her own son had done so much to foster with his surliness, uncooperative attitude and racing around after the other seven year-old who provided a bit of my blood for the actual “incident”.  I never heard back from her.

I did hear back from a woman who runs a summer day camp for an organization that has a number of after-school programs for the fall.  She was interested in having the animation workshop at the camp.  She asked me to prepare a bid, a detailed proposal laying out all kinds of things.  She needed it immediately, although she could offer no guidelines for what they pay, I would have to include the price in my proposal.  I spent the last twelve hours of my birthday and the first few of the next day writing a proposal and reaching out for advice on pricing.  I got several pieces of wildly divergent, mostly passionately stated, opinion.  I gave the most weight to the advice of a self-made millionaire businessman friend of mine, and an even older friend who has been in high end sales for years, and made my proposal.  I noticed an increasing flow of stomach acid and distress as the process wore on.

The price I quoted them was based on the value of this innovative program and also on what this group can afford, based on the tuition that kids are paying.  I quoted a fair price, much higher than they probably want to pay, and more than twice what the PTA pays for the current program, but not inflated to leave room for much negotiation.  The floor and ceiling price are fairly close to each other.  If they won’t meet the floor price I have to walk away, since I didn’t quote them an arbitrary price but one based on my actual expenses, the value of the program and their ability to pay.  But so far, no reply at all.  The only urgency, apparently, was an immediate price quote from me.

As I made my way to the workshop yesterday it was with great reluctance.  Usually I look forward to it, for the first time yesterday I’d rather have not gone.  I gathered the kids and reminded them how fortunate it had been that I was the one whose neck had been gouged the previous session, rather than one of them.  They would have been very upset, and their parents would have been very upset.  I pointed to where the metal tipped pencil had gone into my neck and showed them that one inch over it would have gone into a major artery, and that my blood would have sprayed into the air, my hand traced the spurt so they could picture it, and I’d have had to go to the hospital, in a hurry.  Or, a few inches higher and the pencil would have gone into my eyeball, and I’d be in the hospital with the possibility of losing my right eye, depending on how the pencil went in.   This is what can happen when people are out of control, I pointed out. They were uncharacteristically pensive after this little speech.

“Would you sue Max?” a kid asked a couple of times.  I turned to him and said if I lost an eye I’d have to sue Max’s parents.  “If I sued Max what could I get?  His backpack?”  The kids agreed I’d have a better shot suing the parents.  I reminded the group that anyone who was wild and could not calm down would be escorted out, that there was no room for wildness in the animation workshop.  Then I told them to get busy.

They did, and there was no wildness.