Prepping for Nashville, and Lessons on Being a Showman

Yesterday I was doing something I rarely do, which is go back through my blog history looking for specific posts, in particular images I uploaded that were screenshots of Twitter feeds. It's part of the prep I'm doing for Threadfest 2022.

I noticed that I have a tendency to use cute and clever titles for my posts, which was annoying in my research, because I didn't know what my own posts were about just from the archive index of titles. It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time when I wrote about movies I saw in theaters, I made a strict habit of using just the title of the movie. It worked well until I gave up going to movies and never looked back. It's been at least three four years I think, since I was in a theater. The last movie I saw was the one about PT Barnum, "The Greatest Showman", which was gawdawful and of course super Woke.

Speaking of showmen, that is essentially what I am doing.  A couple months back Patrick asked me to help make Threadfest into a "live documentary" about Devolution (see previous post), and it would include dramatic performances. He implied we could put it together before the show. It struck me as odd at that time, as what he described seemed to imply something that would take weeks of writing, and then weeks of rehearsal in order to pull it off. I scratched my head and figured, "we'll see how things go." I loved the idea, but I couldn't conceptualize how we'd make it happen.

As it happens, Patrick, by own admission, has no experience in theater. Now it all makes sense.  We are less than two weeks out, so we are at the stage where anything that is going to come together has to come together soon.

The key, I told him, was giving me the authority to do things. The number one problem I run into in my line of work (tech consulting) is people want to give you responsibility without authority. I've gotten to the point where unless I get authority to do what I need to do, then forget it. It's pointless to try to do anything.

Fortunately Patrick understands that. He has pretty much delegated the stage presentation part of the event to yours truly and to a woman who lives in New Hampshire, who has a live performance venue in her barn, and who has a long-standing radio show throughout New England on public radio stations. I'm supposed to talk to her in about an hour. I think we can pull this together well.