danger! danger! don't talk to strangers!

Post 83 of 90.

I've been pondering, pondering, pondering...

Following the Shimmies & Strings 2 performance, we had a person "hovering" in the vicinity of the performance space while we were tearing down. I don't know who he was. Somebody probably knew him, since I get the impression most of the audience were friends and family of the dancers. I imagine it's rare for complete strangers to wander in from the street, although you never know. I believe the performance was advertised to the public.

But this isn't even the point I'm trying to get at.

I'm not making a judgment about him, since I have almost no information to go on regarding who he was. This one is all about me. (But then, it's always about me, isn't it?)

No, what interests me is the reaction I had to this person's presence on the scene--suspicion, alertness, the feeling that I needed to monitor this person in order to protect the performance space (still operative, I suppose, even in the aftermath, a point of vulnerability I hadn't considered before).

This experience interests me because of my habit/preference to be "invisible" and lurk around at local music shows here in Cincinnati, going on almost ten years now.

Now and then over the years, the odd local scenester will spot me hanging about and doing my lurking-type thing, and I often see and feel a reaction of outright fear. This has baffled me for a long time.

I mean, I'm there to listen and pay attention to the performance. What's the problem? They advertised to the public. Very often there was also a local music close-up piece in the local rag. They want to be "rock stars" and receive the attention and adulation of the masses, right? Shouldn't they be happy that a member of "the public" has arrived to hear their music? But all the same, here they are wigging out because someone they don't already know has shown up! I often wind up feeling like I've crashed someone's private party by mistake.

Maybe this reaction I had to our very own "lurker" was my chance to experience directly the other side of the equation. Maybe this is what the fearful scenesters are experiencing!

So...what do I do with this?

I'm still sort of mulling it over, but one possibility is that I should perhaps make an effort to introduce myself at some point, so they know I'm a real person and not some phantom of their own projected fears. It doesn't need to be much. Just say hello, thank them for the music, tell them my name, and then move on.

The other pole I swing to is along the lines of, "No, dammit! I'm not out to 'join the tribe!' I'm not trying to 'make the scene.' If my presence bothers them, it's their own damn problem! Do you want to be famous or not?! I'm not going to bend over backwards to soothe your stupid fears! Get over it, rock stars! "

So, I don't know. Maybe there are other options. I can experiment a little bit and see.

On another level, I often shy away from meeting "the people behind the music." I can think of at least one incident (about ten years, in fact) where the guy was a jerk, and I couldn't listen to his music ever again afterward with clean ears. It really polluted the whole thing for me. Don't we already know that the music often happens in spite of the people involved? Why meet them at all? I'll just listen!

We'll see.