We've all encountered an audience whore. You know exactly who I mean: the same insatiable, bleached-out single mom who haunts the aisles of every corner store, hanging on any opportunity to spill her guts to some unsuspecting passerby. You can find her in long lines at the grocery store or at your local PTO meeting amid a conglomeration of her cultish peers.
In my case, those audience whores tend to find me while I'm on the job. They're an inevitable blip on the screen, something you dodge around corners to escape but collide with twice as hard as a result. I would never doubt that the earth trembles with every movement of the past, but if you were to imagine humanity as this skin under which a myriad of stories lies latent, these people would be the acne -- oozing, inflamed with their own legends.
It is due to this phenomenon that I now know what it is to transition, without much prelude, from helping someone choose the right shade of makeup to hearing out the intricacies of a divorce settlement. I couldn't begin to explain which part of "Do you have oily, dry, or normal/combination skin?" sets these kinds of things in motion, but that part of the equation really doesn't even have much consequence. What matters are the 20 minutes you will be stuck nodding in agreement like it's part of some unwritten contract that you signed with your own good manners.
So, there she is. This giddy lady clutching the counter, describing in rich detail how her ex-husband came to hog the kids and screw her out of a large sum of money -- this is the basic sketch, anyway. The fine points aren't what stand out to me so much as the lasting impression that this woman has defined her life by this set of events that took place seven or eight years ago. Her capacity to express herself is constipated by this hairy mess of details and she totally loves it. She hasn't moved on, but she doesn't want to. She walked out of the store with a bounce in her step, I imagine storing us away in her mental file cabinet as a delighted audience, or just those fun girlfriends of hers down at the Lancome outlet. Such theatrical acrobats establish themselves through this sort of epic outcry, reaching us from a cozy perch in the compost heaps of their emotional pasts.
Also pretty interesting are the nuances that exist among these starving loons. Well, some of them are actually pretty, all right. But it's almost as though some of them get fixed on something with no context outside of their own personal volumes, while others share their subjective experiences of an event that has indifferently linked thousands.
Exhibit B is, bless that woman, my Grams, whose most defining aspect of her past is her family's exile to Siberia during the Great Purges. The story has over the years been worn smooth like a block of wood so that it now centers around a few key points: She was 5, her sister 7; they were allowed something like one suitcase; their cows and horses were taken from them and they were forced into one all-purpose room that didn't even have a roof until late October; her baby sister died along the way. Now this seems a story worth telling. But at the same time -- which in no way is meant to discredit the very real suffering caused by that degree of oppression -- I have a creeping suspicion that almost anything before our time is bound to be more compelling than the sort of problems we're exposed to on a daily basis, as if it's a standard quality inherent in the human race: a nostalgia, a reverence for all things archaic.
But if this is true, then it must also follow that a generation of people in the year 2960 will look back to the days of individual woes, of lawsuits and reality television, of everything ranging from jihad to coked-out celebrities and think, "Man, what a history! Those seem like some like some pretty heroic struggles." And I guess that feeling will still be valid, as long as you believe that everything counts in its own way.
In the meantime, the audience whore still roams the arteries of the world with that crooked fever, begging for someone, anyone, to listen. So pay close attention, because this is history in the making. Today's vulgar divorce drama is tomorrow's installment in the Dear America series, with all the same intention to imbue its children with a fundamental awareness. In this spirit I can only say this to those with a story: Get a book contract or a segment on Oprah. But seriously, leave the cashiers alone.
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