188. ...The party piece is broken.

(morning thinking)

You’ll know that scene - three or four generations gathered in a living room, maybe spilling over into an adjacent kitchen, all seats occupied and children kneeling on the floor. There might have been a piano. Someone would sing, everyone would hope someone else would sing. There'd be some anticipation that, if the circumstances were exactly right, a familiar story might be told. A precarious run of jokes teetered on the edge of inappropriate for the audience. An elder, shocked, askance, would hide their head in their hands. There might have been a wee dance. Everyone would have had something in their repertoire. There’d have been clapping and laughter.

What happened to party pieces? Do I even remember them from my eighties childhood? Or am I conflating, mixing in borrowed cultural memory? Is it something I’ve seen on TV? I'm pretty sure this happened. There’s a scene in the Amy Winehouse biopic.

Friends came round to ours recently to share food and conversation. One mate knew I’d been taking singing lessons and asked with a smile if I would be singing tonight. I said no. Too shy still and the song I’ve been learning doesn’t really work without a stadium.

We caught up on one another's lives, eventually, inevitably, we talked about what shows we'd been watching? “What's that on?” and “...oh we don't have Apple TV” or “I heard -REDACTED- can get hookie Fire sticks with ALL the streamers for free”.

Is the party piece is broken? Replaced by excited must watch series recommendations spoken in reverential tones and received with gratitude. Entertainment has shifted from personal, intimate performances to individual passive consumption that we report back with glee. It's something we all do. It goes around the table, informally, without planning or structure, the way party piece performances might have in the past.

The singing lessons are part of my ongoing question to conquer fears. Spiders, heights, public speaking, singing and death have all been addressed. Singing is a work in progress. Dancing, sharks and cancer are… also work in progress. Dancing is the only one of the latter three that I welcome the opportunity to practice with aversion therapy.

I'll stand at the edge of dance floors and move a little. It's harder when you're sober and in the past I’d only ever entertained the idea of dancing while drunk. Working on it. SLow progress.

Singing and dancing are such primal elements of our humanity and feeling cut off from them has been - is - dissociative. To feel apart? Separated from others. Separated from self. Myself. Alone. Lonely.

Singing and dancing are the OG social glue. Before fermentation gave us liquid confidence we had the cohesion of collective movement and voice. Rhythms to align by.

Singing. Fear of singing seems, to have been tied up with an incident in primary school. Needled and punched by a bigger kid in the choir row behind me, I eventually started crying, was shouted at by the teacher and told to leave the room. The shadow of that hurt kid, a fractured part of me, might have been trying to protect this current me from further embarrassment by instigating a hard regime of enforced mime at any subsequent event that has required singing. Happy Birthdays mostly.

I don't want to talk about sharks or cancer yet. Each gets less scary as I get more experience in their environs but they both have very sharp teeth, lurk in the dark beneath and attack out of nowhere. It doesn't do to anthropomorphise rogue cell division but…

I've found, as I've faced fears, that they get their strength in packs. Chipping away one source of anxiety and removing its marble bust from my personal pantheon of fears diminishes the strength of all other fears. The objects of my fear lose potency as I reinforce the fact that there's nothing to fear but fear itself.

Singing is, as I said, a work in progress and I’m forging forward. Maybe next time there's a gathering I'll be ready to share. And maybe I'll not leave it to chance. I’ll keep working purposefully to reduce the maybe. Practice and rehearse and prepare. I think it's worth the effort. To confront it, my fear, because I think we’re better when we're held near in a warm, sticky, social gum. When one person sings and others tap a beat or hum a baseline and eyes close together and smiles spread across lips and from face to face. Connected like that we’re truly, fully, human.

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Thanks for dropping by and especially for reading all the way down to the bottom. You’re very kind. I know my sentences get overly clausy and wander around.

Do you have a party piece? Or a recommendation for some good telly? I think they’re cracking down on hookie FireSticks so watch your back. Stay safe out there while you’re sticking it to The Man. Let me know…

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You can subscribe if you like, that would be incredible.

I absolutely don’t mind if you Share or Restack this. Maybe it does the rounds and there’s a minor party piece renaissance.

Thanks again for reading. I love that you do.

Paul.