I've been thinking of Alice's Restaurant lately, partly because of Thanksgiving. For a while now I've also been thinking about storytelling as a form of activism, kind of like folk music can be. Reading books about folk singers, pondering the messages I have to share and the ones the world needs to hear. And I've been thinking of how broken the world seems right now and wondering how I could possibly make a difference. It seems like your best chance of making a difference is by doing what you do. So I keep doing it.
I tell a lot of personal stories. The main challenge of personal stories is that if you haven't processed the story yourself, if you haven't come out the other side of it, you can't perform it. You can tell people about it, but it won't be a performance.
Stories about things that hurt are difficult. The good thing about performing them, though, is that making them into a performance helps you heal. It forces you to process the pain and see yourself as someone full of agency who has survived and can move on.
Alice's Restaurant has helped me with stories that make me angry. You can't perform a story purely from a place of anger. It sounds like a rant. You have to process. You have to come out the other side. You have to sing and find the humor. This way of dealing with stories that make me angry has helped me to create two of the stories I'm proudest of.
One is the story I call "John's LLM," about getting a certificate of good conduct before moving to England. I have to say that now I am not nearly as angry about everything I went through to get that certificate. With time, it has actually become funny. But I started creating the story as the situation was unfolding. It was clear at the time that it was completely absurd and I didn't want to lose any of the details. But I was angry. I was frustrated by the lack of information about how to undertake this process and about the incompetence and ignorance of multiple state employees I interacted with to get it done. It sounded like a rant when I first wrote it down. Until I remembered Alice's Restaurant. With a little humor and a song (the song is mostly for me because I've never performed it for anyone) it became a story.
The other is a work in progress: "The Ballad of the Birth Certificate." I am still angry that we were kicked out of the courthouse and threatened with physical violence while trying get Virginia's birth certificate, but I think it is an important story. It is important enough that I will find some way to be brave enough to perform it with all the musical components some day. (Performing music for people makes me much more nervous than speaking in front of people.) I don't think it's a good story without the music though. I don't think it's a good story without the fantastic and farcical suggestion that Virginia went on this adventure by herself. These things make it more than just an angry rant.
I think it is clear that the anger is still present in both stories. I'm not saying anger has to be edited out. It has to be processed, like pain. You have to come out the other side. For me, this is how I do it.
There are a lot of things that make me feel angry these days. And sad and afraid and, sometimes, like giving up on the whole human race and starting that Martian colony after all. But I think I'll stay here and sing and tell it all like it's a joke.
