How Many of Me Are There?

March 16th, 2007

Last time, I shared with you my travails in the hosting arena (cue the world’s smallest violin). Here’s one of the things I said:

And then there’s your own set. Performing is different than hosting, in lots of subtle ways, and the mental context switch is so important, and so intriguing, that I think I’ll devote an entire essay to it next time.

Well, I’m a man of my word, so here goes.

There’s a man named Erving Goffman – well, was; he died in 1982. Goffman was a brilliant sociologist, and one of his most influential books is The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which can be summed up, pretty succinctly, by mutilating Shakespeare: not only is all the world a stage, but every situation is a performance, and the roles we assume vary according to which play we happen to be in at the time. I think of Goffman a lot; we’re different people to our friends than we are to our coworkers, or our parents, or our spouses, or our children.

And, somewhat ironically, we’re different people when we’re actually on stage. In fact, like every Goffman performance, we’re literally playing ourselves, but in this case, there’s pretty explicit agreement that the bits of us that we bring to the stage deserve an enormous amount of thought. Some people believe that there’s really no room for more than three basic facts about a solo performer: e.g., you’re tall, you’re a cross-dresser, and you used to be a Marine. The other details are just noise; they detract from the focus of the performance. A while back, I settled on three words: Literate. Resonant. Exuberant. They’re on the top of each page of my Web site. They’re the three things I want people to remember about me, and my performance, when they leave. And I’d like to think I do at least a decent job at conveying that.

But performing as a solo musician is just one way of performing. Hosting is a completely different one. For one thing, the “stage” is bigger – it’s not just the actual stage, but rather the entire situation, a real Goffman stage. When I greet you as a host, I’m doing something I don’t normally do; I’m playing the role of someone who’s partially responsible for your feeling comfortable in the room. When I get on stage to introduce the next act, or point out the fire exits, I’m still filling that role. In that role, I’m authoritative, informative, decisive, gracious, solicitous. I might be exuberant, but these other things are more important. The chances of my being literate – or even of my being literate even being relevant – are pretty much zero.

So when I’m the host, and I introduce myself as the feature, and I hit my first chord, I’m literally, suddenly, a different me. On the stage at the Amazing Things Arts Center in December, it actually took me about four seconds to realize this – I was halfway through the introduction to “I’m Not a Modest Man” before I realized that, yes, it was time for me not to be a modest man for a half hour. And then it was time for me to go back to being a host.

Was it jarring? Was it ever. I had no time to prepare, for one thing. If you’re the feature, you can spend some time assuming your stage persona in advance of your set – maybe you do it in the green room, or maybe you do it in the car before you even enter the venue. I, on the other hand, took four full seconds, and that was time I didn’t even really have.

No time to wind up, no time to wind down. And, perhaps more crucially, no time to create an illusion. At least one person in the audience noticed me switching. That’s bad. The performance should never be obvious. If the contrast between Host Sam and Performer Sam weren’t so great, I probably could have gotten away with it. But at this point, my only choices are to make those versions of me more similar (which means Host Sam becomes exuberant – not Tom Bianchi exuberant; I’d be dead in a week – but exuberant nonetheless), or I just don’t do any more hosting. I’m picking the latter.

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