Herby Agnew
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The Off-Off Broadway Musical…

2/24/2012

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There I was standing in front of the teller at my local Wells Fargo bank and – WHAMO – it happened again. For months now I haven’t had any episodes, so I thought that I had been cured. Apparently, I was prematurely optimistic. Without warning (and with only a few words uttered by the teller as provocation), I burst into song – Stevie Wonder’s "Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing." At first I thought the song was only playing in my head; however, the customer standing at the next teller over began humming along, as the banker handling my request tapped her pen in rhythm with the song.

Before I knew it, the teller looked at me with a big smile and said, looking at my debit card, “Wow, you’ve got some pipes and some soul, Mr. Agnew!” “Oh shoot!” I thought to myself. I felt my eyes widen in sheer embarrassment. “Well,” I said sheepishly, “my bad! I didn’t intend for that to come out.” “Oh no, I just wanna know when the next concert is going to be. I felt like I was in a music video or a musical for a second.” Evidently, her colleague and my fellow bank patrons agreed as I saw nods and heard sounds of affirmation from the peanut gallery. 

Sadly, this was not the first time that my everyday life had been likened to a musical theater performance. One of my best friends, Rachel (Pittman) Bishop once told me that hanging out with my sister, Tiffany, and me was like having a front row seat at a hit Broadway show. The slightest mention of a word or phrase would spark a full on rendition of some song – in perfect harmony, mind you – with my sister. All along I thought it was Tiffany who served as the catalyst of my accidental bursts of song. I was obviously wrong.

But what if my random musical interludes were commonplace in our society? What if life was one big musical – an off-off Broadway show? The setting – everywhere; the plot – life; the cast – a star studded ensemble of everyone and frequently featuring you. How awesome would it be if we all sang along as various moments of joy, conflict, woe, and melancholy ignited a song? Just think how you would feel if your next door neighbor sang backup along side the woman walking her dog and the mailman as you belted out the song lyrics:    

            “I just got a raise….
             After so many years in this rat maze
             I finally got a raise….”

Celebrations would take on a whole new meaning for even the most conservative cultures, as entire neighborhoods would dance in the streets, stepping flawlessly to complex choreography, while singing in perfect harmony (kind of like that opening dance routine of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery). Moreover, we all know that falling in love makes us all want to sing out loud and shout from the roof tops like Eddie Murphy in Coming to America, “to be loved, to be loved – oh what a feeling…” Unfortunately, the reality is that not every occasion will call for a happy song. Sometimes the human experience mandates the mundane, the inexplicable and the painful. 

Let’s face it, as Mary Poppins would agree, music is that spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine (life) go down. A bad day would be so much easier to deal with given that a chorus of perfect strangers would help you sing about your flat tire, job loss, or recent breakup. We might even be able to stomach a state of the union address better if the President sang the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of our country's economy. Fortunately, this current President (Barack Obama) can actually carry a tune in a bucket – so, that might be worth tuning in to hear.

What I gleaned from the bank experience is that sometimes we all really want a song, but certainly not all the time. So the next time you feel the urge to sing a little ditty brought on by your present situation, go ahead and sing it out loud. You never know who will help back you up and sing along or serve as your listening audience. 
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Backstory….

2/11/2012

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Sitting in a Starbucks one morning, I witnessed all sorts of patrons passing in and out of the coffee shop.  Some were well dressed, while others might have benefited from TLC’s What NOT to WEAR. Nevertheless, each of them – myself included – had a story to tell.  And some bore the preface of their individual stories on his or her back. What story did the woman with the leopard print wedged shoes and the blue balloon capri pants have to tell?  Was she a dance or yoga instructor? Had she just gotten those shoes and was trying to break them in before a big date or a night out on the town? Who knows – and I would imagine that few cared.  Probably because it’s so much more fun and entertaining to just pass judgment while creating our own assumptions regarding a person’s back-story, than it is to know the truth.

Just as I came to grips with the fact that I would never know some of these people’s history and that it was best to leave all assumptions aside, a woman broke the rules of the myth I had created not even seconds before she entered the Starbucks.  There she stood at the counter ordering her soy latte – a white woman with Bob Marley dreadlocks, a well-fitted purple and pink-striped turtleneck, a flattering pair of boot-cut jeans, sharp stiletto boots and a Louis Vuitton hand bag. Ordinarily, I would not have paid such close attention to the details of someone’s wardrobe, but she intrigued me more so than the normal casual stranger. Her hair and clothes were in such juxtaposition with one another. But then she took it a step further – she engaged in conversation (and I mean real conversation) with the barista.  “Oh, no, girl – what are you doing?”  I thought to myself. Perfectly content with my original assessment of her (a crazy rich white woman, who had too much time on her hands and wanted to experiment with her hair, while expressing her remorse and sympathy with the black plight in America...), I was forced to know the truth and hear what she had to say.  Her back-story was revealed not only to me, but also to the entire coffee shop.  She freely, casually and honestly shared that she was an expatriate from Trinidad. Things were different here in the US than back home.  And despite how well she seemed to “fit in” here, she still felt like an outsider.  She bore her own plight of being a constant display piece with a reluctant sense of pride, and somehow she developed a sense of humor about her experience. 

I, at first, thought she had overstepped the boundaries of patron/barista interaction.  The accepted etiquette is to get in and out as quickly as possible.  Don’t tarry, woman – people are waiting to get there “mocha–steamed–soy–watchamagig” – and you’re getting all up in the way, madam…  But surprisingly, no one was upset, or even taken back by it.  Here, in this concrete jungle, the patrons of the Starbucks all welcomed the breaking of the “get it and go” rule.  It almost seemed that we all longed to know the back-story of at least one other person.  In this instance, we would be experiencing something real, and seeing someone for who they were – not as we perceived them to be.

All the seats were taken at the time she got her beverage, but two people (Atlantans, mind you) offered up their seats or an opportunity for her to join them at their perspective tables. And when she was about to leave and needed to find a drugstore, 4 people, in addition to all the Starbucks staff, offered directions and possible alternatives (like the Target Pharmacy). She left that Starbucks in a much better position than she had found it. She dragged all of us into an experience beyond the normal rules of interaction and offered herself and her back-story to help us all regain a sense of empathy.  How different would our society be if we unabashedly offered up our back-stories and willingly offered our ears and hearts to hear the truth about other's?
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