One thing to know:
The “sticky stuff” is a brilliant teacher.
It shows up as a made-to-order personal challenge,
one you’ll never forget.

– Gail Conrad

OPENING (with music):

Hello and welcome to the Wildscape Podcast, sharing tales of stepping into the unknown to create more art, beauty, and magic in your life. I’m your host, Gail Conrad, and today you’re listening to:

 

THE STICKY STUFF

I’m riding my bike all over Manhattan like a mad person, knocking on doors and asking businesses to give me more loot.

What do I mean?

Well to give me, or perhaps the word is, to donate things like dinner for two at an elegant restaurant, or a pair of Broadway show tickets, or how about a designer doggie haircut—for your pet, of course, or I even get a donation featuring a singing mermaid act—she’ll perform it at your home.

What’s not to like? And maybe by now you’ve guessed the occasion—I’m doing an auction! My very first. And along the way of collecting things, I’ve somehow collected an auctioneer, one of the top ones from Sotheby’s who I’ve convinced to support my cause.

And what’s my cause?
I have to raise money to buy a portable dance floor!

And why the floor?
Because I’m opening a new choreographed show in New York City. I’ve got a month-long run in a theater that has a great warehouse space.

But there’s one problem: the theater—it has cement floors.

And for anyone who likes to leap, stomp, or even bend their knees a lot, they all know that cement floors are only good for things like swollen knees, or shin-splints.

So I do weeks of research. I now consider myself to be an expert, and I discover my dream portable sprung wooden floor. It’s the kind that all of the top ballet companies tour with. They’ll ship it from Texas. It’s built in 4 by 8 sections that notch together and form a shiny 28 by 40-foot stage. They call it a “refined dancing experience.”

So I’ve got to get it, and to do that I’ve got to collect a lot of loot, for the auction, of course.

And I do. Everything’s ready, except—I forget about one thing. It should be obvious, but remember, this is the first auction I’ve ever done so maybe you’ll understand. I forget that aside from donations, I need to get the right people there as well meaning, people of means—with money, to bid up everything that’s for sale.

Instead the big day arrives and who also arrives are a gang of my artist friends. They’re greatly supportive; in fact, they buy up everything but let’s face it, they make out like bandits. They get all the loot for a song.

To his credit, the auctioneer from Sotheby’s doesn’t bat an eye. He acts the same as if he’s selling a rare Van Gogh. But by the end of the day, when almost every item is gone, my friends are happy, but I don’t have enough money. I get lucky though, when one long-term donor chips in a bit more.

And in triumph, I order the highly rated portable, notched, sprung wooden dance floor!

I’m going to take a time-out, because I want to tell you the back story for what happens next.

In my podcast episode Street Act, I talk about one summer when I’m twenty-three years old and do a tap dance accordion street act in Little Italy, using one 4 by 8 piece of Masonite board, and how that street act leads to so much else.

Well here I am, now directing this show with eight performers and using many different styles of dancing but still, I combine most of it with tap.

For example, there can be tap leaps across the floor that lead to a chase scene, and then to a mambo duet that swirls around the stage. The point is, for much of this show, the dancers are doing full-out large movement AND—they’re also wearing metal taps on the bottom of their shoes. That’s why this first rehearsal turns into a bad version of the Ice Capades.

Okay, so now we’re back to this story. I’ll call it:
Run-Thru—On the Bad New Floor.

It takes no longer than a minute, before the first dancer slips and falls on the floor. Then a second person slips. Yes, you can slide across the floor easy, but that’s about the best thing this floor can do.

Maybe it’s that nice new shiny surface, maybe it’s easier for ballet dancers, who don’t have metal, but put rosin on the bottom of their toe shoes, but for whatever reason, this new floor is dangerous. It’s a hazard. Everyone’s falling, and I have to figure out how fix the slippy factor—right away.

I remember a friend who manages a night club, and that he once said something about using Coca-Cola for floors. I thought he was kidding, but now I’m desperate. I call him up.

“Yeah,” he says, “That can work. We tried it once, when they put too much finish on the floors and we were afraid of being sued. The coke will get rid of the slip—just mop it on.”

So I think—okay! I go out and buy the biggest jumbo bottle of Coca-Cola I can find and mop it on the floor. The next night we open.

Here’s what happens:
Lights up. In silence, A dancer walks onto the stage and you hear squish, squash, and a gluey “stick.” The audience giggles—there’s a bunch of outright hoots and laughter, for just walking on the dance floor sounds like a bad B horror movie, you know the kind where the murderer is sneaking into someone’s bedroom at night, and you know he’s coming, because he makes these squeaky, squishy sounds.

The Coke makes everything so crazy sticky! Thank God we use lots of music, so most of the time the audience isn’t listening to weird sound effects coming from the floor.

But I need to improve the formula, so the next night I add a little more water, and the night after—maybe I add a little something else.

And each night I get better at making my brew with Coca-Cola. It becomes like a fine art. I’m now a mixologist making a new nightly cocktail, but just know—I’m just using this to mop a dance floor.

Still, there is one, shall we say, undesirable side-effect to this treatment:
Let’s say it has to do with cities, and in particular, old theaters as well.

Maybe it’s the sawdust from scenery, or maybe it’s the residue from sweaty costumes, audience drinks and candy, or expired make-up but wherever it’s from, the grime—the best of New York City dust and dirt, especially the rare kind that inhabits old NY theaters and warehouse spaces, now mixes with my Coca-Cola infused wood floor.

Let me tell you I’m thankful! I’m thankful that I don’t sleep there, that I can go home to my own clean bed every night, because here’s what it creates:

A nice thick layer of black gunk, that attaches itself to the bottom of every dance shoe.

It takes time—every night, to get it off. The performers favorite method? They use a screwdriver to scrape it off.

And so life continues on, until one evening after a show I hear shouts from the dressing room, and then an explosion of laughter and shrieks.

I race to check it out and what do I find? One dancer is sitting with her shoe in a puddle of orange liquid; I’m told that it’s Sunkist Orange soda. She dropped it while she was arguing, and guess what? The orange soda dissolves all the gunk off of the bottom of her shoe.

Well, now we have a brand-new routine…

Every night, we mop with floor with my special brew of Coca Cola, then after the show, performers use orange soda to get all the gunk and sticky stuff off their shoes.

By now, my beautiful new floor is looking more like a gritty, hardened war survivor. I’m afraid that I look I think I look that way as well.

But the solutions work; the show goes well. And afterwards, the last thing to decide about the floor is—where to store it? After all, that’s a lot of heavy boards.

But this problem I solve quickly. I donate the floor to the theater. I had been its caretaker. Now, I am done.

I was telling this story to a friend and after cracking up, she says: “Gail, sounds like it was a crazy tumbling of events.”

And I think: “Yeah, it was!”

The challenge of the sticky stuff is that one thing sticks to another, that sticks to another, or causes another sticky…well  you get the idea—sort of like trying to sanitize a bottle of hand sanitizer once you’ve used it, or like what happens when you use crazy glue to fix a broken vase, and realize that you’ve now glued one finger to the vase as well.

But that’s way too simple a description because for me, the true 100% undiluted sticky stuff is much more powerful and complex. It most often shows up as a made-to-order personal challenge, one that I can’t ignore.

So the sticky stuff gets your attention. It’s complicated, often messy, and it can feel as if it will have no end. But think about it—

Haven’t you ever had this kind of experience in your life?

A highly personal tumbling of events?

Maybe not with a theatrical project, but what about with something else?

For the sticky stuff can show up in any part of your life: your work—your family—a relationship —your home.

The trick is—what do you do?

Well, wish I could tell you, but I have just one thing to share, and that is:
The sticky stuff is a brilliant teacher!

Okay, maybe you don’t love or even like this teacher, but they’re a great teacher anyway.

Why? Because right out the door on day one, the sticky stuff challenges you on what you care about most.

In my case it was this show. I loved it. I was invested 100%. Yet here I was, left with this floor that makes scrunch sounds, or else becomes like the Ice Capades. I remember just how impossible it all felt.

When dealing with the sticky, if you don’t care enough about what’s happening, it’s all too easy to give up. But because you do care—well here it comes: you commit!

You commit with everything you’ve got, as if your life’s on the line. You commit so hard, that along the way, even by default, you become a master problem solver.

At the time, it felt like I was problem-solving on steroids: the cement floor that leads to the auction that leads to the floor’s grand arrival, that leads to its grand disillusionment that leads to its coca cola mopping, that leads to the orange soda shoe dunking, that leads to…you get what I mean.

The sticky stuff causes you to make decision after decision. It makes you act!

And in doing so, you come up with some very unique solutions, or shall we say—specialty brews.  For traditional solutions usually don’t work with the sticky but the good part is—you get to invent!

And because your inventions can be a little hmmm…out of the ordinary—okay, maybe a bit crazy, they trigger something else, the most important of all:

They make you laugh!

I’d say that laughing is key to surviving the sticky stuff. Now I admit, it might take you a while to feel like laughing, but in the end—

You laugh in relief. You laugh because you have to. You laugh because you begin to see that in spite of the trauma and the drama, you’re going to make it, and that a seemingly disastrous situation will eventually turn out all right.

You laugh because you find the courage to deal with the sticky. And later when you look back, you can laugh even harder and give yourself credit, because you know that you survived.

That’s key because –

And here I don’t want to depress you.

But you might already know this, or maybe you guessed—

The sticky stuff—it comes back.

It won’t look the same; it shows up in a different guise, for it’s what happens when you’re immersed and actively engaged in something that you care deeply about.

It gets sticky!

There’s no vaccine.

It will always pop up again somewhere in your life.

You know why I say this?

Because the little 1920’s Hollywood bungalow where I live is charming, but its charm does not extend to its porous windows, walls and doors. In other words, it’s the worst for insulating against outside noise!

So here I am, staring at a collapsed pile of heavy coats lying on my studio floor. It’s hot. It’s over 90 degrees. These coats, along with a broken rack, have been lying on the floor like a failed podcast science experiment, all day.

What happened?

Well I might address this in a new episode called Recording in the Closet, for it’s a very different kind of adventure with the sticky stuff, or by this time I might even rename it “The Sticky Wars.”

Thank you.

—

I’m Gail Conrad, your host of the Wildscape Podcast, and I want to say thank you for listening today. The opening music is by Chip Barrow, and if you’d like to comment or contact me directly, you can go to gailconrad.com.

 That’s
https://gailconrad.com/the-sticky-stuff/

I’d love to hear from you, and also—I’d love for you to share this podcast with friends. So spread the word, and I look forward to the next time we connect. Bye for now.