let go
in which we give things up to keep them, celebrate the end of the rockwood residency, and barrel into (Tarot) tech
Hey Hartlist,
Happy Mercury Retrograde everybody! It’s all gonna be ok.
JUST THE GIGS
SAT 5/6 @ 7PM , SUN 5/7 @2PM - How To Read Tarot Cards at The Cell Theatre
Still a few tickets left here!
MON 5/15, 7PM -The Civilians’ “Flops & Fiascoes” at WNYC/The Greene Space
I’m playing my comedy chestnut “The Land” and doing some other stuff.
Tickets here
SAT 5/21 at 11AM - Rebecca Hart & the Wrong Band Brunch-Time House Concert
our friends The North Folk play at 11, RHWB at Noon. Bagels & coffee at this Brooklyn living-room kid-friendly house concert.
Seating is limited, message me for details!
FROM THE CHRYSALIS
“You always have some power. You always have SOME power. Even if your Tarot spread turns up ten major cards and spells out “SURRENDER DOROTHY”, you always have the power of your choices. What you do not have: the same kind of power in every situation.”
-me, ‘How To Read Tarot Cards’
Yes! I am quoting myself and my show because it is THIS WEEKEND and I want you to see it, and also because I spent 6 hours today speaking the text and now I maybe can’t stop.
I kid, I kid. Or rather, I exaggerate for effect. You know, that thing writers do sometimes? I mention it because I’m about to tell you that two weeks ago I was very seriously considering calling The Cell Theatre and saying something along the lines of You know this commission you gave me to create a solo show? Is it too late to give it to someone else? and I know that when I tell you this you will think oh, she’s exaggerating for effect, you know that thing writers do sometimes. And I Am Not.
But the awesome thing is that somehow after a lot of false starts and bad drafts and a bout of Covid (maybe because of the Covid? nah let’s not go down that road), there is a show. And I am just superstitious enough not to want to say that I feel it’s going well (damnit!) so I will just say that it does seem like the show I originally conceived - part Ted Talk, part memoir, part live Tarot reading - actually might be possible. (Damnit! Knock wood.) Well, originally-originally, I was convinced that it needed to have music in it, but my director and I very quickly found that “musical Ted Talk” was not something we felt good about. Nor was (in this case) “musical memoir”, or -god help us all - “musical live Tarot reading”, though you KNOW someone out there is doing that.
And if it's going well (I said IF!) it's not because everything is going exactly according to plan. I mean, there was the Covid, there was the last-minute hiring of an Associate Director because the director has to miss half of tech week1, there was arriving for tech to find a landscaping crew had been double-booked into the space, there was finding out the lighting guy was not a lighting guy, and so on.
But: the covid made me stay home and write the show, the AD is awesome, AND she hired an additional tech person in a 30-second phone call and he was up in the booth 15 minutes later, and everyone is great and doing their best. And the landscaping crew moved outside and we all coexisted harmoniously. On her way outside, the woman in charge of the crew looked at me, shrugged, and said “Mercury is in retrograde”. (She’d seen the title of my show). It sure is. But we are still ok. (Knock wood!)
Last Friday the band played its (for now) final residency gig at Rockwood 3 and it was I’m gonna say a show for the ages. Ok sometimes writers exaggerate for effect, but it was really joyful and a lot of you were there including some people I thought would never show up and then finally did, on this particular night, which I think was really one of our best nights.
And it had NO BUSINESS being one of our best nights.
Or, maybe the recipe for the perfect gig is this: get sick and miss the one scheduled band rehearsal, be so involved with another project that you can’t bring yourself to think about the gig, let alone practice, let alone expend any energy inviting people or doing real promotion, fail to warm up vocally but spend the entire morning of the gig talking your face off in solo-play rehearsal, and actually decide privately earlier in the week that maybe music is, like, not actually your dharma at all and maybe it’s time to let it go.
And then, you know, go to sound check.
Here’s a nice moment from that show:
A friend of mine and I were talking recently about the difference between “giving up” and “letting go”. The idea that Letting Go is Big Magic is not new, it’s everywhere from past episodes of this newsletter to folk wisdom like ‘If you want an acting job, buy a nonrefundable plane ticket’ and ‘Love shows up when you’re not looking for it.’ I have no doubt that what made friday’s show really ‘click’ for me was the fact that I really Let Go of the results beforehand. It was a little scarier to think that maybe this Letting Go was turbo-charged by Giving Up, by the actual thought, maybe I don’t do this anymore. (Which, it turns out, I do, I always do, but.)
So are they the same thing? Is “letting go” “giving up”? Because, my friend was saying, that (I’m paraphrasing) sucks. I can only get what I want by not wanting it anymore? Ew. And also, who can make themselves do that? Even if it’s not the same thing, we all know that Letting Go sounds great in theory and is obviously powerful when it occurs, but can be really hard to do on purpose. Faking it (“Very well, then, I shall no longer look for love!”) is no good. Sort-of doing it (“Ok I’ll relax for ten minutes”) isn’t it. And trying to do it in order to reap the benefits (“Ok I don’t care anymore! Look at me not caring! Can I have the thing now? ”) is just another form of Grasping. And Grasping is.. as fun as it sounds.
Later on, what I came up with was this/these thoughts:
_Letting Go and Giving Up are not the same thing. BUT “Letting Go” is an ingredient in “Giving Up”. And maybe we are all such stubborn and grasping creatures that often ‘Giving Up’ is the only way- or, the first way - we let ourselves experience (taste?) that ingredient. (I really tried for a culinary metaphor here, but I am tired. Feel free to send me yours.)
_We don’t have to ‘stop wanting what we want’. But maybe we have to be truly open to the possibility of not having it, or getting something else. In the end, I don’t think I had a good show because I’d decided to quit music. I think I had a good show because on the way there I thought you know what? Maybe no one will come. And maybe I will not play well. And I’ll be ok. I don’t want that, but I’m willing to have it.
I think in the end the difference between Giving Up and Letting Go is not so much about what you Do or Don’t Do or How Much You Do It. It’s whether or not you understand what is and is not Your Call. And I think, perhaps ironically2, that “Giving Up” is evidence of a belief that you can or should be able to control outcomes, while “Letting Go” is evidence of accepting that you can't. (And that it feels bad to try!)
You have the right to the labor, but not to the fruits of your labor. - bhagavad gita
I used to think that quotation was really depressing; like “You only get to work and someone else will get to enjoy life”. No. Not the takeaway. Have goals. Aim at your targets. Do the things. Because that’s where it’s at.
In writing the Tarot show I’ve been thinking a lot about what is Major (ie, cosmic, out of our control) and what is Minor (things we can do, are up to us). And I think that End Results -of anything - are Major. And thus, I think, BOTH Grasping (“I’m going to make this happen”) AND Giving Up (“Never mind, forget it, I’m not trying”) are attempts to control everything from end results to our own feelings.
And, in a way, both are giving up; taking ourselves out of the actual experience of Doing.
Letting Go, on the other hand, is staying in the game. For real.
All righty. Ice cream and Ted Lasso, here I come. Goodnight, all you moonlight ladies. See you at the show.
Love,
Rebecca
for good reasons
ok i probably used that word wrong there but I am tired