Going Off Script

All the world's a stage

This weekend I was selling my art at a local market.

As a market stall holder, you have a unique opportunity to observe human behaviour. Who approaches your stall, who doesn’t. Who will need to browse for 20 minutes, versus who will make an impulse purchase. Who can be talked into a sale, versus who will chat to you for ages about how much they love your art and buy nothing. All of which are influenced by race, age, gender, class, sexuality, identity... and a million other factors of personhood that intersect in infinite ways. The skill of selling is one of removing the barriers to a sale, the dozens of reasons why a person believes an artwork is not for them, until they decide that it is for them after all.

For this you need scripts.

Some scripts are simple – hello how are you doing today – which will be responded to with a – good thank you – then my favourite way to engage follows – are you an artist yourself? – (this flatters the potential customer, and importantly, breaks down the barrier of customer and salesperson. I am making the suggestion that we are just fellow artists discussing technique and inspiration, there is no pressure to buy here, I am just making a connection with a peer) – oh no – they will reply, smiling – ah, just an art appreciator then – I respond – YES – they will say, smiling more broadly now. This, they are certain of, that they are able to appreciate good art, that they have good taste. And now a logical connection is in their mind. They have good taste in art, they are able to appreciate it, and they are at a local market, talking to an artist from the area, looking at her art. They were drawn to the art because they are good at appreciating art and this art is good. The art now reflects their own good decisions back to them. Hopefully they buy it.

I have perhaps used this same script 500 times. I am good at it, well-rehearsed. I am grateful for each and every customer who has interacted with my art, whether or not that engagement resulted in a purchase, but I am aware that people need an invitation to look, and I have found that this invitation works for me. I have observed other artists at markets using their own scripts – a popular one is to ask the customer if they know about a particular technique. It gives the customer the chance to either show off their knowledge or learn something new. Either way, the barriers to engagement are removed. The invitation to look is accepted.

In the market environment, the script is obvious due to the frequency of repetition.

In life, the scripts are more elaborate, but no less rehearsed.

To get my art to the market, I pack it all into a trolley and take it two stops on the tram. I look a bit of a sight, wheeling a trolley stacked high with paintings and print racks. The tram conductors are used to me now; I know where to put this cumbersome wagon where it is least obstructive to other travellers.

Yesterday morning, as the tram approached, I became aware of the presence of a man of a certain age eyeing my trolley, a half amused look on his face. As per the social script, just before the tram doors opened he made some unfunny quip about it, about its bulkiness, where I was going, something like that. As per the social script, I smiled back at him benignly, though I had not listened to a word her had said. Interaction concluded, our miniature play complete, he found his seat and left me alone.

This is a social script that I am well used to. If you are a woman who does anything manual by herself (such as hauling heavy artworks around town), or, if you are a woman full stop, then men of a certain age will comment on your actions. (I am not trying make a particular point about race, age or gender here, but in my experience, it only older white men who do this. 100% of the time.) They will make a gentle joke, a pleasant remark, and smile at you kindly. Or, they will make a joke at your expense that you find rude and patronising. In return, you are expected to laugh, or smile gently back, pleased for their acknowledgement. Script concluded, roles reprised, everyone walks away satisfied.

A few months ago, I was walking through Leith, struggling to carry large and heavy artworks back to my studio from an exhibition, whilst also keeping a hold of my dog on his lead. I was tired, and wearing large headphones playing loud music in an attempt to cocoon myself from the rest of the world. My dog stopped to defecate, a particularly messy affair, and as I sighed, struggled to put down the artworks, struggled to find a suitable bag, and struggled to deal with the mess, I became aware of the presence of an older white man. He said something. Hoping that he would see that I was preoccupied and wearing large headphones that implied I could not hear him, I didn’t respond or acknowledge his presence. He said it again, louder. I stood up straight, removed my headphones and looked at him.

“Sorry?”

He repeated what he had said, but it made no sense to me, given the lack of context of our interaction. My brain struggled to put together the words. I stared at him blankly.

“I SAID I WOULDN’T WANT TO EAT WHAT HE’S BEEN EATING!” the man said again, a distinct note of annoyance in his voice.

I stared at him blankly again, as my brain put together that this man had seen a woman he did not know struggling to carry heavy items up the street, dealing with a dog with tummy troubles, listening to loud music on large and clearly visible headphones. He had seen this and decided that what this interaction really called for was toilet humour, and that he needed to deliver it. Four times.

“Oh.” I said.

I didn’t smile.

I put my headphones back on, finished clearing up after my dog, and went to pick up my artworks.

“IT WAS A JOKE!”

This he shouted. There was no disguising his annoyance. He was now a man shouting in the street at a woman because she hadn’t laughed at his joke. He walked away shaking his head.

I knew that I was supposed to laugh, or at least smile knowingly. That was the script, the way the dynamics of our characters were supposed to play out, and I was being rude to ignore it. That was how the interaction was supposed to go, if I had stuck to my role. But I hadn’t.

I wasn’t attempting to make a stand, be deliberately subversive, be a strong independent woman who wins the day. I was just very tired. Too tired to smile at a strange man shouting at me in the street about dog poo.

And yet the social pressure to stick to script, to do that fake gentle laugh that all women learn to do, was immense. It was a conscious choice not to. My neutral “Oh” was off-script. Wrong. Bad.

The thing about social scripts is that they are often completely absurd. I’m not sure any Hollywood writer could come up with this scene; it was too farcical. And yet, I imagine that to a great many people it is so familiar, so well-rehearsed as to be barely conscious. The absurdity of the interaction isn’t questioned.

When we go off script, people can react badly, so it is often easiest to stick to it. The script is so deeply ingrained that it isn’t even acknowledged to exist. To deviate from it is to break the rules of social convention. People can be very sure that they are right and you are wrong when the rules are broken.

Yesterday’s market was slow, the cold weather keeping footfall low, so there was much time for thinking through ideas. I wondered why don’t old men talk to one another like this? Perhaps they do, I don’t know, I am not an old man, but I suspect that there are certain interactions, certain quips, that they save for women who are younger than them, where the roles, the authority, the power, is more rehearsed.

For a very brief time, a long time ago, I was the singer in a jazz band. The band was led by the saxophonist, an experienced and talented musician in his later years. As we started work on a new song during rehearsals, he explained that the song’s structure was verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. Did I get that? Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. It was written on the charts in front of me, which I had already read, so I assured him, that yes, I understood. We began to play. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, but as I began to sing the bridge, he began to play the verse again. I stopped singing. He stopped playing.

“Why did you stop?” He asked.

“You started playing the verse again when we should be playing the bridge”, I said.

He blinked at me.

“The structure is verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus,” I said. “Like we discussed. I started singing the bridge, but you were playing the verse.”

He blinked again.

He picked up his charts and studied them intensely, frowning. Eventually a clarity came over his face. He turned to me

“You see, the structure here?” he said, slowly, “It’s verse. Chorus. Verse. Chorus. Bridge. Chorus. That’s where you must have gone wrong.”

“I know.” I said. “That’s what I said.”

He spoke more kindly now. As Gandalf might speak to a confused hobbit.

“So what you need to understand is that it’s verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. Have you got that? Let’s go again.”

This befuddling interaction left me silently furious but also utterly confused. Had he not heard the words that had come out of my mouth? Everyone makes mistakes, why had he found it so difficult to be wrong?

Eventually I understood that it wasn’t that he found it difficult to be corrected, nor that he was directly, maliciously trying to undermine and confuse me. It was that he didn’t live in a reality where I was right and he was wrong. The reality for him was a script about who we were, what authority we had, who was knowledgeable and who was ignorant. I had deviated from it. After a brief glitch, he returned to the script he knew, and we carried on rehearsing.

There was nothing malicious in his demeanour. The universe where he had made a brief error in the structure of a song, and a young woman had pointed it out, simply did not exist.

During the quieter moments of the market, I spoke with the artist selling her work beside me, about the unsolicited advice you receive as an independent business owner. Who gives it, who they give it to, how you are expected to respond, how you sometimes want to respond (the best response, we concluded was “Wow that sounds like a great idea – why don’t you do it?”.)

Sometimes the advice is really good. A colleague or a customer or a friend will provide an insight to your work that enables you to take a massive leap forward. Advice is nearly always well meaning, coming from a place of kindness and community. An invitation to share and collaborate in solving the tricky little problems of life. However, I would urge caution before dispensing it. There is an arrogance implicit in giving unsolicited advice to strangers. It starts from an assumption that you know what success looks like to them, you know what shape their ambition takes, and you have thought of the routes to success that they are ignorant of.

There is an assumption that they want to be just like you.

Trying to reason with an unhelpful advice giver that their foundational assumptions might be wrong, that maybe your goal isn’t to achieve what they have achieved, is so off-script as to be unable to be heard. You instead smile and nod, and thank them for their unique insight. And then totally disregard what they have said.

We get better at what we rehearse. For some folks, perhaps all they have to contribute, all that is well-oiled in their arsenal, is ‘funny’ quips and unsolicited advice. It is the script they know, where they feel comfortable, able to engage with strangers in a friendly manner. Witnessing their audience going off script in response must be terrifying.

Back at the market, another potential customer stopped at my stall. I asked them if they were an artist, and they smiled. The script began again. It was a useful script, a kind invitation to engage. It was also one that I was conscious of, and could deviate from at any time.