Jessica Lee Williamson - Maybe

 

There's a song called Maybe at the beginning of the movie Annie, where Annie wonders about the parents who dumped her off at that godforsaken orphanage. She says, “Maybe they're far away or maybe they're real nearby. He may be pouring her coffee. She may be straightening his tie.” Annie ends the song on a hopeful note, saying that “Maybe they'll be there loving her when she wakes up, but they're not, which makes it even more sad and depressing,” which is exactly the kind of material that I was really attracted to as an eight-year-old artist. [audience laughter] 

 

I really connected to Annie's plight of loneliness. I had all these very intense eight-year-old girl feelings and ideas, but I was also very shy and didn't know how to share them. And then, I would see people like Annie step up onto a stage, and sing a song or tell a story, and I would see how open they were and I would think maybe I could do that too. 

 

So, when I was in the third grade, I decided to sing Maybe for the school talent show. And the moment I stepped up onto the stage, I found myself pondering some maybes of my own. [audience laughter] Maybe I should have put some thought into it [audience laughter] before I volunteered to sing alone in front of hundreds of people. [audience laughter] And maybe I should have bothered to memorize the words to the song [audience laughter] that I volunteered to sing alone in front of hundreds of people. 

 

I had seen the movie Annie five or six times over the course of my entire life and somehow figured that would be enough. [audience laughter] So, I only focused on the feelings I would have while singing the song. I only asked the important questions, like, should I wear a curly wig or will my short, newly permed hairdo suffice? The only thing I practiced was the ladylike curtsy I would give at the end of my show stopping routine. [audience laughter] 

 

Next thing I knew, there I was thinking maybe standing on a stage and crying isn't the best way to make my debut as a performer. [audience laughter] There was an instrumental version of the song playing over the PA system. And every time a new verse would kick in, I would take a deep breath and brace myself, like I was getting ready to sing, [audience laughter] sending out these tiny ripples of hope that [audience laughter] I might just pull it together. [audience laughter] But I never did, you, guys. [audience laughter] I just stood there and cried for [audience laughter] two and a half minutes [audience laughter] while the audience watched in a horrified silence. [audience laughter] 

 

There are very few things that compare to sucking that bad in front of a room full of people. [audience laughter] My mother did not want it to be something that scarred me for life, so she encouraged me to try again, [audience laughter] a whole lot harder the next year. She also suggested that I find a new act, because rehashing the old one might make the audience uncomfortable. [audience laughter] And then, I had the idea that I would find a costar, so that I wouldn't have to go it alone. I found that costar on the pages of a JCPenney Christmas catalog. He was an Oliver Hardy ventriloquist doll. And the catalog description said that he was famous and loved by audiences around the world, which was exactly what I was going for. [audience laughter] 

 

So, I put his item number at the top of my Christmas list and he was waiting under my tree on Christmas Day. He came with a two-page Xerox copied pamphlet titled How to Be a Ventriloquist? It offered very vague suggestions, [audience laughter] like, do try not to move your lips [audience laughter] and don't forget to smile. And then, I would spend every day after school looking in the mirror and practicing tongue twisters, and then my mother would take me to the library and we would comb through all of the choke books. And I would only take the very best ones. 

 

I even wrote one of my own jokes. I would ask Hardy, “What do you call a good-looking bubble?” And then, he would deliver the punchline, which was “A sud.” [audience laughter] It's a play on the word stud for those of you guys that didn't get it. Not my best work, but I was eight, so, you know, I'm sticking by it. But eventually Hardy and I had this three-minute act originally titled the Jessica and Hardy Show. It was everything a comedy act should be, a combination of joke telling and banter peppered with the occasional zinger. We opened with some knock-knocks and we spent some time philosophizing over who had it worse, a giraffe with a sore throat or a centipede with a broken leg. 

 

At some point, I would say, “Hardy, sometimes I think you're dumber than a log.” He would respond with, “Hey, watch it. My mother was a log.” [audience laughter] And then, we would wrap it all up with a heartfelt moment where I would say, “I love you, Hardy,” and he would say, “I love you too.” And after a comedic beat, he would add, “But you still drive me nuts.” 

 

So, by the day of the talent show, I had felt very confident and even a little bit excited about my act. They implemented a full-dress rehearsal that year. [audience laughter] I'm sure it had nothing to do with the one man [beep] show I personally [audience laughter] put on the year before. And it went great. For the dress rehearsal, my mother painted my face like a happy clown. But for the real show, because that's how I roll, I asked her to paint my face like a sad clown instead. And so, the show started. And in the act before mine, two girls did a comedy routine where they just stood there and told each other jokes. It wasn't that creative, if I'm being honest, [audience laughter] but it fell very flat during the rehearsal, but it was a smash hit during the actual show, because they stole a bunch of my jokes. 

 

They took the centipede and the giraffe bit. They took this other bit where Hardy and I made the number seven look like a monster, because he ate nine. And they even took the joke I wrote myself. When I heard the audience laughing at those girls, my heart broke and I started to panic. And that's when my mother leaned over to me and said, “It doesn't matter if they stole your jokes, because you are a ventriloquist, which is considered an art form, and that makes it totally different.” When she said that to me, I really felt like an artist, because I had gone through the whole process of turning nothing into something to creating this thing. 

 

And so, the emcee called my name and I went to grab my costar, only to find him in the hands of a known troublemaker named Jimmy Moore. Jimmy was the type of boy who had a permanent orange tang stain on his upper lip [audience laughter] and just destroyed everything in his path. I guess he saw my doll sitting in a chair and wondered what it would feel like to rip the mouth out of something that somebody loved. It was one of those things that feels like it's happening in slow motion. I was standing there staring at my doll, watching its jaw dangled to its knees by a string, and I heard the emcee call my name again. I was nine years old at the time, so the phrase, [beep] it, I'm not doing that was not something that occurred to me at that age. [audience laughter] 

 

And so, I walked up onto the stage alone and I picked up the microphone and I cried just like I did the year before. [audience laughter] The only difference was that this time, I had a sad clown face [audience laughter] to accompany my curly wig. So, I guess that was an unexpected bonus. [audience laughter] If you could put a question mark at the end of a clap, I would say that's what the applause sounded like. [audience laughter] It was this slow, rhythmic slapping sound that begged the question, “What was that?” [audience laughter] And what it was was me wondering if maybe there was something that felt worse than humiliating myself in front of hundreds of people all because I hadn't prepared. Maybe it felt worse to do everything right and still fail anyway. 

 

And in that moment, I shifted from feeling like I was invisible over to wishing that I was. So much that it took me almost 20 years before I stepped foot onto another stage. But it wasn't just because of that night. I think that whenever you do something you love, you do it with one foot in fear. And I just got very comfortable leaning on that foot. But if you spend enough time there, you eventually figure out that there is one thing that feels far worse than the humiliation that any kind of failure can bring and that is giving into the fear to the point where you don't do the thing you love at all. Thank you so much.