Pulling back the curtain to show the set

Yesterday the fine people who support Disaffected and I were talking in the members-only Discord chat server. If you’d like access, become a paid subscriber to this Substack.

There’s something I’d like to explain about my approach to doing a show. Disaffected is, in contemporary lingo, a “podcast.” Frankly, I don’t like this, because that’s not what the show really is.

I think of it as more like an old-fashioned TV or radio talk show. A one-man show, yes, most of the time. That’s how I like it. Yes, I want to be the star.

I’m not interested in sitting in front of a webcam in my basement, unshaven and no hair done, to blather on. I prefer to look put together and blather on a real set with real production values.

Making a “talk show”, like making any show, involves conscious artifice. We have a set. The producer, my friend Kevin Hurley, is a media professional. His skills make this show look and sound the way it does.

I put on a full face of TV makeup, arrange my hair, and make sure I’m well dressed.

The artifice is necessary for what we want to do. Besides, aren’t we all craving a little more polish, a little more professionalism, in a media world that lavishes praise on lazy, thoughtless presentation?

But it is artifice. I like to “break the fourth wall” and point it out.

That applies to the psychological artifice, too. I try to be honest with the audience about my own psychological motivations. This is a deliberate choice to pull back the curtain, and it’s a different choice than I used to make in how I presented my thoughts.

Very few people who want to perform, or be a “star” in their world, “just happen to want to do that.” Most of us come from abusive or neglectful backgrounds. Whether we are ballerinas, actors, comedians, musicians, we are always reaching for that fleeting sensation of being admired and in control.

I remember the moment when I learned I had the power to command an audience. And that I could do it under pressure. It happened at the same time the abuse in my home was peaking. This was just before my mother put me into a glorified orphanage for "incorrigible" boys.

In 7th grade my English teacher and the drama coach cast me as Captain Hook in Peter Pan.

We had a set full of painted plywood; the biggest piece was the pirate ship. It was a painted cut out with braces on the backside to hold it up.

While I was delivering a line to my "mateys" (bossing the crew around was my favorite part), one of them knocked the ship set and it fell over backward in front of everyone.

What to do?

It just flew out of my mouth in character on the right beat without having to think about it:

"What are you doing standing around like fools, swabbies? Pick that thing up and let's get on with it."

It brought the house down.

Children like me learned that we had to develop whatever performance skills we had in order to protect ourselves. These traits last long after the childhood danger is over. They can make us compelling and charismatic, and they can also feed our unhealthy and maladaptive ways of getting attention.

Underneath the tap dancing, or the talk-show-ing, we’re saying “please love me.”

Before my “awakening” that changed my outlook on humans, politics, and myself (the divorce from my abusive mother), I would never have admitted to my many weaknesses. Nothing was wrong with me, it was only that other people misunderstood me.

My weaknesses were still there, and obvious to other people. Desperate insecurity, fear of disapproval, the need to be right all the time, and the need to be seen as perfectly competent and in control; those are some of my serious flaws.

Though I’ve made progress in emotionally maturing, those are still character flaws. And I know that other people can see them.

This is why I’ve decided to be candid about them, even when I’m trying to entertain you with a good-looking and sounding show.

”Show hosts” are not supposed to pull back their own psychological curtains. It’s not the done thing. It’s not “professional.” The talking head is supposed to be competent and curtained, it’s the guests or others who are supposed to be grilled or analyzed.

It can’t work that way for me.

The truth is that I’m very emotionally sensitive, easily wounded, often scared, approval-seeking, and vain. This is what I have to work with, at least for now, so I’ve decided to be upfront about it. It’s not possible for me to go back in time and “un-know” the things about my psychology that I know are true.

This is why Disaffected is both conscious stagecraft and consciously revealing of the make-believe. It would seem to me dishonest to do it another way.

What I hope for the audience is that other people who come from childhood abuse will see something in the show that they recognize in themselves. I also hope they will see that it is possible to be vain, insecure, scared, and also competent and willing to do it anyway.

I’m not different in any serious way from most of the people in the audience who come from Cluster B. Just because I’m good at putting on a show doesn’t mean I’ve achieved some nirvana-like state that separates me from people who don’t do it in front of a camera.

I haven’t.

But we can still have a good time and try to see the world more clearly, warts and all.

Thank you for being that audience.