The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer

Author:Amanda Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

Hi, Amanda! She threw the door open and ushered me into the kitchen of the apartment. Jesus, you must be exhausted. How many shows have you done in a row? Five? Sorry we couldn’t take you up on the ticket offer, we had some stupid museum benefit to go to. Let me show you the guest room… I’ve just changed the sheets for you and… wait, before anything… WINE. Red or white? Or Scotch? Felix just brought back a special bottle from Scotland…

And she bustled me into the guest room, where fresh towels were folded on the bed.

I stood there in awe, wondering how I ever could have doubted the universe.

• • •

In 2011, I was on tour in New Zealand, an hour from boarding a small plane bound for Christchurch, when the giant earthquake hit. My flight was canceled. All the flights were canceled. My show, which was scheduled that night in central Christchurch, was also canceled. The venue no longer existed.

I spent that entire day—and most of the next few days—on Twitter, talking nonstop with my Christchurch fans. All of them were okay, but a lot of them were freaked out, and everybody knew someone who knew someone who’d been killed, since it’s a small community. Some people had traveled there for the show and were trapped with no place to stay. And everybody shared their stories, and I shared the stories back out to the worldwide crowd. We tightened.

One of the New Zealanders, Diana, had suffered an unbelievable loss. Her entire family—mom, dad, and two brothers—had been killed in the earthquake. I reached out to her online and asked for her address and phone number. She was staying with cousins in Australia, and in too much turmoil to talk, but I told her to stay in touch, to call if she needed me, to use me, to use the whole community.

A few days later, I played a show in Melbourne, and over a thousand fans decorated, kissed, and markered love-wishes for Diana on a bedsheet-sized blank poster I arranged to have hung in the lobby. I mailed it off to her. A few days later, she did call and we spoke for about an hour while I paced around a friend’s backyard in Melbourne.

What could I say? She’d lost everything. Her family. Her home. Her whole life. Her Australian cousins were being kind, but she was having difficulties sorting out her head, and I asked her gentle questions, comforted her, tried to distract her and make her laugh. I assured her that she was loved, that she had a whole human family around her that would not let her fall or feel alone. She sounded strange, despondent, distant, confused, which wasn’t surprising.

A day later a friendly newspaper journalist called me from Auckland. He was a fan as well, and had done some research because he wanted to do a story about this phenomenon: the girl, the fans, me, the net. He had just talked to the Christchurch Red Cross, asking for the details of the teenage girl who had lost both her parents and siblings.

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