Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 160

I hate the fine print

I taught my students how to properly fold a letter before placing it into an envelope.

An important life skill.

At the end of the day, I found a properly folded sheet of paper on my desk.

I was thrilled about the demonstration of competence, and the message warmed my heart.

Until it didn’t.

8 rules for requesting songs at a wedding

My DJ partner, Bengi, and I worked wedding #383 earlier this month.

Our first in more than 18 months.

The couple had chosen every single song for their wedding, from cocktail hour through the end of the night, which naturally tied my hands a bit when it came to taking requests. We were also positioned in the loft of a large barn, making access to us challenging for the guests, thus limiting requests even more.

We had only one request all night, and that song had already been chosen by the bride and groom, so we agreed to play it, knowing we were already going to play it.

All of this was fine with me. I find the practice of requesting songs at weddings to be annoying and a little rude. Couples spend a great deal of time choosing the music for their weddings these days. Why screw it up with your stupid request for Diana King’s Say a Little Prayer?

Yes, it was a cute scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding, but that movie is 25 years old, you’re not Julia Roberts, and it just doesn’t work as well in real life.

I’ve been the DJ for more than 20 years, but I’m still surprised how often an impossible-to-dance song from a wedding movie will permeate the music scene.

But if you insist upon requesting a song at a wedding, please follow these 8 simple rules:

1. DO request your song early in the evening. If you wait until the last hour of the wedding, the DJ is likely locked into a playlist of the couple’s songs, as well as the requests of guests who were smart enough to ask for their songs earlier.

2. DO request music during dinner. Want to hear your own wedding song? Ask for it to be played during dinner, and feel free to escort your spouse to the dance floor. This is a perfect time to play slow songs, and even though people are eating, you are perfectly free to dance.

3. DON’T tell the DJ how important you are as a means of convincing him to play your request. Everyone at the wedding is important, otherwise they would not have been invited. “I’m the Maid of Honor.” “I’m the college roommate” “I’m the bride’s favorite aunt.” None of this means a damn thing to a DJ. Unless you are a bride, a groom, and perhaps one of their parents, your relationship does not carry any weight with us if your request is lousy or we are running out of time.

4. DON’T tell the DJ that the music that he is playing “sucks” when it’s probably the music that the newly married couple specifically requested AND the dance floor is jammed with guests. Essentially, you’re telling me that your friends’ taste in music sucks and that every guest on the dance floor has no taste as well.

5. DO respect the wishes of the newly married couple. If they asked that The Macarena not be played at the wedding, don’t go hassling the bride in order to have the song played after the DJ has refused. Leave the couple alone, damn it. They don’t want to be bothered by your desperate need to hear a specific song at their wedding.

6. DON’T flirt with the DJ, offer to expand his view of your cleavage, or proffer sex in order to get a song played. The DJ is probably married or in a serious relationship, we’ve all seen enough cleavage in our lives to allow us to pass on yours, and women who are willing to offer sex in order to dance to a four-minute song from 1983 are not that appealing.

7. DON’T threaten to “kick my ass in the parking lot” when I refuse to play a fourth song by Chicago during the wedding. It’s not worth it, and you will look foolish when I accept your parking lot offer, knowing full well that I am perfectly capable of kicking the ass of any man who likes a pop rock band like Chicago this much.

True story.

8. DO ask yourself: Do I really need to request this song? Is it worth altering the couple’s playlist in order to hear a four minute song that I can play at any other time?

If the answer is yes, get your self-centered ass over to the DJ booth and be polite, flexible and understanding. If I have time and am allowed to play the song that you have requested, I will, as long as you have asked in a way that would make your mother proud.

I would like my students to call me “Matt.”

I’m not ready to allow my students to call me by my first name, but only because I’m not sure what administration might think, and I suspect that some of my more traditional colleagues might hate me for it.

Mind you:

Neither one of these things are non-starters for me. I’m more than willing to push back on administration, and I’m also more than willing to annoy my more traditional colleagues if I think my decision is correct.

I just haven’t found the right time to pull the trigger yet.

See if you agree with my rationale:

It’s been argued many times that titles like Mr., Mrs., and Ms. are signals of respect.

I don’t agree with this, of course,. In fact, I think it’s nonsense. If you need a prefix to garner respect, and if you need your students to use a prefix to demonstrate respect, you have a problem earning and maintaining the respect of your students. I had plenty of teachers in high school and college who preferred that I use their first name, and I respected those teachers and professors just as much as I did the teachers and professors who insisted in the use of their titles.

In many cases, those “first name only” teachers were some of the best teachers I’ve ever had:

But let’s out that aside for now.

Here is my real issue:

The titles that teachers use are sexist, patriarchal artifacts of a bygone time. They only serve to identify sex and, in some cases, marital status.

If you’re a man like me, for example, you use the title Mister, which only indicates that I am a man.

That’s weird.

My students demonstrate respect by using a title that defines my sex organs?

Why is that relevant or appropriate?

But with women, it’s even worse, because they often identify their marital status with their title as well. Not only does their title identify their sex organs, but if they choose to use Missus, they are also asking students to recognize that they are married.

Also very weird.

Why are sex organs and marital status relevant or associated in any way with respect?

Of course, a woman can choose to avoid using Mrs. and use Ms. instead, which is fine, except that a large number of people will assume that she is not married, which also may not matter, but why are men’s marital statuses never relevant when it comes to their title but a woman’s marital status is?

There is no married form of Mister.

There is also Miss, of course, typically reserved for a young lady who isn’t so old enough to make us wonder if she’s married, thus turning Ms. into the title for women who are unmarried, divorced, and even widowed.

Can you see how stupid these titles are? My students walk around all day, calling me Mr. Dicks, which is simply a weird acknowledgement that I have man parts under my clothing.

Add my last name to the mix, and things get even weirder. Sort of a hat on a hat situation.

One of my students sometimes calls me “Teacher” to annoy me, but the more I think about it, “Teacher ” is a better name than Mr. Dicks because it least doesn’t drag sex, gender, or the patriarchy into my name. At least it doesn’t rest on the patriarchal notion that women should make their marital status clear while men need not.

I still don’t like “Teacher.” It’s too informal, and when a second teacher is present, it’s fairly useless.

Ideally, I’d like my students to call me Matt, because it’s my name and I don’t require titles built upon my man parts and the patriarchy in order to earn my students’ respect.

I also anticipate a day – probably very soon – when a nonbinary, gender fluid, or asexual teacher is forced to push back on these archaic titles, too.

Why wait? Let’s fix this stupidity now.

It seems exceptionally reasonable to me for my students to call my by my first name, even though I suspect that it might cause more than a few heads to explode if I tried it.

Again, a few exploding heads is no reason to avoid doing what I think is right, so that day may come, sooner or later, when I tell my students on the first day to call me, “Matt.” In additional to administration and some colleagues pushing back, I may have some unhappy parents, too. But my hope is that when I explain how the title of Mister only serves to identify my sex organs, they might see my logic and agree.

This world does not, however, always run on logic.

My illustrious lip sync career

While listening to Sweet Child O’ Mine in the car yesterday, I found myself reminiscing about a sliver of time in my life when public lip syncing contests were popular and people – myself included – lip synced competitively.

I was 17 years-old when my illustrious career began. I was still in high school, working for a McDonald’s in Milford, Massachusetts. In an effort to build morale, McDonald’s management decided to sponsor a lip-sync contest, complete with a cash prize.

The competition took place in a meeting room inside the Milford Public Library.

A lip-sync contest in a library.

There were four acts competing in the contest. I was in three of them.

Bengi, a guy named Eric, a now-forgotten participant, and I lip synced Guns and Roses Sweet Child O’ Mine. Bengi was on vocals and I was on drums.

I sat in a folding metal chair and pretended to play the drums. Without any sticks. I just swung my arms around to the beat and pretended to harmonize during the chorus.

Bengi and I followed up this performance with a two-man tribute to Tesla’s classic Gettin’ Better.

The third act was me and a forgotten pair of girls who performed a favorite song of mine at the time, Under the Boardwalk.

The fourth and final act was six older ladies singing and dancing to Heard it Through the Grapevine. They wore enormous trash bags to give the impression that they were raisins. A musical group called The California Raisins, consisting of animated, anthropomorphized raisins, were popular at the time and famously singing that song.

That sentence alone deserves some future exploration.

The Sweet Child O’ Mine act won first prize that night. The prize was $25, split four ways.

Thank God the video camera was not as ubiquitous as it is today. The whole scene must have been utterly ridiculous.

A year later, Bengi, Coog, and I went north to Salisbury Beach to record our own lip sync video at a booth along the boardwalk. We performed a Dokken song (In My Dreams) and a Skid Row song (Youth Gone Wild).

That tape still exists.

One year later, Bengi, Coog, and I lip-synced to Bon Jovi’s Raise Your Hands in a New Hampshire under-21 dance club.

We were not received well.

People were dancing to actual dance music by bands like Dee-Lite, C + C Music Factory, and Blackbox. We lip-synced to a deep cut on a Bon Jovi album from seven years ago. Our routine featured a moment when Coog, a blackbelt who we referred to as a “scaggy bearded ninja,” leapt onto my shoulders and raised his hands.

We were universally despised, but to our credit, we owned that song, giving it our all despite the palpable loathing in the room.

So ended my lip sync career.

I’d like to add that despite our failure to impress our audience that night, I managed to hook up with a girl who thought that our performance was “terrible but gutsy.”

I dated that girl off and on for about a year.

Confidence has always been more important than competence.

This isn’t to say I won’t lip sync in the future. Many students have attempted to convince me to lip sync on TikTok, and though I have resisted so far, I wouldn’t close the door on the possibility. And if Jimmy Fallon of The Tonight Show asked me to participate in one of his famous lip sync battles, I’d be hard pressed to pass.

Looking ridiculous in order to make others laugh is very much on brand for me.

Upending greeting card tradition

I was recently told about a new trend in greeting card giving:

Signing the cards with a post-it note. When you find a card to which you are particularly fond, you affix a post-it to the inside with your signature and any personal message you wish to extend, so that the recipient can use the card again.

I love this idea. It’s eco-friendly and turns the greeting card into a gift of sorts, a physical meme that the recipient can pass along to someone else.

I have a tradition of taking greeting cards that do not match the occasion and transforming them into something more appropriate, often to humorous results.

A “Sorry for the loss of your pet” card becomes a “Happy anniversary” card.

A “Congrats on your bar mitzvah” card transforms into a house warming card.

A card expressing support during a friend’s divorce becomes a card congratulating a couple on their recent nuptials.

In stark opposition to the trite and utterly meaningless application of one’s name to a pre-packaged, purchased sentiment, I believe that this tradition demonstrates my willingness to take a moment and attempt to create something that will hopefully make the recipient smile.

I sent one of these transformed cards to a friend recently, and she responded by calling me “a ridiculous person.”

I think she meant that in a good way.

In fact, there are people in my life who have come to expect these creations and feel ignored when I fail to deliver.

In order to be able to do this, I am in a constant search for odd and unique greeting cards. The more specific the card, the more fun I have transforming it into something else. The stranger the image on the card, the more fun I can have changing it into something else.

But if not for this tradition, I think I’d be adopting the post-it note idea. It’s got that special blend of nonconformity that will offend those who are foolishly invested in decorum and tradition (I love annoying fussy traditionalists ) while possessing just enough reason and logic behind it to make it almost unassailable.

Plus it’s good for the environment. How can someone complain about that?

Kat Koppett changed my life.

On Monday night I won The Moth’s virtual GrandSLAM championship. My seventh championship so far. My first virtual championship.

Credit Kat Koppett, who doesn’t even realize how she has changed my life.

We all need a Kat Koppett in our lives. Lots of Kat Koppetts if possible.

Back in early April of 2020, as the world shut down in response to the pandemic, my speaking gigs quickly disappeared.

National Book Festival? Gone.

Visiting Professorship at the University of Hartford? Not anymore.

Keynote at NYU? Cancelled.

Workshops. Library appearances. Professional coaching. Standup. The Moth. All gone in the blink of an eye.

Then there was a weekend of teaching and performing at the MOPCO Improv Theater in Schenectady, NY, as part of a family trip to Niagara Falls during April vacation. I assumed it would also be cancelled, but theater owner Kat Koppett contacted me about teaching and performing online instead.

My thought:

Never going to happen. I will never teach or perform online. I refuse to do something as sad and stupid as speaking into a camera to an audience who I can’t see or hear. I’ll ride out the pandemic, I decided. Write books. Bide my time.

Bur Kat persisted, insisting that it could be done well. Promising to support me. Assuring me that it could be great.

I didn’t believe her, but upon hearing about the economic state of theaters across the country, I reconsidered. It would still be sad and stupid, I knew, but perhaps it could also bring some much needed revenue to the theater.

“Fine,” I thought. “I’ll do it. But it will be sad and stupid.”

But Kat pushed me to maintain a positive attitude. Lean into the advantages of online teaching and performing. Advised me on ways to think beyond the traditional approach to performing onstage and make it work for a virtual audience.

I listened. I obeyed. But I still didn’t believe.

When the weekend arrived, I found myself in a Zoom room, teaching nearly 200 people from around the world. Six different countries and at least a dozen different states were represented. With Kat operating the Zoom controls, handling the tech, and encouraging me constantly, I taught and later performed for the camera for the first time.

It wasn’t the same as being live, and it definitely wasn’t as good as being in the same room with other human beings, but it worked. I found joy in teaching and performing that I didn’t think possible. I learned that watching someone react to my words and ideas onscreen was still pretty great, even if I couldn’t hear them.

Best of all, people from all over the world – folks who could’ve never made the trek to Connecticut to spend a day with me – had a chance to attend my workshop and show. Fans who I didn’t even know I had showed up in numbers I never expected.

And they liked it, too. So many of them expressed appreciation for moving my work online.

So Kat and I did it again, and it worked again. I got better. Kat helped me get better. Then we did it again.

A couple months later, as businesses around the world shifted online, corporations began calling, asking to work with me seemingly en masse. Companies large and small – Fortune 500 companies – wanted to hire me to work with their marketing departments, their advertising departments, their salespeople, their CEOs, their training departments, and more.

Had Kat not convinced me to give online teaching a try, my response to these companies would have been no.

I don’t teach online. It’s sad and stupid. Wait for the world to return to normal.

But with Kat still in my ear, telling me to lean into the advantages of online instruction and performance, I said yes.

My business exploded. In the course of a single month, my entire life changed. I began working with clients all over the world in a field that seems to have an endless number of opportunities.

Then came my own online workshops. Four to six week courses with storytellers from around the world. Then virtual Speak Up shows, where Elysha and I met new people and expanded our audience far beyond the borders of New England. Eventually, The Moth joined the virtual world, producing StorySLAMs, so I began competing there, using the tricks that Kat had taught me and some that I discovered for myself to perform and win online.

Monday might’s Moth GrandSLAM championship was in many ways a culmination of this journey. I’ve been fortunate enough to perform in 29 Moth GrandSLAMs over the past decade in New York and Boston, and it is by far my favorite stage to perform. While I can’t wait to get back to New York and Boston and perform live for The Moth again, the Moth’s online slams and GrandSLAM have kept me connected to the community, honing my craft, and performing for audiences of Moth fans.

My favorite kind of people.

It’s not the same, and it’s certainly not as great as a live Moth audience, but Kat was right. It’s good. It works. It even has some advantages that a live performance does not.

I wouldn’t have said yes when The Moth called, asking me to perform in Monday’s championship, had it not been for Kat Koppett’s gentle, supportive, persistent urging for me to expand beyond my comfort zone.

We all need a Kat Koppett in our lives. We all need someone who is willing to tell us that we can do more. Encourage us to do more. Support us as we struggle to do more. We need those people in our lives who can tell us that our vision is far too limited for our potential. That we are being stubborn and foolish. We need to be bold and brave.

I needed someone like Kat Koppett to tell me to put on my big boy pants and try something new.

Oftentimes that person is Elysha Dicks. Many times that person is me.

But sometimes we get lucky enough to have someone like Kat enter our lives, offering us the opportunity to see the world in a new way. Pushing us to change our lives in new and fantastic ways.

I got lucky back in April of 2020 when Kat used her time, energy, and expertise to get my stubborn, narrow-minded ass in gear.

I got really, really lucky. One year later, my life has changed in previously unimaginable ways.

I owe it all to Kat.

May you all be fortunate enough to find your own Kat Koppett someday.

Lessons from an afternoon at The Hill-Stead

Elysha and I are looking forward to hosting our first live storytelling show since February 2020 at The Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT on August 18, 2021.

The show will be outdoors, but it’s our first step to returning to normal life once again.

We can’t wait.

You can purchase tickets here:

An Evening of Storytelling with Speak Up – From the Porch

As I wrote last week, I have a long and storied past with the Hill-Stead Museum. Over the years, I have officiated and DJ’d many weddings on the grounds of the Hill-Stead, taken poetry and writing classes with renowned writers in their barn, and spent many a night under the stars listening to poets perform as a part of their famous Sunken Garden Poetry Festival.

There was one other moment at the Hill-Stead that I think is worth mentioning.

About a dozen years ago, my then-principal, Plato Karafelis, decided to take three afternoon professional development sessions and turn them into field trips for our faulty, scheduling visits to The Mark Twain House, The New Britain Museum of Art, and The Hill-Stead Museum.

Here are a few things I know about our trip to The Hill-Stead:

I still remember that day vividly. I recall listening to a lecture in the barn on the history of The Hill-Stead, then proposing a new company with my friend, Jeff, wherein we would interview the men who wanted to date our friend and colleague, Amy, so she wouldn’t waste any more time going on first dates with losers.

Amy is happily married today. I actually officiated her wedding.

I remember touring the building alongside two new colleagues who I hadn’t spent much time with prior to our visit but felt quite close to and began collaborating with them extensively post-visit.

I remember staring at Monet’s haystacks, hanging over a piano in the salon, and feeling utterly inspired.

I remember wandering through The Sunken Garden, looking at flowers and talking yo my friend and colleague, Donna, about problems with the Shakespearean production that I was producing with my students in June.

I remember taking my students to the forest adjacent to our school the next day, feeling charged and excited about helping them to see the beauty in the world and teaching them to find ways to use that beauty in their own writing.

I remember that Plato had to fight like a dog to get those three trips approved and was still beaten up by his administrators about the trips after they were completed.

Here’s the best part of all:

I remember that afternoon with enormous clarity. I also remember with great clarity the trips to the New Britain Museum of Art (a place I didn’t know existed prior to the trip even though it’s ten minutes from my home) and The Mark Twain House (a place I had never entered prior to our trip).

How often does a professional development session from more than a decade ago still reside so clearly in a person’s mind?

Those trips exposed me to art, architecture, history, and the natural beauty of their surroundings. They brought me closer to colleagues. Established bonds that persist today. Inspired me to be a better artist and teacher. Excited me about bringing more art and beauty into my school day.

It was some of the best professional development I ever received, yet in the minds of administration at the time, it was a waste of time. A silly, purposeless adventure. A terrible use of time and money.

It was stupid, shortsighted, tragically uninspiring leadership on the part of administration.

It’s hard to stand at the tip of the spear. It’s not easy to buck the system and strike out new ground. Not everyone can knowingly frustrate their bosses by doing something that they think is right and good. Few people are willing to suffer the slings and arrows to try something new and do something better.

Plato did all of those things on that day, thus providing me with one more important lesson:

Do the right thing, even when those in power don’t always think it’s right. Seek to inspire through novelty and innovation. Take risks. See beyond the mundane and expected to something less quantitive and more qualitative.

Do stuff people will remember a decade later.

Plato is now retired and residing happily on the west coast, which is wonderful for him but perpetually sad for me. But when I take the veranda in August to tell my first story to a real live audience in more than a year, I will be thinking of him and that day spent at The Hill-Stead with my colleagues.

I’ll be thinking about inspiration, leadership, and courage.

Maybe I’ll even tell a story about Plato that night.

 

The Black Spot

I’m reading Treasure Island to my students. One of my favorite books of all time.

If you’re familiar with the book, you know about the importance of The Black Spot.

It consists of a simple piece of paper featuring a blackened circle, signaling to the recipient that he is about to be deposed as pirate leader, by force if necessary—or else killed outright.

Receive the Black Spot, and your days are surely numbered.

As I was getting ready to leave on Friday, I found this affixed to my backpack.

These kids…

Cascatelli: A brand new pasta shape and a moment of creation

Back in March, I listened to a Planet Money podcast about The Sporkful’s Dan Pashman’s journey to create a brand new pasta shape.

Being someone who celebrates, reveres, and adores anyone in the business of making stuff, I loved Pashman’s story of inspiration, perspiration, and realization of a longtime dream.

The result:

Cascatelli, manufactured by pasta maker Sfoglini. Named after the Italian word for “waterfall.”

Pashman demanded three things from his new pasta shape while he was designing it:

Sauceability: How readily sauce adheres to the shapeForkability: How easy it is to get the shape on your fork and keep it thereToothsinkability: How satisfying it is to sink your teeth into it

I preordered five pounds of his pasta as soon as I finished listening to the podcast. I mentioned this to a friend who rolled his eyes and asked why I would spend more than $25 on five pounds of never-before-seen pasta.

My response:

“How could I not?”

A brand new pasta shape, never before seen on the planet, had been invented by a podcast host and food lover. His journey to creation was long, arduous, and inspiring.

Dan Pashman had made something.

He had made something that I never even realized could be made.

How could I not join him on his journey and support his endeavor?

The pasta arrived last week. We immediately opened the box, and Elysha substituted cascatelli for the pasta provided in our Hello Fresh meal.

Not only was it delicious (I love its toothsinkability) but Charlie managed to have some fun with it, too.

When was the last time you had a pasta dish that you will never forget eating?

It’s not easy to make stuff.

It’s even harder to make stuff when the making involves monetary investment, manufacturing, and distribution.

Whenever I have the opportunity to celebrate and support someone who is making something new, I happily, gladly, and excitedly will. Making stuff is hard and important and glorious. It also doesn’t happen every day. We must keep our eyes open for these moments of inspiration and creation and do all that we can do to ensure they happen again and again.

Order yourself a bag of cascatelli. You won’t regret it.

Turns out I am telepathic.

Stephen King refers to books as telepathy. An author thinks something, writes it down, and then months or years later, that sentence appears in the mind of the reader.

Sometimes a thought. Sometimes an idea. Sometimes an image.

He writes:

“Look- here’s a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. The most interesting thing here isn’t even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It’s an eight. This is what we’re looking at, and we all see it. I didn’t tell you. You didn’t ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room… except we are together. We are close. We’re having a meeting of the minds. We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”

When I first read this in his book, On Writing, I found the concept amusing, and on a rational level, I believed him. It made sense.

But accepting something as rational and knowing something to be true in your gut are two very different things. I didn’t believe his telepathy argument in my gut until my books began making their way around the world, and readers began reaching out, talking to me about my stories and ideas.

Just this week, I heard from readers in six different states and four different countries. I also learned that one of my novels is included in the curriculum at my daughter’s school, and Storyworthy is being added to the curriculum in at least two universities this fall.

But my favorite email – the one containing telepathy – arrived yesterday from a reader who wrote (among other things):

“I also wanted you to know that your readership now includes a Mexican teacher (that would be me) working in an international school in northern Thailand, sharing stories with my daughters about Thanksgiving rabbits and LP records.”

That’s telepathy.

I wrote about things that happened to me long ago in a book on storytelling, and now Mexican girls living in Thailand are being told these stories by their father.

Stories about important events in my life are being transferred, second-hand, into the minds of others.

Stephen King was right.

No mythy-mountain shit. Real telepathy.