An old friend of mine from high school wrote me recently and said that although she didn’t have a very adventurous life, she had taken over putting on dramatic productions at her kids’ school. I would beg to differ, on the adventurous part. Adventure is stepping out into the unknown, and figuring out how to get through it without a clear map or predictable outcomes. And putting on a play with students is nothing if unpredictable. Creative endeavors are also always fraught with risk. Those risks may not typically be physical or life-threatening, but they certainly include failure and public embarrassment—which is, as a friend said to me recently, “a death you then have to live with.”
Indeed, the single funniest episode of This American Life (NPR’s long-running show hosted by Ira Glass) I ever heard was the one titled “Fiasco”—an account of a local high school production of “Peter Pan” that went so awry that it raised the question: exactly when does a failure grow so spectacular that it crosses over into the category of “Fiasco”?
If you’ve never heard it, it’s well worth the 20-25 minutes. I had tears running down my face, I was laughing so hard. Which could be just me, of course, but I’d challenge anyone to listen to it and not laugh at all.
But aside from a good laugh, the episode is an important reminder that one person’s fiasco is another person’s cherished memory of how human and imperfect life can be. And that a sense of humor is an essential weapon to surviving adventure—in life, or on a stage.
Lane Wallace is the Editor and Founder of No Map. No Guide. No Limits.
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My husband and I are in our sixties. As we look back over our many years of shared experience, it is the “fiascos” that supply the detailed and colorful memories. We have come to value them as critical incidents in our life story. The stuff that went smoothly is mostly a pleasant blur.