Pen-Elayne on the Web

A Name-Drop in the Bucket

As I mentioned earlier, I tend to go through life considering almost all my friends and acquaintances to be more interesting than me. I also tend to gravitate towards very creative folks, which only reinforces that view. Since I have fairly broad interests in entertainment (i.e., I've never been just a Beatles fan or a Firesign fan or a comics reader or a fantasy reader etc., I like all those and more), I often find myself at the nexus where a number of congruent circles of fandom intersect. And introducing people from the different circles of my life to each other has always been one of my delights. Those who can't do, facilitate, and I think I'm a good facilitator. It's probably why I took to the web as relatively quickly as I did, my life has consisted of linking to things in person and in print long before I could do it online with the press of a button. For instance, one of the cooler moments in my life was when I reacquainted Doug Smith - aka Ivan Stang, the founder of the Church of the SubGenius - with David Ossman from The Firesign Theatre, at a group trip I'd arranged to see a West Village production of I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus. Doug got his initial mailing list for the precursor to the SubGenius, BullDada Time Control Laboratories, from the old mailing list from the 1976 Natural Surrealist Party Presidential Campoon, led by David and others and on which Doug worked. They hadn't seen each other in a decade, so the reunion, particularly at a Firesign-related event, was really amazing. And that's just one example; stuff like this happens around me all the time.

So naturally, I love to talk about it because I find it so incredibly cool. And it's kind of hard to talk about people I know, people in whose creativity I delight, without mentioning their names. Thus, I develop a reputation as a name-dropper among people who, I guess, don't know these folks and therefore consider them, again I guess, on somewhat of a different level ("famous" or whatever) and therefore dropping their names belies some sort of ulterior motive the way talking about other friends who might not be well-known in these people's particular circles would not.

Or something like that.

You can see where this gets confusing. Is it more "okay" to talk about my friend Peter David and his cool books with Firesign fans, because chances are they won't know his work and he therefore isn't considered "famous" to them - and conversely to talk about my friend David Ossman with my comics-reading friends who've never been exposed to Firesign - than to mention these friends' names among their fans? I certainly get that feeling sometimes. And yet, I find that distinction hard to make. Some of my friends are more famous than others, depending on how each little circle defines "fame," but to me they're all friends first and I like talking about my creative friends. Don't we all?

So I just wanted to issue that little caveat for whoever reads this blog. Fame is relative. Friendship with creative folks is amazing and worth crowing about, so long as the focus is on how cool those creative folks are and how unbelievably lucky and blessed you are for knowing them. And there will always be those who Don't Get It. I'm totally nobody special, and yet these amazing, wonderful people are my friends and acquaintances. And they can be yours too. You just have to love the creative process enough to gravitate towards them, to want to learn from them, to share your love for the magic they do without being all sycophantic about it.

Being a facilitator, of course, always helps. ;)