Talent

Hey Steph!
  So this past week I got to spend time with our amazing little brother. We had a great time and really lived up the local scene while he was here. We went to a local theater production of Urinetown the Musical, a university production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, a comedy club that performs in the manner of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and a Spring Salon at a nearby art museum which gathered art pieces from state artists. I've got one word for it all: talent.

talent: an amorphous quality usually attached to the performing or visual arts in which the possessor performs in a superior fashion; also, any quality which the possessor is especially adept at

I believe there is great fallacy in the way we generally think about talent in our society. When I was a little girl, I used to think that the really skilled people were the ones who got success and were famous for their talents. Only the most amazing singers were played on the radio; it was solely the actors with the broadest range of emotional display that were in the blockbusters; only the true wordsmiths were selling thousands and thousands of books.

The older I get the more I see this just isn't true. Talent is everywhere--and I'm not just talking about middling talent; I'm talking about knock-your-socks-off, standing-ovation talent. I know you and I live our lives by the rule we learned in Music 100: if you stand up for every production you see, you are really not standing up for any of them. We reserve our standing ovations for those performances that truly astound us, so we don't stand that often. But I have to say, I'd give a standing ovation for both Urinetown and the art exhibit I saw. Truly talented work was shown in both of those. (That's not to say that the other performances weren't great as well--just not standing ovation-worthy.)

See, Hollywood, NYC, and Nashville don't have the run on talent. They just have the run on famous-ness (more commonly known as fame). And those two items don't always correlate. There are all types of things that feed in to people being famous that have little to do with talent: attractiveness, connections, and luck. In my humble opinion, some of the performers I saw this week were world-class performers (and many of them were pretty enough to grace the cover of Tiger Beat to boot).

I think we sometimes don't perform because we don't think our talent is to par, but this is just because a misguided view of talent. There isn't just a handful of a couple hundred or thousand that have true talent. I think talent is sprinkled throughout the world to share. And, man, am I grateful for it. I'm so glad that I don't have to view talent only through reproductions of Van Gogh paintings or through the tv screen or through hundred dollar concerts and plays on Broadway. I can be uplifted by talent at my local art museum, my community playhouse, and my neighborhood blog.

So if you have a drive to write, please write. If you have a need to sing, please sing. If you gotta perform, please perform. And I'll be your humble, poor-in-money, but rich-in-gratitude patron.

Cheers,

Amanda Kae


Here's an artist to check out (and watch his other stuff on his YouTube Channel):

Also, if you live in Utah, check out  Alta Hills. They're performing in Provo this weekend!

Who's the artist we should all know about but don't? What friend is quietly rocking the world with their talent but needs a bigger mike? Share! I'd love to check them out.