the performance that you give

There's a 1972 interview -- Dick Cavett with the Rolling Stones.  Cavett asks in a sort of meandering way if they don't get tired, sometimes, with all this touring and playing.  He says, "I mean, the performance that you give -- you must lose 10 pounds a night..." and he keeps talking, in awe and amazement, and sort of goes in a circle of words, & Mick Jagger smiles shyly and says modestly, "Uh -- I've forgot the question."





That phrase -- "the performance that you give" -- stayed in my mind.  Lately it occurs to me often that the only thing people -- humans -- really want to do is give.  They want to give something.  They want to give something to --
the world
their children
their wife, or husband
their boss
their employees
their neighbors
their candidate
their nation.




They want to cook something and bring it to work for their co-workers to enjoy.  They want to pick up something that someone else dropped and hand it to them.  They want to write a song and sing it for the world to enjoy -- or at least anyone who's listening, to enjoy...President Obama wants to offer us affordable health care.  "Back in the day" President Nixon wanted people to be safer from injury in the workplace so he established OSHA.


(I remember listening, in a tiny farming community in 1973, to someone "banging on" [that's British for complaining] about OSHA and how terrible it was.  ["We WANT our fingers to get cut off in the farm machinery, damn-it, dictator-gov-ment telling me what-to-do -- suffa, suffa, schmersarattalator...rahr-rahr-rrrrr" -- {shaking fist at sky}])


They offer us OSHA.
They work hard for our health.


The singers sing, the dancers dance, the guitar players and piano players play, and it's all to give, to offer, to help, to entertain, to lift others.  It's all about giving.


So -- why is there any badness or evil in the world?  There shouldn't be, really.  Logically, everyone should be too busy giving, & preparing things to give.





When you watch "A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy" on DVD, it becomes very clear how much enthusiasm and loving work she and her committee and all their helpers are putting into the project.


And though she's living there while her husband is President, it isn't her house, and she didn't do the restoration project for herself and her family; she did it for her fellow Americans.


And for the world -- she says, "In America, we have such a great civilization, and so many foreigners don't realize it."  ("so many far-ah-nahs don't rell-ize it"...)


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