Nothing is as stuck as it seems
Transcript of this video:
Elizabeth Gilbert tells the story of a young American guy, in her book Big Magic, who sells everything he owns to move to France and wander from village to town to village doing occasional work as a waiter.
And one day he falls in with a bunch of French aristocrats who take a bit of a shine to him and invite him to their fancy dress ball a few days away.
He spends the intervening days putting together a really brilliant and inventive costume and arrives at the chateau one rainy night and as he enters realises that there’s a theme for this ball which he either hasn’t heard or was lost in translation and the theme is: the pre-revolutionary French court – so imagine the fancy dresses and fancily buttoned waistcoats.
Only he has come as a giant red lobster with big foam legs and arms and antennae coming out of his head.
In his shock he continues to move into the room and you can imagine the scene as the crowd parts before him in amazement and he’s stuck there until a man comes up to him and says, “Mon Dieu, who are you?”
And he finds himself replying, “I am the court lobster.”
At which point, the astonishment of the crowd turns to joyous celebration.
He becomes the life and soul of the party, has a wonderful evening of revelry, and ends up dancing with a woman dressed as the Queen of France.
And it’s a reminder that in any apparently very stuck social situation, there’s always the possibility of a creative breakthrough.
Photo by Anton Ahlberg on Unsplash
