The nature of cringe, and Mambo No. 5

Hello!

It’s been so long. Last time I wrote one of these newsletters I had long ginger hair and a terrible eye for detail. Has anything changed? All I’ll say is, I’ve had a haricut. ;) I hope you aren’t angry at me for taking so long. But I’m a firm believer in rejecting modernity (sending newsletters at regular, scheduled intervals) and embracing tradition (sending newsletters when I can be arsed). 

I’ve been reading a lot more this year because I’m better than you, and it’s made me remember that I really love writing. I always have. Writing was my second love, after Pingu and before attention. But I also find it quite scary, because every time I look back on anything I’ve written in the past (where past = 24h - 24 years ago) I am filled with a cringe that cuts to my very core. 

There’s something unique about the genre of cringe that comes from looking back at your own creativity. If I had to describe it (and to be fair, I don’t) I would say it’s like the opposite of an orgasm. Not the direct opposite. It just feels like it arrests your whole soul and you can’t think about anything else but in a bad way - the shame afterwards is the same though. Shoutout to the family members subscribed to this newsletter btw!

It must be a feeling that anyone who’s ever created anything is familiar with. But it’s not something that’s spoken about or idolized in the same way, even though it’s probably a massively consistent and essential part of being an artist (yes I’m bringing ART INTO THIS). We’re always banging on about the tortured artist, but what about the cringing one? ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. There’s no way Shakespeare didn’t read that back a couple years down the line and think, ‘Bit on the nose actually’.

A dear friend (now there’s a phrase that lets you know we’re in a newsletter!) made the interesting point that if you don’t cringe at things you wrote two years ago then 1) you’re mad, and 2) you haven’t improved. I will send a screenshot of that message back to him in two years and pray he cringes at it. But I think he does have a point...  Maybe men aren’t so thick after all (tbc). Perhaps cringe is a more productive emotion to feel, because you can move forward with cringe. Cringe sees a better future, where your songs/writing/poems aren’t as bad (poems are always bad).

Cringe is built on the belief that you can do better. It would be much more restricting to see your own past work and feel that it was a completely insurmountable task to produce something to top it. And yes, I know it’s hard to believe that I don’t feel seized by that exact emotion when looking back at Dec 9th’s newsletter entitled ‘Cold Finger (dun dun dun)’. 

I think what’s most important is that cringe is a sign that you cared. No one looks back and cringes at things they were emotionally detached from. You can alleviate the pain of a cringe by knowing that you put your heart and soul into it. I guess what I’m saying is...to cringe is to live. And to celebrate this new catchphrase that I’ll be printing on mugs by the end of the week, here is a story about one of the most deeply cringey moments of my life (SO FAR!).

A STORY

In Year 5 my school hosted a talent show. Year 5, for international readers, is when you’re the ripe age of 9, the age where a child has enough enthusiasm for life to participate in a talent show, but not enough experience or skill to have anything that remotely resembles talent. 

Our school also invited residents of the local old people’s home to watch, as if they hadn’t suffered enough already. Unfortunately this was back in 2007, and euthanasia was much more inaccessible than it is now, so the elderly had no choice but to attend our little show. I shouldn’t assume they hated it Maybe they didn’t! Perhaps for them it was a beautiful reminder of the merits of aging.

The talent show was a staple highlight in the Year 5 calendar, alongside other seemingly crucial events that would disappear from our lives after Year 6: the harvest festival, the assembly where the Year 4 teacher Mr Weeks would play Stairway to Heaven on his electric guitar. It was especially important to me, as even at the small age of 9, I was already afflicted with an unfortunate combination of crippling shyness and a deep desire to perform. 

It wasn’t just a talent show, either. It was a competition. Our school was split into 4 ‘houses’, which were essentially teams to compete at Sports Day and talent shows, a practice common across many schools, designed to introduce children to the lifelong British tradition of hating others based on entirely arbitrary differences. Go team!

I wasn’t in the ‘cool’ house. If I was, I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter. I’d be taking drugs at the Groucho Club and wearing leather (I imagine that’s how they choose to let people in?). I can’t remember the names of the houses at my school, and the website reveals nothing, though it does claim that part of the school’s Vision and Ethos is to ‘nurture creativity’. Well, look at me now! (Unrelated sentences). The red house was the cool one. I was stuck in yellow. So close but so far! According to the rainbow, we should’ve been allies at least, being closer in proximity than the other two houses (green and blue). But yellow was largely viewed as the bottom of the pile.

I had big plans for the talent show. Big, but simple. Be the underdog (check), do an incredible performance (tbc), sort out the reputation of the yellow house (tbc) and become the most popular girl at school in the process (tbc). 

I should also clarify, despite being called a ‘talent show’, we were only allowed to sing a song as a group, with potential for a dance accompaniment as well. I assume this was to keep things quick and timetabled, so as not to take up too large a percentage of the pensioners’ last few years on earth with a snotty 10 year old boy stumbling through an underwhelming card trick. I think the name ‘talent show’ is misleading, anyway. Talent shows favor talent in performance. I don’t think, even had the remits of the show been less totalitarian, I would’ve found a captivating way to show off my above average reading age or impressive levels of empathy brewed during my parent’s divorce. 

So we had to, in the groups of our house/year (about 15 kids), perform a song.  For some bizarre reason the teachers allowed us to take full responsibility for the performances: which song we picked, any choreography, rehearsal schedules. I can only assume this was part of the school’s Ethos to Have A Laugh at Children. 

I took charge on behalf of the yellow house. You must understand, I was cripplingly shy, but the yellow house was SO uncool that even I felt comfortable enough to have authority there. So I picked a little known track that I’d heard on one of my mother’s CDs. It had a catchy chorus, an interesting narrative arc and some beautiful themes that were sure to give us plenty to work with. 

So the yellow house set to work learning the words to Lou Bega’s Mambo No 5. We could be a bit loose with them, as we were all allowed to perform with a CD also playing as backing, presumably as hearing a bunch of 9 year olds singing acapella would cause a rupture in the universe that would open the 9th circle of hell. It also fell to me to choreograph the accompanying dance. The other kids weren’t taking things seriously, and were far too busy wasting their lives away kissing each other and having fun. But I knew it wasn’t about fun. It was about drive, power, and not kissing people because I was working hard on our performance and definitely not because no one offered to kiss me [citation needed]. Luckily, I’d recently taught myself the hand parts of the jive from Grease after watching it on DVD every evening for 7 nights in a row because I was entranced by Danny and Sandy - an early symptom of my current bisexual affliction. The hand part of the jive from Grease complemented Mr Bega’s listing of ladies perfectly. This was all coming together rather well.

I made us (me and whichever other losers weren’t privy to the option of other playground activities like football and kissing) rehearse multiple lunchtimes in a row. For some bizarre reason, none of them seemed to care quite as much as me, but I was quietly confident when the Tuesday afternoon show swung around in the calendar. The pensioners limped into their seats, and the rest of the school filed in to watch. The order was randomly chosen and the yellow house was selected to go last. I continued to be quietly confident: ever heard of the phrase ‘save the best til last’?

The blue house and green house went first and second, with performances so uninspired I won’t waste words on them. Then the red house was up. Their CD went into the CD player, and the opening bars of Help by the Beatles filled the hall. A song with overlapping vocals, harmonies and an emotional core. The red house absolutely nailed it. What’s more, they’d added vivid choreography that the rest of us could only dream of, such as crouching to the floor to represent ‘feeling down’, and drawing a circle in the air to symbolize the line ‘I do appreciate you being round’. It was a masterpiece. There’s that creativity the school was so intent on nurturing.

I was furious. Not only had they cheated by picking a song by a band that were famous when the old people were alive, they were also all good singers and dancers. This was going to be a nightmare to top. 

The yellow house were called, and I went over to give Mrs Dunne, the stage manager (she pressed play on the CD player) our CD. It was at that point that I realized a problem: I didn’t have our CD. I turned to the rest of the house to check if anyone had the CD. They didn’t. How dare they! How dare they rely on me for the thing that was explicitly my responsibility because I had demanded it was and that no one try to take it from me!

I ran back to the classroom and checked my bag. Nothing. I must’ve left it at home when I took it back to practise after school. I felt sick in a way I never had before. In fact, the memory of writing this has given me a stress headache and I’ve just had two Panadol. I dragged myself back to the assembly hall and explained what had happened to the rest of my troupe. They were not happy. Though they weren’t hugely angry either - I cannot express enough that I cared about this SO much more than everyone else.

So we did the only thing we could. The yellow house performed an acapella version of Lou Bega’s Mambo No 5, accompanied by the hand bit of the Grease jive, whilst the 9th circle of hell slowly opened. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the misfortune of doing karaoke, but if you have, you may recognise this feeling. It’s a feeling I’ve only experienced doing karaoke and at the Year 5 talent show. And that’s a realization that only dawns on you when it’s too late and you’re already up there, mic in hand. It’s the realisation that, despite having listened to this song many, many, many times, you actually somehow don’t really know the tune, the words, the rhythm or any other features of it that define it as a song. The 9 year olds of Year 5 yellow house were unified in experiencing that. That was, unfortunately, the only thing we were unified in. 

So came three minutes of us stumbling through an approximation of the song. A little bit of Erica in my life, a little bit of Tina...by my side. A little bit of Diana? Jess? RACHEL? LET’S JUST SING WOMEN’S NAMES. We petered out to a stunned silence. There was a smattering of confused applause, pitying smiles, and loud exhale as one of the pensioners unplugged her life support. 

The red house won. Obviously. Even had we been armed with our CD there’s no way we could’ve beaten such sophisticated choreography. I slunk back to the classroom, filled with shame. I guess sometimes the underdog is the underdog for a reason (organizational).  That shame that grew exponentially when I went to my locker to get out my books for the afternoon classes, and nestled amongst my belongings, smirking up at me was Lou Bega’s face on the Mambo No 5 CD. And that is a secret I have kept until this day.

I guess the best way to tie this all together would be for me to look back on that cringey memory, accept it, and prove that I have gotten better by doing a new adult performance of Mambo No 5 where I know the words and the hand and the foot part to the jive because I’m an adult and I’ve improved. But I’m not going to do that because I’m not completely insane. I do, however, look forward to reading this back in a couple of months and cringing deeply at every word. 

Thank you for reading!

Ania

Xxx