The Generous Ones

This is an impromptu interview conducted with artist Nicole Duennebier last night about what it’s like to consciously do something for someone else with the intent to give them a really strange story to tell other people.

I think it’s common for people to have that urge, but to me the act of recording or disseminating the story outward, online, to people who don’t know the parties involved, is a kind of (forgive me) META-level application of the original activity, whereby the story she and her friends created for this one person becomes a story that you, the reader, now have some degree of unsought participation in, similar to the also-unsolicited participation of the guy who was the story’s original unwitting recipient.

So–

[We're standing on the steps outside Nicole's Portland apartment. The street is dark, making the sole focal point the stairwell of a university dormitory, which is glass-encased and brightly lit. Students are traversing the stairs... it's basically an ant farm. Nicole is watching them over my shoulder and starts to laugh.]

Alana: What?
Nicole: Just, well. [gesturing at the stairwell] Derek and Julianna and I had walked this kid we didn’t know home from a party. This kid whom none of us knew was sitting on those stairs, reading–this was after the Halloween wedding.
Alana: [nods, trying to remember the Halloween wedding, not asking for clarification because it seems non-essential to the story]
Nicole: So Derek was dressed in the Mrs. Potts costume, and he started screaming at the kid. Screaming and screaming at him.
Alana: [giggles and starts mimicking the scene]
Nicole: Right! And dancing. Really lewdly dancing, at this kid who was just sitting there reading in the stairwell by himself.
Alana: So he’s, like, thrusting the tea-spout at this person, and screaming really loudly.
Nicole: Yeah, and I’m wearing this Medusa costume… no, sorry, Ursula. Ursula from The Little Mermaid. I was wearing my Ursula costume and playing the accordion.
Alana: You have an accordion?!
Nicole: A small accordion. A concer–
Alana: [self-consciously unable to repress knowledge of any lesser-encountered word] Concertina!
Nicole: -tina. Yes. I was sitting on the curb making noise with the concertina while Derek danced suggestively in a Mrs. Potts costume at the kid in the stairwell, who had noticed and was looking freaked out.
Alana: Did he know you guys?
Nicole: That’s what made us do it. He didn’t know us but the kid with us vaguely did, and he and his friends were kind of obsessed with their idea of us? They had this concept, like we had some kind of crazy amazing lives and they would all trade stories about the wacky things they saw or imagined us doing.
Alana: So this was really pushing it over the edge for him.
Nicole: Yeah, we decided to give him a really GREAT story about us. ‘The Night I Hung Out With Them’. As if everything they thought about our shenanigans was not only true, but perhaps the tip of the iceberg. As far as the stuff comprising our normal lives went. As if we did this sort of thing all the time and he was just now glimpsing the reality–
Alana: –which was beyond anything he could have imagined.
Nicole: We were thinking about him going back to his friends and saying, “You guys are never gonna believe this. But I just saw what they are really like. They do this all the time.”
Alana: It would fuel an entirely fresh echelon of imaginings regarding how you and your friends, the subject of this other group’s fantasies, actually occupied your everyday free time.
Nicole: Oh! And Julianna and the kid were waving sparklers.
Alana: Oh my god. [Picturing a waifish half-Chinese gay man lasciviously waving the tea-spout on a Mrs. Potts costume between two other costumed people, one of them simply swept up in this happening, waving sparklers, Ursula in the background playing a concertina. Picturing the concertina-sounds as... menacing. Yeah: menacing.]
Nicole: Sparklers. That was the night Becky never forgave her boyfriend for making her go home early.
Alana: [thinking, 'I can barely forgive myself for not inventing a time-traveling device that would enable me to participate in this tremendous event in a stranger's life'.]
Nicole: We don’t know what came of it.
Alana: That was going to be my next question: whether or not any stories trickled back to you.
Nicole: No.
Alana: It’s better that way, though, that’s how it should be when you, when you…
Nicole: …make a memory for someone.