One of the highlights of my youth was my Spelling Bee career. When you're a pudgy little nerd, you take your competitive events where you can get them, and I was a great speller. In 8th grade I took the Denver written spelling test and I did well enough to qualify for the state test, also in Denver. That memorable day began with the test in a fancy hotel downtown, followed by a lunch banquet for all us little geeks and our parents. After lunch, the top 20 spellers, based on the state written test, were announced, and I was one of them!
They piled us into taxis – my first ever, having grown up in suburbs, where everybody has a car – and sent us to the studios of channel 7, a local TV station that broadcast the final rounds live. I survived for an hour or so under the hot studio lights. What pressure! Then, with 5 people remaining, I met my fate: frontispiece, which I misspelled "fronticepiece". Ding! My fifth-place finish earned me a dictionary, which I still have somewhere.
All my spelling bee memories are happy. There was no cramming, no parental or self-imposed pressure, no worrying. I only wished there had been a professional spelling league in which I could become a star and earn a living. Yes, dreams die hard.
Why did we travel almost 2000 miles to see a total eclipse?
All my life I've loved science fiction movies with amazing special effects. Yesterday I stood on a field with a few hundred people as it gradually got dark in the middle of the day. I watched through heavy sunglasses as the sun became a crescent and then slipped away completely. The temperature dropped 12 degrees in a few minutes. Then I took off the glasses and stared at a giant black hole in the sky. I felt like I was on another planet. The horizons looked like sunset – in every direction. Then, just when the sun had surrendered, it reannounced itself with an explosive "diamond ring" effect that said "Fun's over, folks. Put your glasses back on or you'll regret it!"
Seeing this event with a crowd of people was surreal and awe-inspiring. It made me think about a universe or god that enables an incredible cosmic coincidence where ONLY ON OUR PLANET do the sun and the moon have the same apparent size. The eclipse made me laugh and cry. It was otherworldly and surreal. For 2 minutes I got to be on a different planet! Better than any special effect ever.
I've had an incredibly fortunate career in Silicon Valley. I spent 7 years at Apple in the '80s, a few years at General Magic in the '90s, and more years at Microsoft and Google after that. I'm a writer, not an engineer. I've loved watching, teaching, and describing the incredible work I've been lucky enough to see: Macintosh, HyperCard, Magic Cap, and other marvels.
Over the years I acquired a long list of stories about the amazing, bizarre, fun, and just goofy things I've seen in my work. A few years ago my boss at Google, the legendary Louis Gray, encouraged me to start writing some of these stories in blog posts. That was great! But then, in a shocking development, I discovered stage performance and fell in love with it. And it turns out there's a thing called solo performance, where one person gets on stage and tells stories, creating a narrative, typically for an hour or so.
Could I do that? It sounded hard and really, really fun. When I told stories to people, they seemed interested. So maybe it could work. I started listing my stories and then rewriting them to be delivered live. I found it very hard to rehearse, because I felt foolish without an audience, with no feedback to guide me. But I also realized I had been "rehearsing" all the time, whenever I told stories to a friend at lunch or a poor cornered family member. Eventually I was comfortable enough to do a test run with invited friends. It was terrible. Really bad! I got great feedback on what I needed to change, and I changed it.
I spent a lot of time planning, organizing, rewriting, procrastinating, and dreaming, but not performing. Last year I applied to a new works program at The Marsh, a legendary solo performance venue in San Francisco. They accepted me and I got to perform for 20 minutes several times, and again I learned a lot (and got better). I realized that the only time I really made progress was when I actually performed. So I got over my fears, talked to my friends at Playful People Productions, and scheduled a date in San Jose at the Historic Hoover Theatre. Then I actually invited people to come.
Last Friday night was my first full-length performance. So many dreams came true that night! I told my stories on stage in a theatre, for an hour, in front of a good crowd of people, with sound, lights, projected images, props - a real show. And it felt fantastic! And thanks to my great friend John A. Vink, it was recorded, so you can watch if you want. And if you want to see this or future shows live some day, you can sign up to get on my email list here.
Now I just have to figure out when I'm going to do it again!
There's a long tradition of storytelling and theater in technology companies. You might be surprised to hear this, because a lot of people think of tech as mostly nerds and bros doing nerdy bro things. But tech companies aren't shy about talking of changing the world, making a difference, and so on, in addition to selling widgets or serving up websites. If you think your work is important - and it might well be - then you spend time in your companies telling stories to each other and to the world.
And if you doubt the importance of storytelling by companies to their customers, may I refer you to the latest Apple keynote. This keynote hasn't actually happened yet, but I know it'll be superb theater - sure, they'll be talking about world-class innovative engineering and design, but it's presented on a stage in a master storytelling fashion, complete with drama, humor, pathos, and tension. It's no accident that Apple spent $179 million dollars on its new theater, and then named it after Steve Jobs, the greatest storyteller in tech history.
There are many ways to tell stories: in writing, in small groups, from a stage. These ways further subdivide: you tell a story differently in a blog post than you do in a tweetstorm. There are different techniques for a solo stage show than for telling a story to your friend over coffee. I've become acutely aware of these differences lately. I'm blessed and cursed with a compulsion to tell stories, as my long-suffering friends are all too aware. It's not enough for me to experience something interesting, unusual, or funny - I have to tell other people about it or it feels incomplete.
I'm a writer, so I usually share things by writing them down in my blog, or on Facebook or Twitter. But recently I thought it might be interesting to tell my stories from a stage as a solo show. I've been working on this for awhile, and very soon I'm going to get up onstage at The Marsh in San Francisco and try it out. From a stage, I have to be bigger and bolder than when I'm just "performing" for a few friends. I have to add characters, really live scenes instead of just describing them. Because I've mainly been a writer, this is new for me. It feels uncomfortable and I'm sure I'm doing a million things wrong. But I'm compelled to get up there and tell stories this way. I hope eventually it's entertaining - even if it never changes the world.
A few weeks after visiting the "Steve Jobs" production office, I got to watch some actual filming. The Mac was introduced at Flint Center in Cupertino in 1984. In the movie, Flint Center got to play itself. The place was nicely dressed up for the occasion.
Lots of people were taking pictures of the 1984 banners with their iPhones
The crew needed 2500 people to come sit in the auditorium for hours, and they weren't sure how many would show up. But it turned out that thousands of people stood in long lines to get in, and some had to be turned away because there was no room, just like at the original event.
Thousands of extras were recruited to be the audience in Flint Center
There were actual non-actor security guards at the doors, but they let me in without an argument - much different security than an actual Apple event would have. There were actors dressed in '80s clothes and wearing fake old-fashioned Apple employee badges. I met the guy playing Mac software engineer Steve Capps, who wasn't wearing what Capps would wear.
I ran into Danny Boyle, the director, who I talked to on my first visit. He was very busy, but took a few minutes to chat. He remembered my story about how I was recruited by Steve at NeXT. He said he told Michael Fassbender that story as an example of how Steve never gave up and ended up getting something from me anyway.
An actor I saw backstage asked me if I was Andy Hertzfeld.
As filming began, they shot this scene from act 1 many times, with the actors trying different things each time. I was watching on a giant monitor with some of the crew.
This didn't exactly happen in real life
This was weird. It felt like I was watching actors play people I know in real life - which is exactly what was happening.
Here's a super-blurry photo taken while filming an outdoor scene of Jobs and Woz as they walked and talked, Sorkin style, outside Flint Center under the giant trees.
Jobs and Woz (Fassbender and Rogen)
Master Mac historian Tom Frikker got this wonderful souvenir.
And when I left for the day, I got this parking ticket. Which made me think: WWSJD?
