When I had the idea, I couldn’t understand why no one had ever thought of it before, and didn’t take the time to look it up before I acted on it. I just started to get ready to go. I’ve been preparing to live in Manhattan ever since I realized that I could move out of my home town. I nurtured it, then, from a very young age, but hadn’t had the perfect idea until now. My playing was very good, and I do live, breathe, and sleep the electric guitar. I know I’m not alone, because anyone who’s ever been a teenager, or considered it, has something of this in their past. I was also very fast and very loud and I still knew that this wasn’t enough.
In New York, they say, you gotta have a gimmick. And I finally had one. I booked a room in a New York cheap hotel, had my guitar and a good-sized extension chord that I’d dug out of my dad’s garage, an old pair of ice skates, and the main thing, which was a block of ice. My plan was to play on the corner near the hotel, wearing the ice skates and standing on the ice, and when the ice melted, the performance would be over. It was a cool idea, I had thought.
Only there were a few problems. First, I had not booked far enough into the spring, and it was near 34 degrees most of the day, and for ice to melt, it needs sun, and it was dark and windy. It didn’t melt for a very long time, even though I was grinding it and sometimes kicking the ice with my skates. The other big problem, of course, was, as one passer-by noted, “Laurie Anderson has already done that.” I did not realize, until I read about her Duets on Ice, and then realized that I probably read about it somewhere, and stolen the idea. There was one other little issue, and that was the fraying in the extension chord. Ice will melt, and when it does, it might not respond to electricity the way you’d like it to, and small electric shocks were running through my idea-stealing hands.
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