Thursday, June 2, 2011

"ATTITUDE"

She was trying on a hat in Macy's department store.  She had girl friends with her, and was putting on a show to make them laugh.  The sales lady was black and gorgeous and laughed along with them.  "You've got attitude!" she said with just that right drawl.
Having attitude seems a lot like "acting out" although I've never quite put my finger on that theory.  "Acting out" could also describe writers and painters and musicians.  These people put their artistic personalities "out there".  They express what's in their souls and put it out for the world to see.  It seems to me that this would take some guts, to bare your innermost thoughts and feelings and passions and abilities.
If you were to line up the world, and put all the actors and musicians, and comedians, and writers, and dancers off to one side, it might look pretty small. Artists have different bells and whistles than the rest of humanity. 
This group must be growing though.  
Babies have cameras clicking as they come out of the womb.  Look at Facebook, listen to them talk.  Way more "in your face" than their parents were at that age. Look at their photo albums.  They have photo shoots, even dress up for them and pose in wonderful silliness. Teenage boys go to Malls to spend a day posing in various positions and various places in the Mall.  They don't even realize they have a sense of the shot, a perfect sense of silliness.  Artistic silliness.
You can shove a microphone in front of anyone on the street and as if they had been doing this sort of thing all their lives, "I saw it come down over there and then there was a loud explosion".  Take out your camera and the waiter, the girl in the table next to you, and the busboy fight over who will take your picture.
In far off lands, people are yelling and shouting and waving banners and flags and in some cases putting themselves in real danger fighting for a better life.  And all the while they know where the camera is and play to it. 
So, yes, perhaps there are folks that would say we have way too much 'attitude' .  Fair enough. 
I know there is an underside to this.  I know that we often say "He's way too full of himself". 
But in the trade-offs of life, I would respond most often to people with "attitude".
People who when they walk in a room make the others say "who's that?" People who light up a room. People who are larger than life. who say unusual things in unusual ways.  Attitude is not  the worst thing that a person can have.  

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