For my first trick, I’ll need a volunteer from the audience.
You there! You’ll do. Come up here, now, don’t be shy.
That’s it. Right this way. Let’s give ‘em a hand, folks!
Wonderful, wonderful! Now then, tell the audience all your darkest secrets. Go on, spit ‘em out! I promise we won’t laugh unless they’re funny. But just look at you, you probably have more skeletons in your closet than fuckin’ John Wayne Gacy! This ought to be a riot, eh folks?
Now where do you think you’re going? You can’t just walk off the stage without saying a word. Get back here. Get back here, you little shit. Don’t think you can get away from this. I know everything about you.
I know the way you try to shut your brain off when your hear family fight so you won’t react to them. And oh, I know the morbid thoughts you get when you think about the world’s overpopulation. I know you really don’t care at all when tragedy strikes on the other side of the world. I know the remorse you feel when you explode at someone you care about. I know how you drive your friends away with your selfishness and your completely unwarranted sense of entitlement. I know everything that you’re ashamed of. I know you’re a hypocritical, perverted, lazy, spineless piece of garbage. I know everything.
And best of all, kid?
Best of all,I know that all those people out there… they’re all just like you. Down inside of them, where no one is allowed to enter and nothing is allowed to leave… they see themselves up on this stage. They can hear the unfair and ignorant judgments their friends are making about you, and they will join in, but really, they feel it being echoed into the same hollow, dark part of themselves they ridicule, and it hurts them immeasurably.
Your task now, my friend, is to tell these people not just your secrets, but their secrets. Release them from their cognitive dissonance, break their emotional shells. Tap into their innermost feelings, their absolute truths of self, and speak it back to them so that they might use your words to express their feelings.
You’ll know when it’s over if you won. If you succeeded in reaching their cynical hearts, they will let you know somehow.
Got it? Now tune up your guitar, you’re on in five.
