The Element (15 page)

Although she practiced for weeks, when she found herself at the podium she simply froze in terror. She said that her mother had to go up onto the platform and bring her back down to her seat. And yet she went on to become one of the most accomplished comedy actresses of her generation. This was, in part, because she found her tribe.

Following a successful career at school, Meg won a scholarship to New York University to study journalism. She had always loved to write, and her intention was to focus on becoming a writer, something she considered at the time to be her true passion. To help pay for tuition, though, she found work in the occasional commercial. This led to producers choosing her for a regular role in the soap opera
As the World Turns
, and to Meg’s discovery that she loved traveling in this circle.

“I found the world of actors fascinating,” she told me. “I was around hilarious people. The job was like being in this nutty extended family. It was a kick. I was doing sixteen-hour days and I became more and more comfortable with the ‘everyday’ of it. I loved the fact that we were always talking about why someone would do something and examining human behavior. I found I had all these opinions about what my character would or wouldn’t do. I didn’t know where I got them from but I had lots and lots of them. I would say things like, ‘OK, that’s what the subtext is. So why am I speaking my subtext?’ I would find myself rewriting lines and really engaging in the character and their world. Every day we’d get a new script and I had to memorize all these lines. It was absolutely, overwhelmingly engaging. There was no time to think about anything else. It was complete immersion.”

Still, after leaving
As the World Turns
and graduating from college, Meg did not set off immediately for Hollywood. Believing she had more to discover about herself, she spent some time in Europe and even considered joining the Peace Corps. But when a movie offer took her to Los Angeles and she returned to the acting milieu, she found once again that she was in a rare place when doing this work.

“I met up with this really great acting teacher. Her name was Peggy Fury. Peggy started talking to me about the art and craft of acting and what being an artist meant to her. Sean Penn was in the class above me, and Anjelica Houston, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nicolas Cage were there, too. I was surrounded by people who worked from really deep, deep down in themselves and were interested in the human condition and the idea of bringing writing to life. All these things just started to bloom in my mind and in my heart and in my soul. So I stayed in Los Angeles and got an apartment. My agent in New York hooked me up with an L.A. agent, and that’s when it all came together for me.

“Various movies have come along and taught me so many things and helped me grow as a human being. When I decide to do a movie, it may be because I think it’s funny, or I want to work with a particular actor, but in the end, it always has a profound effect on my life. If it’s not the subject matter, it may be a particular group of people. My evolution is served by the different incarnations that are part of every single movie.”

Meg Ryan could have been many things. She has genuine skill as a writer. She has considerable academic talents. She has a wide variety of interests and fascinations. However, when she’s acting, she finds herself with a group of people who see the world the way she does, who allow her to feel her most natural, who affirm her talents, who inspire her, influence her, and drive her to be her best. She is close to her true self when she is among actors, directors, camera and lighting people, and all of the others who populate the film world.

Being a part of this tribe brings her to the Element.

Tribe members can be collaborators or competitors. They can share the same vision or have utterly different ones. They can be of a similar age or from different generations. What connects a tribe is a common commitment to the thing they feel born to do. This can be extraordinarily liberating, especially if you’ve been pursuing your passion alone.

Don Lipski, one of America’s most acclaimed sculptors and public artists, always knew that he had an artistic bent. There were some early signs that he had unusual creative energy. “When I was a child,” he told me, “I was always making things. I didn’t think of myself as a creative person but as someone with nervous energy. I had to be doodling and putting things together. I didn’t think of it as an asset. If anything, it was a peculiarity.” This “nervous energy” made him feel different from other kids, and sometimes uncomfortable. “As a child,” he said, “more than anything else you just want to be like all the other kids. So rather than me seeing my creativity as something special, it seemed to set me apart.”

Through elementary school and into junior high, Lipski was pulled in different directions. He was academically bright but bored by academic work. “Academic work came very easily to me. I would finish assignments very quickly and with the least effort rather than the most depth.” He was gifted in math, and his school moved him into an accelerated math group, but in other respects teachers thought of him as an underachiever because he did just enough to get by. He spent more time drawing on his books than thinking about what to write in them: “When I should have been doing academic work, I was drawing or folding paper. Rather than being encouraged, I was chided for it.”

One teacher strongly encouraged his artistic talents, but Don didn’t take art that seriously. The teacher became so upset with Don that “he literally wouldn’t speak to me.” Shortly afterward, the teacher left, and another art teacher arrived at the school. He brought with him a revelation for Don. “They had a very rudimentary welding setup in the sculpture department, and he taught me how to weld. To me it was like magic that I could actually take pieces of steel and weld them together. It felt like everything I had done before in art was just child’s play. Welding steel and making steel sculptures was like real adult art.”

Discovering welding was like finding the Holy Grail. Still, he wasn’t sure what to make of this fascination. He didn’t think of himself as an artist because he wasn’t good at drawing. He had friends who drew well. While they were drawing, “I was playing with blocks or building things out of my erector set. None of that felt like real art. It was the kids who could draw a horse that looked like a horse that felt like the real artists.”

Even when he began winning school art shows for his sculptures, he never thought about going to an art school. When he graduated from high school, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin as a business major. He subsequently switched his major to economics and then history, but he stayed away from the art department, even though he found little inspiration in any other classes.

In his final year, he bluffed his way into taking two electives, woodworking and ceramics, for which he wasn’t actually qualified. He loved and excelled in both. Most importantly, he felt, almost for the first time, the true exhilaration of working as an artist on his own terms. In the ceramics class, he also found something he’d been missing throughout his college experience: an inspirational teacher. “He was a very romantic and enthusiastic guy. Everything he did was like an artwork. If he was buttering his bread, he was totally into it. He served as a model for me and made me think that I could really make my life by making things.”

For the first time, a career as an artist seemed possible and worthwhile to Lipski. He decided to go to graduate school at the Cranbrook Art Institute in Michigan to study ceramics. Then he hit an obstacle. His parents had encouraged his creative work as long as it was a hobby. When he applied to Cranbrook, his father, a businessman, called him in and tried to drum some economic sense into him. Don agreed; studying ceramics made no practical sense. But it was all he wanted to do. His father looked at Don long and hard, saw that his mind was set, and stood aside. And when Don went to Cranbrook, he discovered a new world of people and possibilities.” I’d had very little exposure to arts students other than in the few courses I had taken,” he said. “Cranbrook is almost completely a graduate school. There were maybe two hundred art students there, and about a hundred and eighty of them were graduate students. So for the first time I was around a big body of people who were very serious, knowledgeable, and committed to making their artwork, and it was fantastic for me. I went to all the critiques, not just in the ceramics department but in the painting department, the sculpture department, the weaving department, and everywhere, just soaking it all up. I spent a lot of time visiting with other students in their studios absorbing what everybody was doing. I started to read the art magazines and go to museums and fully immerse myself in art for the first time.”

At Cranbrook Don found his tribe, and it set him on a different path.

Finding the right tribe can be essential to finding your Element. On the other hand, feeling deep down that you’re with the wrong one is probably a good sign that you should look somewhere else.

Helen Pilcher did just that. She stopped being a scientist and became one of the world’s few science comedians. She fell into it after falling out of science. In fact, falling around has been a theme of her professional life. As she puts it, “I wasn’t pushed into science, rather I stumbled.” After school, she was offered a university place to study psychology and “to drink cider and watch daytime TV.” After university, “a generalized apathy and unwillingness to find a real job” led her to take a one-year master’s degree in neuroscience. At this point, science itself started to get interesting for Helen. “There were big experiments, brain dissections, and ridiculously unflattering safety specs.”

Bitten by the science bug and little else, she stayed on to complete her Ph.D. She learned some useful science, as well as “how to play pool like a diva.” She also learned something else. She enjoyed science, but scientists were not her tribe. In her experience, science, unlike pool, was not played on a level surface. “I learned that seniority in the scientific community is inversely proportional to communication skills, but directly related to the thickness of trouser corduroy.”

She did learn something of her craft too. “I learned how to make forgetful rats remember. I ‘made’ and grafted genetically modified stem cells into the brains of absent-minded rodents, which, shortly after my meddlings, went on to develop the cognitive capacity of a London cabby. But, at the same time, my own attention began to wander.”

Most of all, she found that the world of science as she experienced it was not the utopia of free inquiry that she hoped for. It was a business. “Whilst corporate science pours cash and man-hours into medical research, its downfall is that it’s driven by business plans. Experiments are motivated less by curiosity, and more by money. I felt disappointed and confined. I wanted to communicate science. I wanted to write about science. I wanted out.”

So she formed “a one-woman escape committee and started digging a tunnel.” She enrolled for a diploma in science communication at Birkbeck College in London, and there found “like-minded friends.” She was offered a degree in media fellowship “and spent two wonderful months writing and producing funny science films for Einstein TV.” She plucked up the courage to sell her freelance science writing to anyone who would have it: “I whored my wares to radio, to print, and to the Internet.” Finally, she left the laboratory and went to work for the Royal Society. “My role was to find ways of making science groovy again—not the official job description.”

And then, unexpectedly, she received an e-mail message offering her prime-time stage space at the Cheltenham Science Festival to do stand-up comedy about science. No sooner had she said yes than the panic set in. “Science, as we all know, is serious stuff. Einstein’s theory of relativity does not a one-liner make. I enlisted the help of friend and fellow comedian and writer Timandra Harkness and several pints later, The Comedy Research Project (CRP) was born.”

She went on to join the London comedy circuit, and for the next five years, she “cultured stem cells by day and audiences by night.” The CRP became a live stage show where Timandra and Helen counted down the “Five Best Things in Science Ever.” Members of the audience “find themselves joining in with the formula for nitrous oxide, volunteering to catch a scientist recreating early experiments in flight, and singing along with Elvis about black holes.”

The CRP, she says, aims to prove scientifically the hypothesis that science can be funny. “We are methodologically sound. During each show, a control audience is locked in an identical, adjoining room without comedians. We then assess whether this control audience laughs more or less than the experimental audience who are exposed to jokes about science. Preliminary data gathered from shows around the country looks promising.”

For Helen Pilcher, a life in science has given way to a life of writing and communicating about science. Leaving the lab was scary, she says, “but not as scary as the prospect of staying. My advice, should you be contemplating making that leap, is to make like a lemming and jump.”

When I talk about tribes, I’m really talking about two distinct ideas, both of which are important for anyone who is looking to find their Element. The first is the idea of a “domain” and the second, of a “field.” Domain refers to the sorts of activities and disciplines that people are engaged in—acting, rock music, business, ballet, physics, rap, architecture, poetry, psychology, teaching, hairdressing, couture, comedy, athletics, pool, visual arts, and so on. Field refers to the other people who are engaged in it. The domain that Meg Ryan discovered was acting, particularly soaps. The field was the other actors she worked with who loved acting the way she did, and who fed Meg’s creativity. Later, she moved to another part of the domain, to film acting and within that from comedy to more serious roles. She extended her field as well, especially when she met Peggy Fury and the other actors in her class.