Guest Blogger: Amy Scheide

One of my amazing eGroup ladies, Amy Scheide, allowed me to post this here. She sent this to our whole eGroup on The City as an illustration of how captivating we can be when we cease to strive. Amy is studying French and Theatre at UNCC and has been called to start her own Shakespeare performance company called Books and Daggers Shakespeare company. You can find more information about Amy and her adventures at http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/Books-Daggers-Shakespeare-Company/168601379826294.

A Brief Treatise on Dean Martin and Not Striving

This week I started researching Frank Sinatra’s “Rat Pack” (Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, et al) to see what it was about them that CAPTIVATED audiences for years.

I realized that being a captivating woman is not unlike being a captivating performer. A captivating woman gives generously of herself, shining in her gifts and letting Jesus cover her weaknesses—there is an effortlessness about her, and that is her allure. A captivating performer, similarly, gives of himself or herself to the fullest, hones his or her talents to excellence, and experiences the present moment effortlessly.

The thing that made Dean Martin truly cool is what I mentioned tonight during group— all he had to do was show up, sing, and support the guest performers. (For those of you unfamiliar with his show, Dean Martin signed a contract that he would not have to attend any rehearsals. So when he showed up to film the day the show aired, he would have no idea what he was doing next— he followed cue cards and was quite often just as surprised as the audience.) The singing was easy for him because he was so gifted in that area. Supporting the guest performers may not have been “easy,” but because he was so generous, he was good at it. Anything that surprised him, he just rolled with. He didn’t control things, panic, overcompensate, shut down, or try too hard to make the act “work”. If you watch any of his performances (which were aired on national television for nearly a decade), you will never see him STRIVE. And it’s amazing. I think we can learn from that…. So in case you’re curious or you would like to be entertained, here are a few clips:

This first clip is Dean Martin & Victor Borge. Borge was a musical comedian, and remember— Dean didn’t know he would be working with him until they began taping that night’s show. This clip is the first and ONLY take they did of this routine, and even though Dean Martin had the giggles and could barely keep up, it was BRILLIANT because you can’t sense a struggle— he’s just enjoying himself up there, and in turn his audience got to have fun, too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiGgnpUrP98

This last clip is Martin & Sinatra. You can really see in this one that these guys didn’t worry about what they were doing. Most likely there was no rehearsal involved before they started singing—only cue cards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR48pc93oWY

Captivating an audience and being a captivating woman seems like an odd comparison to make, but it really is something to think about. Imagine how the people around us would be at ease, imagine how people around us would open up, imagine how many people around us could be smiling if we could all stop STRIVING.

If Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra could be that confident in their own singing abilities, why can’t we be that confident in the perfect grace Jesus gave us to share?

I will pray this week that in spite of the busyness, the worries, the pressure, and the stress, that we girls [and guys] will JUST SHOW UP AND SING, and trust Jesus for the rest!