A few months ago I was in NYC for a music session in a bar.  I wan’t playing, just meeting a piping colleague for a drink to talk about festival business while the local musicians tore it up with some tunes.  

I had played in this session before and just like the last times the music and energy in the place was sparkling. Everybody in the session seemed like they were giving it all they had in this breathless way, and it always struck me as odd and wonderful how this particular bar had a Celtic jam session that felt like it was right out of a movie.  

At one point somebody in the session recognized me and called me out to play something so I got out the flute and started a tune and pretty soon the place was roaring.  Then the lead guitar player started a song and then, same thing: by the second chorus the whole bar was all in, holding glasses high like we were at a wake for someone we all knew and loved, except we were mostly strangers.

After the session some of the musicians and I went a few doors down to a late-night dive and we stayed there until 4-ish AM with the conversation flowing and a feeling like we were having one of those special nights we remember from being young, except a lot of us were pushing 50 not 20. I noticed this at the time and part of my mind was trying to figure out why the NYC sessions always felt this way, and a night with them felt like one of the best nights of your life.

Then it hit me:

Many if not most of those players had moved to NYC as younger people who had been in school drama programs and worked in or around theater at some point.  A couple of them were still working in the arts at high levels but most were doing other jobs and they had just stayed in New York with their friends.  So the guitar player/singer wasn’t just playing guitar and singing, he was playing the part of a musician in a dark NYC bar. Even if he wasn’t consciously doing it there was some kind of “wax-on-wax-off” instinct him that came into play. Likewise in the dive bar where the conversations never died, there were enough people who had trained in theater improvisation that every sentence led to another building on it. 

It struck me that a good portion of the NYC general public audience at any one time contained people who had some experience acting, and they served as a social cue for everybody else, it’s ok to clap here, it’s ok to call out, and the result was the whole performance felt like we were all having the best time.  

Musicians and Actors don’t always get along, and I’ve never had any experience or desire to do any acting myself, but that night I started to understand how everything in our lives would be better if more kids had acting training.  It’s not so we can have more professional actors.  It’s so a higher percentage of people in the room at any time have training saying “Yes! and here’s how I can build on that…” and more people knew how to pay attention, and knew how to consider how another person would feel, what they would do, and more people would be striking a balance between whats better and what will just work to get us through this scene. Acting is a high form of intelligence as any biologist would tell you, and everything in our world would be better if more people at a young age exercised their ability to take momentary social risks to make everything better and were engaging their imaginations to do so.