AliceFraser
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Avocado Ripeness and Reviews
🕑 Added 2017-04-04 04:34:09 +0000 UTC I'm in writing jokes for The Project today, before my show tonight and there's some top notch office banter about avocado ripeness happening in the staff kitchen.I was filling my water bottle at the water cooler - revelling in having access to a water cooler after years of assiduously avoiding office life. Mid-bottle-fill, I tuned in to the chat of two excellently scruffed and coiffed production dudes making salad at the counter behind me and talking about their avocado buying tactics.
Most of the time I work on my own, and have no opportunity to eavesdrop on this kind of pleasantly harmless social grease.
One of them buys underripe and plays the waiting game.
I ran out of empty bottle and had to leave before I overflowed, but as I left I heard one of them say "you do your best, but it is what it is".
"It is what it is", is a fantastically meaningless filler phrase that has a particularly fraught place in my heart, and it made me feel a bit like laughing and a bit like crying to hear it in a serious avocado discussion as a mantra for dealing with the essential quantum uncertainty of avocado ripeness.
In the oncology ward with mum, "it is what it is" was a turn of phrase that the Doctors tended to use when they meant, "we don't know what's happening/what's going to happen/whether your mum will die or not". [delete as appropriate]
You find out if you spend much time in hospitals, a lot of Doctors spend a lot of time not knowing what is happening or is going to happen. But part of their job is to be reassuringly omniscient. So instead of saying "we don't know", they'll say, "it is what it is". An incontrovertible definitive statement.
Now into the second week of MICF , with reviews starting to come out, there's the usual discussion among comedians about who has said what about whom, and whether it's accurate, brutal or generous. I've been party to a few happy public posts and a few sad late night private message streams, and while part of me wants to go 'nobody cares', of course we all care what people think about us.
The comedian's curse is to care more while desperately pretending to care less about what people think, like a skydiver who is afraid of death; constantly running into the teeth of our worst fear in the hope that exposure to it will blunt its teeth.
I feel like "it is what it is" is sort of the gold star towards which reviewers aim. The point of a review is to say what a show is (without giving away the show) - so that people can choose how to spend their money in a marginally more informed sort of way; seeing things that will suit their taste.
But the nature of live performance is that people see different things in a show, that audiences are different on different nights and that one man's heart-warming-joke-fest is another man's confusing waste of an hour.
Saying "it is what it is", is fraught. Because sometimes, it isn't.
I don't know what the moral of this little meander is. Something about avocados I guess. Take them with a pinch of salt and some balsamic vinegar? Something like that.
Chiz!
Alice
Comments
When Mum was dying I never heard the phrase "it is what it is". I used it often. And I always remember being in the hospital when Mum had gone to the loo and a tea-lady grasping my hand and saying, "Sometimes it works out." I like avocados just slightly al-dente (is that the right word for a soft fruit?). Random kitchen work chats are best chats - they go all over the place.
