A quick peek backstage

Just before showtime
Las Vegas, NV
November 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

You’re looking at the backstage area area at #InfoTechLive, deep inside The Cosmopolitan in #LasVegas. If you look just so, you'll see a snippet of the stage itself.

As these kind of things go, it isn’t terribly spectacular. Then again, when are waiting areas behind stages considered spectacular? They don’t have to be. Like so many aspects of a large-scale event, they exist to simply get the job done, and that’s a good thing.

That remarkable presentation you can just make out on the stage is made possible by countless people, elements, and resources. Including this seemingly unspectacular space.

Its unspectacular nature, however, IS its appeal. Living in the margins, as I so often do, means focusing on the trivial even when you should probably be focusing on something more important at that particular moment in time.

Don’t get me wrong: In the leadup to my going onstage, I was completely in the zone, locked into what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it, and how my time up there would play out. I had visualized it in my mind so many times that I could almost feel what it would be like to hit the stage and do my thing. And this time, I wasn't going to fall on my way up.

But still, the trivial beckons. And why is that?

Here’s what I think: When the stress-meter is pinned past the limits of the instrument, I often look for ways to defuse it a little, to feel a little less freaked, a bit more normal. It’s an attempted reminder to myself that I’m still me, that no matter how big and loud and bright things are about to get, I’m still that doofus with the pink bike who likes to talk to ducks as he rides past.

Or try to remember what important moments in my never-predictable life feel like. And photos like this, strange as they may seem, accomplish just that.

I could also tell you the story about the next photo I took - of my colleague’s rapidly cooling plate of eggs - but that’ll have to wait for another day. There’s lots of trivial yet to go around.

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