I spend a lot of time trying to hide something, but I might as well come clean here. I have these slightly creepy, longish fingernails on my right hand. You can uncurl the top lip a little. It’s not like I am lounging on a gilded, wing-backed settee in a robe and grinning while scratching the top of a sleepy Persian cat’s head with three inches of talon. They’re just a little beyond the ends of my fingers. I play the classical guitar and the nails are how you get good sound on nylon strings. Still, it looks weird from the uninformed perspective. In the end, my nail issue sums up an awkward situation for the unknown artist in our society.

See, I have to walk around with these things. Does it kill me? No. I just get tired of constantly having to (or wondering if I should) explain them. At parties, I drink beer and reach for cookies with my left hand. When I am teaching a class, I put my right hand in my pocket (an action that must be limited, as having a hand in one’s pocket for a long time is not exactly a ridicule-proof choice when one is teaching teenagers). Out of context, when I am neither playing nor sitting surrounded by a thousand other guitarists at a David Russell concert, the nails simply look weird.

Andres Segovia, the father of modern classical guitar, looked weird, too, I guess, just sitting on the train as an unknown traveler, but by the time he had become an international star, brazenly sporting a cape and hat that made him look like “The Shadow” and boasting that it was his “destiny” to “save the guitar from Flamenco,” the nails were all part of the Segovian mystique.

But people like me — we don’t get to have a mystique.

A mystique is only available if you’re able to dedicate half your time to your art and the other half of your time to . . .  having a mystique. Like most “normal” people, I have to do loads of mundane stuff, like cleaning birds’ nests out of my dryer’s exhaust port, squirting tick medicine between my squirming dog’s shoulder blades, taking the car for service, driving the kids to practice, shopping for socks, etc. And, I have to hold down a job that involves neither quill nor soundboard, on top of it.

So, “no mystique” equals “no free pass for looking weird”. Because of this, I keep my nails as short as possible without sacrificing tone and I hide them when I can. I loathe having to even think about it, but, damn it all, I love making music so much — it is such a drive — that I am willing to tolerate veering slightly from tradition in a way that might cause some eyebrows to arch. (I even brush the damned things with a strengthener made with myrrh — I kid you not. Ladies, I could give you nail health tips to die for. If you suggested to me, at eighteen, that I would someday curse violently because I “broke a nail” I might have punched you in the lips.)

I have heard people refer to Lady Gaga as “courageous”. Uh, no. In her position, what she does is about as courageous as wearing a hat to a hat party. But what if your sister went out to the clubs in a meat dress like the one Lady “Queen of Metaphor” Gaga wore to the VMAs? Exactly. On the club door of real life, just behind the velvet rope of convention, there hangs sign that says: No mystique, no meat dress.

There are lots of ways to “look weird,” though, and it’s not just about appearance, as you might imagine. Artists “look weird” for the offbeat way they think; because of the seemingly antisocial choices they make; because they have to do things the rest of the kids don’t, and for pouring most of their passion into a calling that much of the world doesn’t give a flying fez about. But the serious artistic “unknowns” have to suffer judgement without a gauzy, glittery scrim of mystique to draw closed in order to put perceptual distance between them and their daily, often critical, audience. Still, they paint, write, sculpt, (manicure) and play on.

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Chris Matarazzo

Chris Matarazzo is a writer, composer, musician and teacher of literature and writing on the college and high school levels. His music can be heard on his recent release, Hats and Rabbits, which is currently available. Chris is also the composer of the score to the off-beat independent film Surrender Dorothy and he performs in the Philadelphia area with the King Richard Band. He's also a relatively prolific novelist, even if no one seems to care yet. His blog, also called Hats and Rabbits, is nice, too, if you get a chance...

Latest posts by Chris Matarazzo (Posts)

• Book Review: An Encyclopedia of Tolkien - October 14, 2019
• The Emperor decrees an end to positive comments about “selfies” - June 16, 2015
• The Emperor decrees that graduation clichés will cease - June 9, 2015
• The Emperor decrees that all official documents will be printed in Comic Sans - March 24, 2015
• The Emperor decrees that the letter “E” shall no longer be spoken as an “A” - February 10, 2015

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