When I was in my 20s, my friend Heather told me she thought I was a shadow artist.
I’d never heard the term before. It comes from the book The Artist’s Way. It describes someone who builds a life around artists instead of becoming one themselves.
Heather was a stand up comic. Young, redheaded, and effortlessly creative. I knew her from my job as a server at Acme Comedy Club in Minneapolis. My favorite job, and a very formative one. It was my life, cozied up after a short shift with my fellow servers and a collective of local and visiting comics, drinking and laughing and feeling like I belonged for maybe the first time in my adult life.
Before that? I was a cocktail waitress at The Red Carpet during college. It was a popular music venue in St. Cloud. I loved it. It was a little seedy and glamorous and cool. I started smoking with the staff. After the bar closed, we sat around the bar drinking for free, sometimes until the sun rose.
It was a brand new world for me. I remember someone told me that they wanted to buy a shot for the bassist. They wanted me to deliver it to him on stage. Embarrassed, I had to ask someone which one was the bassist. Turns out it’s the guy with the longest guitar neck.
While I was working at Acme, I started a 20 year career at Barnes & Noble, where I managed stores and sold millions of books.
I loved being around creative people. I admired them. I read about them. I cheered them on. I just couldn’t quite imagine that I might be one of them.
But Heather was right. She saw that I had more to serve than drinks and plastic bags full of books.
| Me in 2007, in peak shadow artist form, proudly hyping a different Heather’s book at Barnes & Noble. I’m in the blue cardigan. The author Heather is holding her pug Walter. I was such a committed shadow artist that I had not one but two Heather artist friends. Both redheads. |
I bought a copy of The Artist’s Way, which I still own. I picked up and put down the habit of Morning Pages – scrawling three pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts first thing in the morning, before my shift at the bookstore.
The author Julia Cameron also recommended weekly Artist Dates – gathering up yourself and your creativity and going for a spin in the world. It was meant to inspire your creative inner child – a phrase that most certainly made me roll my eyes. Besides, I certainly wasn’t an artist.
Nothing stuck until I was in my mid thirties.
I was halfway through my Barnes & Noble career. Single. Living in Uptown, Minneapolis. I went to the YWCA and would gaze out the big windows onto Hennepin Avenue while I hopped up and down on the elliptical machine, going nowhere fast.
Bobby Bead was across the street, a funky store for jewelry makers.
I don’t know if I’ve ever told anybody this, but I was terrified to walk across the street to Bobby Bead. I was intimidated by a bead store.
In one of my bookstore eras, one of my booksellers was a younger woman who made jewelry and gave it away to her coworkers. I thought she was cool and brave. Making jewelry felt like something other people did. Not me.
Later, my neighbor had a friend who designed beautiful charm bracelets with semiprecious stones. I bought one. I think it cost $90. Like a sixth of my monthly rent.
I loved it and looked up the healing properties of the stones on a new-fangled thing called the Internet. It had labradorite and chalcedony, stones that promised courage and transformation, or intuition, or confidence. I don’t remember exactly. I just remember desperately wanting whatever they were selling.
One day, I left my Saturn Ion in the parking lot of the Y after my workout. I darted through the traffic across Hennepin Avenue.
And I walked into Bobby Bead.
Sending love and cheering you on,
Kelley
