I just found out a few minutes ago that when Stefani Germanotti was in college, and already performing at places like piano bars, a very small group of classmates created a Facebook page dedicated to the title proposition, “Stefani Germanotta, you will never be famous.”
Screen captures exist, but I am not going to share them.
The group never had more than twelve members, but while it was up the postings included snaps of her in performance with a disbelieving, “Who the hell does she think she is?”, and memorably, a proud photo of one of her distributed fliers, defaced with bootprints and then placed back on the bulletin board it had come from.
Stefani Germanotta would come to be known as Lady Gaga.
And here’s the goddamned thing that’s most fucked-up about this.
No matter how commendable a human being you are, you just thought some variation of, “Wow! They messed with the wrong person!”
The wrong person.
As if this would have been better had retrospect revealed her to have been a mildly talented singer who never would catch all the breaks, destined to give up on trying to make a go of it, and ultimately found working as dental hygienist.
Folks, I do not occupy the tier in fiction that Lady Gaga does in music.(Maybe two people at a time do.) But I also had people who delighted in predicting failure, and not because I was an unpolished, uneven talent whose approach to some pretty glaring limitations was to defy them. Indeed, those voices were pretty much split down the middle between people who had read my work in class or elsewhere and had the raw data on hand, and those who knew I wanted to write and thought it hilarious to throw mud on my ambitions. I heard it, over the years, from any number of people who came across that information who would only be seen in close proximity with a book if one bloody fell on them.
It’s a sick human thing, to predict failure and to do it with relish. And in the years that follow, the cruel idiocy of that behavior is only remembered when the target becomes a J.K. Rowling or a Lady Gaga; not when one goes on to a less grandiose destiny like selling a few short stories to small press magazines, or sighing with fondness at the memory of the days when you used to sing for tips, in smoky clubs.
I promise you, the mockers are ahead on points. Most teen girls who wanna be singers, and are mocked by peers who snot, “Who the hell does she think he is?” don’t become Lady Gaga. Most people who write in coffee shops do not become J.K. Rowling. That kind of thing cannot happen to many people.
“They messed with the wrong person” is absolutely the wrong lesson, here.
The lesson should be that if you find out somebody you know has anything at all special going on, you’re a piece of crap if your response is anything but, “Wow! Good for her!”
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