Sometimes at the open stage I start streaming performers on Instagram Live. It feels like a small gesture of goodwill, a way of tossing something into the river, letting it drift out to strangers who might be curious enough to come next month. But last night, twice, people asked me to shut it off and delete what I’d started recording. I didn’t argue. I turned it off, deleted it. No problem. I understand the impulse to control, I have it myself. In the early days I hated seeing any recording device pointed at me onstage. I asked someone to stop one time in Dawson City. It turned out they had vision impairment and the device wasn’t a recorder but something that helped them see better. I had just finished trying to humiliate them from the stage for being so bold with what I though was a video camera. One of my all time best memories of feeling stupid. Gradually, re: recording, I realized it wasn’t about liking it or not liking – it was about seeing that I can’t stop it, can’t control it. That’s the world now: everyone carries a camera in their pocket, a recorder in their hand. The Tranzac itself has surveillance cameras running in the very room those two people asked me to stop; the TTC records you picking your nose on the subway. This is the water we swim in.

I comply when someone asks. I’m not interested in being the jerk who won’t. But I can’t help thinking those performers, if they keep performing, will spend their lives frustrated if they expect audiences to obey. Even Dave Chappelle, in the multi-millionaire realm of locked pouches and threats for filming, only adds to the lure. “Do not record” makes the recording more valuable. Some part of the world doesn’t just ignore rules, it’s wired to break them, sometimes for the thrill alone. I’m not saying any of this is right or wrong. I’m only describing how things proceed. The law says cross at the light, do not murder. A certain number of people will cross wherever they like and, tragically, sometimes do worse. Life rolls on with its own currents. Paddle or drift, but we don’t control the river.