"How do you know when you've outgrown a container?" featuring Connie Flachs

This episode features Connie Flachs, one of Campfire’s Fellows. Connie provides her answer to the Season 16 question, "How do you know when you've outgrown a container?" A Fellow’s Campfire can best be described as TED without the data, The Moth but interactive, and a sermon but without the religion. You can learn more about Connie Flachs on the Campfire website, https://cmpfr.com/events/connie-flachs/.

The Campfire Fellows go through rigorous training and coaching provided by Campfire Faculty so they can share their wisdom through story for you. Our Fellows are the people next to you at stoplights or walking by on the street. These Fellows apply or are nominated by people like you, who know interesting and introspective people with some wisdom to share. The Fellows go through a unique process with our team to discover a wealth of wisdom inside themselves and then are trained on how to share the origin stories of their wisdom. 

This episode was originally performed in April 2025, produced by Jeff Allen, and recorded live at Work & Leisure.

Please be advised, there are adult themes.

Transcript

Steven Harowitz (0:13):

Hello Internet. I'm Steven Harowitz and I will be your host for this episode of the Campfire Storytelling Podcast, recorded here in St. Louis, Missouri. This podcast shares stories about life and how we live it, as told at our live storytelling events. And the stories you get to listen to are from our Campfire Fellows and they do long form, interactive storytelling all focused around a season question that our audience gets to vote on. That season question is basically the prompt. It is the inspiration for what stories the Fellows go out and discover. So they actually get into this storytelling program without a story in mind, but in it for the discovery. So that’s what makes this podcast and these episodes so fun. 

And while you’re listening, I have an ask. Our Fellows are trying to answer the season question through their stories. And so as you’re listening, maybe when you get to the episode’s end ask yourself, “What would my answer be to this question?” It’s a nice moment for reflection, it’s a nice moment to take a breath. So join us, just as our audiences do at our live events. They actually get to answer the season question. We want the same for you. 

Okay, that’s enough chit chat. Let’s get down to the thing that you’re here to do. Let’s head to the Campfire to listen to Connie’s stories as she answers the season question: “How do you know when you’ve outgrown a container?"

Connie Flachs (1:42):

Hello. Man. Oh, I'm so glad all of you are here. Thanks for being a part of tonight's container. We've got you. We've got the season question on the board that I'm going to speak to. We've also got all these lovely plants, some courtesy of people in the audience. Thank you. The plants are here because they connect to the story in a way that will soon become clear.

Connie Flachs (2:07):

Also, because they help me relax. And because they're excellent metaphors. So let's start with a plant metaphor. The soil I grew up in was a 50/50 blend. I'd say it was 50% your, like, pretty average, white, small town suburban upbringing and then 50% professional dance culture. So both of my parents were professional ballet dancers. I have a picture of them here.

Connie Flachs (2:42):

My mom and dad are both in ballet costumes. My mom is standing on point, my dad supporting her lightly. They're in this, like, grand mansion with a spiral staircase. And my mom is holding me as a tiny little baby. All three of us are smiling. So growing up on the outskirts of professional dance culture meant I observed a lot.

Connie Flachs (3:07):

I spent a lot of time standing at the door of the studio, watching my parents take class. They would jump and turn and stretch. I'd watch them hone their craft, and then I would wait for my moment when the studio was empty at the end and I could run through. I could show off my cartwheel. I could do my backbend.

Connie Flachs (3:30):

Like most little kids, I tended to mimic the adults around me. I have some video evidence of this.

Audience (3:44):

[Audience awws at video playing]

Connie Flachs (3:49):

You can see me in this video. I'm in a blue and red dress and twirling around in the living room. I'm loving the attention of our home video camera and the mimicking didn't stop there. When I was about five, I found a pair of my mom's pointe shoes in her upstairs closet.

Connie Flachs (4:09):

Took them out, slid my little feet into them. They were like boats on my feet. There was plenty of room to grow into that container. And I tried to lace up the ribbons. I don't think I could tie bows at that age. So you can imagine them just like flouncing behind me as I clomped down the stairs to the living room where my parents were.

Connie Flachs (4:32):

So I showed off my moves for my parents. I twirled and tried to balance and they were a very generous audience. They gave me round after round of applause and I loved it. Applause is going to come up a lot in this story, so I'm curious for all of you, what do you think of when you think of applause?

Connie Flachs (4:54):

You can just shout it out. Yeah, go for it. 

Connie Flachs (5:02):

Yeah, okay. It can be really overstimulating. So take care of yourself tonight because there's going to be a lot of it. Yeah. What else do we think of when we think of applause? Golf clap. Good job. Some affirmation. Anyone else? Performance. Performing. Yeah. I was really stuck on the good job. The affirmation, the appreciation.

Connie Flachs (5:30):

I loved that as a five year old. And because it's going to come up so much, we can stand here and talk about it. But I want you to experience it too. Of course, taking care of yourself as needed. So I was going to ask all of you to practice your applause with me. I already heard you doing a pretty good job prior, but you can warm up your hands, shake them out, maybe rub them together.

Connie Flachs (5:54):

Oh, yeah. And when I raise my arm and say applause, you're going to clap until my arm comes down. You ready? Okay. Applause. [applause] Yeah. Okay. You guys are great at this. Awesome. Okay, hold on to it, because it's coming back. I'm going to call you in again later. So, five year old me experienced what you all just did was like, I am so into this.

Connie Flachs (6:24):

I refused to take the pointe shoes off for the rest of the evening. I wore them to dinner, and it wasn't until my mom finally convinced me to go upstairs, go to bed, lay down that she slid those shoes off my feet and revealed a big red blister. It would be my first blister of many from pointe shoes, but not for a little while.

Connie Flachs (6:50):

So remember I told you I had a kind of normal childhood too? So I also, I'd like, joined my softball team, I did choir, I did a little bit of Girl Scouts, and my parents had always been really adamant that they were not going to put me in dance unless I asked. They were like, this is a hard career, doesn't make much money.

Connie Flachs (7:11):

She doesn't need to do that. Eventually, I asked, I'd gone to a summer camp and it was like a singing focused summer camp. But there was one dance class that I was obsessed with, and it was good timing. When I asked because my parents were opening their ballet studio so they could be my ballet teachers, they could take on this challenging dual role of both ballet instructor and parent.

Connie Flachs (7:42):

The thing is, at this point, I was already behind. So most dancers start at age two. They are in pointe shoes by age nine. I was 13 at this point and looking back, I'm grateful for that childhood. I'm grateful that I got this opportunity to experience like joy and play. I think it made it easier to find those things again once I had lost them.

Connie Flachs (8:08):

But at 13 I was like, I have work to do. So my dad took me aside. He was like, “Con, do you want to be good at this?” I was like, yes, of course. At that age I wanted to be good at everything. At this age, I still want to be good at everything sometimes. So he said, “Okay, this is what you have to do. You need to be in class six days a week, ideally taking two classes a day. And I don't want you missing rehearsals on the weekends for silly things like school field trips.”

Connie Flachs (8:45):

Now, my dad's an intense guy. This is reflective of his personality, but it's also reflective of the broader dance culture. I have a quote here from a famous dancer, Rudolf Nureyev. He is known as the best male dancer of his time, and he's talking about taking dance class. And I'm having my fellow Fellow, Sam, read my quotes tonight.

Sam Lander (9:09):

My fellow wife, thank you. “When I miss class for one day, I know it. When I miss class for two days, my teacher knows it. When I miss class for three days, the audience knows it.”

Connie Flachs (9:22):

So you have an idea of the commitment and the dedication that's expected. My ballet container was starting to be created. I was in, I bought it. I remember at, this fair before I started ninth grade. We had a high school fair in our courtyard and there were booths all around, so I like, walked around all the booths. It was like robotics club, and environmental club, choir. And I took them in and then let them down very gently. It's like, oh, I couldn't possibly be in your afterschool club, I'm going to be in ballet class every day after school.

Connie Flachs (10:08):

I was serious about it. I made some time for, like, sleepovers with friends and a little bit of high school theater. But I got more and more dedicated to dance. When I was 16, I spent the summer at a summer program. These summer intensives are really common for pre-professional dancers. You go away for like six weeks and you're studying like 4 to 6 hours a day, taking multiple classes, kind of pretending what it would be like and practicing what it would be like to do this full time as your career.

Connie Flachs (10:45):

That summer, I was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Ballet. You can see a picture of the front entrance of the Pennsylvania Academy of Ballet up here. It's a red door with a decorative wreath. There's a maroon awning and the flower boxes on the front. And this was a special place because this is where I had grown up cartwheeling through.

Connie Flachs (11:08):

This was the studio my parents had trained at before me, and now I was there. I was the one getting to hone my craft. That day I was taking Mr. White's class. Mr. White is our family's ballet patriarch. He trained me. He trained my parents before me, and he trained many other dancers who went on to dance professionally.

Connie Flachs (11:31):

He's like your quintessential old man. It's like white hair, wiry white eyebrows. And then this wry expression on his face, totally flat, wry sense of humor. And he'd watch class. And the only way you could know you were doing a good job is that he would get this, like, twinkle in his eye, this tiny curve of his mouth, and you'd see that glimmer and I'd be like, yes, I nailed that pirouette.

Connie Flachs (11:58):

I saw the glimmer. So I enjoyed trying to get that reaction. And I just finished his class. I went outside, stood on that sidewalk, and chatted with my parents about where we were going to go for dinner. They were in town, too. They were teaching at the summer intensive and they said, Con, before we go to dinner, we want to talk to you.

Connie Flachs (12:20):

We had a conversation with Mr. White and he says your technique is looking really good. Your strong looking, flexible, nice artistry. The thing is, if you really want to do this professionally, you're going to need to lose some weight.

Connie Flachs (12:39):

I don't really remember where the conversation went after that, but I do remember the feeling. There was this drop in my stomach. I had this feeling of, oh, I was letting my parents down. I was letting ballet culture down. I was letting Mr. White down. I was not meeting the expectation. And I looked down at the ground, and there I saw this skinny little tree planted in one of those sidewalk planters, surrounded on all four sides by concrete.

Connie Flachs (13:10):

And in that moment, the tree and I had something in common. We both had our containers established around us. We both knew exactly what we needed to grow into, and now we had to do it.

Connie Flachs (13:27):

I did a pretty good job of pruning myself. I found out how to make my body smaller, how to eat less food. But the thing I didn't know about pruning I would learn later working on a farm, working with fruit trees, is that while you prune in some areas to contain growth, it often promotes growth in others, like you prune a fruit tree to try to get more fruit production.

Connie Flachs (13:50):

So while I was trying to make my body smaller, I started having these horrible episodes of binge eating. I would be eating like everything in sight. It almost felt like a different person was controlling my body. I couldn't stop. And then I'd come back online out of that feeling sick, feeling nauseous, feeling totally ashamed of myself. Like, why was I doing this thing that was so clearly far, far away from my goal of becoming a dancer?

Connie Flachs (14:26):

How come I couldn't control it? Those were painful, but I kept them under wraps enough that they didn't interfere with my audition process. And at age 18, I got my first professional job dancing with Grand Rapids Ballet in Michigan.

Connie Flachs (14:46):

This is a picture of me dancing in a show that I will get to very soon. That first year in the company, kind of like this photo, that first year in the company was magic. I was around other people who loved dance as much as I did. I was doing rep I had always wanted to do. I had grown up hoping that I would do,

Connie Flachs (15:07):

I would work with my colleagues. We'd, like, be in the room together. I lived with my colleagues, and then other colleagues would come over after work and we would sit. And so our pointe shoes and watch ballet videos. It was wonderful. Towards the end of that season, my boss came over to me. I was finishing up class, standing by the bar, and she said, “Connie, make sure you're in shape when you come back from summer layoff.”

Connie Flachs (15:36):
Now, in shape is ballet's favorite euphemism for skinny. And it wasn't paranoid of me to like, think that this is what she meant. In my end of year review towards the end of the year, we had this evaluation and she was like, your technique's looking good. You can work a little on your jumps. And also please try to lose 5 pounds.

Connie Flachs (15:58):

But I was hopeful that she was hinting at something a little bit more. She was hinting at an opportunity coming my way. And sure enough, I came back from summer vacation and there was my name on the cast list under the leading role for Sleeping Beauty. This was a big deal. I was headlining the show. I was only 20.

Connie Flachs (16:21):

It was only my second year in the company, and I was expected to really lead the entire thing. I really wanted this opportunity. I was hard on myself and my boss was hard on me too. The rehearsal process as a whole, it's a little blurry, but a few things really stand out. The first is how special it was to get that ballet lineage, that ballet history and knowledge passed down to me.

Connie Flachs (16:50):

My boss had danced this role as well, Aurora, the leading role, and she was kind of famous for it. So she had a lot of knowledge from like, okay, how you pick your foot up off the floor to what are you thinking about when you're doing this? What's your interpretation? What does it mean? I got to carry that onwards.

Connie Flachs (17:12):

She was also really mean to me, to the point that my partner, who he was a principal dancer, he had danced other leading roles before. He'd been in the company for longer. And he took me aside after one rehearsal and was like, “Connie, she's being really hard on you”. I would finish those rehearsals and go to the dressing room, which was usually empty. The rest of the company had left, and I would lie on the floor on the blue industrial carpet in my sweaty practice tutu and sob.

Connie Flachs (17:53):

The thing is, it was worth it. I was in peak ballet shape. I was fitting my container perfectly. I have a memory during that show week of weighing myself and looking down at the scale, seeing the number being like, I will never let myself go above that number ever again. I also was dancing really well, like better than I ever had before.

Connie Flachs (18:18):

On my opening night when I debuted my role. I hit this flow state.

Connie Flachs (18:26):

I was balancing longer than I ever had before. I was doing triple pirouettes instead of doubles. I was totally in the moment and I got to the end. I took the final bow. I raised my arms and the audience rose to their feet and applauded. [audience applause}

Connie Flachs (18:49):

My dad took me out to dinner after he was there to see the show. My boss gave me an approving nod. And then it was over. We were on to our next rep. A couple of weeks later, I was in class rehearsing and noticed this pain in my foot. I couldn't go from standing flat to rising up on demi pointe.

Connie Flachs (19:19):

An MRI later revealed that I had a stress reaction in my foot, and emotionally, I was also having a stress reaction. I just poured so much of my identity into myself as a dancer and now I was injured. I couldn't do it and I didn't know what to do or even like who I was. A lot of the mornings I would wake up and feel like, oh, I'd rather crawl in a hole than go face the world.

Connie Flachs (19:51):

And I was panicked about my body changing. I was terrified I would grow. I would gain weight. The binges came back with voracity and I did anything I could to control them. I have a memory during this time. I went to the gym in my big boot that's supposed to immobilize my foot, and I'd sit on the stationary bike like pedaling, trying to get in my cardio while reading self-help books titled Women, Food, and God or Food: the Good Girls Drug.

Connie Flachs (20:28):

I knew something was really wrong, but I couldn't talk to the people I was dancing with about it. I was too afraid of the stigma, of the shame, of the judgments, of lazy or unmotivated. I'd made those judgments before I tried to talk to my parents, and they were supportive as they could be. They're like, “Con, you look beautiful. Injuries are hard. We can help you with your diet.” And it didn't quite cut it. And even the first therapist I went to, I told her about the binges and she looked at my still objectively thin body and said, “Meh, I don't really think you have a problem.” I felt totally alone. So I am a millennial. I turned to the internet.

Connie Flachs (21:18):
Yeah, on the internet. I was really surprised to find this community of people who were describing exactly what I was going through.

Connie Flachs (21:28):

There were all these people who were talking about their relationship with food, like feeling obsessed with it, not able to like, think about anything about their body. That out of control feeling, they talked about that. And they had found this kind of solace in something called intuitive eating. Like they ate what they wanted, when they were hungry. It sounded great, but I couldn't mess around with stuff like that.

Connie Flachs (21:55):

I had my job on the line, couldn't let my body change. I also came across some articles written by dancers about their struggles with food and body, but all of them were written by people who had retired like years ago. They were like ten years out of the profession. There was nothing I could find written by someone who was actively dancing.

Connie Flachs (22:18):

Talking about this. Eventually, I found a good therapist. Her name was Laura and she had long, flowy hair and it matched her long, flowy skirts. And she'd greet me at the door. She'd give me a big hug and she'd say, “come on in, sweetheart.”

Connie Flachs (22:44):

With Laura in the container that she created each time I went and saw her, I got to start to explore some different ways of being. Like, what was it like for me to just pursue pleasure instead of having to go through pain to get there? What was it like to rest? Even when I didn't absolutely need it because I was so exhausted, just because I wanted to.

Connie Flachs (23:13):

With Laura's help, I continued dancing. In my eighth season with Grand Rapids Ballet. We had a new boss. There was a lot of new energy here. We were like, okay, he has a vision. He's bringing in new stuff, new people. What will this be like? Towards the beginning of that season I was taking class. We'd just finished our grand allegro, which was like these big jumps at the end of class.

Connie Flachs (23:41):

So my heart was pounding. And someone said, Connie, the artistic director wants to see you upstairs in his office. This did not help my heart rate slow down. No one got called to the artistic director's office in the middle of a season for a good reason. Still, I like, pulled on my leg warmers. I put on my sweater.

Connie Flachs (24:04):

I walked upstairs to his office and he was standing there. He’s like a fairly short man, a little taller than me. It's like awkwardly fiddling with his hands. He said sit down. I sat. And he said, “Connie, I read your article.” Okay, okay. Now, my heart rate could slow down a little bit. He had read an article that I had written for Dance magazine's blog.

Connie Flachs (24:33):

I wrote the article that I was looking for. A dancer actively dancing talking about what it's like to struggle with body image and food. I'd let him know that I had written it. He was new. We were like building our relationship. I didn't want to blindside him. I gave him a sneak peek and now he had read it.

Connie Flachs (24:55):

Maybe he was going to tell me how wonderful my writing was, how great the article was. So he continued, “I read your article. It was really powerful stuff. However, we think it could reflect badly on the company. I'm going to ask you not to publish it.”

Connie Flachs (25:14):

Again, I felt that drop in my stomach that I wasn't meeting the expectation. I did something wrong. I could feel the walls of the room almost narrowing in on me. And then I felt this new energy too. This, like tingling outwards energy. Anger. How dare he told me not to publish this? This is such an issue in the dance world.

Connie Flachs (25:42): 

And he thinks that by not talking about it, it's just going to go away. But I composed myself, tucked my feelings back in and like a good ballerina, I said, “okay, I won't publish it.” I walked back down the stairs, back to ballet class, feeling myself pushing against the edges of this container and thinking, maybe this isn't even the container I want to be in anymore.

Connie Flachs (26:13):

But I couldn't think about that for too long because we had to do Nutcracker. Nutcracker happens every single year for dancers, especially ballet dancers. It's like the big moneymaker for the company. It's so dependable, I had a colleague who had a t shirt, and on the t shirt, it said Death, Taxes, Nutcracker. So at this point in my career, I had danced practically every leading role. Actually, in practically every female role in Nutcracker.

Connie Flachs (26:48):

The final season was no different. I was dancing sugar plum, Spanish Arabian, snow flowers and marzipan. And a quick ballet nerd rant moment about marzipan. Everybody hates dancing marzipan. It's this pretty ballet piece and pointe shoes and tutus. And it comes after Russian. And if you've ever seen Nutcracker, Russian is the one where all the men are, like, flipping in the air or doing these fancy tricks.

Connie Flachs (27:17):

The audience is giving them a standing ovation. And then I come on. But I had a soft spot for marzipan. I have two pictures on the screen. The one on the bottom right is me dancing marzipan at age 17 or so with the Pennsylvania Academy of Ballet. I'm in a pink tutu with other dancers. There's like a whimsical candy backdrop in the back.

Connie Flachs (27:43):

And then the top photo is me with two other dancers in blue tutus. I'm on the far left. The applause emojis are over me.

Connie Flachs (27:55):

And we're caught, like, midpoint step. I had danced marzipan every single year since I started doing Nutcracker. I just somehow always got cast in that role. So this year was no different. We did our run of shows. We got to our final show where I was performing marzipan. I went on, I performed, and then came the finale. Now, Nutcracker finale is like my favorite thing to dance.

Connie Flachs (28:26):

There's this swell of music, and then everybody rushes on stage. So I'm running on stage with all of my colleagues catching their eye. We're smiling at each other. We're swaying back and forth. We sashay down downstage and we raise our arms and the audience applause. [audience applause]

Connie Flachs (28:49):

I stood there in that applause and I knew in my gut that this was going to be my last Nutcracker with the company. That was a painful thing to know. It's really hard to stop dancing. And I could talk about it a lot. I could say a lot about it, but there's a quote that captures it pretty well from a woman named Martha Graham, a famous dancer and choreographer who had her own company in New York City. I'll pass it off to Sam.

Sam Lander (29:22):

“A dancer dies twice. Once when they stop dancing. And this first death is more painful.”

Connie Flachs (29:33):

Yeah, I didn't quite feel like I was dying, but I felt like I was going through the worst breakup I had ever experienced.

Connie Flachs (29:44):

I was also, in some ways, grateful. I was grateful to know that I was stopping. I was grateful that I got to choose, that I was stopping because it let me stand there with my arms raised taking in the applause at the end of Nutcracker and be totally present. I could feel the stage lights on my face. I could feel the reverberations of the applause around me. I could burn that memory into my brain.

Connie Flachs (30:18):

I went home for our Christmas break, and I told my mom that I was going to retire. She had one question for me. She said, “are you sure?” And when I nodded. She said she was happy to support me in whatever I wanted to do next. My dad came to Michigan. He helped me pack up all of my stuff.

Connie Flachs (30:43):

He drove us all the way down to Tennessee, where he helped me unload my car and the moving van. My dad, remember I told you he's intense. He was badly in need of hip surgery at this point. So he had this terrible limp, and he was holding my arm chair, limping it into the house. And I watched him and realized that I had thought that his intensity was always predicated on me being a professional dancer.

Connie Flachs (31:16):

But watching him carry that armchair into my house, I realized that he was just as stubborn about supporting me and whatever else I wanted to do.

Connie Flachs (31:27):

That move to Tennessee was so that I could do AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps is like the stateside version of Peace Corps. You get placed with a different organization and you help them with their mission. So I was focused on issues of food justice and food insecurity. And my second year in AmeriCorps I was working at Beardsley Community Farm. My favorite container on that farm was the greenhouse.

Connie Flachs (31:55):

It was this amazing sanctuary. I have a video of me in the greenhouse.

Connie Flachs (32:04):

You can see the little baby plants on pallets in the foreground. It's like a tall greenhouse, and I emerge dancing in the background.

Connie Flachs (32:16):

I loved it because you could go inside and be warm when it was cold. It was COVID time, so you could go in to escape from the anxiety of COVID swirling around outside. And I spent a lot of time in there with those little baby plants, feeling a sort of kinship. We had both grown up in this highly structured, regimented environment, and we both benefited from it.

Connie Flachs (32:42):

Growing up in professional ballet, it gave me this awesome, unique entry into adulthood. It let me pursue my passion as my career. It let me prioritize creativity. I made some amazing friends. But neither me nor the plants could stay in that greenhouse forever. For the plants, we took them out as they were outgrowing their containers, and we planted them around the farm where they flourished and grew and started to fruit by the time summer came around. 

Connie Flachs (33:18):

Summer was also when we held our Beardsley Farm Garden Party Art Gala. You'll see on the screen there's a promo pic for this Garden Party Art Gala. It's me and my colleagues we’re on colorful benches in front of a barn, and we're trying to promote this immersive experience to our community. So local artists came to the farm.

Connie Flachs (33:41):

They showed their work all around. We lined up an open mic lineup and I decided to choreograph. I decided to make a piece. I spent some time looking for my partner. I wanted it to be a duet. And eventually I found a suitable partner. Although he was a little bit stiff. It was our farm scarecrow. The Scarecrow and I performed on a stage underneath a redbud tree.

Connie Flachs (43:10):

It was a bench under this big, beautiful redbud. And I was wearing an old dress. I was barefoot, and I stepped onto that stage and saw my audience in a semi-circle around me. It was this mash up of Knoxville hipsters, my coworkers, the community members, and then my really good friends. I'd made these incredible friends in my time in Tennessee, and they were like a healing relationship for me.

Connie Flachs (34:42):

They could have cared less about my appearance. I was covered in dirt most of the time that I knew them, and they were just great, great people to be around. So I started my dance, and there's a way that I can view this and view it as a total demotion. Like just two years prior I was performing in front of an audience of 2000 people, with stage lights and professional costumes and all this production value.

Connie Flachs (35:14):

And now here I was, barefoot in the dirt on a farm. There's one more quote that captures this feeling really well for me. It's by Jonathan Gold. He is a famous food critic. He was the first person to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for writing about food, and as a boy, he practiced cello. He really wanted to be a professional cellist.

Connie Flachs (35:42):

So this quote is him at the end of his career, near the end of his life looking back on it. 

Sam Lander (35:52):

“When I wake up in the morning, I don't feel like a semi successful writer. I feel like a failed cellist.”

Connie Flachs (36:02):

Yeah. I don't feel like a failed dancer. But I do often have the feeling that nothing I do will ever be as magical as being a professional ballerina.

Connie Flachs (36:18):

However, that day on the farm, I was just having fun. I finished my two minute dance with the Scarecrow, most of which was me trying to get the Scarecrow's attention. And I took the scarecrow's hand, raised our arms, and my audience applauded. [audience applause] Okay, okay. You guys have been so good at this that I want you to have some of this experience, too.

Connie Flachs (36:42):

I want you to get some applause. So we're going to take just 30seconds and I'm going to ask you to think of something that you are proud of yourself for over the course of the past week. It can be big. It can be like I got engaged or it can be, I got out of bed this morning and I put shoes on. Like whole spectrum works. So take your 30s and I'll call you back.

Connie Flachs (37:29):

Okay. Seeing lots of eyes on me, which I'm assuming means you're ready. So I'm going to ask, we have time for about three people to share, I'm going to ask for three people to share their thing that they're proud of. And the rest of us will give you a big round of applause for it. So if you feel up for sharing, you can raise your hand and Campfire staff will come over to you with a microphone and you can say the thing you're proud of into your microphone.

Connie Flachs (37:58):

It looks like we have our first person over here. 

Audience Member (38:03):

I wrote and performed a play over the course of four weeks for a community college class. 

Connie Flachs (38:11):

Yeah, applause! [audience applause] Awesome. Awesome. No small feat. Could I get someone from this side of the room? I see a hand.

Audience Member (36:27):

I found out about a grant application this morning, and I filled it out and submitted it already. [audience applause]

Connie Flachs (38:40):

Those are hard to come by. Glad you could find one. All right. We've got time for one more person. 

Audience Member (38:52):

I built a couple of chairs, and I sit in it with Connie's mom, and we watched some plants grow in the garden. We did. [audience applause]

Connie Flachs (39:08):

Thanks, dad, for tying in the plants.

Connie Flachs (39:19):

Amazing. So we're going to do one last round of applause, because I know it's hard to share in front of a group this big, but all of you sat there and thought of something you were proud of. So I'm going to come down for this one with you and let's together just give everyone one big round of applause. [audience applause]

Connie Flachs (39:45):

My hope is after that, but you have just a small taste of what I was feeling on the farm that day in front of my new community, taking in the applause. For me, that was the moment I knew I had outgrown my container. I thought I needed the container, thought I needed it for my parents approval, thought I needed it to do something meaningful.

Connie Flachs (40;09):

But I needed it to be proud of myself. Maybe for a while I had, but I didn't need it anymore. My answer to the season question “how do you know when you've outgrown a container?” is that it just doesn't fit anymore. Which, duh. Simple answer, but there's no way to really know that until you've gone through it and you're outside of it.

Connie Flachs (40:36):

My friend Sarah ran out of the crowd. Her baseball cap was tipped sideways, her face really, really excited. And there's a photo on the screen of me and my friend Sarah. We’re proudly holding up garlic that we braided, each wearing our Beardsley Community Farm shirts. So Sarah grabbed my hand. She was like, “Connie, that was amazing. Also, there's ice cream in the barn.”

Connie Flachs (41:03):

So she dragged me to the barn. I followed after her happily, and we scooped our ice cream, and we took it out to the garden to sit amongst the plants that had outgrown their containers. And I sat there chatting with Sarah, really aware of how spontaneous this moment was, how joyful it was, how playful. And I sat and ate my ice cream and wondered what I would grow into next.

Connie Flachs (41:33):

Thank you.

Steven Harowitz (41:47):

Hey, that is a wrap. Make sure you’re notified when our next episodes hit the airwaves by subscribing to the Campfire Storytelling Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And, if you liked what you heard, please leave a review. It helps other people find us and that supports our storytellers and that’s pretty neat. We’d love to have you come out to an event or even to take a class. Visit cmpfr.com for all the details. 

Steven Harowitz (42:17):

A neat little factoid that I get to share is that our live events and all of these episodes are all ad and sponsor free. We can only do that because of the folks who take the public classes and the organizational clients, you know those nonprofits, universities, foundations that we get to work with. So if you or an organization you work with or for are interested in learning about storytelling and how it can be a positive impact on their team and their work, please tell them to reach out. They can also visit cmpfr.com for all the details. I can’t end an episode without saying a huge thank you to the Campfire team, to everyone who attends the live events, and most importantly to our storytellers. Thank you for listening to the Campfire Storytelling Podcast. I’ve been your host, Steven Harowitz. And hey, until next time.