"Make a Face in Your Mashed Potatoes"

Kurt Vonnegut gave this advice to a group of high school students on how to live their best lives:

The Quote

"Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or how badly, not to get any fame and money, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of [your teacher], and give it to her.

Dance home after school, and sing in the shower, on and on.

Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula.

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope [your teacher] will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever.

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow."

Abigail spots Gloria in the Magic Garden

I do love this letter. It gets at something essential about art.

Art begins with play.

And curiosity. It’s the impulse to make something just because you feel like it.

Kids understand this instinctively. Adults slowly train themselves out of it.

And that’s why “Make a face in your mashed potatoes” feels profound.