It all started, as most things did, with a push from my mom. 

About 15 rows of metal folding chairs were lined up in front of the stage, with enough space left for dancing. Three bands were on the bill at The Truman, as I remember it — a Beatles tribute band, a modern-age grunge-type band with a Kurt Cobain lookalike for a singer and a band of five kids who called themselves “Quite Frankly.”

It was the fall of my sophomore year and I was finally going to write my first big feature story for the school newspaper. Carolyn was a junior at the time. She sang in Quite Frankly. 

I heard about “the art of hanging out” as a journalist — the concept that a journalist should take time and be present in order to report on a story properly — and I knew I needed to see the band in action. That and I thought it was pretty sick that she was in a band, so I wanted an excuse to check out a show. 

My best friend, Erika, and I sat on the metal folding chairs as my mom tried in vain to convince us to get up and dance. I nodded my head along with the music Quite Frankly played. Most of the songs were covers — pretty good covers. 

After their set, Quite Frankly’s frontman, Jolson Robert, went outside for a smoke break. That’s when he ran into my mother, Sheryl Lynn. I’ve always admired my mom’s audacity. She could befriend an angry bull in a China shop, convince it to stop breaking things and probably show it all my baby pictures, all in the span of ten minutes. It was easy for her to acquaint herself with Jolson, a charismatic and extroverted musician. She told him about my story for the paper, and he suggested I come back to the green room for an interview with the whole band.

Jolson came inside, shook my hand and led Erika, my mom and me to the green room. It was a small room with a couch, a few chairs and a table. I sat on one of the orange fabric chairs, avoiding some questionable stains, and tried to mentally prepare myself for the impromptu interview. Unlike Jolson and my mom, I was never an extrovert. When I interviewed someone, I always had a list of questions, and I pretty much stuck to it. This time, I felt completely unprepared. I was in that small green room with the whole band, their manager (who doubled as the bassist’s mom), a reporter from local entertainment magazine The Pitch, along with my mom and Erika. If I screwed up and made a fool of myself, there would be plenty of witnesses. 

I started with a sheepish, “Do you mind if I record?” When they all agreed to be on the record, I started recording and set my phone face down on the table. To my relief, once we all started talking, the interview flowed smoothly. It didn’t feel like any other interview I’d done. It felt like sitting around and chatting with a bunch of friends, partially because of the language I’d have to cut out later. 

That experience taught me a couple of important things. Firstly, as someone who always loved music and writing, I felt like I found my niche. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I could go to a rock concert, talk to the musicians, write about the whole experience afterward and get paid (or, in my case, given a good grade) to do it. 

Secondly, as I phrased it that night in a conversation with my mom, “You can just talk to people!” 

This profound realization was life-changing for me both in journalistic pursuits and in my other personal adventures. With this information, I made friends, I networked and I landed myself a gig interviewing local artists on a small radio station in Kansas City. The radio job pushed me to approach several local musicians who I’d admired for months or years. I felt like the geeky teenage version of Riki Rachtman from MTV, with whom I was completely obsessed at the time.

In a full-circle moment, my third radio interview was with Jolson Robert. This time, I contacted him directly. I wanted to follow up and see what he’d been up to in the two years since we last spoke. In my preliminary research, I found that Quite Frankly was, quite frankly, no more. Scout, the bassist, is in a punk rock band called Mopsy, and Jolson started his own group called Jolson and the Fear of Snakes. I went into the interview with a set of questions and expectations. I’d ask about the new projects he was working on to allow him to brag a little, and that would be that. 

We ended up talking for nearly an hour, and I had a great time. I learned that he plays the banjo in addition to guitar and that his aforementioned fear of snakes originated when he lived on a farm an hour outside Kansas City. 

I discovered a lot through journalism. For one thing, “good” stories aren’t hard to find. They’re in every classroom, concert hall and grocery store. 

Humans are more than preconceived notions. When we know someone’s story, we see beyond our own prejudice and understand them as more than the one-dimensional impression we may have of them. I’ll always remember each time a person has told me that something I wrote changed their perspective on someone or something. This drives my passion for storytelling. This drives me to continue on my journalistic path for the rest of my life. 

Interviewing people on the radio or for The Patriot didn’t magically turn me into an extrovert. I’m still scared out of my mind every time I have to go up to someone I’ve never spoken to before. Just a week ago, I had to talk to a teacher, and I stood outside the classroom for longer than I’d like to admit, trying to convince myself that it’s completely normal to ask someone a question. Most of the time, I can only bring myself to do it if a publication is counting on me. 

That’s not the point, though. The point is that I couldn’t have had all these experiences — hanging out with bands or hanging out with Dr. Dain and Mr. Wilkins, which might have been even more rock and roll — unless I threw myself face-first into the proverbial lava pit that is the unknown of human interaction. 

My mom once told me, “Ren, you can do anything. You just have to do it.” She was talking about finishing my homework, but the message stands true in every facet of my life. It’s better to jump into the deep end than to sit around and wonder how the water would feel.