The Great Performer.

A theatrical stage embodies the fear that every single person keeps deep inside them.
It's common for an actor to get butterflies before a production opens. Standing backstage, watching as the curtain rises and the audience quietens, your heart leaps to your throat, your mind becomes blank, if you don't force yourself to move, you'll freeze to the spot. The pressure is all on you, then the spotlight flicks on.
What was the first line? Forget that.. what's the damned play about?

Somehow, as you stride forward, the character you are trying to present envelopes you, each step brings confidence, each breath brings you closer to centre stage.
Then suddenly you click, and for the next two hours you're a different person. The words come flooding back, the lump in your throat dissolves, your head clears. It's all about engaging the audience. It's about thrilling, exciting and taking them somewhere else for a short while. It's about entertaining them. Your reasons for doing it are meaningless now. The audience doesn't care why you're there, they care about what your character is doing there. They care about what the character is going to do next.
What defines someone as a great performer is if they never let their mask slip. If their character is so believable that the audience never even sees the person beneath, only the character before them.

What holds people back from putting up that mask is fear. It's the fear of failure, real and inescapable under the glow of the spotlight, and the only way to make sure that you don't let disaster become reality is to trust that you know what you're doing. Trust that you've read those lines, walked these steps, hundreds of times already. And trust that when those lights come up, you're ready to leap into the fray, and leave yourself behind, to let the character take control.

It was this same fear that I felt when I opened the paper this morning.
I looked down at the page before me, and realised, we failed.

Now comes our great performance. Now we'll find out if we can fix the mess we made.

Revisit what you've already found, and help me.

Fortune cookie.

I opened a fortune cookie recently, which told me in plain red text: "We make our own fortunes, yet we say it's fate".
Now, I'm not one to call fortune cookies into question, many who know me know I'm hardly the kind of person who complains to a chocolate company about the misformed M&M I found to get freebies, yet I disagree with whichever fellow wrote this thing for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, if it had said: "We make our own choices, yet we say it's fate", it would have been more feasible. I mean, I suppose the credibility of these things can be called into question especially when the last one I got said "Tomorrow you won't even remember", and I did, but 'choices' implies that we intentionally created a path that we followed, and therefore ended up at our fate, whereas 'fortune' is defined as something we have no control over. We cannot make fortune, unless we have control of some kind of... fortune-creating... machine, but that's a different story.
Secondly, even if this was indeed the message the man was supposed to forecast, he's wrong anyway, because a tautology of 'fate' is itself 'fortune' and so the sentance becomes redundant.
Finally, if you're going to make a fortune for someone, you had better make it a good one, because chances are, some people are superstitious folk who will believe something if it speaks to them. (See, 'Weird crap that has happened to me this year' on sale soon!) Saying 'you're going to see a car' isn't a good fortune. It's an obvious deduction. As obvious as the fact that Oprah was touched up on the cover of Vanity Fair, or the clue I'm about to leave for you now;

Clue

Jimzip :D

One hundred.

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