How My Vaudevillian Great-Grandparents Taught Me to Love Shameless Self-Promotion

Hap Hazard

By Melissa Hart

I started writing when social media meant word-of-mouth, an article in the newspaper, or if you were lucky, a minute on the radio to plug your project. Before Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and all the rest, “shameless self-promotion” ranked up there with the F-word. Somehow, readers were supposed to find out about your work without your input. And so, I blushed at the audacity of the poet I met at a writing conference wandering the halls with a wagon full of paperbacks and a t-shirt that read “ASK ME ABOUT MY BOOK!”

My own first memoir, picked up by a small press, came and went without fanfare. I barely publicized it, and the publisher didn’t, either. When a different editor purchased my second memoir, my mother—a veteran public relations manager—stepped in.

She’d learned from the best; my great-grandparents had been comic performers in circus and vaudeville, and their success depended on their ability to promote their act in surprising ways. Mom sat me down at her favorite coffeehouse in Ojai and proceeded to teach me everything they’d taught her.

“Honey,” she began, “You need to get this story out there. Figure out how it’s of use to people, then come up with fun ways to promote it.”

“Of use to people?” I repeated. “How is a memoir of use to people?”

She pointed her omnipresent purple marker at me. “Is your book inspiring, educational, or entertaining?” she asked, and answered for me. “All three. You mention Frito Boats in the second chapter—you could make a mock cooking video with your book strategically placed.”

I cringed. “Too in-your-face,” I groaned.

She pursed her lips. “You want this thing to sell? Then figure out a way to promote it.” Then she intoned my great-grandmother’s favorite line. “And make it a spectacle.”

My great-grandmother, Mary, met my great-grandfather in the early 1900s circus when she was a bareback rider, and he was a wirewalker. They developed a comedy juggling act for vaudeville and U.S.O.. She loved to recount how they flew from theater to theater in a biplane with my great-grandfather’s stage name—Hap Hazard—painted on the wings. When he neared a city, he flipped the plane upside down so people could read his words. . . the ultimate self-promotion.

Hap Hazard and Mary Hart

“Comedy was crucial back then,” my great-grandmother said more than once. Audiences reeling after World War I and struggling during the Great Depression craved entertainment. Even more so after the second World War. Audiences needed what my great-grandparents were selling.

Mary curated their decades of glossy black-and-white headshots, their posters and newspaper reviews. None of this embarrassed her. You had a product, and you figured out a way to get it into people’s hands. If that product was a circus bareback and juggling act, you literally paraded it through the streets of town alongside elephants and acrobats. If you had a vaudeville act, you flew into cities upside down. The idea of spending years perfecting one’s art and then not creating a spectacle, seemed to Mary–and to my mother–ridiculous.

I ended up making the Frito Boat video, channeling my comedic relatives to teach viewers, with mock gravitas, how to cut bags of corn chips along one side and spoon in chili and cheese. The film resonated. Directors of writing conferences saw it and invited me to present. Booksellers asked me visit their stores. I got an agent and another book deal. Mary and my mother were right.

These days, shameless self-promotion is the rule rather than the exception. Even venerable Broadway stars have taken to twerking on TikTok. My great-grandparents would approve. Social media gives us permission to celebrate our creations, to acknowledge our work and our sacrifice. It’s allowed us to give generously of our knowledge.

I’m thinking of Caseen Gaines, author of Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way; he makes TikTok videos about Black history and popular culture. His recent post about two Black psychologists who helped to desegregate schools has—to date—27.5K views.

I’m thinking of queer Dominican American author Claribel Ortega whose forthright, witty social media posts helped turn her into a New York Times bestseller. I’m thinking of the fans who, like vaudeville audiences long ago, help their favorite entertainers succeed with word-of-mouth. My great-grandparents would have put their biplane up on TikTok in a hot minute and reveled in their success because they knew they had a value-adding product.

My mother and my great-grandparents are gone now, up in that happy vaudeville theater in the sky. But I sense their presence every time I launch a piece of writing or teach others to do the same.

Last summer, I taught at a writing conference, and a lovely silver-haired woman raised her hand. “I’ve got a novel coming out next month,” she told me. “I want it to find readers, but I find self-promotion vulgar.”

Melissa Hart

Around the room, other writers nodded in agreement.

Up at the podium, I suggested gently that she reframe her thinking. “Is your book inspiring, educational, or entertaining?” I asked, recalling helium balloons and trolleys and painted biplanes and circus parades. “Figure out how your book adds value to the world,” I told her. “Then come up with a way to promote it.”

“And one more thing,” I added. “Make it a spectacle.”

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Melissa Hart is an Oregonian journalist and the author, most recently, of two middle-grade novels—Daisy Woodworm Changes the World and Avenging the Owl, as well as Better with Books:500 Diverse Novels to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, CNN, Longreads, and numerous other publications. www.melissahart.com and social media @WildMelissaHart .