After sailing along for three weeks, the close of (everybody else's) work week brought us to the realization that the hard work was just beginning.

There's a line from Satre, from Huis Clos (No Exit) that sums it up nicely: Hell is other people. Hell isn't an eternal damnation with singed skin. The Existentialists knew all about this. Dealing with other people--any other people--can be a chore. Remember this, though, when dealing with the difficult: It is up to you to make it work.

I saw a book in the market the other day. The title was something like "Thirty-one Days with Difficult People: Thrive or Die Trying!" or "The Joys of Organic Gardening with Difficult People!" or some other outrageous dare or promise. Whatever it was, the title was certainly optimistic.

This is how I deal with difficult people: I get back-ups. I have to do this because at some point someone will become not just difficult but overly demanding, and I need a replacement. I deal with difficult people all the time and there are people who cannot be replaced, like parents, but there are those whose contribution is far less significant. The food vendor who failed to tell me he had already booked himself into the Arkansas State Fair was replaced. This was not difficult, just annoying.

Difficult is when someone tries to hustle you, or when someone believes that his or her contribution is essential to your project moving forward. It isn’t. Guess what? The public sees only what you present. They only know the is, not the what-might-have-been. The public wouldn’t know that you really wanted to offer them egg rolls sold from a magnificent golden conveyance that was sculpted to look like a dragon. They also wouldn’t know that you fought heroically in the Battle of Bonsai, were gravely wounded in the effort, and then lost the dwarf trees to a crafts fair an hour south that claims to attract half a million visitors.

It is just like this story; you don’t know what I’ve omitted.

I used to work for a man who would get himself so worked up that he’d turn purple. This was amusing until he directed the tirade at you. One day, he keeled over and died. Here lies Garrett, A Difficult Man. He’s probably bleating away at God right now because someone underestimated the amount of liability insurance needed for a chicken processing plant.

We have lost our Mongolian dancer. For some superstitious reason, the Mongolian dancer was important to us. We let our emotions get involved. This is always a stupid mistake. The Mongolian dancer had, by default and the fact that I got a good snap of her at last year’s event, become the face of the festival. She’s on our advertising. We had a verbal agreement that she would return; this agreement was part of the contract we sent out a few weeks ago. We would get ten minutes’ worth of the Mongolian dancer twirling in her red dress (plus some other stuff not involving the Mongolian dancer) in exchange for a nice sum of money.

This afternoon, the person who arranges for the Mongolian dancer said that the Mongolian dancer had two children and was not available. Where were these children last year, when I took her picture by the fountain? Maybe, the person said, a bit more money would convince the Mongolian dancer to change her mind. And while we are on the subject, maybe I should up my coordination fee as well while at the same time informing you that my acts are no way going to stay at your festival for the whole day. No, we are going to show up and leave halfway through.

Last year, this person brought her acts in late. This was the lead-in to the feature story the newspaper wrote about the event. Not what a great event we had or how the Chinese acrobat played to SRO crowds, but how this dance group showed up something like two hours late.

This is not the kind of coverage you want to get. You want them to say that you blew the roof off the joint and that the city will never be the same again. Tourists might come here and rent rooms in the spiffy new downtown hotel. Jobs may be created so that 26.53% of the population is not below the poverty line. We might get more than four flights a day and we might get real airplanes! Wowee! We might be on the map!

The person wasn’t happy to be told that she couldn’t get paid the same thing if half of what she brought wasn’t going to show up. As a solution, she decided to charge more. As if this weren’t diabolical enough, Friday closed with us realizing that half of our dance program was likely to drop out, leading us to the firm conviction that all you really need to bolt down are the headliners. And we have those, sort of. We are still waiting on our headline food, but the headline entertainment is in place.

The rest is just decoration. Difficult decoration, but decoration nonetheless. If we were to substitute a hula dancer for the Mongolian dancer, who’d be any the wiser? So what if the Mongolian dancer is on our poster and in our ads? Did you think that the generic representational images on posters are actually what you are going to see at the show? Think about that next time you look at an ad for the Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circus. That’s not a special elephant on there. It’s not Dumbo. If you have a headliner, you name it and put its picture in the artwork. If not, you pull up a free image—a lion, an elephant, a girl in a red dress—and use it to represent something you figure you’ll get later. It’s not false advertising. It’s a brutal reflection on commerce sprinkled with fairy dust so it magically turns out all right in the end. And you'll never know what you missed so you go home happy with a tired smile on your face and your fingers sticky from eating the delicious red-bean ice cream.

Unless we can't get the red bean and have to substitute green tea ice cream instead.