By Robert Hudson Westover
The Vast Estate (and me!) are very pleased to announce that
the Lord Westover Twitter account, @lordwestover,
has over 4000 followers, or Lordiacs,
as I like to refer to fans of His Lordship.
So, you may ask, why did I start
the Lord
Westover Find Your Inner Nobility performance art piece?
It all started many, many years
ago when, as a young Trog, I was introduced to a woman who changed my life. She
gave me a gift that has sustained me throughout my life for which I am
eternally grateful. This gift was an awakening of something we all have within
us: our inner nobility.
A high-born Russian countess (for
real), this woman, Olga C Morgan, was uniquely qualified to take a very rough-hewn
character and make him into someone who would lead a productive and useful
life.
It could have so easily gone the
other way (really easily!)
 |
| Unidentified Trog (believed to be this Steven Tyler person) Attempts to congratulate His Lordship upon hearing the news of the growing followers of @lordwestover Twitter Site |
Since Olga’s passing I find
myself constantly drawing on the wisdom she imparted to me to guide decisions,
shape my behavior and most of all, to provide me strength. I now realize this
noble teaching, this framework of higher life ideals, can be used by others to
help them overcome their own life challenges and ignite the spirit of inner
nobility that burns within.
And it can be funny, too!
As an artist, I sought out an
array of ways to bring this noble awareness to others. Then it hit me! Why not
use comedic (that means funny) performance art? What better way to see the
impact on fellow Trogs but to actually witness it! (Of course, Lord Westover is
not a Trog, obviously.)
I started with a Nobility Oath based on Lowell’s Be
Noble quote
and created the character Lord Westover to administer it. I then
recruited others (seriously, I did) to play the roles they most thought brought
out (or didn’t!) their inner nobility.
We “opened” our first “performance”
at the Jon Stewart Rally on the National Mall (that’s Washington, DC, not the
Mall of America.)
The impact went far beyond our
expectations. I named our performance art piece Find Your Inner
Nobility and it received national attention with many wanting to take
the Nobility
Oath!
Later that year I then created a
blog and developed the Ask a Lord column taking “questions”
from both “noble” and “trog” alike. The timing could not have been more
appropriate for shortly thereafter the horrific Tucson shootings of
Congresswoman Giffor, her staff and bystanders, shined a white-hot
spotlight on the growing
incivility taking hold in our national discourse.
That year, the Washington Post
asked readers to submit their one minute “State of the Union” address. Lord
Westover’s speech, addressing incivility, was one of only three to be posted by
the newspaper and by far received the most hits.
Our next installation (of sorts)
was to take the concept of Inner Nobility to a medium most
familiar now to American audiences: the reality show venue. We called it American Monarch
(yes, I know, it congers up so many amazing images!) and created a ten minute
“sizzle real” and a “promotional” trailer.
At the same time both comedic and
profound, I think Find Your Inner Nobility breaks new ground and
goes to the core of why so many of us want to be and do good things (really,
most of us do).
Discovering one’s inner nobility has
very little to do with the bling (well, not entirely) and societal positioning (ok,
maybe not entirely) that Lord Westover possess. It has everything to do with
the intrinsic desire we all have in us to be noble as we best understand what
nobility means to us.
Here’s to four thousand more
Lordiacs!
