**I found this in my drafts just now, and I can't believe I never posted it. Feel free to read it, and then read my thoughts on it at the end.**
"And, that's my time. Thanks, guys. You've been a great audience. Sincerely."
I twisted the microphone back into it's holder. The audience still clapping. It was a lazy clap though, like they felt they had to do it. I've been in those audiences, been the person who just did not want to keep being there.
This has been my fear for so long, I don't even know how to quantify it. I mean, I suppose I could say for the last 27 years. Or, I could say for the past 7, or I could say, for as long as I knew what stand up was — imagining all the while that talking is difficult. Talking in front of strangers is difficult. Talking. Difficult. Frozen.
BUT. That's not how it is at all. Man, if only I knew. There was one time about two years ago now where I was at a birthday for a friend, well, the birthday of a friend's boyfriend and we were all comedy people, doing improv in Chicago for the last four years, whataever, some standups, some writers, some actors, all jokesters. Anyway, there was a microphone you could use to roast the birthday boy.
I've always been a rather funny person, I guess. I make people laugh in conversation and tend to be opinionated about things that have no bearing on anything. I hold fast to my ideals even if it means that I stick with the wrong thing because I thought it was something else and then I realized I was wrong but don't want to admit it.
Basically. I am a one woman show wherever I go.
Stand up just makes it such that no one can interrupt me when I'm going on my verbal expeditions. Taking a crowd of people with me on my journey from learning how to play a guitar, numb fingers and all to why firemen have the easiest job on the planet.
If people do interrupt me, there's a special name for them (heckler) and they get thrown out! If only this happened in my real life when people are being real dicks.
**It would be nice if people would stop interrupting my verbal expeditions. What a great phrase, Bridge. But in all seriousness -- I think why I didn't publish this is perhaps I had the fear that I then would be accountable to becoming a standup, and not just a standup, but a good standup, a female standup, always held to a different higher standard, because god forbid, we have a female Dane Cook.
I chalk it up to this feeling: if I missed a mic I couldn't call myself a standup anymore. Some arbitrary rule I made myself follow. Throughout my life, and I'm sure most of us do this, I've had nearly one-billion irrational fears. Because I grew up competitive, and have a brother who one could say was a natural athlete, it escaped me that practice was necessary for most everyone. And the truth was, my brother was given a ball when he was a baby, so he'd actually been practicing his whole life, so scratch that, practice as necessary for everyone. My brother just never lost interest in his thing. And, what happens to most of us, I'm learning, is we lose interest in that first thing. It happens in improv all the time. You could say most people's lives are rather rough improv shows, that we trudge through hoping somehow it will all tie together, everything will make sense in the end because we remembered our suggestion.
We remembered, "Ball," and we can trick ourselves into thinking we were going to get back there all the time. That there is some invisible hand guiding us home, and maybe there is. I like to think so.
My goal at the present moment is to not just cut myself some slack with my purpose in being alive, but to remind myself I'm just making all of this up as I go along. I've never done this before. I've never done today before. Have you? How can I possibly know what I don't know? And when I strike gold, when I have those little victories that makeup a life, when I remember something I did learn, and I then put it into practice, that's a gift, it's not the rule.
We're just doing a bad improv show most of the time, and it's fine. We just made it up. Just do as much as you can with what you have, and it's pretty tough to regret those choices. It's sort of nice to think of life this way.
That said, I don't do standup, but I should again because it was fun, and man, some of my Twitter jokes get a lot of favs. I see you, favs. Thanks!**
No comments:
Post a Comment