tinyholidays

When I woke up yesterday morning and looked at what I had prepared for open mic, I felt unsatisfied. It was too rambly, didn’t have enough of the little punches that I tend to use. So, I worked over those three minutes all day. For, like, 5 hours, at least. By the time I needed to catch the bus downtown, I had something totally other from what I had before. And this change-up led to me learning a valuable lesson. More on that in a second.

Got to the club, had a beer, the cool group of dudes from last week showed up. I learned their names. We signed up to perform and sat down. The manager decided to run the show guy-girl-guy-girl, so I got to go up about midway through, since that rotation expires pretty quickly. 

I started my set. Briefly tried to pull the mic out but was a bit afraid of harming the set-up like last week and getting a reputation, so I just leaned timidly into the mic stand, which, you know, is bad. Set set set. Did about 10 seconds of standing there in the middle of it to make people uncomfortable. Then, when it got to the end joke, I completely blanked. I had reached the funniest part, and I had no idea where this was going. So, I wrapped up, ended on a soft laugh, and sat down.

Even after I sat down, it took me, like, a half hour to remember what I had meant to say at the end of that set. Also, I had a headache. 

A couple of the guys in the group killed and did some crowd work, and I was really impressed, since I tend to get stuck in This Is My One Woman Show mode. 

I wasn’t upset about my set, just confused. But I think that I learned something about how my brain works, and that is that I really need to sleep on material. Let those neural pathways soak overnight. It’s okay to make tweaky changes day of, but not the entire set. So, that’s fine.

I’m doing People’s Republic of Koffee on Friday, so I’ll get the chance to do this same set again, with the final punchline this time. Also, the dudes, who need some sort of collective name, were saying that sets at PROK run 5-6 minutes, so I’ll get the opportunity to push together my MaxFunCon stuff and last night’s hobbly broken stuff. And I’m looking forward to trying out a new venue.