I lost this entry already once. Now I will rewrite in shorthand.

I had a bad show last night. Here are the excuses:
* I just moved.
* I was moving during the rehearsals
* Mom called just before the show to tell me she was going into surgery tomorrow because the dog bit her a week and a half ago, snapping a ligament in her finger. Mom’s getting a pin in her finger. Mom always prided herself on never having a broken bone, and now she does. From the dog, who was freaked out because she’s moved and twelve and got scared.

But the real reasons:
* I was unprepared for the show
* I hadn’t run through the second half, and was thinking about that during the first half
* My voice was crappy and I didn’t do a warmup
* Mom’s going into surgery and I hate being so far away from her when she’s got big stuff like this going on.

I don’t perform often enough to have a regular bad show. Back when I was doing comedy shows five times a week, the bad show became something to laugh off and move on from. Bad show at nine? Midnight show will be better. Crappy midnight show? Crowd was probably too drunk to notice anyway. It was the stuff where inside jokes were made.

But I don’t have another one of these shows coming up. It was a one-time thing and I just sucked. I dropped three lines, stepped on another and my voice was horrible during the song. I got the timing right on the second-half fight scene, the thing that was distracting me during the first half, but my job is to supply the props, not actually perform. This means my job as prop mistress was flawless. My job as actor? Not so much.

It makes me feel like a fuck-up. Either I should have admitted I was too busy to do the show and let someone else fill the role, or I should have devoted more time to my lines (which were like, ten. Maybe ten lines. Why wouldn’t they stay in my head?). After the show I cleaned the stage and gathered the props and washed my face with industrial strength soap (it was covered in lipstick and I had forgotten to bring soap). I tried to avoid seeing real people, because then they feel obligated to tell me I did a good job and I know I didn’t, and it’s embarrassing to see people after you know you ate hot ass.

(Those are the sentences that make me suddenly remember that all kinds of people read this webpage, like my mother, relatives of stee’s who sometimes forward them to his mother (hi, nancy!), people I used to work for, people I tried to work for, people who knew me in high school and haven’t told me that they read, friends of mine who don’t tell me that they read, and my sister. And then I say something like “ate hot ass,” which is an actual thing people say when they have a bad show, but you know, most people don’t say that in their daily life.)

Just got an email from Dan that he’s coming to visit. This week! And just like that, the bad show funk is erased.