a nap.
First of all, I totally screwed up, and forgot to include this as a squishy splash page nominee. My apologies. You can vote for this one even if you’ve voted before.
So, the show opens this evening. Last night, around midnight, I had finished performing it in front of real live people for the first time. Guess what? They liked it.
I was pretty nervous about it. Last time I at least had Eric telling me it was good. This time it was my tech crew seeing my show for the first time. They even laughed in parts and stuff.
Someone wrote to say that I haven’t even mentioned what my one person show is about yet. Well, you could read the very nice Chronicle teaser in the comedy section that J.C. wrote, or you can read the Theatre press release that Ray wrote himself, but I guess I can just tell you that it’s a piece about my struggles with serial monogamy, my celebrity boyfriends, why I don’t date struggling musicians, love, sex, and pop music.
Is that enough of a description?
So, it opens tonight and I’m pretty much freaking out about it, because doing a one person show is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. The last time I was freaked. This time I’m all, “Sophomore Slump! What if it’s not as good as the first one? What if the first one wasn’t even that good but no one had the heart to tell me to just stop?”
I think I had been so nervous about it that I didn’t tell anyone I was doing a show, because I keep having friends ask if I want to hang out this weekend and then they’re all, “You’re doing a show? Where? What show?”
The others thought I was doing the same show from the Aspen auditions. For a few weeks, that was the plan. And then I decided that I had a good space and a chance to play with some technology that you don’t always get in a theatre, and a main stage at a real theatre time (the 11:00 shows have a hard time pulling large audiences) and that I might as well try and bust out something (mostly) new.
So, who knows. I’m just going to do it. It’s teched. There’s nothing left for me to do but show up and do it for the next two weekends.
New Webhead: I might be losing my mind.
Have you ever been in a Starbucks when the Nazi Machine breaks down? It’s terrifying. This morning I was trying to get my Venti Caramel Macchiato when the drink barista just stopped. She just stopped. I don’t know if she was new or hard of hearing, but the cashiers would shout, “Quad Venti Latte!” and she didn’t say anything.
She’s supposed to shout it back. We all know that. She’s supposed to shout it back. We need to hear the shoutback. It means that our order has been heard, and is currently being processed. Our precious life-fuel is only minutes away.
But she didn’t shout back. She just stood there holding a cup. And the rest of us in the increasingly large line just stared at each other wide-eyed and nervous. She needs to shout.
“Huh?” she shouted.
“Quad Venti Latte!”
“Where?”
“Quad Venti Latte!”
“Slow down! I’m still on the last order. What was the last order? What have you been shouting at me?”
This was terrible. There were fifteen of us all standing around the pick-up counter waiting for our drinks and there were seventeen empty cups all lined in a row with Sharpie marks all along the side mocking our lack of caffeine intake. Awful. We started getting the coffee DT’s. We all held hands and took deep breaths. The other two cashier baristas broke the Starbucks code and stopped taking orders to make all of our drinks. We all eventually got our ambrosia, but for three and a half minutes there, we were terrified.
Never let the Starbucks Machine break down. It’s just not pretty.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.