This was a nice little two night run to bring my confidence back. I feel like I’m at home in the Midwest, and I was able to have very strong shows. That’s very good in a way, but in the big scheme of things it really doesn’t mean a whole lot. What does? I wish I knew.
I had a lot of time to think in the car on the way back to Chicago, and that’s always the consequence of working a gig so far away. It’s just as long of a drive home as it is to get there, but it usually feels longer by far because I want to get home. Whatever thrill of the anticipation of a show is long gone, and sometimes those miles can get long and lonely.
Kate Brindle helped keep it interesting for a while, but she got off in Lansing where she left her car to meet me for the ride north. I hadn’t been to Lansing in a while and it hasn’t aged well at all. I lived there in 1990 when I had my first morning radio gig and I thought it was a toilet then. It’s gotten worse, and I’m glad I never got a chance to lay roots there.
I never got a chance to lay roots anywhere. That’s a lot of what percolated around in my brain the rest of the way home. I’ve chased an elusive dream my entire life, and I screwed myself because I didn’t even have a picture of exactly what it was I wanted. I just threw it all to the wind and let it happen however it would. No wonder I didn’t enjoy the results.
If I’d really wanted to be a big time standup comic, I should have zeroed in and focused on that and that only. I should have moved to Los Angeles at some point and stayed there, with maybe some time spent in New York first to make connections. Radio came into the picture unexpectedly, and I wandered down that road instead. That was a stupid mistake.
I’ve made lots of stupid mistakes, mostly because I had nobody around to tell me I was about to make them. I did what I did with the knowledge I had at the time, and sometimes it was just a guess. More often than not things blew up in my face, and then I had to make more decisions to try to get myself out of the mess that had been made. It’s been rough.
That’s why it was important to me to have a chance to record a DVD in front of a group of up and coming comics who had a chance to ask questions to someone who’s done what they’re trying to do. I never had that and I know how valuable it is for those who’d use it.
There’s a guy named Brian Kanner who goes by the stage name of Bubba Muski. He’s a very kind soul who’s putting his own act together but also runs an ‘open forum’ at a place called Pressure Café on Clark Street in Chicago. He calls it that because ‘open mike’ isn’t very sexy, and he’s right. Open mikes can be brutal, and he’s trying to keep things upbeat.
He was the perfect person to approach, and when I did he was very up for it. He got the word out to his crowd, and we had a nice turnout of people to sit around and talk comedy for an hour while my other friend Russ Martin recorded it on his camera. I didn’t pull any punches or sugarcoat anything and I thought it came out very well. The people who came out were very grateful, and hopefully I was able to plant some seeds for future growth.
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