Wednesday February 15th, 2012 - Eau Claire, WI I know I keep saying I have to stop accepting randomly scattered far away bookings that don’t pay all that well, but when there’s nothing on the calendar for the week and bills are piling up - exceptions get made. I needed to rustle up a few bucks, so back to the trenches tonight for a gig in Eau Claire, WI - almost exactly 350 miles door to door. That’s a haul. At least I got to bring my own opener in Steve Purcell. He lives in Madison, and we like hanging out so that shortens the drive. He’s low maintenance, and doesn’t often complain about anything - on stage or off. Russ Martin was off and also wanted to ride along for an opportunity at some stage time at a paid show. That’s valuable for a beginning performer. The weather was beyond good. It was dad gum almost tropical, or at least it seemed that way as we drove with the window cracked to allow some of the sweetness of the sunshine to permeate the inside of my car. If I had to be on the road, today was the ideal day for it. We worked a venue called ‘Fanny Hill’, a dinner theatre that has run comedy shows for just over a year. I was here before, but I didn’t remember until I walked in the place. They all start running together after a while, and that’s another reason to work closer to home. This was a friendly place with a laid back audience as I remembered it, and tonight was an exact duplicate. They fed us a scrumptious meal as part of our compensation package, and it was unnecessary but much appreciated. I felt a quality vibe coming from the whole situation, and knew I had something to do with how it all came about. It made me proud. I had made it possible for Steve and Russ to get on stage, and that’s very satisfying. We had a blast in the car too - but the real reason I came (besides the money) was to begin the ongoing process of inserting new material. I’ve got a lot of it to work on, and it never gets done overnight. It can’t. It takes focused effort on nights like this to ease it in gradually. It would have been easy enough to just walk through my regular act tonight and nobody would have said a word. In fact, that’s what they were all expecting. Nobody in the crowd had any idea who I was, or what my ’regular’ act was. They’d assumed I’d be competent. And I was. I made them laugh for more than the amount of time I had been scheduled to do it, and I threw in all kinds of new ingredients ranging from entire chunks of material to subtle nuances of how I said bits I’ve been doing for years. This was a scrimmage game. The one bit I was thrilled that worked well was one about my diabetes diagnosis. I want to polish that story up to find the funny in something that normally wouldn’t be listed as a prime source for humor possibilities. It’s a delicate subject, but I can see laughs in there. The audience did too. I wasn’t fishing for sympathy, only looking to educate people that might not know about the dangers of diabetes. I didn’t, and it took me by surprise. It felt a little choppy at first, but I got into it and then they did too. That made it all worth the trip.
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My Father in law died from Diabetes, the person who taught me how to draw caricatures had it (and is dead) and my brother in law is now diagnoses with it. If you can laugh at death you can laugh at anything ... And whatever does not kill you makes you stronger.
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