Andrew J. Lederer

and, after a terrific noon show and an effective anthology, it was a disaster.

got back to berlin from the green room huffing and puffing, covered with sweat with only 3 minutes to spare. there was a massive crowd waiting for me -- andrew roper was beaming supportively and had set up the room to accommodate the clamoring mass.

only thing was, it wasn't really set up well for me.

i'd found i did best in the room if i left it informal and unset-up; people, even a large crowd, would naturally form kind of a circle around me (or something similar) and it facilitated the storytelling style of the show.

but this set-up, while it would have been fine for joke-oriented stand-up (where what you're saying is important, rather than how you say it) was not going to work. people were far-flung and i had to connect, so knew it was going to be a tough haul.

normally in this run, i've been explaining at the outset that i'm going to tell a story and that if anyone was expecting something more jokey and didn't want to sit through a monologue, i would not be offended if they decided to move on. but with a big crowd like this, it would have been bizarre to do that -- to greet a room filled with people by basically saying, "i'm not gonna do what you came for, so get out."

so -- ambivalently -- i plowed forward, wondering what would happen.

i toyed with doing my less serious thing, but even that -- improvisational and personal in style -- was not easy to accomplish with the crowd split into different sections of the room.

therefore -- going for broke -- i started the monologue but, unfortunately, with their ears tuned to joke frequency, the crowd was not picking up on the quiet humor in my piece.

and i don't want to make anyone miserable, so i basically stopped the show. i told the audience i'd probably made a mistake in trying to tell my story, which i could tell seemed dry and boring to them, but that i felt shifting back to a lighter tone would not work at this point, so if they wanted me to simply stop, i would do so.

i said if they wanted me to continue, i would go on and if only some of them wanted me to go on, i would continue the story for them. and a lot of people left, after which i moved the remainder into one area and continued.

they seemed genuinely interested and we all felt a lot better, but i changed the order of the story elements to juice things up and that left the remainder of the story bereft of necessary climaxes and interest turned to tolerance which turned to impatience, which marked the show a failure.

it was, i guess, my fault. i probably should have reorganized the crowd and implemented all necessary explanations and disclaimers.

then again, it's become a tradition that my last show, no matter how well the run has gone, is a poor one.

but, of course, that was not really my last show. i have one more "anthology07" tomorrow.