Andrew J. Lederer

For all the whining about life-choices, this has, I suspect, been (though I hope it will be superseded) the best year of my life. Late last year I threw myself to the winds and the winds have blown me onto pretty satisfying ground.

The "Anthology" shows are drawing interest, I'm not entirely penniless and I'm not entirely alone. These are good (and different) things.

I wish good things for all of you as well

Stick with me. I'm not promising but it could be interesting.

Happy New Year and Lots of Love,
Andrew

Even as I waxed effusive about normal people yesterday, I knew I was being in some sense disingenuous, though the representation of my thought process was authentic.

Truth is, it was made abundantly clear to me that the happy normals I spent time with in Wales had made decisions that placed them on the opposite side of the compromise scale from where I sit but, still, they are on that scale. They wanted artistic lives of risk and excitement (like my package of vagabond whimsy) but decided that too much comfort could be lost by taking those rides.

Thus, they probably sit awake wondering about the lives they could have had, just as I wonder about the domestic seductions they represent. But that doesn't mean the compromise scales are balanced when our notions are weighed against each other.

That my opposite numbers have regrets does not mean my choices are as good as theirs.

My week in Wales was spent largely among (read no condescension into this) "normal" people. Extraordinary normal people -- artists, dancers, amateur film historians, living in a "real" place with real relationships, doing real things.

But even though life there was nicer than a life spent as (at best) a marginal figure in comedy, I still can't seriously entertain the thought of living in a world which, to me, has always seemed sort of fake, there to flesh out the "authentic" world of places like New York and London in the same way extras and bit players flesh out the world of a film.

What would life be like, I wonder, if I were a humbler person; if I could somehow be happy with a relatively simple existence, which would, ironically enough, be less simple in terms of day-to-day options than the cash-constrained ambitiousness of the life I live today?

After deciding to spend an extra day in Wales, where things have been so damn nice (emotionally, I mean; the weather has sucked), I began to enter too much territory -- too much me for the people I'm staying with, too much talking during movies for me. (I tried to join in as a coping mechanism and got chastised for my talking.)


Uh-oh. I was just given coffee and affection, necessitating a change in the tone of this post and bringing into sharp relief the subjective nature of these things.


Everything is beautiful. We're going to a bizarrely-spelled Welsh place on the bus. Last night's dream, in which my happy dancing was followed by my mother telling me that I was embarrassing her by smelling bad (I think it was due to unwashed clothes and simply rolling out of bed and into the dance party), has been nearly forgotten.

I have been craving normalcy.

Am I getting it? Do I want it? Can I take it?

For a variety of reasons, not all of them narcissistic, I decided to make last year's primary Edinburgh show a chronicle of the previous year in my oh-so-fascinating existence. I didn't know how the year would turn out, only that I was increasingly fucked; in a drugless, alcohol-less, nevertheless downward spiral.

As the months passed, I monitored my days, getting excited if something else seemed poised to go wrong. (Better for the show, I thought.) I assumed that, to benefit my story arc, I'd be forced live life in ways I'd previously avoided, taking emotional risks for the good of the show I'd have been unlikely to take without it.

Of course, this meant that, before August, I would have to fall in love. Imagine my frustration as May became June which gave birth to July with no love interest in sight.


Because no one would love me, I had an inferior show.


Now, damn the luck, there are events transpiring that, while more than pleasant, would have better served my comedy if they'd happened earlier in the year.

And for Christmas-related reasons, I'm not doing the Anthology show tomorrow, which means I don't have anywhere to talk to strangers about it.

I’m looking out the window at a Welsh valley.

I don’t feel beaten as one typically does when ogling a valley. (Winner – Non-Sequitur of the Year, 2007) But I do feel outside time as it relates to ambition.

I want to be in love. I want money. I want a career.

In reality, I have nothing.

Sleeping in borrowed spaces on two continents, warmly advising others with more capably-navigated lives than mine; conjuring spectacular notions and ripping songs from solvent friends’ CD collections.

This is not a life..

But . . .

I feel great. Everything seems possible.

Maybe it’s because the world is closed for the holiday and when it starts up again, I’ll feel out-of-step once more.

Maybe there’s someone who’s made my life better and I’m not as out-of-step as I like to think I am.

Maybe . . .

some "hoodies" (not actually wearing hoodies as far as I can remember) were starting a fracas, supposedly in the name of "East Africa", and Elise suddenly became a crime-fighting hero, telling the bus driver to wait while she ran to the nearest police station (with me panting behind, semi-cluelessly) to get help. A slow-moving, seemingly groggy, lone police officer at the Kentish Town station seemed fairly uninterested and when we got back to where we'd been the bus was gone.

Fortunately, another one came right away and we quickly got on, followed, of course, by the very thugs we had reported. (They'd apparently been ejected from the previous bus, enabling that bus's driver to abandon us to danger and move on.)

Well, Elise leapt to her feet once again, alerting the new bus driver to the danger posed by these villains from our previous carriage and he stood his ground against them, laughing as one told him he could easily be shot and killed.

Then today, barely recovered from her heroism, Elise straightened out my spine, making me, she says, considerably taller and causing my belly to sound less like a drum when pounded on.

She is a true American hero. (British-variety.)

And I have not let my end of the friendship flag, manfully downloading illegally-available episodes of "House" for us to watch, a habit I will maintain until the writers are fairly compensated for web runs of their work (and beyond). Her inspiration will continue to move me into new arenas of indolence and chicanery.

I salute her.

Again at The Ship.

Haven't said anything here yet about the show we did two weeks ago, so I thought I'd post excerpts of what I said about it in some things I sent out to promote the next one:

"last time, scott capurro told us about his suspenseful hiv test and potential sources, deborah frances-white told us about the son of a wwII japanese soldier who came to australia to find an australian soldier who had been kind to his dad during the war, terry saunders told us about locking himself in his own toilet and i told about being laughed at by Tiny Tim."

"they were a good audience but i'm not sure they didn't feel in some way betrayed by the nature of the show even as they enjoyed it. it seems there's an unspoken compact between promoter and audience "guaranteeing" certain rhythms and styles.

interestingly however, the most comedy-savvy in the room -- a couple who venture in from outside london every friday to see comedy, often at jongleurs or monkey business -- were the most unabashedly delighted."

I guess I hope those snippets make you wanna see one of these things. Next show will be holiday themed and feature Sarah Bennetto and Ewen Macintosh among others.

Stay tuned for more details.

but not the type usually associated with "the festive season".

Monday, I went to a "do" celebrating the conclusion of several weeks of actual broadcasting by the now (re-)relegated to the internet, Radio Peckham (known far and wide for the jingle proclaiming them "the mighty, mighty, mighty 101.4") and the highlight of the affair was a kid who manhandled pretty much every one of the sandwiches on offer, presumably looking for the best one.

I wouldn't eat those sandwiches afterward, but he handled them with a delicacy that suggested he thought he was being polite. The kid would (in effect) do things with his right hand that were relatively low-impact, while his left hand sent piles of mayonnaisy debris flying toward all corners.

But I was pretty sure I hadn't seen him do much damage to the Jamaican-style chicken, so I opted for more of that and ended up smelling of sulphur for the next few days., a fragrance which likely suggested the arrival of an emissary from Hell at today's party -- the funeral for Earl Okin's mother. (She would have been 95 on Tuesday had she not died on Sunday.)

What a fascinating group -- Earl's 94-year-old ex-landlord was there (he owned a clothing shop on Portobello Road during the post-WWII era) plus Jews of all ages, who reminded me of the New York variety and made it eminently clear that our ethnic lifestyle predates our arrival in our current nations.

Sadly, the otherwise happy experience was marred when I spilled hot coffee, barely missing a sweet octogenarian named Bunny (just after I told her I'd suffered from a disease that robbed me of my taste buds). Perhaps I was shaken up by the hasty disappearance of the lox from the bagels on display.

At any rate, it must have seemed in character to people who first saw me when I entered the funeral late, the door slamming behind me as I conspicuously walked back and forth from my pew, trying to make certain I had the right prayer book.

Then came the lengthy ringing of my cell phone.

I don't know. I think these are the wrong kind of parties.

Doesn't anyone throw Christmas parties anymore?

about a BIG project that could make a BIG difference in my life and the lives of others. It was requested that I dress appropriately.

BUT --

If I spent the money I needed to on dry cleaning and shoes, I'd have been completely broke.

SO --

I didn't pick up my dry cleaning and bought the cheapest pair of sneakers I could find, their only advantage being that they were not falling apart like the previous (otherwise identical) ones. I found a crumpled sports jacket in my dirty laundry and draped it over my arm so that it looked like I had been wearing a nice jacket but for some reason had taken it off.

My shirt was unironed but freshly laundered and, fortunately, stretched out by my fat. I put those white, plastic things in my collar and wore jeans in respectable black.

Since I don't have an overcoat, I wore t-shirts under my fat-stretched shirt to keep myself warm. One of them was a pocket-t.

Just before the meeting, I noticed a lump on the left side of my chest -- a ball in the pocket of the t which had once been bread but which had been turned into dough by the washing machine.

I guess some days before I had wanted to throw the bread away but was not near a garbage can, so I shoved it into my shirt pocket 'til I found one. Now, I was beside an important associate with a ball of dough in my hand and -- still -- no place to throw it out. (I'm still not sure how I got rid of it.)

My posture was off, my shirt was too tight, my jeans were too low, I felt freakishly fat and unattractive and I was crammed, one of four, into a tiny, ancient elevator.

I think the meeting went well.

attending (as I generally do) Elise’s cavalcade of newish acts. But there’s big-deal stuff goin’ on tonight and I don’t feel like a big deal here.

My old friend Freddy Asparagus used to say you gotta make anyplace you are the place to be. But I haven’t mastered that skill (which, at least partially, is simply feeling that’s the case).

I feel left out; marginalized. Not the big fish/small pond-type, I’d rather be negligible but still at ”the thing”.

On the bright side, there are leftover Christmas crackers from an earlier party and I am wearing a paper crown.

means I won't be comped for tonight's show? (He did go online to send an event update after I sent him my request.)

Oh, well. Peter Grahame said I could come see Rich Hall and Omid Djalili. (And, um, Ivor Dembina.) But I guess I'm not goin' there either.

Elise's show is tonight and I suspect my presence will be appreciated (not to mention, expected).

I guess I'm not as central a figure on the comedy scene as I like to think maybe I am or can, kind-of, be perceived to be.

On the other hand, Elise is bringing me chocolate Chanukah money, so who needs that other stuff?

a guy did a story about sucking a cock for the first time, having gotten drunk and not fully remembered that he wasn't gay. (A true-life adventure, apparently.)

Someone asked if he was, in fact, gay and he replied that he would have said no but for the small matter of his having sucked that cock.. So, I brought up the old joke about how you lay a few bricks, nobody calls you a mason, you tell a kid some facts, nobody calls you a teacher, but suck one cock . . . Unfortunately, he couldn't hear me and thought I was offering him a second cock. (What would have happened if I was drunk?)

Later, Elise went on, which is why I was around, and was, I think, nervous but the audience responded to her warmly. I'd like to see her perform frequently enough to not care what happens when she's on stage; she was very relaxed on Radio Peckham today and she really is a natural.

When all you need is to relax, I think you're in pretty good shape.

Saw the big electric menorah in Trafalgar Square tonight and it seems England has developed greater sensitivity to her Jews in just a couple nights. (The correct number of lights were lit instead of all of them was the case the other night.)

I do like it here.

It's not a bad place to be a Jew.

I was gonna walk the few minutes from Camberwell Green to Elise's place in Peckham -- after all, it saves me 90p. But there was a #12 bus alongside me and I figured I had to take it, seeing as how it's a bendy bus which you can board from the rear; one, therefore, on which you don't have to pay.

Sure, I thought for a second that I might get caught but who was to catch me? The bus started moving and I was home free.

Except for the fact that it was going in the wrong direction.

So, I got off -- farther from Elise's than where I had begun -- and discovered there had been, I don't know, maybe eighteen (maybe more) police officers and Transport for London employees directly across from where I'd cadged my ride, who'd apparently implemented some sort of sting, numbing and killing passengers who had done what I had done, only a few feet away.

Wow, I really dodged a bullet.

So, I happily walked the next couple blocks but -- suddenly -- there was a bus beside me again, this time for sure in the right direction.

I got on in the back.

I didn't pay.

Nobody paid. (The system is designed to make you feel like a schmuck if you do pay.)

Elise texted me to see when I would arrive but my presence provided the answer -- I was there within moments.

as I wrote yesterday, that Saturday's post was probably one post over the line as far as brief, perfunctory, trivial entries were concerned. And the following comment confirmed my sense of the trend:

"is there anyway that you could stop writing these appallingly bad blogs. at least the other writers have the decency not to write every single day, and when they do, they are funny."

On the other hand, I also got this confused but enthusiastic comment on MySpace (where the blog is mirrored):

"WTF???

LOL"

Truth is, how bad can a post be that has the following sentence?:

"And the freneticism of the tussle between her embrace of primitive superstition and my rejection of this naturo-mystic implement has suddenly ended. Elise is curled up in a corner of her futon, silently staring."

It's the kind of sentence that can show us all the way. Perhaps I will follow it wherever it leads, even to the ends of the Earth.

Turns out it's hard to write something cogent while simultaneously laughing at someone and delighting in their humiliation.

But, believe it or don't (and I know you might disbelieve, though experience says my analytical aim is true), the primary culprit in said post's ineffectiveness was one sentence: "She was holding it over my head so it will leave me empty and despairing just as it left her that way." Its inartfulness changed the featherlight offering from a tiny blurp of life into something cloddish, which I knew as soon as I read it back.

But the entry was already posted.

Now, a more stable person would have unposted or edited the thing, but as I've written before, I feel that once you put something up, it should not be changed as, once someone out there has read it, it's like lying about your talent to make what other people read something better -- and even more of a lie to remove the piece and pretend it wasn't there.

So, I'm stuck with a black mark on my permanent record card.

Then again, as an expression of my fallibility, which you guys out there might have been unaware of, the incompetent writing shows that I'm human, just like you. Perhaps it will bond us and be the start of a new, mutually-forgiving relationship.

As an illustration of the kind of forgiveness I'm talking about, I forgive the woman who called Friday and said she was bringing 15 people to "Anthology" but didn't.

. . . No. I don't forgive her.

That's what my friend Elise may be creating by running water on the life-depleting crystal a charlatan healer gave her long ago.

She's transfixed by it; can't take her eyes of it even as it destroys her. She's babbling. Seems to think it's clearer now.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

She was holding it over my head so it will leave me empty and despairing just as it left her that way.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH . . . . . . . . . .

She held it front of my eyes!!!!

She says it's changed in the time she's had it.

And the freneticism of the tussle between her embrace of primitive superstition and my rejection of this naturo-mystic implement has suddenly ended. Elise is curled up in a corner of her futon, silently staring.

There's nothing I can do to save her. I must save myself.