25/10/06
Dear Dairy -
Categories: Odd week. On Monday, I made 400 people who hated me love me (and then made 4 people who loved me hate me), on Tuesday I broke a year-long personal rule about work, and today I received a letter that - no exaggeration - will have a massive impact on my life. And it's only Wednesday. God knows what tomorrow and Friday will bring.
Mondays are usually my day off but since getting back from Edinburgh, they've been uncharacteristically busy. The Monday just gone was the busiest of the lot; and it started mid-morning with my third weekly Alexander Technique lesson.
The reason why I've not written that much about the Alexander Technique so far is because the exercises I am doing seem to be particularly divorced of anything throat related (the reason why I am going down this route). However, even though the majority of the lessons so far have involved standing up and sitting down repeatedly, and lying in a 'semi-supine' position, there's definitely something in it. As I understand it, a lot of the Alexander technique relates to the weight you put on your neck, head, and spine to remove tensions and stresses from the throat. Or something similar. She's made me adopt positions that have made me feel weightless, and other times, like I'm falling upwards. At times it seems ridiculous, but other times, unlike anything I've ever experienced. Hence me continuing with it.
My teacher's name is Juliet but she is an ordained Buddhist and has changed her name to Suryagitta (this is phonetically correct, but I have deliberately misspelt her name as she's an avid googler and I don't want her to know I'm writing about her). Most of her clients are singers and actors who have to project, unamplified, so I'm beginning to think my throat problems are small fry compared to what she has to usually do. For the first time though, today's lesson actually involved throat warming exercises. After 45 mins of lying down, standing up, sitting down, and general oddness I was ululating and sending air down across the roof of my mouth. This whole process is fascinating - I'm still cynical, but I'm also optimistic. And to a certain extent, desperate - my voice has gone twice in the last week alone and I have to sort it. It's so important, I'm becoming quite obsessive about it.
As soon as this was over, it was a quick dash to the station to head to London to work on Graham Norton's Bigger Picture. I'm doing the warm-ups for his show, which has a rather odd time slot; with it being recorded in the afternoon despite being a late night chat show. This meant I was going to finish by 7pm; just enough time to get a train back to Brighton to do my Brighton Comedy Festival Fringe show at the Marlborough Theatre. This show, despite how it's advertised in the link, was going to be a different show altogether; a collection of my best stories linked together by the stories I could extricate from the audience. Hence I spent the entire journey up tapping a script and a setlist into my new PDA.
For some reason, nearly all the guests for the show were running late, so we kicked off the record about 15 minutes over our target start time. This meant the audience were getting a touch fidgety and mardy; and I knew they would be confrontational when I started my set. However, it all seemed to click nicely and despite doing a fairly lengthy warm-up at the top (20+ minutes), I got a crowd of doubters on-side. Pretty happy at this point.
After the show, I raced through the pouring rain back to Blackfriars to get the next train back to Brighton, which was cancelled. Things were getting tight. When I finally got on, we had double the commuters in each carriage, and I felt pretty angry about it until I saw the particularly cramped-up hasidic jew stood diagonally opposite and became overwhelmed with 70 year old societal guilt about the significance of overcrowded trains.
When I finally managed to get a seat, I pulled out my PDA to continue to sort out my setlist. Except I didn't, as it was still sat on a researcher's desk at London Studios, charging. Numerous phonecalls later (with my other phone), it was in a padded envelope ready to be sent Tuesday morning via Special delivery to my home. Panic over, however, no set list.
This shouldn't have been a major problem though, as the gig at the Marlborough Theatre wasn't being billed as a major show - it hadn't been advertised anywhere and it was always going to be a 'word of mouth' gig for Brighton fans. So I was somewhat surprised to have a front row of, well, how does Ray Peacock call them? Twats.
It's not as if I can't deal with this, and it's not even as if dealing with it isn't part of my repertoire. It's just that... I shouldn't *have to*. I don't do 50 seater theatres to give lessons in crowd control to aggressive, stupid, and paraletic tits. But on this occasion, I had to. Despite the rest of the crowd being absolute angels, the only feedback heard eminated from this psychotic Scotsman ("I canne understand you, boy. Don't look me in the eyes, I kill you"), his battered wife ("don't Michael, not here, deep breaths, I fucking hate you, you've ruined my life"), her mad Zimbabwean friend ("eeeeh! Eeeeh! EEEEEEEEEEHHH! I've lost my shoes!") and her bisexual boyfriend ("[whatever soundbites exist to demonstrate someone whistling songs under their breath]").
The worst thing was, that they were enjoying themselves, but were too high and rude to show that in a way that didn't wreck it for everyone else. So instead of ignoring them, or barracking them, after 3 minutes of bright red internal warning signs, I politely asked them what it would take for them to leave. When they wouldn't, I got on with the show, returning every 5 minutes or so to build a damning character profile on each of them. This became a running joke. The first to crack was the wife, who left her potentially violent husband ready to leap out at any point (and he really did look like he would). When he stumbled out, 10 minutes later, the gobby Zimbabwean lady decided to berate me for them leaving. That exchange of frank views and opinions resulted in her leaving so angrily she forgot her other shoe. Her other half then snuggled up to a supposedly unconnected male friend as soon as she was out of eyeshot. Madness.
The show ended up being 1hr 20min in the end. There's a review of it coming out next week. Ouch, possibly.
I've rambled on too long now so I will add what happened Tuesday and Today at the end of the evening when I'm back from my gig in Chertsey. I'm particularly worried about this gig as I'm driving my track car there as my road car is getting repaired after I crashed it (point 6 on my 10th Oct blog). I never normally drive this to gigs where I can't park it securely. Suffice to say I don't imagine the weirdness or bad luck has run out just yet; so here's a teaser to the blog entry that's coming. I'm currently digesting my last ever milkshake.
Comments:
I wanted to stop you and buy your DVD in the bar, but frankly we were both desperate to get home and get some sleep and didn't want to risk further encounter with psychotics.
For the record, bf just read your blog as well and we agree that it was a pretty fair representation. Better luck next time...
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28/10/06 @ 14:00 Thanks again for being the only sane part of the front row!!!
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