CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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My Very First Stand-Up Open Mic Part 2

Saturday, February 23, 2013

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "weird fishes"

(cont'd from yesterday.)


So there Kristen and I were, getting out of her car. It was frightfully cold-- it had "snowed" a bit earlier in the evening. This is Phoenix, keep in mind, and it literally hasn't snowed here since I moved here in 2001, but there were flurries, and while it wasn't enough to stick to the ground, it was enough to freak everyone the fuck out.

The bar was down an alley, which intimidated me. It was cold and wet, much colder and wetter than it has probably been down this alley, like, ever, but I kept thinking, hey, don't sweat it. Sometimes bars are down alleyways.

When we walked inside, it was a long, narrow room with tables set up on the left, and to the right was the bar itself, sunken.

And behind the bar, there was a wall made of plexiglass. And there was a goddamn hockey game happening behind it. The bar is attached to a hockey rink, and the crowd of about twenty people was a mixture of forty year olds drinking beer, watching their eighteen year old children play hockey, and gruff, logger types, who spend their Wednesday nights watching a hockey game.

I looked at my friend calmly and we sat down, and she pointed at the place against the wall where the microphone was, saying "You'll be performing over there," completely unperturbed by our surroundings. I remained cool on my exterior, but on the inside I was saying "Oh no! Oh nooooo! Oh, what have you done to me, Kristen?" These people weren't at all going to get my Harry Potter joke. These people were not going to appreciate my joke about not drinking alcohol. And yet, here we were. Kristen had been driving for over two hours, leaving immediately from her work, all the way to my place, and then all the way into Phoenix, so I couldn't not tell my jokes. I was resigned to my fate.

At 8:30 on the dot, however, the bar was suddenly filled with nerdy types, hipsters, and enthusiastic college girls, and I realized, oh wait, here are the comics. And soon the group outnumbered the grumpy logger/ hockey family types, and I heard them saying "There is a fucking hockey game going on, what the fuck are we going to do?" Which made me feel better regarding this situation, because at least, while this show has been at this same location for two years, this was unusual even for them.

Which brought the second anxiety. Everyone knew one another and was already friends. But of course they already knew each other. They probably came every week. There was a group of girls who were clearly not comedians, but were just fans of this particular open mic. Why wouldn't there be? But it intimidated me, being the odd one out. I was the only new comic that night, and while everybody has to be new at some point in time, ordinarily when you're the new guy, say, at a new job, you do whatever you can to not call attention to yourself, to blend in. In this situation though, not only was I the new guy, but I also was about to demand attention-- all of the attention. And any time a new guy shows up at your work and is immediately an attention hog without any getting-to-know you phase, well, people hate that guy.
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with love from CRS @ 10:24 AM 

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