Open mic 1

Venue: Kitty O'Shea's
Date: September 5, 2010

If I want to make this odyssey truly satisfying, I should ideally start with nothing.

Boy, did I ever.

This night had all the elements of things going horribly wrong: the night was dark and stormy. I had no clue what I was going to do. The audience was three mostly disinterested people. All things considered, it was a good effort.
I still bombed. That's bad. Killing is good, bombing is bad and I was like amateur night at the RAF. There is no worse sound than the total absence of laughter you expect to hear. It is one of those sounds that makes the bottom of your stomach drop out and you suddenly feel
very
very
foolish.

So I cut my losses and bowed out after about three or four minutes. I'm not exactly sure how long I went on for, because silence has a way of stretching time.
Pommy Johnson, the MC for the night (and a very very funny man) got me some pity applause by saying that this was my first night.
I wanted to say that it wasn't. I knew in the past I could command a room like this and make people laugh. I've performed at the shittiest venue I know of, on nights that were (in the abstract) far worse than this. But that was years ago. I was a different person then.
If I'm going to start from nothing, then there's no better place to start than here. I felt like a complete moron for a good half hour. The show ended, I talked with the other comics, and slowly started to feel better. Walking back to the bus, I felt... alive. I had done open mic and survived. I bombed and lived to tell about it. I was already re-working the things I had said on stage, creating newer, funnier things. Things I could not wait to try.

That's why I do open mics.