Everybody's better than I am - but to be king you don't need a castle

Saturday blog: long overdue post about lots of junk -

Hey, there was a long weekend of Renaissance Festival last weekend. It was insanely, wonderfully hot. That's right, I love the heat. Even in too many layers and a hat that smells like the inside of a raccoon. It's awesome. The ridiculous heat, combined with long days in the sun and the fact that I went home on Sunday night and then back to Festival again made it seem like at least 3 weekends passed between August 30th and September 1st.

After getting back from the long weekend (which takes me out of the house before the boys wake up and gets me home just in time to kiss them goodnight) I got on a plane to spend the entire week in Arizona (where it was REALLY hot - love it), returning late last night. For my sake and the sake of my family I'm off a day from performing to just spend the day. It's not much but it makes all the difference.

I have to say I'm really happy with things this year, we've had up and down moments and shows, for sure - but in general I'm back to discovering new stuff and the energy keeps on coming and it's all a good time. As usual, I couldn't begin to tell you what happened during a given day beyond a few performance notes I noticed for myself (because really, my brain is not engaged when I'm out there acting like an idiot, so I have lots of time to be analytical) and a couple fragments that got lodged in my mind.

One thing that really jumped out at me was performing at the Smoker - arguable the drunkest audience ANYWHERE - and how the rest of the year I perform more theater-y theater in a theater and get pissed when the audience is a little too rock-n-roll and rambunctious and isn't paying attention to how serious we are about "our craft". For the rock-n-roll drinkers we do a rock-n-roll show instead of going on, getting bulldozed or ignored and then sulking offstage about how the audience wasn't paying attention. I'm taking that note with me at the end of the season, especially given the fact that I plan on opening a theater with a bar in it.

Tennis has been an odd ordeal for George and I this year - we "retired" from it for so long and told ourselves we'd come play again when it was fun again, and that's mostly what we've done. Mostly. It's hard to only play "a little" for me - I feel like I need to be in it and really shaking it up for myself or it's hard to kickstart into it everyday.
Feels like we're still shaking rust off every time we get up there.

When we stopped playing we couldn't even use our cleaner (funnier) material because the crowds knew damn well we had dirtier stuff and were therefore bored by the old stuff (for the record, if you listen to what we say, we've never been THAT dirty) and our material was not the stuff pushing the boundaries anymore, something that had become as much what we were known for as what we said, so it ended with a bitter taste.

The really cool thing we/I realized the other day was that we've been gone long enough that we're new to people again, and we're not expected to be the people "going there" all the time and we did an entire show with our clean stuff and absolutely killed with it. It was fun again on many levels. Oh, and we still "go there" but that's not all we're stuck doing. It's a very free feeling for the first time in a long time of doing the same show.

We're back to growing into new things again after being stuck as this static "thing" that was part of the show - we did the show well and I enjoy that people learned from us and ran with it but I hope people are also learning how to progress with it and keep from some of the pitfalls we ended up in.

DREAMS!!! - if you were there, it was funny. It'll never be funny again.

A lot of really humbling things have happened over the last few years as George and I have been figuring out this thing we do (both onstage and on the street) and who we are and all that artsy-actor-y junk. We're still not there but it is still unreal amounts of fun finding "it". Honestly, half the time we have NO gauge at all if what we're doing is good, great, bad or something else - so it's taken a few years but audiences have been really great to us and the performers have been (with rare exception) nothing but inspiring and supportive.
Tawn and the rest of the guys we share(d) the stage with (all the way back to London Broil) have been really understanding of two dudes that clearly don't have it as "down" as they do and helped us get better at it and how to be professionals about it without being uptight jerkwads.
Feedback has always been welcome and we get lots of encouragement that means a lot and tells us we're not crazy for loving what we're doing.

The coolest was last weekend - Queen Anne's Lace was in from Texas for the weekend and one of their people pulled George aside to ask why we only had one show per day (at the same time they were scheduled elsewhere) and if there was any other way to catch us.
She told us that someone from their group had been up to the MN Festival last year checking the place out and had seen our act - and she apparently went back to Texas and told the group about us and we were "the show to see" - that's when things go from complimentary to humbling.

We do our thing because we love it, we have a handful of regulars in the crowd (which is awesome) but mostly the faces come and go. People find out about us any number of ways, hopefully some of it is positive word-of-mouth and I try to tell by the smiles and the applause and the hat-pass if we're doing "it" but never once considered the concept of how we stack up as a "show to see" or the idea that people hear about us from any further away than George can project (which is far, FYI).

So that was a sudden, welcome revelation that we're doing something right.
We'll keep messing with it and pushing it and trying to keep the whole experience fun but for someone that spends a LOT of time wondering 'is this working' it was a breath of fresh air to get an enthusiastic 'yes' from someone unconnected and unbiased.
Thank you.

I'm ready to really attack it again, no mercy.
Tighten your grip and adjust your stance....here we go.