It burns being broke, hurts to be heartbroken - always being both must be a drag

The obligatory end-of-Festival blog:

I don't know where this habit started but everything I do nowadays is documented with a series of sunrises and sunsets. This means I start work too early in the morning if nothing else.

I started blogging after each weekend more as a good way to get back into the swing of writing more often again but stopped focusing on the play-by-play since it would impossible (and unreadable) for me to distill all the individual moments that made me laugh out of any given day or weekend and the general picture usually boils down into the same thing - street was good, crowd was good (the crowd is always good and anyone that says otherwise is missing something), weather report and how much I love my show.

Usually I spend a bunch of time thanking people I think deserve it but if those people haven't heard it from me and don't know how much I love doing what we do together until they read it in my blog then something has gone horribly wrong.

But it's still nice to look back over the whole thing, as much as I love the show and love doing it, I'm not going to miss it at all. In fact, I love that it ends and goes away and at the end of the season. In fact I think I enjoy the show more because it goes away when it does.

I've never been one of those people that wants to endlessly plan and discuss Festival (odd that I've worked for the office as many times as I have) all year round. Hell, I don't often even tell people that I do the show unless there's a good reason.

Full disclosure - At least half of that is keeping my Secret Nerd Identity semi-secret - both for social reasons and because running into the guy that entertained your kids and they thought was awesome and crazy and made them all wide-eyed isn't nearly as fun (in fact it's shockingly un-fun for everyone involved, usually) out of context and costume and it takes some of the fun away next time the same people see me again during the Show.

But there's something very fun and interesting about temporary things - I was just writing a bit on this as it relates to improv theater as well. These crazy, random impermanent things are somehow so much cooler specifically because they don't last, even if you don't realize it when it's happening.

That translates directly to how I perform out there on the street and the environment itself - if something is static and you can always find it at certain set times of the day (like our stage show, as just one example) you can always find it, that part is easy and suddenly mundane and missing it isn't a big deal since you always know where and when you can come back and find it some other time.

Conversely, I don't know how many times I come around a corner or through a crowd and some kids' eyes light up and they freak out and their parents tell me, "they were looking everywhere for you, they were worried they wouldn't find you today" - and while I hate thinking about how many little kids look everywhere for the squeaking weirdo and go home disappointed, the ones I do run into know that whatever happens is really special and cool and have fun with it because it's not guaranteed.

It's just luck and it's really fleeting and we crank up the energy and the fun or that little time and then it goes spinning off into the crowd again. And you hope that it happens again, you know that it might not but somewhere in your brain you know that it's really kind of cool that it MIGHT, just MIGHT be the last time. That may sound crazy.

Maybe it's crazy. But it makes a little more sense than doing this huge, difficult, painful, challenging thing for little money, decent risk of injury and slim chance that anyone will ever recognize all the energy you pour into it - except the audience, and they're the only ones that matter.

The only comparable example I have is my friend Mouse.

We met years and years ago through mutual friends at Festival, anyone that knows Mouse knows that he's probably best described as "random" even in these days of relative normalcy. This is a guy that has TWICE forgotten about annual travel plans and told me he was on his way over to my place - only to call 4 days later because he ended up in New York City instead of my driveway. That's pretty fucking random.

Twice.

Anyway, we met and were pretty solid friends right off the bat and then he just vanished and I got pulled sideways into some other things and we didn't see one another for a couple of years. To a normal person that sounds like the opposite of what you do with friends you call "close" but it made perfect sense at the time and he never seemed distant or less close because of the time that passed or that neither of us had any idea if we'd see each other ever again.

In fact, when we did see each other again it was at the Festival, in a crowd of people and only lasted about a minute - We were both walking through a crowd of people dancing at the cast party and recognized each other at a distance, the really fun part was that he recognized me first because I just happened to be wearing his clothes. Random.

We met in the middle of everything, smiled, hugged, which turned into two punk guys throwing elbows and tearing shit up in the middle of everyone that was actually "dancing", a slap on the back and a couple of grins and then both went our separate ways. Not another word.

After that I don't think I saw him for another year.

I don't know if I'm making more sense or making myself seem more crazy.

The Festival is the same thing. I love it and I have way more fun because I have no idea what's going to happen. The people I run into have much more of an impact on me because I'm glad it happened and I know it might never happen again - and everything gets dialed way up for those little moments. It's really cool and genuine and it happens a million times a day on the street and backstage with some of my best friends and most brilliant entertainers in the world.

If there ever was an explanation for why I do the show and why it's worth the colossal pain in the ass (and everywhere else) and why I can't imagine not going back, that's gotta be it.

At the end of the day we make a lot of people laugh and smile - but what they get once from me I get a thousand times a day from all of them. That's a lot of smiles and energy and just pure fun for one guy. I'm just a really lucky guy in a clown suit

Goodnight, Misfit Toys.