30 march 2017
Yesterday was soooooo goood. We held Sleepwalker at Babycastles, and the vibe was so strange and warm and perfect. The show was not a sell out in any sort of way. As a comedy show, it was maybe not a success at all. but as a Salon, or a memory, it was a knock out. I had that realization about ahalf hour before the show. I knew that the crowd attendance would be low, and would likely be each performer plus the one friend they brought. And I don't really know how to promote. Social media promotion doesn't work for me and just makes me sad. Or it is maybe that all my friends in the city are also comedians, and have show fatigue.
But I also knew that the show was going to be gooooooood...for the 7 people that made up our audience. We put our hearts into it. I made up several web pages for the night. I made about 3 times the amount of pages as audience--just so each comedian would have an animated backdrop and we could move smoothly from slides to music to sketch. Angelica made a dancing animal gif for every comedian. I learned a javascript tool to create minimal slides from the command line and then run them off a local server, just to ensure that our presenters could move through the slides without worrying about their wifi. And then I wrote a futuristic sci-fi prose piece that crystallized everything I loved about solarpunk and made a slides for that too. And then the show started and everything went off without a hitch. Every performer was incredible and diverse. We were able to move quickly without any technical hiccups (a thing I HAAAATE in ny comedy shows). Everyone seemed to feel included and lucky and everyone lingered after just because they were warm and happy after the show.
I have a maybe unhealthy love for the underappreciated, for the small thing that is pretty because it exists but does not need anyone to know.. I mean, that's why I'm writing here, because I know that it's not easily found. And yesterday I watched the band Photo Jenny play at our beautifully set up stage, with their beautiful animated backing track playing behind them and all the unecessary hard work, the potentially fruitless efforts, felt worth it. We were friends in a room making something we love as well as we can, because what else would we do?