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06/23/2008: ""
So I'm on the Spirit for six nights and I'm working four of those nights. I'm staying on for the end of one cruise and the beginning of the next. This is the same ship I was on last week. It is really nice to be in a familiar place and to know the deal. Often, I am travelling into a mystery. I arrive on a ship but I'm not sure when my shows are or how many or even where the shows are on the ship. There is so much turnover in this business that I often don't know who I am going to be working with. It is much easier to have confidence in your performance if you can visualize it specifically. If you know what the venue looks like, how the crowd is going to be, you can plan out the show as you want it.
The Olympics are coming up and you are going to hear a lot of sports folks discussing things like 'peaking at the right time,' 'visualizing the perfect race,' having confidence in one's abilities.' These things can apply to anyone's life.
When you are a solo performer, you have to believe that you know what you are doing whether you do or not. If you show any fear to a crowd, they pick up on it and even if they want you to do well, even if they are rooting for you, they start to doubt your belief in yourself and then they start to doubt their belief in you.
I'm doing my second of the four shows on this ship tonight. It is a midnight show in the lounge and I did the same show last week. I have no doubt it will go well. I know exactly how the room is going to feel, how the crowd is going to look and what I want to say. It won't be exactly as I imagine it, but there won't be too many surprises.
My show went well a few nights ago, the orchestra pit is still stuck open on this ship, so shows on the main stage are a little tough being stuck behind a big open hole. I knew what to expect, though and adjusted accordingly. Tonight, I am in the lounge, very intimate. I look forward to being able to develop a more intimate connection with this crowd.
George Carlin died yesterday. Of course, he was a hero of mine. Carlin at Carnegie Hall was about as good a comedy special as anyone has ever taped and it made HBO something that everyone needed to have.
George Carlin did things in this business that sound simple but that many of the 'greats' have failed to do. He continued to perform live and create new material when he no longer had to. He paid as much attention to what he was saying onstage as he did to how he was saying it (many are good at one or the other). His range of material stemmed from simple and cute observations "You ever find an empty plate in the fridge? Maybe the olives ate the peas?" to poignant political statements "I don't vote because voting implies a consent to be governed."
George Carlin is not only one of the reasons I started doing comedy, I believe he is one of the reasons there is a market for live comedy today. Many blamed television for the downfall of the comedy club boom. The idea was that if you could see comedy on TV, you wouldn't go out to the club to see it. Carlin's specials made people want to see comedy live and he continued to perform live himself his entire career.
I don't know how to end this rambling blog so I'm going with, "Hooray, lizard shit, fuck"