on the road

Getting on stage in New York City is so much extremely very different than getting on stage in Philadelphia.
It's the whole Little Fish in a Big Pond thing I think.  Rather than here in Smalltown USA where we are Actually Pretty Good Sized Fish in a Little Pond.
We (I) get nervous and our confidence drops.  We get shifty and shruggy in the greenroom and hemmy and hawey after the show.  It's a strange dynamic (I just typoed dymanic.  Sometimes I'm dymanic) for us.  But it's So Effing FUN.  So that's why we do it.

The theater was gorgeous and awesome and so super cool.  Way different than our theater here.  Maybe someday we will have something gorgeous and awesome and so super cool- we're working on it.  On the inside of the pillars to either side of the downstairs stage was painted "Follow the fear", a Del Close quote that is nice to see when you are up there under the lights.  I failed miserably at the fear following.  Maybe next time, I'm working on it.

Our show was good.  We thought we had a prime spot, 8pm on Saturday.  But there were other things going on in NYC at 8pm on Saturday night too.  On the stage upstairs from us, the curly headed high pitched bubbly lady from Flight of the Chonchords and now the new Page on 30 Rock was performing.  And across town, Christina Gausas was performing in her last show for something.  So some of our friends (friends! in New York!) went to those shows instead.  I understand.  Plus we still packed the place so it's all well and fine.  And I had people I love in the audience, that always makes me feel one thousand times better, and I saw some new New Yorkers that were previously Philadelphiers until recently in the lobby.  Nothing is cooler than walking out of a show and seeing people you know when you are a couple hours away from home.  It feels very homey.  To see some homies. 

It wasn't our funniest show.  But we hit the form really well, so that matters.  And there was Cher.  I love it when Cher makes an appearance in our shows.  We all do her, and we all do her very differently and I love every single different way we all do Cher.
Cher.  Comedic Genius. 
And I got to be a dinor waitress, which is my ultimate post-retirement career goal.  But I won't be as gross as I like to pretend I am.

I spent the night in a hotel room all by myself for the first time.  I was a little nervous at first, but I slept amazingly- after I checked the room eight times for bedbugs.  I escaped New York with zero bites and (hopefully) no tagalongs.  Victory!
You get to do all sorts of things in a hotel room that you can't do at home.  Television in bed, hot baths in pitch blackness, quality uninterrupted underpants time, eight solid hours of sleeping.  Bliss.