Fearful Productions

A heads-up that I'll be hosting the Word Ninjas open mic again this Tuesday, for the first time in a while. I've written at length about my deep and abiding love for the local open-mic scene -- it was my introduction to performing in the Twin Cities, my first foot in a lot of doors -- I still rely on it heavily, and it's exhilarating to see old friends, as well as first-timers taking their own anxiety-ridden baby steps, week after week.

I don't really think in terms of "contribution to the community" -- I generally find such claims dubious, difficult to quantify, and reeking of self-justification -- but having been a part of establishing Word Ninjas, even in small part, is one of my great points of professional pride.

Also been trying to pick a piece for the upcoming Fear Itself, a collaboration between the Rockstars and Fearless Comedy Productions, a new company founded by some old acquaintances.

I've been doing this long enough to have built up a pretty large library of sets and routines, and I've found that the greater part of success for me these days is picking the right piece for the right audience. This is often complicated by trying to weigh what percentage of any given audience will have seen a piece before.

I'll confess that this is a trend that I acknowledge, but don't fully understand -- the degree to which audiences actively resent hearing a set more than once. I interface with storytelling in much the same way that I interface with music -- if there's a single that I like, I'm happy to listen to it over and over.

Comics don't seem to have this problem, which gives them the luxury of working and polishing their routines at greater length. And as I write that, I think, no, the greater issue is that there's a larger number of comedy-oriented mics in this town. I've often bemoaned the lack of storytelling mics, but the fact is that even the ones that exist tend to have a lot of audience overlap -- I'm likely to keep seeing the same people at most of them.

(This problem is often exacerbated by the fact that when I have a larger gig or a show coming up, I want to work the individual pieces as much as possible. Though it pains me to say it, it's entirely possible that the local audience pool for storytelling is too small to sustain this kind of process.)

That's why getting booked at places like Patrick's and Sample Night Live is such good fun -- because I perform there more rarely, it's an audience that hasn't seen most of my material.

So have I chosen wisely? Find out next week -- different Verbosity-Time (Wednesday March 13th at 7:30pm), different Verbosity Channel (at Honey. Honey? Seriously? Just "Honey? I'm both bewildered and vaguely aroused).