Friday, July 30th, 2010

Almost Done It

Spent most of the day dealing with some (hopefully and probably only embarrassing) medical issues, which may necessitate my returning early. We’ll see how that pans out.

Had another show, back down to an embarrassingly small turnout. If last night was the inevitable Artist Night, then this was the equally inevitable Zombie Night – the night where the audience seems to be consistently engaged, but generates almost no appreciable vocal response. They seemed to enjoy it, but it’s always extremely frustrating to play. The temptation is to overextend yourself, but that reeks of desperation – it’s difficult to relax and let the story happen without the playful back-and-forth that usually propels it.

I dunno. One more performance left, and unless it really sells the hell out, I’m going to need to seriously re-evaluate the wisdom of returning to KC. The thought pains me – I’ve really come to love this place, and it’s only on this trip that I’ve begun to realize to what degree that’s true – but I’ve really done the best I can here, and it’s hard for me to justify continuing to throw money at it with so little return.

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Saw two shows that evening, both by out-of-town solo performers. Saw Kurt’s show, and actually found it really engaging: it has that sort of uber-ironic anti-comedy thing going on, kind of Kids in the Hall but trippier. I was glad to catch it.

Followed it up with The Hefner Monologues, which I saw last year in Indianapolis. Was debating whether or not to see it again, and it was a wise decision: an 11pm show, populated almost entirely by other artists. The upshot of this is that he ended up performing a kind of director’s commentary – pausing and interrupting himself at various points to comment on what he was doing, which cities various jokes had gotten laughs in, et cetera.

They headed out to a bar in Westport – I offered to join them, and stumbled across the cast of SHARDS on the way to my car. Ended up sitting and talking for a while (and, hooray, we finally found YJ’s open, with the legendary late-night biscuits and gravy I’ve been craving since I was first told about them, and they were everything I was hoping for, and I could have been hit by a car immediately after consuming them and died – well, with a lot of regrets, but at least I wouldn’t have been hungry) before we decided to try to catch up with the others.

We had an under-21 in our party, however, which immediately eliminated a number of possibilities for nightlife. (Shades of the 2008 tour, when our stage manager had managed to come without a license, severely limiting our activities.) We ended up wandering around Westport for a while – which apparently comes way the hell alive on a Friday night, in the best and worst possible ways, place was crawling with cops and they all had plenty of work to do – before returning to the house of their billeter, a barber who works out of her own home.

One of those sprawling, endless conversations about work and art and all that good stuff, before I excused myself at five in the morning to try to get back to my place before my billeter woke up. Time flew right by, and I didn’t have a drop of alcohol in me. Who knew?