Hey, Hey, Look at ME!

When I was younger, I toyed a bit with stand up and with improv comedy. Stand up is HARD. Especially for me, because I can only take so much one-on-one attention and then I want to scream “stop LOOKING at me!” Which, if your timing is right, will make the audience weep with laughter. But it is sort of psychically scarring if you’re serious. As I was. I’ve been known to get uncomfortable on DATES because I couldn’t handle the focus. Maybe I could have gotten over it. But one thing was guaranteed at the time, when I was young and a pregnant woman could stand around at a party with a drink in one hand and people would rush over to…refill it, and that was that every comedy club was filled with cigarette smoke…and I was pretty certain that any standup career would be brutish and short, since I’d need to take three days to recover from any show.

And improv was fun, but I kept winding up in dysfunctional groups that either couldn’t get booked to save their lives, or were populated by people who thought that any bit that contained references to an enema or penis was the height of hilarity. There were always the people in the group that liked working with me, because I balanced out the wacky and could pull off Sydney Biddle Barrows (go ahead, we’ll wait while you google) and Miss Manners but then the wacky-enema-penis crowd thought I wasn’t “edgy” enough.

( Which is weird, because you all know I will say ANYTHING, but apparently I wasn't doing it while waving my arms around and bugging out my eyes, so....not EDGY. )