It's showbiz, baby.

Good morning and happy Monday to you. I’m at my desk, at the job that I hate so very much, but I won’t let it get to me today. It’s been a few days since I’ve written, so let’s play catch-up. Not to be confused with ketchup, cuz I don’t like that on my fries.

Thursday and Sunday, more script meetings. I finally feel that we’re getting somewhere with it, and I’m pleased with the direction the writing is going in. I’m happy with my contributions. We have two weeks to complete 50 pages. We can do it. Oh yes we can.

The weekend was pretty good, although exhausting. Evan taught classes and helped out with the “Hurricanes are Funny” shows at the club. A bunch of displaced improv folks from New Orleans regrouped in Austin and wrote a sketch comedy about the tragedy of the hurricane. It was ‘R’-rated and I had the kids with me, so I didn’t get to see much of it. He did some voice over stuff and had a few speaking lines. Saturday nite we had dinner with his adopted ‘little sister’, Heather. She’s a sweet college kid who rides a motorcycle really, really fast. She’s braver than I. We had a lovely chat while the boys were taking things out to the car.

Sunday were the auditions for the Las Vegas Comedy Festival. Yikes. What a beating. Stayed up way too late the nite before, and had to get up way too early. Originally Evan was supposed to go with me and keep the children entertained, but he got called to teach a class, so the kids went along with mom and were terribly bored.

Here’s a tip: If you’re nauseatingly nervous, don’t take energy pills to wake yourself up. Bad idea. I shook like a leaf and couldn’t sit still. I really thought I was going to throw up. Does stage fright ever go away?

This was my first comedy audition ever. There were I guess about 30 comics. I expected a lot more. We were told to arrive by 11:00 AM, and we did. Of course, the producer lady didn’t show up until later. It’s showbiz, baby. She finally got there after noon and had us fill out forms. Everything we were told was apparently incorrect. When I initially inquired into the auditions, I was told that callbacks would be the same evening. We found out that no one will actually be contacted until mid-December. That’s fine, no big deal. They were videotaping everyone, each comic would get the light at three minutes, and at that point you had to wrap up whatever you were doing. When the auditions began, we didn’t get introduced individually – they called groups of five and you had to remember who you were after. I went up in the second group. We were the audience for each other, which was ok. I had hoped that we would just be performing for the festival and club people, but I guess it’s better to have an audience of comics than no audience at all.

I made the kids leave the room when I went up. I don’t think the little darlings are ready to hear mommy’s act just yet. Talk about “R” rated and years of therapy! I think it made the comics uncomfortable to have them there, even though the majority of them were clean. My apologies to the comics. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way I want them to. I guess I did ok. There were a couple of comics I didn’t know, so the jokes were new to them. But everyone tells you that you did well, even if you didn’t. I would love for someone to be honest with me, just once. I was so nervous when I went on stage, I think people could tell. I did what I thought were my best three minutes and moved on. We stayed to watch the whole thing. Everyone did well under the circumstances. My personal favorites were the Cooperation Corporation, Raj Sharma with his pope and tsunami jokes, and of course, Corey Sutton, who went did last and kept on going after he got the light. I wonder if he noticed that he did one of his jokes backwards? It was still funny. Bryce Richardson also had what I thought was a really good set. When it was all over, they said thank you, took a group photo of all the comics on stage, and sent us on our way with no feedback.

So my first audition came and went. I lived through it, and I hope I learned a few things. Next weekend we’re filming a short film with my kids. That should be tons of fun. I can’t believe they’re onboard with it, but I think Evan could ask them to do just about anything and they would do it. They dig him.

Have a great week folks!