In January, I’d dissolved my long-term sketch team, Duct Tape Revolution, after a lot of bad blood and scary implications. When I told non-comedy people about the breakup, they invariably said, “Aw, well that’s a shame,” and then moved on. When I told comedy people about it, they shrugged and said, “Well, you were around for three years. Most sketch teams last two, so you did good.” In both cases, that is absolutely not what I wanted to hear. What I wanted to hear was that people understood how devastated I was, and how much the absence of the team had left a void in my life. I hated that DTR ended; I hated how it ended; I hated that I wasn’t sure how to move on from it ending.
Then two things happened:
The first was that my comedy partner and former Duct Tape Revolution head writer, Allen, and I hit on the idea to create a show at ImprovBoston, a new splashy summer sketch show to capitalize on all the good we’d been doing in the world of sketch. We pitched it, called it Comedy, America!, and got it off the ground. I wrote sketches. There were song meetings. Starting to feel like you’re in control again after freefalling for so long is its own reward … but man, the show was shaping up to be something fantastic all on its own.
The second thing was that I decided to get the band back together. I reached out to the people I’d worked with before who I was interested in working with again, and added one new person Allen recommended. I rebranded the group after both the name of the sketch one-off show I’d put up the year before and the Drive-By Truckers song that seemed to describe my year thus far: World of Hurt. Our first meetings were used to air shit out. And then we got to work.
I got a new tattoo from John – my first representation of Archie Comics on my body. I went with the 1950s version of Moose Mason, mainly because his jaunty hat always made me so happy.
My publisher, Cemetery Dance, perhaps recognizing that the Comcast buyout and the subsequent “no freelancers” policy was kind of terrible, took me on as a freelance proofreader. I must have done an okay job, because once the door had opened, it never really closed.
In other comedy news, I decided to make April a women-only comedy month at Johnny D's without announcing that it was a woman-only month. I was interested to see what the reaction would be. The most interesting reaction was no reaction at all: people didn't riot, no one freaked out, I got no death threats saying that Women Aren't Funny. I wrote about the whole thing here, if you're interested in the scoop.
Helping things was that I was cycling again. The winter was officially over and I could bike everywhere – well, everywhere there was a Hubway station. I loved the bike-sharing deal that Boston had going on, but every Saturday night, after I left the theater downtown from the midnight Rocky Horror, I was reminded over and over that I couldn’t just ride the bike all the way home. The nearest Hubway station to my house was about a half-mile away, and at 2:30 AM, that’s a bit of a walk. (Not as much of a walk, say, than the 4.5 mile walk I used to take on when I walked all the way home from downtown, but still.) I started to wonder how much a new bike would be, knowing that in the year following my lucrative-job layoff I could never afford something like that.
Shawn and I went to Record Store Day, a concept that was foreign to him, and I picked up the new Bruce Springsteen EP and the new Blitzen Trapper single and it was so warm and pleasant outside. I proofread. I hosted comedy. I performed comedy, in a panel show called Interesting Points and in a storytelling show called Bare and in a naked standup show called The Naked Standup Showcase.
And I wrote. I wrote like hell. My book, Panic Town, had caught fire and it wasn’t letting me go. Every day I sat down and worked on my book for two hours. Then three. Then I couldn’t stop. It became addiction. I wrote 7,000 words in one day just because I didn’t want it to end. I’d told my Kickstarter supporters that the book would probably be finished by October. That seemed unlikely now. I was aiming now for late summer. When had I last written a novel in five months? Had it been in the mid-2000s?
The hiatus from who I was seemed to be over. Things seemed to be moving forward; difficult, sure, but worth the difficulty. More, I began to feel like I'd earned this. The terrible of the preceding three months had set me up for a success that I wouldn't have felt as keenly if I hadn't gone through it. A small but very present part of my mind whispered that it couldn’t last. That May was coming, and May could be bad. Because a year is a long time, and there are all these pitfalls, and one good month out of four didn’t mean the shit was over.
But let’s leave it here for now, when things are okay for a little while.
No comments:
Post a Comment