Cold Sweats and Stand Up

Well folks I'm back from a weekend in Pittsburgh to see my friend Mike Travers and to do a gig for a benefit.

Saturday night was exciting and terrifying at once. I was going to do ten minutes of comedy and to be honest I didn't think I was ready for ten minutes but gave it the college try.

I started my set by dancing to My Lady Lumps by Blacked Eye Peas, always a crowd favorite, and a time filler. But it was a bad idea I was very winded and that effected my stand up it took a few good minutes to be able to be ready to go into my diabetes joke and the delievery suffered.

Although I got laughs for it, it was a loss of confidence for me and I feel the crowd felt it. I went into my spill stumbling over lines and filling in with the definate I'm not confident remark "we having fun?" Always a sign of a guy struggling.

Although I continued to get laughs (thank you crowd for that), I also found out later that I was pretty much eating the mic. I had it up to my mouth muffling pretty much everything I was saying making it even harder for the great crowd to hear every joke. But I still had some winning jokes that got lots of laughs such as my beach joke and my student loan joke and my mom's tatoo joke.

After struggling thru my act I turned it over to a real pro in Mike Wysoki. I sat back and enjoyed watching his set. Soaking it all in. How he held the mic, how confident he was in delivery and his well crafted jokes. I tried to learn as much as I could. Than I went back up there and did another five minutes before turning it over to my buddy Mike Travers who did a great set of comedy set to music.

He also called me up to help with a few songs and thats where I did my best work of the evening. My facial expressions and playing off of what he did went over huge with Mike and the crowd so the night wasn't a total bust and it was a great learning tool for the next time.

Going over with it with Mike got me excited and even more determined to be better next time. I'm going to basically start with 3 minutes and work it until I have it down...timing facial expressions and content. I'm hungry to get better at this and my audience will have to bare with me...I'm really rusty. :)

Thank God I have plenty of Virgils soap to clean of the sweat and fear lol..