Let's cut the shit
I’m on a five year run of failing myself. Promising myself that I’ll spend more time dedicated to “my work” which means writing or creating comedy things mostly and opinionated editorials, occasionally. Half a decade of forgetting the craft of honing my voice. The sitting down and practicing the art of confidence that is documenting ideas, be it written word, video or stage. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been productive. I started a not for profit and a comedy festival and a podcast, oh my. What started as a tool to forge a new path, turned into a shackle of my own making. Producing.
It started in the early 2000’s when baby dyke comic me was informed that “mc’s of comedy clubs are the palette cleanser, not too controversial” . This was a well intended man ( club owner) telling me that if I wanted to work in clubs, I needed to clean up my act. The problem was, my act wasn’t particularly dirty. Yes, when I first started the word “fuck” was my nervous tick, but I learned to reign it in and drop it only for theatrical effect or in the name of drunken debauchery. That wasn’t what he meant. He was talking about my reference to my girlfriend. This was 12 years before Winslow Vs United States. Ellen had come out, but had also lost a career because of it. The lesson was clear: be yourself, but not that much. To be clear. I wasn’t talking about fisting my girlfriend ( that came later), I simply acknowledged that I had one. Too gay. I was faced with the same choice that decades of queers had been forced to ponder. Do I change the pronouns of the person I was in a relationship with for a job, or do I accept that the entry point into my industry had a built in fee, and I couldn’t pay the toll?
I chose the latter. No disrespect to queers who chose the former. Comedy is a place where authenticity thrives. If you were a queer pretending to be straight on a stand up stage and people believed you, you had fucking skill. It’s what Ellen did. She was/is an incredibly talented stand up. Lea DeLaria came out and pulled it off. She was the Dyke comic. Not that she had much of a choice. She wasn’t an “aesthetically blended” lesbian, she was a fucking dyke. I had a similar masculine presence. If I wasn’t “out” onstage, the audience spent a large chunk of my set wondering if I knew I was gay. Suzanne Westenhoefer had long hair AND was out onstage in the 90’s and got work in clubs, but Ellen got the TV work and THEN got the bonus glory of being a game changer for the movement. I don’t judge anyone’s path, or their decisions. But let’s remember that Ellen got to where she is by originally pretending to be someone she wasn’t. In my humble opinion, her dues were paid by taking a stand later, with quite a bit on the line. That moment took her career ( for a hot minute). That’s making a difference, regardless of the price. Rosie had a day time show too, I watched it religiously. I studied it. I learned that you can be the fun, lovable lesbian. Just don’t tell anyone, k?
In 2006, Dykes of Hazard was born. I had been doing comedy for 5 years. My mom had owned a travel agency and the idea of routing a road trip didn’t scare me, and best as I could tell, all queer southern bars had a drag show and all drag shows had a microphone. That was all we needed. I was officially a producer albeit not a good one, what with my yet to be diagnosed fluctuating hormones and steady stream of Jameson. I will get into these tour stories more in the future. All the fuck ups and the good times. For today purposes, 2006 may be the moment when I stopped “working on my act” and started “producing”. I wasn’t the only one producing independently. My buddy JT Habersaat had started a similar niche tour, Altercation Punk Comedy, and Uncle Doug Stanhope had taken to showing up in mid size markets for 80% of the door. Doug already had The Man Show under his belt and his overall brilliant drunk vibe. JT and I would spend the next few years shrugging off the stereotype of unknown “producer comics”. The assumption was, if you had to put on your own shows, you couldn’t be that funny. We were funny, good at math and lacking the constitution to be someone other than who we were. DIY producers were who we would be. No one was as shocked as I was when I ended up the GM of a comedy club the year PASTE magazine named me a “comic to watch in 2013” . I digress. Back to the point.
Producing is a technical skill. Is there creativity in it? Absolutely. Is it thrilling to have an idea, assemble the team (if you’re lucky), the marketing materials, the gigs, the logistics that accompany those shows if its a tour, the hotels and opening acts and and and …yes.
But for me it also became the vehicle for my anxiety to keep me from the meaty middle of vulnerability. The writing time got replaced with the scheduling time, or the driving time or the social media marketing time. I went a long way out of the way to create a stage that allowed me to be who I was, only to show up and regurgitate a stagnant self all over it. That’s not to say I didn’t write new jokes. I did. Just not a lot. Luckily, producing created regular stages for me, with plenty of stage time to work out shit. Unfortunately, those stages coincided with a time in my life that came with a pretty sick (medically I mean, though she was hot) fiance and a need to find a stable income. The Club manager gig called “shotgun”, performing hopped in the back seat.
Fast forward to 2019 (yes, it took years to recover. Another story for another day.) I start touring as a headliner with a helper who is not only hilarious but also handles some of the heavy lifting (thanks DePonce) and I prove to myself that I can still do it . I swing by Uncle Doug’s in Bisbee and he mentions maybe I could hop on some shows with him. It will be almost a year later (memorial day 2020) when we are both balls deep in mushrooms when he reminds me to “get out of my act”. He was right. Years of projects and distractions put my voice on autoplay. Time to cut the shit.
There have been no 2020 stages to test out my newfound approach to life, but there has been an enormous amount of time to reflect on a twenty year career. To recognize that the nagging “you’re not good enough” in the back of my brain subconsciously drives me. To own that I use a tremendous amount of energy doing good work ( not a bad thing) to somehow trick my brain into thinking I’m worthy of the luxury of creative expression. My personal quid pro quo. I’ve acknowledged that my blue collar upbringing nips at my neck in the form of “get a real job”. Still. Twenty years later. Fuck that shit.
For 2021, I won’t make the mistake of past promises to crank out x amount of work, on x days a week. I won’t declare sweeping reforms to my process. Little by little, I’ll do the work of showing up, not produce the act of showing up.