Being accepted as a shambles
Picture the scene: you're sat at the back of a venue, it's a comedy gig, it's the last show of the evening, there's a hundred people waiting for the show to start. Your fancy watch buzzes to tell you that your resting heart rate had just crept over 130 bpm and you may need to worry about this. You're about to go and do your 10 minutes onstage.
But it's your 44th birthday and you've been out with friends all evening and you've had six pints.
You get called on.
You stagger on. The audience are told by the brilliant MC that it's your birthday and you're drunk, it gets a cheap laugh. You start. You do your usual 'throwing bits of percussion into the audience' routine, but with less tact than normal and it's a miracle that nobody gets hurt when a cowbell flies across the venue. It gets a cheap laugh. Your first 'song' ends, it gets the expected laugh, it's cheap but it ticks comedy boxes. You're so drunk you think you're actually dreaming it, hoping that you might just wake up and you're not onstage, before you remember you are. You skip the stand-up bits and go straight to the games, it's all about survival at this point. It gets a cheap laugh. You panic and realise you've got very little else left in your set after the game, it's normally just the 'poem' and then you're done. But you can't do the poem yet, you've only been onstage for 6 minutes. You backtrack and garble out some stand-up bits, your mouth is dry and you feel like a rabbit in the headlights but the content is tried and tested and it gets a decent laugh from about half of the room. You finish on the poem, the start of which doesn't make any sense because you're too drunk to remember the lead-in. It gets laughs in the right places. You're an absolute shambles. The audience think that's the act. You stagger off, get a polite 'well done' from the other special guest act, and you want to die.
As the audience pile out at the end of the show, strangers shake your hand and tell you how much they enjoy your guest spot. Somebody buys you a pint, which is the last thing you need right now. People like the shambolic version of you, but let's never do this again.
***
The next day, at the same festival, I was back, this time in a smaller room, performing my 'There's a Band Playing...' show. Someone who had seen me drunk the night before loved my guest slot so turned up to watch me do a full hour. The other guest act from last night was also outside, having just seen another show, but she actively avoided eye contact. For the record, I hadn't had a drop this time, but the show was still every bit as chaotic and spiralling as it should be. People like the shambolic version of me, I guess I'm lucky.
Anyway, I'm now 44. And I'm not drinking for at least a fortnight.
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