MID-40s PHENOMENON

Here’s what being in denial that you are in your forties is about.  I have an extreme aversion to the opposite sex and I have two unsuccessful half careers.  (I’m being dramatic) (and then there’s office gigs - Oh, the humanity!)  All this while I’m spiraling towards a narrow margin where people feel compelled to comment about my reproductive functionality, “well, you still have time to have a baby,” which is downright impolite, never mind implausible.

What is also happening is that I’m beginning to loosen the grip some.  Who knew?  Getting older has wisdom?  No kidding.  Trying to manage a creative career can be maddening.  I also just up and moved to New York City.  I always like to make things complicated.  My life consists of doing standup gigs, often travelling for them on the weekends.  I will do some writing and go do a set somewhere a couple of nights during the week.  At times, I also work an awful full-time job, so my schedule can be grueling.  I’m also a visual artist, but lately, I almost never have time and I currently have no studio to make art (the other half career).

I said to myself “for reals I’m out” which translates roughly to “I want to quit.”  Actually, I had arrived at this conclusion as a result of wanting to rid myself of worrying about money, and to live in a nicer apartment.  So I entertained the idea of letting go.  It’s not performing that is difficult.  The “grind” is working some job that takes up all of your energy, and then writing and performing anyway.

I emotionally gave up comedy because I wanted to see what it would feel like.  I wanted to just live life for a minute and avoid furiously trying to stay relevant.  What I noticed is work floods in.  When you’re not frantic and trying so hard, it puts you in the space to step aside and allow the universe to do its thing.  This new found detachment also allowed me to be freer on stage.   

I can’t really fool myself.  I’ll never give it up.  But in my false quitting, I noticed that finding contentment with exactly where you are has a lot of power.

It’s not evident whether my uterus will be all for naught.  I can’t seem to get the online dating thing to have significance, particularly because, gross.  But, perhaps when I am in the right state of mind, I will consider a relationship.   As far as my half careers go, I don’t really have an answer.  Writing, performing and making art are really just about doing it.  Living in New York makes me scoff at such liberties because it is so expensive.  I’m telling you, I was born in the wrong era.  I would have been perfectly happy being a mafia moll with a tommy gun.

WHY DO I ALWAYS WANT TO MOVE BACK TO BOSTON? Part I

I’m writing all this out because it helps me sort out the lunacy of being a creative person in New York.

I got weepy on the plane coming back from Florida which makes no sense (I don’t really do that), and it made me want to move back to Boston.  I think that coming to New York because you’re a creative person is a great, yet terrible idea.  I think I take one step forward (was just at the Friars Club), and three steps back (I drink more now than I ever did).

I still have this issue where I don’t want to emotionally commit to comedy.  It’s hard to commit to anything, emotionally.  I think it’s funny (or not) that men have a hard time committing to women.  I resist committing to my career because that’s way scarier than giving someone half the house.  It’s a huge gamble.  A lot of people are taking the plunge into performing (in New York, at any given time, there is a free comedy show, somewhere; several, even, on a single block). 

New York is a gamble (and apparently I’m Ginger from Scorcese’s Casino) cuz I’m rollin’ the dice baby.  Men don’t want to commit because it might ruin their life.  That’s the same reason I resist pushing with my career.  It’s fear.  Ah, that little bugger.  It also depends on what day you catch me on.  When I used to work Vegas twice a year, I was, in my mind, in show business (to some degree). 

Comedians are an interesting faction of show business, because we work the hardest and get the least respect.  We are like boxers.  We take all the risk.  We are the writer, producer, editor, performer, booking and marketing person.  No wonder I want to quit often.  But I’ve only felt that way since moving to New York so I blame the Yankees. 

We get the least respect because we are alone on stage so we get heckled sometimes, and the bookers are all frustrated performers with fickle personalities, who are just looking for an excuse not to book you.  I think I’m going to a Met game.

When I got booked in Vegas, I worked at the Riviera.  You got a hotel and had meals at the employee cafeteria.  Let me tell you something, two shows a night for seven days, I woulda ate Chef Boyardee.  But the reality of a day job is enough to make you want to die by some epic, old school way like consumption or sticking your head in an oven.

This double life is what is getting to me.  (and I sort of get fired a lot).  I come back to the day job after Vegas, back to the meaninglessness and futility of it all, and it’s hard to take.  No wonder I drink too much.  It’s all garbage.  That is why I cried on the plane.  First of all, I am a New Englander.  Being in the 80 degree weather of Florida in December and then parting from it is reason enough, but as I find I am scrawling this out in an airport, I’m thinking there are other reasons as well.

Everybody who does comedy SPECIFICALLY in New York City has this I suspect – even if you’re doing well (this being=crying, wanting to quit, fear of commitment).  But there is something that we're getting as a payoff.  I suspect that it is the satisfaction that we are forging our own way in a city that many don't have the balls to move to, never mind navigate the pot hole-laden thoroughfares.  New York demands the best out of an artist.  That is a good thing.  It requires an amalgam of ourselves into what we aspire to become.  Ultimately it’s what we want.  We want to be changed.  We just didn’t know it was going to be this hard.

More About Art+Comedy/ADD Rant & Lorna Doones

Blogging is perfect for women because we over-analyze everything.  I’m revisiting Carol Leifer’s book.  She’s had a great career in comedy. Which brings me to standup in general, and why we do it.  Recently, a friend asked me if comedy was something that I always knew that I would do.  I directly answered “no.”  I said that I originally wanted to be a successful painter.  I could always draw.  I majored in studio art in college.  I discovered that I was meant to paint when I was twenty years old and I did a semester in Italy.  After I graduated, I set out to try and become an artist.  I remember how daunting it was to have a job and then paint at night and weekends.  I enrolled part-time at Mass Art, because I was so petrified of it all.  Becoming an adult and trying to make it as an artist in an economy and social atmosphere that does not value artists was a tall order.  And the contrast was evident from my visit abroad where artists are respected and celebrated.   I burned out before I was thirty, due to the fact that I wasn’t selling a ton of art and I didn’t have a dealer that was representing me. 

I’m not entirely sure the answer I gave him is the most accurate.  I did get frustrated with art, but comedy was in my life from way back.  My father was a huge fan of comedy.  He loved Rodney Dangerfield, and of course, Carson, and he always had a list of street jokes available that he could share with his old buddies from Phili.  I used to listen to Spike Jones records and grew to become a huge Carlin fan, both by way of my dad.

If I had my way, and, left to my own devices, I would be in my art studio, rigorously making paintings with the kind of ferocity that comes from having a psychic space to create.  I loved how in the studio you make discoveries, you ruin paintings, and then you rediscover in another painting what you didn’t resolve in the first, and stuff like that.  In this hypothetical scenario, I would have a huge studio and no day job.  I would hide away and read shit like Susan Sontag’s Memoirs and Notebooks and then get drunk with other artists + writers and argue about the validity of Roy Litchenstein’s success.  What’s funny is there is not much difference with comics; just replace Litchenstein with Larry the Cable Guy.

But comedy is like being a painter.  You’re the creator.  I’m not singing Sondheim.  I’m the writer of the lyrics and the melody, and the performer. 

I would love to write for television.  That’s on my radar.  More writing in general might be the key to unlock my current state of feeling stuck.  And, my God, do I miss painting.  So much ADD today.  I had like 15 windows open in my browser.  I will list here all that I was trying to accomplish:

Create listing in TimeOutNY

Log in to stupid online payroll

Write this blog

look at Why My Cat Is Sad twitter page

I think I’m too tired to list the rest. 

It’s a boring list anyway.  More ADD i.e. on to the next thing (or things) such as:  1. Find Lorna Doone cookies; and 2. Tweet about someone’s demise and cats (and Lorna Doones).

Divorce, Rhino Bed, Pall Mall Smoking Cat

I totally wrote this blog and then went to re-open the document; I got that crazy sound effect the laptop makes when you've made a fatal error and it wouldn't open. So now I have to remember what exactly I was thinking about - or what I wrote at all. Do I start from scratch?   I guess I have to. The divorce part is easy; I got a divorce, The End. (condensed version).

The Rhino part - well, at the time, I wrote a lot of weird animal stuff. For a while it was kangaroos. They have 3 vaginas. (look it up). They can be perpetually pregnant like a Catholic. It's amazing. Then it was pterodactyls. (see tweets below)

went to the store for peacock gloves and jarred pterodactyl queefs. found neither.

going to cryogenically mutate my uterus to house a small pterodactyl that I get from 

the future or maybe I'll just go to the store.

But the rhino part of the blog/part of my life was derived out of having to sleep on an inflatable bed that was enormous and when fully inflated you could bounce a rhinoceros off of it. PAM !

Divorce/Rhino/Pall Malls Part I

You get a divorce and then you have to start over. It's cool dawg. So you figure out how to go about life sleeping alone. There's a lot more to it than that but that's the jump-off. As a comic you'd think it'd be a great source of things to write about, but really, you have all this rage.

It's funny, you'd think it would be about your struggles to cook for one, or what to do with your time since you're not nagging or cleaning up after someone. But no. It's a death. So the first thing you face is failure. Everything that was in your psyche, your way of looking at the world is done. No big, you're just devastated. And then your friends/colleagues chime in, "you'll meet someone" or "you weren't happy anyway."

You begin to write all this angry material about those people. You think to yourself "what are they talking about anyway... I'm not looking to meet someone - I hate everyone, including them. Why would I be on the market to do it all over again?"

So then you move in with gay guys that cheer you up just because of who they are. Like, when they are ironing in the kitchen in their underwear, listening to Aliyah. They understand you the way a mother would. "You're fine girl, a fresh start is what's happening and you'll come out stronger in the end." You cook together and watch American Idol and things start to smooth out a little.

So you start to write some other stuff that's less angry, more funny. I began a steady track of getting on stage a lot. I drove out to weird parts of New England to do fundraisers to very receptive audiences. My vibration started to rise some. I became the house emcee and Nick's Comedy Stop in Boston. More progress and momentum.

I worked doing odd jobs. I house painted. I took care of my friend's chain-smoking mother, helping her with housework, driving her to the doctor and to get scratch tickets.

Eventually I wanted to really buckle down and get ready to move to New York. I had no savings, so I moved into my girlfriend's house in Saugus and worked a full-time job, while working as a comic every weekend. It was me, her and the cat. The cat meowed frequently and sounded like she smoked 4 packs of Pall Malls a day. The futon in Saugus was not good, so I borrowed my friend's gigantic, inflatable bed (yep, another inflatable bed) and dreamed of rhinos bouncing off of it.  I'm always going to wonder if the original Divorce/Rhino/Pall Mall Smoking cat was funnier, but I posted this, nonetheless.