Getting Mad at an Audience, Listening to a Jerk Cry, and Re-Watching Poltergeist

Some thoughts on performing and empathy

Photo by Louis Smit on Unsplash

Hi! I miss you! Is that weird given that I don’t really know many of you or ever see you in person? Maybe, but that’s how I feel when I don’t get to write a subby for a little while. The virtual is not to be under-estimated I guess, and community comes in many forms. All this to say, you matter to me, and I really love connecting with you. Thank you for subscribing!

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Last weekend I did stand-up again for the sixth time with a bunch of really funny people. I don’t know why I keep track of doing it in this way, but I do. This was my first time trying to memorize my whole set and not use my colored paper notes which I then throw up into the air after each joke.

Yes, I’ve been writing each joke in big letters with a Sharpie (I can’t see close up very well with my two different contacts, welcome to the joys of being in your 50s!) on a neon green, blue, yellow, pink, or orange piece of paper, and after each joke I launch and it flies around. This started because of horrible stage fright and turned out to be something that made people laugh.

So yeah I memorized my jokes. I walked around my apartment for two days and told them to my cats. It reminded me of getting my M.A. and studying with Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell, who both made us memorize poems and recite them to the class. I hated that! It really stressed me out. I know people love making students do this (and I get why it can be great for our brains), but the anxiety it caused me, yeesh! But maybe it set me up to memorize these jokes I wrote, some 27 years later.

I still had the papers, but I didn’t hold them or throw them up in the air, and I only looked at them a few times. I am proud of myself for that. There were two shows and on Friday night I did a really good job! I got a lot of laughs and the audience was really fun and into it.

Same set Saturday night, much harder. The audience, especially the first two rows were not responsive. They sat there, frowning at me, and not laughing. One woman made so many weird faces at me that I checked in, “Are you okay?” She didn’t answer. Anyway, I got some laughs and I made it through my set, but it was hard and I was sad afterward because I felt, I dunno, exposed, unfashionable, disabled, humiliated, and pissed off.

After, I cried because I was so mad (at them sure), but also myself. I thought, Why do you insist on doing so many hard things in this life? You already write and publish books in a very difficult publishing landscape, you’re disabled and queer and sometimes your self-esteem is in the toilet, and so you decide to get up on stage and tell jokes about your sex and dating life?! Great idea Carley!!

Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash

Later, I learned that half of the comics felt that the audience hated them, even our headliner. My friends mostly pumped me up, and let me cry, and told me that I’d done well considering the crowd. The producer of the show and fellow comedian and friend, the genius

MeghanScibona

, did really well that night, which I was super happy about, and she, in all of her comedy experience and wisdom reminded me that sometimes an audience just has very bad mojo. The vibes can just be way off.

Audiences! Be nice to people on stage doing hard things! Smile! Nod! Laugh! Do not act like someone is hurting you when they are maybe just telling jokes you don’t love.

But more importantly, it was good for me to think about my boundaries and what I want to do that’s really hard. The laughs you can get from stand up feel really, really good to someone like me, AND I can also get those laughs from my friends.

Two weeks earlier, I’d done my first ever live performance for a band I’m part of, mostly created by my dear friend

Jason Nunes

. We’re called Tiny Techno, because sometimes techno songs are just too long. I never meant to be in a band, and I certainly never imagined I’d have to perform alone (Jason did everything off to the side honestly except sing/talk) to a beat while wearing cute/not cute (can one ever truly see oneself objectively from the outside?) matching rompers that Jason had picked out for us. Once again, I made it through, but I did not love it. It was fucking scary! This time the audience was wonderful and cheered me on, but phew, how many hard things do I want to do in a month?

A few less I think.

In other news, it’s still a coup, there’s an ongoing genocide, people are being disappeared in vans, and the man that just a little more than half of voters selected, is a raging narcissist out to destroy the country so that we will be even more beholden to him. Surprise! We’ve all seen this with various narcissists in our lives.

Narcissist abusers will break everything you hold dear to control you, even if it hurts them too. THE POWER OF IT ALL. THE RETRIBUTION. THEY FEED OFF OF IT.

But the resistance continues, and I enjoy the little wins as much as the big ones (go Wisconsin!) This morning, I enjoyed listening to Elon Musk cry at DT about what’s happening to Tesla, while DT blathered unconvincingly that “It would all be okay.” Possibly (hey look I just checked some facts) this might not be real, the link explains it all, but he was still visibly upset that Tim Waltz made fun of the falling price of Tesla’s stock prices.

This is the person who said empathy is bad, and I’m supposed to feel empathy for him? Again, narcissists love to start crying and act very wounded when you call them on anything.

Bullies hate it when you fight back.

What if all of they were parented properly, like with empathy, love, understanding, and some boundaries? Not making any excuses but what kind of hellhole of trauma creates DT and EM and all the MAGAS? And yet, that’s too easy of an explanation.

Lots of us were raised terribly and didn’t become cruel dummies. But anyway. I’m running out of steam on this part of the subby. My mom recently told me my brother has gone MAGA. I am not surprised.

Also, what are stocks? I’m serious. I don’t own any. I don’t understand the stock market other than to know we’re headed for some bad times. Occasionally, someone will say to me, hey you should buy some stocks, and I always think “Sure, yeah, I should, with my extra grocery money, hahaha, I don’t even eat eggs anymore.”

Wait, I have a retirement account, so yeah, I guess I own stocks. Let me try a little harder. Stocks are shares of a company that people can buy when the company goes public. How does that sound?

Pivoting now to reading and watching. I really love

Ali Liebegott

‘s Substack. I’m currently reading Love Joe, The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard edited by Daniel Kane. I love Joe Brainard and wow did he write some of my favorite letters of all time. I’m halfway through this book, and I feel so attached to him. Letters were so great weren’t they? They were kind of like an outward facing diary. A recounting of the day. I miss writing them and having them arrive in the mail.

I recently finished Gilgi, One of Us by Irmgard Keun. I bought this in Germany and it’s so so good. Gilgi is a young hardworking German woman who falls in love and almost ruins her life. Set between the two world wars, Keun’s portrait of Weimar Germany is unsparing.

I finally re-watched Poltergeist, a movie that scared and scarred me so badly, when I was eleven, I couldn’t sleep for two years. This time, I could handle it. It was fun to re-watch and try to remember why it rattled me so much. The tree outside the window, the clown underneath the bed, the disappearing child, the closet that is a portal to a evil spirit world, the T.V. as kidnapper, and the house built of top of a cemetery. What a great movie! How it terrified me!

I’ve learned so much about the horror genre from my kid who is a horror movie expert and superfan. She’s taught me to love the genre and see the subversive and radical in many films I would have never chosen to watch on my own.

Like everyone, I’m watching White Lotus, Yellowjackets, and the new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Spoilers. The incest threesome is so V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic, but gay, so I’m both horrified and totally there (as I was for those books). I love a threesome friend breakdown, and it’s so lovely to see Parker Posey get attention again. She’s such a treasure and I missed her. Yellowjackets just keeps getting wilder and wilder. Shauna! You are very bad! This season’s twinks on Drag Race are such a joy. I found myself missing Sam Star mid-week, like I wanted to hear is voice. Now that’s a cast.

Lastly, the above photo is a robot The New York Times says some of us will use as a butler in the future.

Can you imagine that waking you up in the morning? I really don’t like the slippers and the murdery hands.

Enjoy the typos!

xoxoxo

Carley