On this ride, your hosts Steve and Mal hurtle from Point A to Point B while while examining the stuff of dreams and dread: live performance. Everyone up on stage for … The Ride to Redacted!
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Show notes:
The name of the masterful improv classmate Steve was trying to remember is Stacey Weingarten. As her website at https://www.saweingarten.com/ reveals, she is a director, producer, writer, puppet wrangler and puppeteer. From what Steve could tell as her classmate in that Magnet Theater improv class, she also happens to be a wonderful person.
The show notes for one of our previous episodes mentions “Murder at the Bingo Hall,” by Amigo the Devil (the musical accompaniment to Mal’s drag debut). A wonderful recording of that song can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek-qzLB5w78&list=PLoCQU5WsVfleR069uVWpuB0aNE_vDWBtH.
Here’s a transcription of Mal’s lyrical description of what grew long ago in the darkness of a certain covered sandbox (formatted by Steve as free verse):
It was populated with like colonies
Of different kinds of beautiful delicate
Moss and lichen
That grew
In the semi-darkness under the sun-bleached
Plastic cover
Of the sandbox that had not been moved
For decades
Because it had literally grown roots
And you know the lid had not been removed for quite some time
And so the sand was kind of
Damp sandy perfect conditions for like
Growing this beautiful sort of otherworldly scale model of like a
Dune
Ecosystem
A nice Quora thread about bombing on stage while doing stand-up comedy can be found at https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-bomb-on-stage-as-a-stand-up-comedian This thread actually made Steve consider telling another story — some story, not yet picked out — at the Mosquito event in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Some time. Maybe.
Articles on stage fright abound. Not gonna put in links to them; you can find those on your own. Instead let’s just say that none other than Laurence Olivier, that avatar of actors’ actors, revealed that he suffered from stage fright late in his career. And closer to home, Dusty Sklar, Steve’s mom, reported that Alan Arkin — another on a short list of actors’ actors — told her when she took an improvisation workshop with him that late in HIS career he, too, was suffering from stage fright. So apparently it’s not only first-time drag performers that can feel performance anxiety. Go figure.