Shocking
After sweating and worrying and wave after wave of nervous headaches and nausea, I cobbled together a firm chunk of my Minnesota Fringe show. I was scheduled to perform it at the Vilification Tennis show last night, and was desperately freaked out. Working on my own, with no outside feedback, I had no sense of whether or not my material or approach was funny. Not to mention, I had maybe a couple of hours to memorize it, and no idea how to block it. Furthermore, I was deeply unsure how my dry, rambling comic style would go over with Vilification's usual crowd and their preference for... let's call it a wet, hard comic style.
I could quibble about my performance, and since it's my blog, I'll do that. I bobbled a lot of lines, at one point completely blanking. I couldn't figure out how to make it theatrical, so I just kind of stood there and said lines. Plus it was a smaller than usual Vilification audience, so I didn't get exposed to as many people as I had hoped.
But whatever. My preview went over very well. I'd guess the reaction was roughly three-fourths "gol dang this is funny!" to one-fourth "what the hell is this crap?" I was expecting at best a 50/50 split, so I found those proportions very gratifying. My sense of relief is enormous. What I'm doing works. The show will wind up fine.
So I went home happy, and got thrown a rather disturbing curve ball.
I thought I play a little Left 4 Dead 2 before bed, as is my wont, when I heard loud banging and crackling noises, like firecrackers. The house was hit with a brownout that made my computer reboot. There was more crackling, and flashes of red and blue light. I looked out the alley-side window, and was startled to see that the power line connecting to my house was throwing off sparks. More brownouts. I grabbed my phone and wallet, called 911, and got the hell out of the house.
A fire truck pulled up right away. They didn't do anything but rope off the area and yell at me to stay back. I did hear one fireman say that he'd never seen anything like this before, which was distressing. They shooed people away, and kept scanning the roof of my house and the surrounding trees for any signs of fire.
The arcs and crackling kept up for several minutes. Then, then entire power line glowed bright red, and some bits melted off and dripped on the sidewalk, setting some weeds on fire. Astonishingly, this was the only thing that happened that could be construed as damage. Also astonishing, not once did the power ever go off in my house. After the glowing incident, the arcing stopped. So we waited for the XCel Energy guy to show up.
The XCel guy shut off the power at the transformer (which is right outside my house), got on his cherry picker, and futzed with the line for about 10-15 minutes. Then everything was fine. He said the live wire and the ground wire got in contact with each other somehow, maybe some side effect of the horrid heat wave we'd been having. He also said I was lucky that it was copper wire. Had it been aluminum wire, it would've broke and been on the ground, zapping all over the place. And y'know, maybe my house would've burned down or something cute like that.
To state the obvious, this was a rather scary experience. I'm still amazed nothing serious happened. The line is like two feet from my house, and there's a tree in my back yard that grows into it (like to the point that the line is embedded into the tree, and that's were most of the sparks were.) I don't know how this wasn't a major disaster.
So, finally, around 2:00 AM or so I went to bed. I had two major panic and relief episodes with the space of maybe five hours, and I was wrung out. I'm grateful for a lot of things today. I've also got a wedding to attend later, so I'm going to not do much else this afternoon, and just appreciate the positives in life.
I could quibble about my performance, and since it's my blog, I'll do that. I bobbled a lot of lines, at one point completely blanking. I couldn't figure out how to make it theatrical, so I just kind of stood there and said lines. Plus it was a smaller than usual Vilification audience, so I didn't get exposed to as many people as I had hoped.
But whatever. My preview went over very well. I'd guess the reaction was roughly three-fourths "gol dang this is funny!" to one-fourth "what the hell is this crap?" I was expecting at best a 50/50 split, so I found those proportions very gratifying. My sense of relief is enormous. What I'm doing works. The show will wind up fine.
So I went home happy, and got thrown a rather disturbing curve ball.
I thought I play a little Left 4 Dead 2 before bed, as is my wont, when I heard loud banging and crackling noises, like firecrackers. The house was hit with a brownout that made my computer reboot. There was more crackling, and flashes of red and blue light. I looked out the alley-side window, and was startled to see that the power line connecting to my house was throwing off sparks. More brownouts. I grabbed my phone and wallet, called 911, and got the hell out of the house.
A fire truck pulled up right away. They didn't do anything but rope off the area and yell at me to stay back. I did hear one fireman say that he'd never seen anything like this before, which was distressing. They shooed people away, and kept scanning the roof of my house and the surrounding trees for any signs of fire.
The arcs and crackling kept up for several minutes. Then, then entire power line glowed bright red, and some bits melted off and dripped on the sidewalk, setting some weeds on fire. Astonishingly, this was the only thing that happened that could be construed as damage. Also astonishing, not once did the power ever go off in my house. After the glowing incident, the arcing stopped. So we waited for the XCel Energy guy to show up.
The XCel guy shut off the power at the transformer (which is right outside my house), got on his cherry picker, and futzed with the line for about 10-15 minutes. Then everything was fine. He said the live wire and the ground wire got in contact with each other somehow, maybe some side effect of the horrid heat wave we'd been having. He also said I was lucky that it was copper wire. Had it been aluminum wire, it would've broke and been on the ground, zapping all over the place. And y'know, maybe my house would've burned down or something cute like that.
To state the obvious, this was a rather scary experience. I'm still amazed nothing serious happened. The line is like two feet from my house, and there's a tree in my back yard that grows into it (like to the point that the line is embedded into the tree, and that's were most of the sparks were.) I don't know how this wasn't a major disaster.
So, finally, around 2:00 AM or so I went to bed. I had two major panic and relief episodes with the space of maybe five hours, and I was wrung out. I'm grateful for a lot of things today. I've also got a wedding to attend later, so I'm going to not do much else this afternoon, and just appreciate the positives in life.