This is what I remember about the first time I was on fire. It was a gay club. I was wearing a leather outfit with chains across the chest. I blew a fireball and what I always say is that the air conditioner kicked on and it blew back on me, but that may be made up, or a lie. I wasn’t very good at fire-eating. I had only learned a few months ( Read more... )

We had $250,000. We earned it with tears, we earned it with arrogance. Kevin the Shark-Tank-Shark/Dragon’s-Den-Dragon yelling in person is 100% less funny, especially when it’s at you. Did you know the judges’ platform is raised, that supplicants are lit from below the platform, that our two minutes and thirty seconds was edited from almost an hour ( Read more... )

In Eastern Europe, there are little pastries called Fornetti. You buy them in a shop, or at stalls at festivals, and you buy them by weight. They come out of the oven every few minutes on big trays, little hot pockets of chocolate or apricot or pizza-sauce or sausage in crispy layers of filo-dough, and the shopkeeper scoops up however many you want ( Read more... )

He sits in the beer garden, next to the street performance pitch (Pitch D, the hardest one to gather a crowd, day or night) and shakes his head, smiling. The smile that says, Oh no you don’t and I’m not that dumb and I’ve seen what street performers do to volunteers.

And that’s where I curse every bad street performer, every low-rent magician and ( Read more... )

“I guess you travel all the time, eh?”

“Sure do!” I say to the kind audience man footing the leg of the rig, keeping it from sliding while we take it down after the show.

“So where’s home?”

And the shortest answer is, “I have a house in Kalamazoo, Michigan.” Sometimes followed by, “I’m there about three weeks a year. Not all at the same time.”

And most ( Read more... )

Statistical Mode: the most frequently appearing value in a set.
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This is the Fringe.

This is where you find out if you matter.

What do you value? You value art, you value money, you value being good, you value mattering.

If you build it, will they come? Will you finish the day back-slapping other ( Read more... )

Laugh, and the world laughs with you
                          - Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Solitude

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Our episode aired again, two weeks ago.

I know this because every day, people have been talking in low tones about ten feet from me,

“Ask!”
“No, you ask!”
“It’s her!”
“It’s not her!”

I know this, because people I have never met ( Read more... )

Every gig has a schedule.

In Dublin, walk to the pitch around noon, warm up, throw down three scheduled shows hour-on-hour-off.

In Edmonton, 11AM draw for two show times, sometimes three, plan our day from there, Facebook the schedule to our fan list.

London is different.

You only get one show a day.

Because Covent Garden has only one pitch. ( Read more... )