I'm currently on the slow train back to Hitchin, after doing a short spot at the lovely open mic night Touching Cloth at The Water Poet, near Liverpool Street.
("Geography".)
It's not often you see the words 'lovely' and 'open mic night' in the same sentence, but if there were ever a sentence worthy of featuring all three, it's the one above (which is an elaborate way of saying "I like the club"). The MC Frank Cassidy is one of the few people in the open mic stand-up world with solid ethics, who strives to give the acts performing the best possible gig. It's a nice little room and a good crowd, although it was very performer-heavy tonight.
I enjoyed my set. I don't know why but I woke up today in a good mindset, which I managed to keep a hold of until the end of the day. I decided to try and settle back into the new material (which had only had one other airing) and try to enjoy telling the story, rather than rattle through it at a rate. It's almost impossible to get your personality and style across in a five-minute set, so you might as well take your time and invest in what you're trying to say, rather than apologise for it. It still didn't go perfectly - listening back to the recording I made on my phone, I can hear that I'd talked over laughs and gabbled a bit - but this is par for the course when the material is largely untested. At least I feel I can tick off what I did tonight as having something of worth to it, and spend the next few days cementing the other ideas I have brewing into some semblence of a set for my next gig. The more stuff I can get vaguely run in before April's Bath 'Work in (Hope of) Progress' dates, the less I'll have to rely on old material to pad the show out, and I can hit the ground running for Brighton in May. It's all about taking small steps; tonight, I took a few of them.