Sometimes you do a benefit gig and can feel good about yourself for helping out the poor and/or nutty kids or raising awareness for some unjustly imprisoned Albanian poet or helping people with the cancer or the AIDS. Its great to know that by telling some jokes about cocks and wanking one has made the world a better place and to know that your job is more useful than all the doctors and aid workers and nuns put together. But tonight I could feel even more proud of myself: thanks to me (and a few other no-mark rubbish comics and singers, so mainly me) the foyer of Lyric theatre in Hammersmith (which I was looking at tonight, thinking, its pretty good as it is) will slightly improve. Yes, I slept well tonight knowing I had given my bit back to society. I cant abide a merely adequate theatre foyer and will do everything I can to try and improve the bit in a place of entertainment that people have to pass through in order to get to the bit where all the interesting stuff happens. We did a show tonight that may well have paid for up to 5% of the costs of the new foyer.
I was glad to help though, mainly because the event was organised by the woman who awakened my youthful libido,
Janet Ellis. Not only that the show would be closed by her equally beautiful daughter who acted like a high caffeine drink to my thirty-something libido (keeping it awake when it started feeling a bit sleepy) and who will also one day give birth to the woman who will act as a kind of syringe full of adrenaline plunged into my chest for my libido when I am 60 or 70 get on with it Sophie. Do not let the line of beautiful Ellis women die out.
So despite the unsexy foyer based cause, I had to be involved , if only for the 13 year old me watching
Jigsaw and feeling a bit funny in my tummy. But mainly in my pants.
It was another balmy, barmy evening, but we had a lot of fun despite the warmth (made worse by the additional warmth we experienced through knowing we were doing something so important for foyers in general). I cleverly elected to go on first, learning from closing the recent BAC show that starting out means you are able to enjoy the hospitality in the green room and get drunk, whilst the poor schmuck on last has to stay sober! At the end of the evening when I went for my tenth beer I successfully managed to break the fridge door, thus wiping out all the profit that the evening had made. But Milton Jones (who closed the comedy) was still uninebriated (ebriated?) enough to put it back on for me, which meant the next person who opened it would get the blame (I am pretty sure someone else had already pulled this trick on me, so all is fair on love and fridges). Sophie finished the show with a couple of her songs, beautifully sung with only an acoustic guitar to accompany her. I didnt manage to meet her backstage, which given my crapulous state might have been a good thing. She looked lovely though and has a new album out in the autumn, so look out for that. Shes the mother of my future wife, so the way I look at it the royalties will filter down to me eventually.
Thanks to those of you who came along. Your money will have gone to improving a carpet. Weve all done our bit.
