Days Without Alcohol - 21. Three weeks down. Taking it one day at a time, but pretty confident that I will get to the end of the month at least now! After having had another bit of a crash yesterday (maybe it's a Saturday thing), today I was full of beans and wrote two treatments this afternoon and had an enjoyable easy 30 minute run in the gym. I felt like a different person and could see that I have got a lot slimmer already. I am certainly feeling a lot healthier, though finding it weird that I will have one day a week where I flake out and feel exhausted and sluggish. But if I feel this good the day after then I don't really mind. It was a bit like I was a snake that had shed a skin, or a Russian doll that had busted out of its bigger fatter sister. And I was in an annoyingly good mood. I am sure if there had been anyone around to witness it they would have found it unbearable. So I will just have to be unbearable to you instead.
I haven't done too many gigs this year, but tonight there was another one that was almost scuppered by a persistent and drunken heckler. It had been a lovely evening up to then, with some newer acts all doing interesting and funny stuff to a small but appreciative audience. But in the interval before I came on the promoters unwisely let in a girl who had been crying in the toilets. She had apparently had a terrible day and they had taken pity and tried to cheer her up by letting her see the comedy for free. The compere must have immediately regretted his generosity when as he came on open the last part and she began to heckle him about his hat, asking if he had stolen it from Pete Doherty. Hilariously it looked a bit like the kind of hat that he might wear and from thence the humour arose. She became increasingly rude to him, labouring under the delusion that the audience was finding her remarks more amusing than the charming host's act. In fact everyone was bristling, immediately aware that the tone of the evening was in danger of being ruined.
Unfortunately she didn't shut up when I came on, but kept up her unamusing commentary, mistiming her remarks so that they crashed into punchlines. She was obviously in a bit of a state and I think there's a good chance that she might be a slight nightmare anyway, but clearly alcohol had played its part in the loosening of her mouth and the disconnection of her brain. At the moment it's a bit like the gods are sending down warning examples of the downside of boozing to keep me firm in my resolve.
Luckily being sober I was more than up to the battle of wits and made her look more stupid than she already did. "Who ate all the pies?" she shouted at one point.
"Are you insinuating I am fat?" I asked, "Because I have actually lost over half a stone this year, so imagine how much funnier that heckle would have been if you had got it in a fortnight ago. I'm not that fat. I don't think I've eaten
all the pies. I think I've only eaten about seven of the pies, leaving plenty of pies in the fridge for the proper fatties to have a go at."
Nothing was going to make this woman be quiet and she seemed to feel that the fact that she had had a bad day was enough of an excuse to ruin everyone else's. It was an easy situation to stay on top of, mainly because the rest of the audience hated this silly woman. I suggested that we could engineer a "Murder on the Orient Express" style scenario where we all stabbed her and then blamed it on someone who had snuck into the gig and stabbed her 20 times. As long as we all stuck to the story we'd get away with it. I think if I had pressed the point that I might actually have been able to make it happen. The woman was that annoying.
"What's your proper job?" shouted the woman, in a further attempt to undermine me, even though everyone else in the room was enjoying the act and had relished my verbal destruction of her.
"How do you mean?" I asked, feigning misunderstanding.
"Well you're not funny enough to do this professionally are you?"
"I seem to be doing OK for everyone else."
"Yeah, but if you were successful you wouldn't be playing this tiny room to fifteen people, would you?"
She had not only destroyed what was a potentially magical gig, but had also completely failed to appreciate what it was that made it magical. Personally I often prefer these smaller gigs because the audience is more up for experimentation, which is why I do them. But to her if a gig is not in a massive room packed with braying idiots like her then that means it is not a success. I didn't bother to explain to her that the reason I can do these small gigs is because I make enough money doing other things to mean I can play a small room beneath a pub, to a dozen or so people for no money.
It made it an interesting gig in a different way than I had hoped. I had hoped to do some of my gentler stories, but knew the interruptions would ruin them, so ended up doing a more boisterous set. I still enjoyed it though. My favourite bit being in the "Give me head til I'm dead routine" where I say of the guy wearing the T-shirt, "I'm not racist, I abhore racism of all kinds, but I am 100% sure that that man was Australian." Before I had even got to that punch-line the drunk woman had stood up, and shouted, "No, no, I'm not standing for that. I'm mixed race" and walked out (only temporarily alas). So she had essentially got offended because I had said that I didn't like racism. That's how far away he brain was from working. But I wished that I had realised earlier that this was the way to get rid of her, saying I would have sprinkled the act with racial slurs right from the start.
I love my job.
