Rage Across America Tour: September!

"The Gambler's Fallacy...is the belief that if deviations from expected behavior are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future...[it] implicitly involves an assertion of negative correlation between trials of the random process and therefore involves a denial of the exchangeability of outcomes of the random process."

I've been thinking about the Gambler's Fallacy a lot on this tour, as my audience numbers have been wildly yo-yo-ing up and down from city to city. (Not that attendance is a random process -- there's some pretty clearly evident variance in cause and effect -- but the emotional results can certainly feel that way, and the Fallacy's more about a psychological phenomenon than a mathematical one, anyway.)

tl;dr: you can't make predictions based on what you feel like the universe owes you.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
FOUNDED: 1833
POPULATION: 2,695,598
HIERARCHY: metropolis
MOTTO: Urbs in Horto
VENUE: Youth Company Chicago

I find myself doing a more ambitious tour every couple of years. By the end of each one, I'm exhausted and frustrated enough that I swear not to do so again, but then a few years pass and the itch of wanderlust returns. In this case, my primary motive (perhaps appropriately for a libertarian show) was financial.

To say that I regard myself as a somewhat private person may seem absurd, coming from a blogger who got engaged onstage, but there are many aspects of my life that I try to keep guarded from just how crass I know show business can get. In this case, the anxious/euphoric/stressful cloud over my head that I haven't been mentioning for the past couple of months is that I'm getting married -- in, Jesus, a few weeks here now.

A longer tour seemed like an opportunity for me to generate some badly-needed cash to help finance the shindig. Unfortunately, my unbroken track record for failing to predict how successful one of my shows is going to be seems to be spot-on -- while I have turned a tidy profit (and I'm deeply amused by the notion that such irreverent material is contributing to a very reverent event, which seems like an apt metaphor for the whole relationship, really), it's fallen pretty far short of the economic neighborhood I was aiming for.

The other complicating factor is the fact that traveling to raise money for the wedding means that I haven't been physically present for much of the actual wedding planning. I have the most phenomenal fiancee on the planet who's never been anything but supportive, but I've definitely been able to hear the stress in her voice, and our shared frustration at my inability to shoulder some key bits of the workload has been wearing.

---

The inverse of the Gambler's Fallacy is the notion of streaks of good and bad luck, and though they're mathematically problematic I've never been able to help being swayed by them. In this case, I found a number of troubling signs collecting around my approach to the Chicago Fringe:

- the complete lack of any press response, despite an unusually high level of marketing aggression on my part.

- the cancellation by my billeter shortly before I arrived in town. I want to emphasize that this is no way the responsibility of the Festival's housing coordinator, who went above and beyond the call of duty, offering her own living space to be shared by myself and another artist.

- the parking situation, which I anticipated would be problematic but has grown exponentially more so since my last time working in town (in 2011). After several hours of searching, I couldn't find any space nearby for my car that wouldn't set me back several hundreds of dollars that I hadn't budgeted for, and circumstances would require me to move it several times. This, in addition to basic day-to-day costs of being in a city the size of Chicago, was placing me in some pretty dire financial straits.

- early on, I also had an episode of night terrors that cost the artist I was sharing a room with to lose a precious night's sleep. I've been plagued by a number of parasomnias, loud screaming and sleepwalking among them, but they've never been a problem while touring -- until now. Mortified, and since I am apparently incapable of moderating my behavior while unconscious, I quarantined myself to sleeping on the patio, to prevent future soporific episodes from plaguing anyone else.

- I'd say that the final stroke, however, came when I ended up canceling my opening night due to lack of turnout. It's my second such cancellation this tour -- but the first one was a one-night deal, due to some pretty mitigating circumstances. Canceling an opening night in a major city is a very, very bad sign.

I found myself playing through the upcoming two weeks in my head. I was exhausted, and hadn't had an uninterrupted night's sleep in over a week. I was hemorrhaging money at an alarming rate that I was now clearly not going to earn back. What was the best-case scenario? That a handful of other artists would take pity on me, show up to offer their support, and I'd give them a free show? I had just that last little bit of pride left, that stated that it would be preferable to give myself a penile frenulectomy with an icicle.

A mid-Festival cancellation is rare, but not unheard of. Even considering it brought an extraordinary amount of guilt and shame -- it is, after all, a slot that could potentially have gone to another struggling artist, and it creates just that much more work for the Festival organizers who are already spread terribly, terribly thin. The third -- and, in my view, the greatest factor -- is the betrayal of the audience.

And, in a sense, it's that third factor that convinced me. What audience? What audience was there to betray? This ain't my first rodeo. I know when it's time to call the patient. I sat down with the housing coordinator, explained my situation; contacted the director, and swung by my venue to pick up my properties; told Siri to take me home, and with that, I pulled the plug.

---

The trip home was not without its stresses, including faulty brakes and several lightning storms, because Loki apparently can't resist the urge to sign his work. Partway to my destination, I received a text from my fiancee, telling me (to my astonishment) that I was expected. One of the downsides of being in love with a detective is that it's impossible to surprise her. A few hours later, I let myself in her front door. There was a box of wedding invitations on the dining room table, and my groomsmen's jackets were laid out on chairs surrounding it.

I was coming out of a lot of shame and frustration and anger. I knew I had a lot more in front of me, as I worked through the consequences of my decision. I've made a lot of shitty choices in the past couple of months. But in that moment, for better or worse, I knew that this one was the right one. I was where I needed to be.

SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA
FOUNDED: 1854
POPULATION: 285,068
HIERARCHY: city
NICKNAME: Pig's Eye
VENUE: Amsterdam Bar and Hall

You never want to end with a matinee. It's one of those unspoken bits of production wisdom: you always want to have a matinee, for the audience that can't make your evening show, but it's not going to have your strongest turnout. And you want to end strong.

Booking a Saint Paul show was all about trying to end strong. There was already an element of risk here, since Fringe remounts traditionally have to struggle to find audience, and this show had already struggled in Minneapolis: but I knew that I wanted to close out somewhere close to home. I knew the venue -- I'd hosted a burlesque show here last year -- and it had the added resonance of being less than a mile from the state capitol. I booked it eagerly.

I did everything I could think of to make this one special. I made it a fundraiser, donating half of the door to FairVote Minnesota, an organization devoted to electoral reform -- and they were kind enough to send several volunteers with T-shirts and a mailing list. I invited two other libertarian comics to perform with me on the bill. I officially announced the release of the sketch comedy album I've been secretly working on for the past several months (available now on Amazon! And iTunes!). I didn't know how many people were going to show up, but by God there was going to be a party for those who did.

Turnout was, unsurprisingly, small -- not embarrassingly so, greater than my fears but short of my ambitions. Most importantly, it was just short of that critical mass that every comedian desires -- the number of bodies that generate the collective response of a crowd, rather than the response of a collection of individuals.

See, but this was actually one of the most interesting aspects of the show. My marketing blitzkrieg had resulted in several disparate groups -- there were Fringers, there were libertarians, and there were electoral reformers -- and the overall result was that you could hear ripples of laughter from individual pockets of the room: one joke would hit one demographic, another another. The performance felt, at times, almost like a textbook study of targeted jokes. And a death knell to the notion of universal comedy.

Which, really, may have been, if not the strongest, then by far the most appropriate note to end this tour on.

SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?

I think that I may actually be dumber now than I was when I started.

FIRST AMENDMENT BOX RESPONSES

As part of the tour, I've included in each programme a "First Amendment Box", in which audience members may write any extreme, absurd, or politically incorrect thought -- and submit it anonymously. I share them here, with no commentary or context.

"I believe passionately in the right of individuals to recuse themselves from coercive acts of the state. Specifically, I believe in the 13th Amendments of the (SERIOUSLY ENDANGERED) United States Constitution, and that it enjoins the federal government or any state or local government from obliging involuntary servitude in any form - civilian and/or military - whatsoever. LEGALIZE THE U.S. CONSTITUTION!"

"I hate men. I pretty much think they're all pedophiles and idiots. And warmongers and controlling sociopaths. (Well, most.)"

"AN-CAP *voluntaryist/abolitionist +Voting is immoral & the lesser of two evils imposes aggression by proxy."

"I had to urinate SO BAD that my bladder was walled against my feces, only the strength of my anus can save me now"

"I don't think much I don't say; so, I'll say this: fuck Kanzer and Bieber - Thought"

"Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
My term of endearment:
C-U-N-T"

(I just want to indicate that my transcription cannot capture the loving calligraphic detail, as well as the illustrations and flourishes, with which that last poem was written. And I can't imagine a better note to end this entry on. I'll plan on penning an overall reflection sometime next week: otherwise, thanks for reading!)

Rage Across America Tour: August!

August turned out to be a month of some very bizarre and unexpected extremes. Fortunately, I'm an extremist.

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

FOUNDED: 1867

POPULATION: 382,578

HIERARCHY: large city

MOTTO: En avant!

VENUE: U of M Rarig Center Arena

By all accounts, this was another record-breaking year for the Minnesota Fringe: audience numbers continue to grow, a number of new and upcoming companies did surprisingly well, and I heartily congratulate the new administration on their hard work to bring this about. As for me, I had the worst audience response and turnout that a show I've produced in the Festival has had since 2005. My audiences in both Kansas City and Indianapolis outstripped my hometown attendance by an order of magnitude. What happened?

One trend that I noticed was an upsurge in the suburban audience -- I saw several audience reviews talking about making the trip into the city, etc. I know this is a grail that the staff has been chasing for some time, and I believe that it's ultimately good for the long-term health of the Festival. One of the bizarre short-term effects is a major spike in the overall conservatism of the audience -- I saw some of the most audience-friendly comics being sternly lectured about the vulgarity or non-traditionalism in their shows. And, uh, I am on the opposite end of the spectrum from audience-friendly.

At just about every show, I'd walk onstage to see a large number of older patrons glowering at me humorlessly. And I was torn between my typical mental response of "I'm so grateful that you've come out to hear what I have to say!" and "Oh, man, you are really not going to have a good time for the next hour."

(This did give me the surreal experience of being pulled aside by people in LA and KC saying "You really need to step up the raunch, dude, seriously" and being pulled aside by people in my normally progressive hometown saying "You really need to dial back the raunch, dude, seriously.")

But I think that having a handful of audience members stumble in from outside of my target demographic -- that's a smaller issue. The larger one is, where the hell was my core audience? I'm coming off of a string of well-attended and well-received storytelling shows: the audience that met them with warmth and enthusiasm was nowhere to be seen.

The most obvious notion is that they were leery of the content. I'm hesitant to accept this, because I've done quite well producing political comedy before. But that was during the Bush administration, when being a libertarian was cool and weird and sexy. Under a Democratic administration, it's a dirty word. I spoke a while back with an older libertarian comic who confided in me that he just couldn't get any traction with that material in the Clinton years, and for the first time I think I'm starting to understand what he meant.

(I must have understood this on some level, since I largely quit political blogging once Obama was elected. There just wouldn't be any more fun to be had: we must regard our leader with great solemnity, now.)

I did a show a few years ago with another storyteller who advised me to cut the phrase "libertarian activist" from my standard bio, concerned that audiences would associate me with the Tea Party. My immediate thought? That I had been a libertarian for years before this vaguely racist pack of anti-intellectual bumper-sticker-shouting paranoid hacks stumbled drunkenly onto the scene, and I would be damned if I would yield the title to them.

My experience this year to me suggests that my consent was never necessary, and that they've already won that battle in the public eye. Libertarian is a dirty word, and will be for the foreseeable future. We lost the war; and insofar as one of my goals with this show was to humanize the philosophy, my inability to get an audience in the door to hear the material made that a resounding failure.

INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA

FOUNDED: 1821

POPULATION: 820,445

HIERARCHY: large city

NICKNAME: Circle City

VENUE: ComedySportz Indianapolis

ME: Hey there! I'm doing a political comedy show over at ComedySportz.

PATRON (peering at the card suspiciously): I saw this in the programme. I didn't know what to make of it.

ME: Then you should come and see the show! And still not know what to make of it!

The executive director of indyFringe is a real sweetheart, who pulled me aside partway through the Festival and asked, with some concern, how my experience had been going. A number of people had been asking her warily about the libertarian, she informed me.

See, I didn't need her to inform me of this, because part of the bizarre, translucent nature of Fringe fame means that I've been hearing a lot of this firsthand. Either I'm incredibly lucky this year or people are talking about my show constantly, because I've been overhearing conversations about it in every city I've been to.

There was one particularly insufferable couple in Indianapolis. As I stood outside doing my aggressively intensive vocal warm-ups, they peered in through the window and spent several minutes pointing at my audience, making fun of them, and laughing. I smiled, nodded, and agreed that whoever had brought this show to their town must be an idiot. I then waited until they left, slipped my flask back into my pocket, stepped inside, and proceeded to do a show in which that audience laughed at nearly every sentence out of my mouth for the next hour.

Indianapolis may have been wary, but you would never have guessed it from my audience turnout, which was consistently robust -- and once I guided them through their initial trepidation (which typically takes me about 5-10 minutes) they were hooting, cheering, and applauding. I had one group that came with the explicit intent of sabotaging my show through heckling: they quickly became among my most vocal supporters.

Indy has one of the strongest senses of community of any Fringe that I've toured to. This can be attributed, I suspect, to several factors. For one, it's much smaller -- there's only 64 shows -- which means audiences are seeing a larger percentage, and are consequently much more game to take chances on an unknown. For another, it's geographically tight-knit: just about everything takes place in a four-block radius. With copious buskers, you turn onto Mass Ave and you enter Fringe World.

I was dragging my heels into this one, dreading every performance; and I walked away from just about every performance feeling like my skin was singing. After an uncharacteristically negative hometown experience, Indy's adventurous audience restored my faith in the circuit.

"What we love about you," the ED said to me, "Is that every show you bring forces the audience to make a choice." I'll take it. On to Chicago.

SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?

That I still have a lot to learn.

FIRST AMENDMENT BOX RESPONSES

As part of the tour, I've included in each programme a "First Amendment Box", in which audience members may write any extreme, absurd, or politically incorrect thought -- and submit it anonymously. I share them here, with no commentary or context.

- I want to control the weather

- Mandatory oral sex at all voting locations

- A chicken in every pot and pot in every pipe

- Health care - flat tax

- Snowman tax

RE NEXT FREE ELECTION:

1)  All Republicans are obsolete and irrelevant post Andrew Jackson;

2)  Hillary Clinton is too morally ambiguous and ego [illegible];

3)  another [illegible] free candidate after Obama, if we must, but a hyphenated name like -- Garcia-Schneider!

America is a land of illusion, full of pageantry and falsehoods. There are figureheads in the highest offices, producing theatre, hiding behind false ideals, letting the wizards behind the curtain do what they like. I sometimes feel like I'm watching a movie and I'm the only one who can tell Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time. You can be free in America, but you have to have enough money to buy it.

War against pigs. Legalize meth. Ban the behind the ass under the balls angle in porn. Forget the Alamo. Lower the drinking age to 13. Ban anime, execute all anime scofflaws. Smoke weed. War against the mail-men. Set Mike Pence on fire and throw him down stairs. Don't comply. (BLACKS!) Eternal salvation or your money back! SUBGENIUS.com

If those fucking tea-baggers and crazed evangelicals got all the dumb shit the way they say they want it, they'd still probably not realize how fucking stupid they all are! Dumbass Libertarians are included in this mini-rant I wrote. Your ideas as a Libertarian are repulsive!

The Repubs are like bank robbers. You might not approve, but you can sort of understand. The Dems are more like the guy who takes a tennis racket and tries to chop down a lamppost because he thinks it's the Antichrist.

The electoral college should be disbanded and all governmental positions, federal, state and local AND all federal, state, and local policies should be voted on by the people of the US. Even tax changes!

Change the national anthem to Mm-Bop. Or something with a peppy tune. The internet gives too many idiots a forum to be...idiotic. And, apparently, I am too much of an idiot to deny them my attention.

People should be allowed to save unused votes and then use them all in the event a qualified candidate runs. Congress shall pass a balanced budget before any other bill and before being paid.

To the extent that we have taxes, men should pay more, as they disproportionately commit crimes and burden the criminal justice system (which is a big business in America anyway).

America is not the greatest country in the world. Christianity is not compatible with being a soldier.

We are all doomed! Unless we are not...revolution. It will be televised this time.

End of life care is too expensive -- sick old people should be euthanized.

Campaign finance reform is priority one. All other concerns are secondary.

There is no hope unless we can bring ourselves to compromise with our enemies.

As a gay man, I'm terrified of AIDS but condomless sex feels so good.

I really want to hate your show, but I don't. Bravo. Keep inquiring!

I believe that eugenics may be the answer to our future survival.

Robin Hood was returning citizens' extraordinary taxes! Thanks!

[Drawing of a marijuana leaf.] THIS. (I am an intellectual.)

If the world smoked a joint, there would be peace forever.

Stupid people should not be allowed to reproduce.

(I pretty much say everything I think.)

A right not exercised is a right lost.

#GaryJohnson for President

Anything I believe

     I believe is true

But

     I don't believe

     everything I believe

     is true

Rage Across America Tour: July!

I've found that this month has evoked a strong, strange sense of déjà vu for me, for a number of reasons. Des Moines is the first city I ever toured to, for one, and the show I'm touring is a sequel to the first I brought to Kansas City, for another -- not to mention the fact that this was the KC Fringe's tenth anniversary. Just about everything I experienced seemed to be happening in the shadow of something I'd experienced before.

DES MOINES, IOWA
FOUNDED: 1851
POPULATION: 203,433
HIERARCHY: city
NICKNAME: The DSM
VENUE: Java Joe's CoffeeHouse

Des Moines is a weird place. (Actually, I take that back -- everywhere is a weird place. There's no such thing as normal.) I remember my first night there many years ago -- I impulsively contacted all the other out-of-towners and, since we'd been running tech rehearsals and promoting all day, set out to find something to eat at 11pm. On a Thursday. We were stunned to find everything closed. Finally, we found a pair of guys smoking outside a bar. I approached one of them, saying, "Hey, we're from out of town, and we were wondering if there was anywhere nearby we could grab a bite to eat..." and he, no exaggeration, hands-on-his-hips Errol-Flynn belly-laughed at the very idea of finding food after ten o'clock.

Of course, that was years ago, and back before I was more adventurous on the road. This time, I noticed that my venue had a poetry slam taking place the night before my show. My experience at C4 in Rochester taught me that I'd be a fool to not take advantage of this and, after some grumbling and heel-dragging, I hastily packed my stuff and left early enough to check into my hotel and walk down.

I slipped in the side door, ordered a beer, and signed up to compete when the list went up. I'm a competent slam poet, though not a great one -- so imagine my surprise when I plowed through to the final round. After my first set, the host peered out at me and asked "Wait a minute, who the hell are you?" I explained I was from out of town, and he was generous enough to give me a chance to plug my show from the stage.

Aggressively handed out postcards to everyone on the way out, and it paid off -- turnout was small, but more than half of it was from the slam. (The other slightly-less-than-half was from the local libertarian community, so that press release paid off.) Venue offered me a door-cut, so it didn't cost me a dime -- if nothing else, it was another live-fire rehearsal I made some pocket change off of, and it was great to have the chance to connect with both the poets and the politicians. (I chatted with one of the former about the now-defunct Iowa Fringe, and assured him that I, for one, was just waiting for a bunch of them to get together and get it up and running again. I'd be there in a heartbeat.)

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
FOUNDED: 1853
POPULATION: 467,007
HIERARCHY: large city
NICKNAME: Paris of the Plains
VENUE: Westport Flea Market

Another one of the (many) nicknames of this place is the "Heart of America", since it's close to both the population and geographic centers of these United States. I tour a lot (obviously), and just about every city I go to claims to be nation's cultural crossroads. This is the one place I've been (and, indeed, it's one of the reasons that I keep going) that I think has a credible claim to the title.

There's just plain a little of everything there. There's some of the Midwest, some of the South, and a great big dollop of both the coasts, everywhere you go. It certainly has its share of racial tension. I remember a sketch comedy I toured back in 2008, which contained a series of jokes involving racial slurs. In Minneapolis, we'd get some audience pullback, then a sort of cautious "Okay, let's see where they're going with this." In Kansas City, you could hear a fucking pin drop.

I love Kansas City. This is my seventh consecutive year working there, and I fall a little more in love each time. It's weird, but it's a different kind of weird than Des Moines. Similar, in some ways, to Indianapolis. I have the impression that both are, overall, conservative cities, and consequently their arts communities compensate by swinging way left. Jesus-bashing, Bush jokes, and naked flesh go over like gangbusters in both places.

(KC has an obsession with burlesque that the local audience seems totally unconscious of -- every time I bring up the fact that it's unusual they look at me like I'm crazy. No, I say, every Fringe has, like, one or two that do okay. This Festival always has, like, a dozen -- that are selling out every show. It's both awesome and mystifying to me.)

The flip side of that is that, being that rarest of animals -- the fiscally conservative artist -- no one quite seems to know what to do with me when I swagger in, brandishing my politics on my sleeve. (I had several audience members tell me point-blank that they weren't seeing my show because of the content, which I respect more than the phony glad-handling I received in LA. I was gratified to see that my years of working here are paying off -- I'm generally known to the audience, and I had several people coming up to me gushing praise for my previous shows, even as they acknowledged that they weren't attending this one.)

One pleasant surprise I found -- in every city on this tour, I've been appealing to local libertarian groups. For whatever reason, this is the state that responded effusively. They plugged my show, and I had a handful of libertarians showing up at every performance, often inviting me out and buying me drinks afterward. The sense I had from them was one of wariness (is he really one of us, or is he making fun of us?) (...er, answer: both), which rapidly progressed to relief (oh, thank God, we can actually relax and talk about these ideas without fear of reprisal). I'm nothing but grateful to them, and hope that I provided something in return.

The experience was probably best summed-up by the late-night shows I performed at. The Festival runs a late-night cabaret (of which I've had the honor of being one of the hosts for several years). It's a strange animal with a strange mix of audiences and responses, and I definitely got the full range.

One night, the evening took the format of a playful game show, in which we were asked random questions via the spin of a wheel. Not that I'm a comic genius with the ad-libbing -- it's a loose, silly, late-night kind of deal -- but wow, did I get a sense of audience hostility. My politics were a recurring joke, and I'd look out to a sea of tight-lipped frowns every time I opened my mouth. Not to dismiss the (painfully likely) possibility that I was just chronically unfunny, but I seemed to get audience pullback before even stumbling towards a punchline.

A few nights later, I did another comedy set to a packed house. (And I'll be honest -- I overheard some audience members behind me bad-mouthing me, not realizing I was in earshot. It got me good and angry, and angry is when I seem to do better with audiences.) Frankly, I killed it. One of those shows -- they were hanging onto every word and I knocked every laugh-line out of the park. It was fun, it was gratifying, and it reminded me of the fact that the material actually works when there's a critical mass of people who are sufficiently relaxed -- which makes it all the more aggravating when that audience doesn't show up. Which I have to regard as a marketing failure, on my part. Too confrontational? But how the hell else do you sell this?

SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?

In Des Moines? Strongly reinforcing what I've already begun to suspect -- that these one-night shows can't just be one-night shows. You've got to show up at least a week in advance to start putting yourself out there and promoting.

As for Kansas City -- enh. I've had other performers, both there and in LA, pull me aside and give me marketing advice, which seems to boil down to "Be more sassy and confrontational!" But my sense is that that is exactly what is alienating my potential core audience. Not that this is a new problem, for me. I have lots more data, if I could only figure out what the fuck to do with it.

FIRST AMENDMENT BOX RESPONSES

As part of the tour, I've included in each programme a "First Amendment Box", in which audience members may write any extreme, absurd, or politically incorrect thought -- and submit it anonymously. I share them here, with no commentary or context.

"Sometimes I feel like I desire stronger relationships with others - but don't say anything due to what they may think like - to tell my husband I have feelings of being with other men who were so amazing in bed & spirit, or telling girlfriends I want to get with them, not that I would, just that I want to, or telling people I believe in Jesus, that's got to be the hardest honest statement to admit to those I know these days."

"Superman sucks donkey dick. Marvel > DC!!! Keira Knightley should not put away her nipples. She has literally no boobs though so it doesn't matter if you see the nips or not. Milton [Friedman]'s assertion that capitalism separates the spheres of economic and political power is a load of crap."

"Quack-a-dilly blip. What to do you call an 80 year old atheist...agnostic. What do you call an oppressed libertarian...Democrat. What do you call a successful business man who is a libertarian...Republican."

"If you are a lawmaker and pass a law = you should have to live by it also...not be exempt. I know how to live my life and spend my money better than any lawmaker or rulemaker. They think - they know how to live my life better than I."

"Our hope is to remove Gov. Sam Brownback in the next election. Or replace w/ anybody but Tea Party person. The GOP party are the zombie party seraching for brains."

"What I meant to say is that George Bush is a narcissist while Dick Cheney is a megalomaniac. And the two cannot be considered in isolation."

Rage Across America Tour: Interlude

A little past the halfway point of the tour, now, and with the Minnesota Fringe just around the corner I thought it might be worthwhile to collate/archive some of my online content from the past couple of months.

THINGS TO WATCH

0:35     KC Fringe Promo. The place is crowded and I didn't have a mic, so it's damn-near inaudible, but in the interest of completeness here's a clip of me plugging my show when I arrived in KC.

1:30     2014 Fringe Participant Interview. A brief promo I did of my show with the Hollywood Fringe in LA.

2:22     MN Fringe Preview. Live promo I did with Matt Allex of Vilification Tennis. This was singled out by Graydon Royce of the Star Tribune as "solidly on the nice list."

2:37     Jumpin' Jack Kerouac Trailer. Trailer for a dance show I'm performing in in Minneapolis.

2:50     Jumpin' Jack Kerouac Preview. Live promo I did with the rest of the cast.

4:43     Indefinite Articles Trailer. Trailer I put together for the show some months ago.

5:37     The Calof Series. Promotional video for a storytelling series at Patrick's Cabaret that features about a minute of me workshopping one of the stories from the show.

THINGS TO LISTEN TO

1:00:01     Obsessed with Joseph Scrimshaw. A podcast interview I did in LA about J.R.R. Tolkien and his influence on my work.

1:49:47     Apropos of Nothing. Rather embarrassingly, I get even drunker than usual on this one and it rapidly devolves into us shouting slurred arguments over each other. That does seem to be what this audience comes for, however.

THINGS TO READ

03/23/2014     Story SlamMN! Interview. An interview I did with Paula Reed Nancarrow about competitive storytelling.

06/09/2014     Reddit AMA. I impulsively did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in which I answered online questions from strangers about my career.

05/30-06/25/2014     Libertarian Rage Blog (Part One and Part Two). Reflections on the first two months of my tour.

06/25/2014     Libertarian Rage as Theater. A rather confrontational interview I did with Stubble, a local men's magazine.

07/07-11/2014     Word Sprout Blog (Part One, Part Two, and Part Three). A series of essays about storytelling that I wrote for a local spoken-word organization.

07/18/2014     Friend a Day. A surprisingly glowing profile by local comedian Tim Wick from a series in which he writes kind things about people he knows.

REVIEWS

Anger, Sarah Palin, and Whiskey. An effusive review from the Tolucan Times, a Los Angeles paper.

Hollywood Fringe Audience Reviews. Just what it sounds like.

KC Fringe Audience Reviews. Ditto.

LISTINGS

...a handful of plugs/calendar listings. Mostly variations on sampling the press release (so not too interesting to read), but included here for archival purposes.

Rochester Post-Bulletin
Express Milwaukee
Body Mind Spirit Guide
Broadway World
Libertarian Party of Missouri
Asian-American Press

...more to come, hopefully. Watch this space!

Rage Across America Tour: June!

"...nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis."

- Aldous Huxley on Los Angeles

Y'know, even if I couldn't have articulated this to myself, I think that some part of my brain was expecting LA to be more like New York (which I revisited recently) -- at the very least, much more crowded. But while it has about half the population, it's got a third of the density. It doesn't feel so much like a city as a collection of cities, each with a distinct culture, although united by one pretty awesome transit system (and as someone who tours frequently, boy howdy am I impressed by a 24-hour bus service).

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
FOUNDED: 1781
POPULATION: 3,904,657
HIERARCHY: conurbation
NICKNAME: City of Angels
VENUE: Theatre Asylum

I also think some part of me was thinking that LA would have some phenomenal theatre scene -- on the basis that it's a film/television town, and consequently full of struggling actors and writers. I was surprised to find, in my initial research, that there were very few papers regularly covering local theatre. I was also anticipating that there would be a much higher bar to clear, in terms of production quality -- but what I found is that, while there's a hell of a lot more of everything (i.e. a lot more really good shows, and a lot more really bad shows), the overall ratio of good to bad is pretty consistent with just about any other city I tour to.

The good shows (and I saw at least one that I'd call phenomenal) aren't that interesting to talk about, because a large part of what makes them good is the fact that they're unique -- they don't conform to obvious patterns. But boy howdy the bad ones do, and different patterns in every city. I saw a string of bad ones as soon as I made it into LA, bad enough that I was dragging my heels and despairing of ever seeing a good one again.

The LA bad-show pattern: a solo performance, consisting of a physically attractive actor bouncing around in front of an audience loaded with friends, cheering, laughing, and applauding throughout. The show is a memoir, with maybe about five minutes of story. The actor proceeds to put on a variety of voices, accents, and characters, sing songs, maybe do a little slapstick, all with the thinnest thread connecting this to the actual narrative. And after about four of these in a row, I had the revelation that, ah. I'm sitting through somebody's audition reel.

This is a networking city, no doubt about it. Usually, I have to down a few shots at Fringe Central before setting out and shoving my cards at strangers; here, everyone else is approaching me. I spent my first three days aggressively pushing my show at every Fringe event before realizing, hey, I don't think I've encountered a single audience member. It's all other artists. Likewise, there's hardly a critical review on that website -- it's almost entirely artists gushing at each other. I briefly considered diving in before realizing that this really wasn't the appropriate venue for critical analysis. That's not why anyone's here.

It's an environment that revolves around building relationships and being liked, and consequently my brash, swaggering, confrontational style has been met with an extraordinary amount of audience pullback -- in the shows proper, in my previews, and in my street interactions. The tense, guarded expression that comes over the face of everyone I hand a card to when they see the word "Libertarian" is a study, I tell you what.


SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?

Audience numbers have been thin, but I've received some positive press, which was my primary goal in coming out here, as well as at least one serious invitation to a promising performance opportunity, which is one more than I was expecting. I certainly don't regret making the trip.

Would I make it again? That's a harder question. It's a huge investment of time (it's a month-long Festival, most are only about ten days), as well as a huge investment of money -- in addition to just general cost of day-to-day living in a city this size, I was immediately inundated with offers (hire me to do your publicity! Hire me to record your show! Hire me to place an ad!) Definitely couldn't have swung it if one of my old touring buddies hadn't offered to put me up. So while I don't object to the notion of returning at some point, I can't see it happening anytime soon.

That said, in terms of intangible benefits, well...I spent an evening chatting up an attractive Irish bartender with tales of Celtic mythology. I watched a street preacher on Skid Row quote Ecclesiastes not half a block from where I saw a homeless dude lighting up a crack pipe. I spent another evening talking the Fringe circuit with a sex worker who introduced herself by comparing me to a mass murderer.

There was an article going around Facebook a while back, but its basic gist was that Baby Boomers devote their lives to collecting status symbols, while Gen-Xers devote their lives to collecting experiences. I am definitely in the latter camp.

FIRST AMENDMENT BOX RESPONSES

As part of the tour, I've included in each programme a "First Amendment Box", in which audience members may write any extreme, absurd, or politically incorrect thought -- and submit it anonymously. I share them here, with no commentary or context.

"Morals, while subjective, support the common sense of legislature. Professed Christianity is not, as popularly misunderstood, a shorthand for strong moral character. We should refuse to allow the sloppy invocation of religion as a mass appeal in our political process."

"The key problem of our age is immature masculine energy. All problems can be traced back to some man fucking things up."

"Get more graphic with Palin."

"That I'm awesome."