Two Weeks From Once In A Lifetime Thing

In two weeks, I fly to Orlando to visit Port Canaveral to board the ship that will set engine for Barcelona from which I will fly to Italy for the Venice International Film Festival.

On Friday, I perform in a comedy show with Melinda Hill.

Long-term parking, festival passes, luggage for the trip, all those basic things have been purchased and prepared. Apart from a few big premiere tickets (which do not go on sale until the middle of the month), we are ready to go. And what a way to make me feel less ready.

The show starts on the cruise ship. 4,000 passengers, and I tend to get cruise famous, so I will be leaning into that harder for those upcoming fourteen days. In some ways, I feel as though I am at the top of my game. I just need to rehearse. Gather bits and rehearse them. Over and over. Then shmooze in Italy, using some of what I will likely innovate on during that cruise.

Once in a lifetime opportunity. Documentary about me has a title and a logline. Working on other pitches as well.

Whoops! Got Fraud'd

Oh how young I was in my last blog post.

We are nearing the end of June, which is when I was expecting to go to Florida for my cousin's wedding. I reserved a hotel room at a reasonable price, which is usually the pricy issue, but alas, flights were expensive! So I searched various websites and found one with lower rates. I booked my flights.

Then I received an email saying that I needed to call them. I dislike phone calls, but okay. I captured audio and video of the conversation. They claimed that I got some special discount voucher, which means they cannot send me the confirmation code now, but I do assuredly have a ticket. This sounded suspicious to me, but competing flights were significantly more expensive, and I also would not be devastated to lose a chance to see family.

As luck would have it, I never received the follow-up email with flight information. I called the agency 20+ times, and during one of those phone calls, I managed to get through and confirm that yes, this was LowFareBuddy, and gave them my name. Then they hung up on me. So then I called my bank to report fraud.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how my sister got to stay in her own (my planned) hotel room instead of sleeping on my uncle's floor.

My dad texted me this past Sunday, on Father's Day, about me being at the wedding. I did not open the text, but it did give me enough anxiety that I am feeling relief to instead just be focused on putting my comedy show together. No more events of significance before Venice. Writing and refining a show, screenwriting a film. Lots of songwriting, and, as I realized last night after being inspired by the Supergirl movie, more physical bits! More contortionist stuff! Regardless of the strength of the writing, the contortionist stuff is what others simply cannot bring to the table.

Get Some PR For Venice?

Elf draft. Paying a magical idiot elf to write your first screenplay draft for $10.

That's the trick that a current big horror director Zach Cregger, who comes from sketch comedy writing. Maybe I will be able to make myself do that.

One of the questions currently on my mind with regard to Venice is what I need to do to maximize opportunities there. I let the director know that I daydream about doing press for these things, that I think such situations are fun improv opportunities. I just emailed a PR firm to ask what they could do, but also, maybe our creative team is already on it.

I am slowly but surely coming up with songs and song concepts, and building them. But wow it sure is annoyingly slow as a process. But writing is rewriting.

Post-Birthday

On June 5, I had become older than I had ever planned to be. Everything from this point forward is a bonus.

I had previously worked under the assumption that the human body peaks at the age of 35. This is, for the most part, the physiological reality. But this is when vocal cords peak, which means that as a singer, I am only likely to get better for the next decade(+) to come.

And we shot that VR short film... and it is premiering in Venice... I just looked up awards, and major ones do exist for short films. A VR film has been nominated in the past.

What. If. That?

And now I need to research every film in the lineup if I can, at least in terms of familiarity with directors, producers, and writers. Like, who is this new-fangled actor/producer "Tom Cruise"?

I just read that Venice in particular is a launching pad for The freakin' Oscars. What if... live action short film category.

Then again, it is a comedy, and comedies are infrequently chosen unless they are actually dramas.

It was amazing. 

Lazy Then Locked Out

I was depressed for a couple months, got medicated again, could not figure out how to log into this account... then in the last few weeks, I booked a role that I particularly wanted. And when we had our first zoom meeting, I learned that it is being made with a grant from the Venice International Film Festival, and will be premiering there. So my mom, fresh from a breakup, said we should go. I found a transatlantic cruise that could leisurely get us to Europe the day before the festival starts, and now it is set.

The project will be shot in VR, and is a comedy. Everything is in my wheelhouse. I get to wear some prosthetics, so today was a costume fitting, but I will also be showing up early tomorrow to finalize that. The director asked if I could get there earlier than call time. The only thing that was holding me back from showing up when the crew does is the maintenance of social norms, so I will just be there at the start of the day tomorrow. And there is a gym nearby, so I can get properly stretched in the morning too.

My music and standup are going well. The main issue I currently have as I gather all my bits together is that I keep referring to a set list, which takes attention away from the audience. This is bad, even though I do riff on it and get some laughs in there. So I have a little under three months to get on stage as much as I can, then on that cruise, I will have nine days at sea, during which I hope to steal unused stage space and do enough rehearsing and organizing of my bits to maybe have my routine figured out.

Then we will dock in Barcelona, fly from there to Venice, and attend the oldest film festival in the world.

This could be how I break into the industry. The director was pretty practical in how he talked about it, but apparently few have tried a narrative project in VR, certainly not comedy, and definitely not in the way that we are. It is a cast of 24 people, each of us with our own lav mics. 

Dress rehearsal is tomorrow, shooting the next day. 60 people total on set for the shoot day. Very exciting.

Approaching Valentine's Weekend

Well look who came crawling back to his blog like the worm I am. Off the edibles, so I have been getting stuff done. Music videos with Frozen Soul? Check! Finished editing a tolerable version of the comedy doc pilot while sleeping in my mom's convertible in the midst of snow and ice in a Waffle House parking lot after flying in for the aforementioned music videos because the hotel prices kept going up, but I was not gonna pay 3x the rate when I knew I would have a full day to recover for the shoots anyway? Check!

I have focused more on the music. Yesterday, I tried following a friend's advice and being sad onstage. This came in handy because a song I am working on is called Breakup. But it perhaps worked too well? People (not everyone) thought it was real. Or is that good? People think that about She Was Kind too... But it is a downer, so I maybe need to up the absurdity at the end. I have a show tomorrow night (Valentine's) where I plan to just play the one song, then another on Monday where I will be filling ten minutes. Since that will be after Valentine's Day, it seems like a pretty good time to lean into the breakup song, but I dunno.

I bought a season pass to Universal Studios Hollywood, and that amount of stimulus with that little effort on my part really had me craving edibles again. Very fun time. And a great way to avoid being sedentary. A full day of that followed by a movie at AMC? You got a stew going.