I actually wrote this post on Sunday, but apparently in my hungover stupor I didn’t hit Publish.  I don’t know what I hit, but it wasn’t Publish.  At least it wasn’t Delete. 

Last night was a fucking blast.

It started, really, at 11am Saturday morning.  I was getting ready to head out the door for a quick run before work when Kyle got a call from our boss.  Apparently the show that night was being postponed because the talent was worried about the impending weather.  So out of the blue we now had Halloween off.  Which was kind-of awesome.  I’ve had to work the last two Halloweens, and it always sucks.  Sure, I’d meet everyone at the bar after work.  Sure, I’d make the obligatory, “Like my costume?  I’m dressed as a stagehand,” joke.  But it’s never as fun.  Especially since everyone would already be good and drunk by the time I got there, and it’s never fun being the only sober person.  I know, I know, you don’t need to drink to have fun.  Except that when everyone else is drinking, you kinda do.  So I was looking forward to being able to be a part of the festivities from the beginning.

Except that this sudden participation presented a new problem: it was 11am on Halloween morning and we didn’t have a single idea what to do for costumes.  Not a single one.  The show was going to go until at least 10:30 or 11:00, there’s no way we’d hit town until 12:30 or 1:00, and by that point everyone’s drunk so who gives a fuck if we’re wearing costumes.  So we hadn’t given it a single thought.  But now we’re going out for the whole night, and my feeling is that if you’re not going to participate in Halloween on Halloween night then you might as well just stay in and drink at home.  So we needed costumes.  In 12 hours.  And preferable without spending much money.  Go.

Several hours and six stores later, we came up with this:

In related news, you cannot find a St Louis Cardinals or Texas Rangers tshirt anywhere in Saratoga Springs, but you can find a NY Yankees championship shirt from 2009.  So we went with Plan B, (the plan, not the pill,) and went the DIY route.  Not bad for free-handing with a paint pen, eh?  The eye makeup, which I am incredibly proud of, was achieved by putting in a metric ass-ton of dark eye shadow and liquid eyeliner and then making myself cry.  I put a drop of eye makeup remover in each eye (that shit burns like hell) and my eyes watered like crazy.  Granted, that was probably a really dumb thing to do, but it worked!  Perfectly ran eye makeup.

We met up with friends at Circus.  Christine was the Slutty Tin Man for a Slutty Wizard of Oz group.  (I don’t get it either but she looked smoking hot so…Merry Christmas, Ryan.)  Ryan wore a black shirt with two yellow lines down the front and carried a fork in his shirt pocket.  He was a fork in the road.  (It’s punny.)

We hung out and talked and drank and laughed.  There were women dressed as men and men dressed as women and some guy dressed as Oscar the Grouch complete with garbage can.  There was some dancing, some singing along with the karaoke.  (Seriously, who can hear “Take Me or Leave Me” without singing along?)

We moved to a different bar at one point.  Kyle drunkenly decided that my costume wasn’t slutty enough so he used his keys to hack a slit in my shirt.

And a great big 'thank you' to everyone who failed to tell me that Kyle's war paint rubbed off on my nose. It was sexy.

But mostly it was just hanging out and talking and drinking.  And honest to god, with as much as we’ve been working lately that was exactly what I needed.

We partied until around 3:30am, at which point my liver said, “Fuck you, bitch!” and gave up.  The night caught up to me and suddenly it was very much time to go home.  NOW.  I won’t go into details, (I’d like to maintain at least a little bit of my dignity,) suffice to say that Kyle says I held onto my shit until we were (mostly) home, I didn’t embarrass myself, and there are no dry cleaners open on Sunday.

So even though I am hung-to-the-over today, I still consider the night a rousing success.  Great time with fantastic friends, and we all came out the other side only slightly worse for the wear.  I’ve never been much of a Halloween person; in fact I’ve gone so far as to say that I hate it.  But if they can all be like the one last night, I think I could start to get excited about Halloween again.

(As soon as I get over this hangover.)

A woman’s purse, I might argue, is a direct reflection of herself.  What’s important to her, what she needs to get through her day, what she struggles against.  All this we can learn just by taking a peek at and inside a woman’s purse.

When I was a in high school I used to look at my mom’s purse with a certain level of disdain and disgust.  It was a utilitarian, nondescript black thing, usually stuffed to the gills and with a layer of crumbs at the bottom.  It was very much the standard “mommy purse,” the kind which at all times inevitably contained some crumpled dollar bills, a baggie of Cheerios, and a collection of wadded up tissues.  And she carried it with her no matter the occasion.  But being the high school shit that I was, I always swore I would never have a giant, single purse.  I would always switch my purse to match my outfit, and only carry the bare essentials.  My purse would always be tiny and adorable and fashionable and would never have crumbs in the bottom.  Because, like, ew.

But now, at 25 years old, I find myself carrying a utilitarian, nondescript gray purse, usually stuffed to the gills.

Oh, and not only is there a layer of crumbs at the bottom, but I also found a Swedish Fish at the bottom of my purse.  (I ate it, don’t judge.)  Right at this moment, the contents of my purse include:

1 carabiner with three keys, include house and 2 cars

1 carabiner with a metric ass-ton of keys, include my office, my shop, and several I don’t know what they open

1 1st generation Kindle

2 pairs of sunglasses, 1 teal and 1 black

1 gigantic brown wallet, also stuffed to the gills

1 point-and-shoot camera

1  Ultimate Focus Tool, on a telephone cord with carabiner clip

1 small flip notepad

7 pens

3 sharpies

2 Raspberry Lemonade Single Serving Drink Mix

1 pack of Trident Layers gum

1 coupon for Auntie Annie’s Pretzles

1 $1 bill, crumpled

1 scrap of notebook paper, Kyle’s Subway order written on it

1 stud nose ring

3 silver gum wrapper

1 key, to what I can’t remember

1 CVS card

1 penny

3 reciepts

4 hair ties

Now, to be fair, the reason I carry such an un-dainty purse is because I carry it to work, a decidedly un-dainty place while wearing decidedly un-dainty clothes.  A nice purse would only get filthy.  And I do own many other purses that do come out when I dress up which are sassy and fashionable.  But let’s face facts: this gray monstrosity is my go-to purse.  Unless I’m feeling fancy and make the effort to transfer a portion of my crap into a new, prettier purse, (which, these days, is not too often,) it’s the one I grab.

And the more I think about it, I think it’s what happens when you become an adult.  As an adult, we take on more responsibilities and have to stretch ourselves further than we could possibly imagine as little high school shits.  And I think we find ourselves making small sacrifices in order to just survive life.  Little things like carrying an unsophisticated purse.  Not doing the elaborate hair and make up every morning.  Having Cocoa Puffs and Funyuns for dinner every so often.  Not having sex two or three times a day, every day.  It’s not what we imagined for ourselves and it’s not the fairy tale, but it’s what we need to do to get by.

And it’s those little sacrifices that help us get through the day successfully.  Yeah, they’re maybe a little lazy and a little sloppy.  But by carrying my unfashionable yet extremely functional purse, it means no scrambling in the morning for the “right” purse.  No “Fuck me!  I left my wallet in my other purse!” moments.  Just grabbing my purse, running a hand through my un-styled, air-dried hair, and running out the door confident that at least I know where my keys and my asshole are.  And in my world, that can mean the difference between getting by with our dignity in tact and crashing and burning.

So  here’s to you, you utilitarian, nondescript, ugly-ass gray purse.  I couldn’t do it without you.

No one likes a critic.  Especially when they write nasty things about your show for all the world to see.  In the entertainment industry, a bad review can break a show faster than Nutella can break a diet.  (Seriously guys, I can eat that shit with a spoon.)

In my corner of the world, however, reviewers aren’t such bad guys.  Three or four of them tend to cover the majority of our shows here at the Egg, and over the years we’ve become familiar with them.  Even without knowing them personally, you can always tell a reviewer by their location at the back of the house with a laptop on their lap.  Beyond that, each of them has their own style.  One of them will write furiously for the first 10 minutes or so, watch for the most of the rest of the show, and make a break for the lobby shortly before the end of the set.  Another will not only remain through the end of the show, but he will continue to sit in his seat for the next 30-45 minutes while we strike, finishing his thoughts before he leaves.  My favorite reviewer sits in the seat right next to my light board and will chat with me before the show starts.  There’s even a little tit-for-tat between us: I let him copy down my set lists for his own references and he leaves that bit I said about how the FOH (front of house) audio engineer is an epic ass weasel off the record.   Most of them are just nice guys who love music and have found a way to make money by seeing shows for free.

Besides, I don’t have any beef with the reviewers because I’ve never been bitten by one.  With a few (mostly well deserved) exceptions, the guys who write about our shows generally only have good things to say about the shows in our spaces.  While they may not always be 100% complimentary, I’ve never heard of them absolutely filleting us.  Besides, they never talk about lighting in the reviews.  Ever.  Not even a little.  I’m pretty sure the only way they’d mention lighting in a review is if I fucked up big; lighting-fixture-falling-on-someone’s-head-and-killing-them levels of fucking up.  So the reviewers don’t really bother me because I’m rarely in their crosshairs.

Until a few days ago.

It was the John Ritter show.  Just a man alone on the stage with his guitar.  It was a good show, though, I confess, with the endless string of shows (many of them solo acoustic guitar) I had to read the review to remind myself which one he was.  But, unlike many of the shows we get that don’t really connect with me, I truly enjoyed this show.  And apparently, so did the reviewer.  But what made this review unusual is that it actually mentioned the lighting.

Let me repeat.

The review actually mentioned the lighting.

I won’t make you read the whole review, (it’s here if you happen to be a Ritter fan,) but here’s the part in discussion:

Taking advantage of his quiet, often finger-picked accompaniment, Ritter lowered the volume of his quiet vocals even further than on record, often crossing into speak-singing. He counted on being riveting and pulled it off, rooting the show in a quiet place and sometimes shifting the dynamics to allow the exuberance of “Good Man” or the anthemic melody of “Open Doors” to burst forth. “Change of Time” was more aching than its studio incarnation (weighed down, the latter is, with ponderous backing) and both “Wings” and “Southern Pacific” proved heartbreaking. When Ritter called for the house lights to be turned off completely during one song (and kept there for another), it suited his quiet storm just fine.

(Written by Jeremy D. Goodwin of the Metroland.  Bolding was added for emphasis.)

Okay, first things first, he didn’t call for the house lights to be turned off.  The house lights (which are the ones over the audience) were already off.  He called for the stage lights to be turned off.  So if we’re going to talk about lighting, let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same fucking thing.

But more importantly, let’s take a second look at what he had to say about my lighting.  He liked it when I turned the lights off.

Let me repeat.

He liked it when I turned the lights off.

Nothing about how I tried to make the lighting echo the mood of the song.  Nothing about how I added drama to his face while making sure that the audience could still read his expressions.  Nothing about how I played with intensity and combination of colors to ensure that even his most raucous songs were still warm and intimate.  No, he liked the way I turned everything off and we all sat in the dark.

Fuck me.