The Intelligence Estimate

I survived the world premiere of my one man show Countdown: The Story of the Exploding Whale. The Iowa Fringe Festival was July 19-22 in my old stomping grounds of Des Moines. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Nonetheless, being who I am, I can only concentrate on the negatives.

One of the comments on the Fringe website was, "funny but too long for one story…" First off, let me say thank you. I appreciate that you thought the show was funny. However, the title of the show is "the story of the exploding whale." What story did you expect to hear? I feel I'm pretty safe posting this here because it's buried all the way in the second paragraph. Even if she found this web site she'd never make it this far down.

I was allotted an hour, but I only used 45 minutes (which, apparently for some people was still too long!) so during my second show I decided to do a question and answer session. After the Sunday show it got a little...well...weird.

The first question I got was not even a question at all. It was a older guy in the front row. I knew this guy was different from the moment he entered the room. I showed up 20 minutes before the show started (which is 10 minutes before the doors were even supposed to be open) and immediately started asking us if we could make it any colder in the room. My lovely wife told him very gently that we didn't have any power over the air conditioning. This did not shake the guy at all. He just sat down and plugged in the box fan he brought with him. Iowans are a plucky, resourceful folk who are accustomed to disappointment. But rarely have I seen them plan ahead with such foresight. Bravo Fan Guy!

So this guy is the first one to pipe up after the show and he starts rambling on about how I'm a regular Herman Melville and Captain Ahab, blah, blah, blah. I think it was complimentary. I'm not sure. I assume he meant well. Honestly, my memory of the non-question is a little fuzzy because of what came after it.

An older woman on a Rascal scooter raised her hand and asked, "So what happened to the whale." As I've already mentioned the title of the show is "The Story of the Exploding Whale." So naturally I was more than a little taken aback by the question.

"I'm sorry?" I asked.

"What happened to the whale?"

I didn't know how to answer. I responded meekly, "You mean THIS whale? The one the whole show was about?"

"Yeah. That one."

"Ummmmm...it exploded."

How do you miss a little detail like that? It is the whole point of the show.

"Oh," she explained, "I fell asleep and missed that part."

This bothers me for a couple of reasons, and not just for the fact that she missed the thinly veiled foreshadowing in the title. First of all, what do I have to do to keep your attention? There was an actual explosion on screen! Blubber rained from the sky and your reaction was, "Man I'm tired!" And secondly, you decided that you needed to tell me that! "Sorry your show couldn't hold my interest. Maybe you should hold onto that day job a little longer."

"It wasn't you," she said in a vain attempt to salvage...I'm not sure what she was trying to salvage at this point. "It wasn't you. The show was interesting I've just had a really long day. I was real tired."

A band-aid solution to a sucking chest wound problem.

Then she tried to make up for it with this: "Oh, I got another question. What do you think they're gonna do with those seven dead kangaroos in Mexico?"

And then she ripped the band-aid off and rolled away.

Labels: Comedy, Iowa Fringe Festival