all I’ve actually done this morning is eat breakfast and take an hour-long flight from Atlanta to Birmingham. To be on tour was to hear, at least ten times a day, “You must be exhausted.” People would insist that what I was going through was grossly unfair, too much to ask of a mortal human, and just as I’d find myself agreeing I’d think, Hold on . . .
“I just don’t see the need for that language,” he’ll sniff, referring, on one occasion, to the term “bare bottom,” and, on another, to “ovaries.” “Do you have to talk that way?” One of my many nicknames for him is Congressman Prude, and for good reason. Hugh saying “That’s terrible” is a sure sign that an audience will laugh. “Disgusting!” is another of his favorites. “You can’t say that,” he’ll insist on the odd chance I make it past my opening sentence. Hugh and I have vastly different senses of humor-this is to say that I have one and he doesn’t. “Yes, but by then it will be too late to make changes,” I’ll tell him. Instead, someone came to the apartment, and I used his. In the course of the next eighteen months, I did do one Zoom event, though it wasn’t on my computer. “Well, can you mark which button?” I asked. You press a button and, wham, it’s there.”
“It’s nothing you have to buy or attach to your computer. “What do you mean, ‘get’ it?” my boyfriend, Hugh, asked. I decided from the start of the pandemic not to get Zoom. The circus would take to the road again, but not with this elephant. A part of me worried, though, that when the world eventually moved on it would do so without me, or at least without any particular need of me. On the best days, I’d remind myself that everyone was sitting at home, that this was just a temporary setback. That was what I used to do for a living, I’d think. The evening was unremarkable-a shame, because for the next year and a half I would reflect upon it obsessively, would almost fetishize it. I read something new and realized it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped.
#MOCHA COOKIE CRUMBLE FRAPPUCCINO MOVIE#
“It was what’s his name who’s on that TV series with the woman who used to be married to the guy who made that movie with a song in it that everybody knows.”Īside from my star sighting, my last show was pretty typical. “Oh, you know,” I said to my friend Adam, who produces a good number of my events and who rode with me to the airport an hour or so after I had finished my breakfast. Then I couldn’t remember the guy’s name for the life of me. They’re on the carpet and look as if they belong to a wealthy ghost who’s just scooted over to make room for you. I’m never the one paying for the room, so I’m spared the part where you lie awake and wonder if it’s really worth six or seven or eight hundred dollars just so someone can creep in while you’re out and arrange a pair of slippers beside your freshly turned-down bed. The audience was lovely, though, and I liked my hotel, which, at the end of the day, is really what it’s all about.
The last show I did before COVID-19 robbed me of my livelihood was in Vancouver, British Columbia, in a theatre I didn’t much care for, a rock house with a grim, cramped lobby and the sort of dressing room you see in movies about performers who overdose on drugs because their dressing rooms are so depressing. I always loved my work, or at least the part of it that was public and involved reading out loud. Many felt that they had taken their jobs for granted, but not me. Throughout the worst of the pandemic, I, like everyone, thought of the many things I’d failed to appreciate back when life was normal: Oh, to be handed an actual restaurant menu to stand so close to a stranger that you can read the banal text messages that are obviously more important to him than his toddler stumbling off the curb and out into traffic. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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