Where in the world am I today?: Ketchikan, AK, USA boarding the Golden Princess
Somehow one day off between finishing up at the Pacific National Exhibition and leaving to join the Golden Princess just didn’t seem like enough time to really shift gears properly from being a Wiener Wrangler in The Hot Dog Show and the familiar world of comedy juggling as The Checkerboard Guy… Mind you had I been leaving the very next day I would have somehow made it work… It’s amazing what one can scramble to do if you put your mind to it and need to catch a plane to make the next gig happen…
Even better than the return to a world I’m so comfortable in is the fact that I’ll be doing mini 15 minute-ish shows in ‘The Piazza’ of the Golden Princess. This will almost feel like a vacation after the 17-day, 51-show extravaganza that I lived through as part of the Street Stars Program…
As I mentioned a couple of days ago my new The Hot Dog Show panned out more or less the way I had anticipated it would and the performance grew and developed enormously over the course of the run. Doing something so new, watching as it grew and evolved, was incredibly exciting and rewarding. It was also hugely exhausting. Even though my confidence with the show grew daily, I was constantly looking for ways to improve the performance and figure out how to maximize the potential of the show given the limited time that I had to work on it. This proved to be a wonderful exercise in creativity and persistence but it was also a huge drain on my energy, so it’s a bit of a relief to be returning to the familiar territory of a show and character that’s very much second nature.
I think of it a bit like a visit to a museum… I’m good at absorbing the content that your typical museum has to offer for about two to three hours after which I don’t seem to be able to ‘get’ much more from the experience. I need to let my eyes and brain have a rest so that I can process the information that I’ve bombarded myself with. In a similar vein I’ve picked up enough French and Japanese over the years to be able to listen to conversations and pick up most of what’s being said provided I stay fully tuned in and really concentrate. By the end of the day in a foreign language I need a break and all my brain really seems to be able to process is a conversation in English…
I think this week aboard the Golden Princess will be the rest I need from having lived through a pretty intense two and a half weeks with the new show at the PNE. Before leaving I put some wheels in motion so I’ve got a couple of Hot Dog Show related projects to work on upon my return. I did this deliberately as I’d hate to loose my momentum with the new show, but I think that taking a week off will allow me to return to the props, the ideas for retooling things and the video footage that was shot at the fair with fresh eyes. This will hopefully mean that the next round of work on all things Hot Dog will be more productive from having had the break.
Besides, I still really like The Checkerboard Guy Show and the work I do as a comedy juggler, so not only will this week be a nice break, it’ll also be a whole lot of fun!
