This Week's Hoax Well, it's a blog, but when I started writing these in 1996, I called them "hoaxes."

Ugh

Here I sit
All brokenhearted
Came to win
Left before I started

I had a bad feeling. At the Alex Theater on Sunday, I was directed on how to respond if I were kicked off. "Craig will call your name, and then you'll stand here for your memorial package and then you'll exit left."

"What if I'm not kicked off?" I asked. Other comedians were rehearsing that outcome. Of course, the choice of which comics rehearsed what outcome was random. But something still felt wrong. I heard a banshee cry. In Glendale. What the fuck?

During the show, four of us stood in a line, three of us would perform. Tommy, Rachel, Felipe and me. I think. I haven't watched the episode, I'm writing this from memory. My friends Lisa and Leif waved from the audience. I hadn't seen Lisa in about 20 years- we reconnected on Facebook. Lisa and her brother Leif were great swimmers. As kids, she and I served together in the KISS Army, helping pop culture defeat The Bay City Rollers. Cara, a comic from San Francisco, sat with the L's, along with Lisa's husband Grant. Did these people really come all this way to see me ejected? Did I? I made a throat slitting gesture across my neck, hoping to jinx a bad outcome. The music began, it was comically right out of a reality show music library. Kind: Suspense.

"The next comic leaving Last Comic Standing IS..." boomed Craig.

Me. I can tell when someone's about to say my name because the muscles used to say "Laurie" force the preceding word to land in a specific way. As Craig finished "IS", he pulled his tongue in and down, half-bowed, ready to enunciate an L word.

"Laurie Kilmartin."

Fuck.

All I thought of was the money I spent. Probably ten thousand dollars, total. I'll add it up one day, probably April 14th of 2011. Cabs, babysitters, two months of rent in Manhattan (on top of my rent in LA). A NY gym, a personal trainer (hated that), plane tickets for me and my son. I turned down a 2-3 month writing job in LA, which could have meant health insurance for me and KilBaby next year. I did over 200 spots in about 65 days, creating two brand new three minutes chunks from the ground up (primetime clean and politically correct), and retooling some existing material for the third set. All for nothing.

I'm still in post-op. I went to the hospital to get some work done on my career. The doctor just gave me a mirror and the swelling is horrific. My last set on LCS sucked and the only way I can erase it is to tour for the REST OF MY LIFE until I die alone,  eating hard boiled eggs during the closing minutes of a complimentary hotel breakfast bar. Anonymous commentors on various message boards have been ripping me to shreds. I either have to develop a stronger stomach or stop reading.

Ugh.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback

I have not watched last night's episode. I have spent too much time wondering what people think, how they vote and how they respond to things. I need to detach from comments, facebook messages, message board threads and reviews. Here's my experience and impression of the last two episodes.

The semi-finals aired on July 7th. On that show, the judges were picking 10 comics from 43 semi-finalists. I did a set for the judges. I picked material that I thought Greg, Andy and Natasha would respect. I opened with an abortion joke that usually starts with a gasp and ends with a laugh, then I did a few "being a mom is killing me" jokes, and ended with the Russian jokes, which are old but clean and smart. I got picked to move on. Great. My strategy worked.

The next set, the set that aired last night, was taped two weeks after the semi-final, on April 28. Immediately after the judges picked me, I went into a panic. This next set would be the first "America votes," and I had just done abortion jokes. If I was going to move on, I needed to get back some of the people I may have lost. I decided that this second set needed to be straight down the middle. Also informing my writing was that I was still knee-deep in fury over the ex's affair. I wanted to stab them both in the eyes, from the stage with my jokes. And yes, in her emails to him, she constantly misspelled "tomorrow," and other common words that ought to be in any English-speaking person's wheelhouse. If you watched last night, I guess you know I got that bitch real good, huh?

Ugh. Who cares. Now it's almost three months later, that raw rage is gone and that situation is an event from my past. I'm a comic again.

If you saw the semis, you may be wondering, "what abortion joke?" They were edited out. That set ended up being mom and Russian boyfriend jokes... straight up the middle. It turns out that I didn't need to get back the people I may have lost to an abortion joke because they never saw it.

Next Monday night's show will be taped on Monday afternoon. I have all weekend to decide which jokes I'm going to do (if I move on), and I am frankly tired of predicting which material will help me move on to the next round. I've got my notebook of eligible material and almost every joke I like is a bad idea if South Dakota is voting. Or if comics are voting. Or moms. And men. Women without children. People who only like one female comic and it's Sarah Silverman. Or Lisa Lampanelli. Or that other girl from the semis who isn't me, how the single mom got picked over FILL IN NAME is beyond me, I stopped watching! Or None of the Above because women aren't funny and the blonde and that other girl with the legs are fucking tokens anyway. Every demographic can find something to loathe about me. Too cynical, too bland, too many mom jokes, too dismissive of her child. Contradictory and relentless.

Standup is me, prowling onstage, snarling, "here's what I THINK is funny. Sit down, shut the fuck up and listen." Standup is not me, wondering offstage, "I wonder what THEY THINK is funny. Please pick me to be a finalist, please vote for me ten times, please put me in the top five, please make me win!"

I'm prepping for Monday. I believe three comics will be eliminated at the top of the show. If I'm not one of them, then I'm having a set for me. And you all can sit down, shut the fuck up and listen.

Holy Freaking Shit

A real person recognized me at a coffeehouse today! Even though I wore my glasses and no makeup except for eyebrows. NBC aired my episode of Last Comic Standing three times in eight days, all during primetime. I don't know how far I will go in this competition, but I am preparing for the best (which is very un-Irish of me). If I make it into the finals, then it's possible that I'll could perform my act every Monday night on NBC from July 12th through August 9th. Holy fucking shit. Oops, I gotta be clean now. Holy freaking shit.

I booked myself into a pair of weekend rooms in my two favorite cities, Seattle and Austin. If I am lucky enough to keep advancing, then I'll be able to really have fun shows on the Friday/Saturdays preceding the final two Monday night rounds. If I am eliminated, I will have really fun shows on the Friday/Saturdays preceding the Monday nights where I get drunk and yell at the TV. Either way, after a few years of feeling burned out, I am really loving standup comedy again.

KilBaby and I are in our second NYC sublet, until July 15th. My mom is flying out tonight to provide free babysitting for the rest our stay. First she made me check to see if the apartment had Animal Planet and Bravo. She needs her Real Housewives and her starved, wet horses.

Do come see me August 5-7 at Seattle's Comedy Underground. Or July 30-31 at the Velveeta Room in Austin, TX.

Man, this hurts

Man, this hurts.

This is how I normally work out a new joke: I bookend it with A jokes, so if it bombs, the audience won't see me with my pants down for more than a minute. Later, I try to figure out what went wrong. And repeat, until the joke works. Or I give up. But either way, it's fairly painless. Worst case scenario, you lose a little bit of audience good will, which can be recovered immediately with a dick joke.

I'm doing it different this time. Now I go onstage with 5 new chunks, each one comprised of 2-4 jokes. Perhaps I open my set with an old joke to get the audience on my side, but often I have less than ten minutes and I don't want to waste a second of it on material that already works. So I go right into Chunk 1: Joke 1. The wording is very important and if I mess it up, then it gets less of or no laugh. No surprise, I messed up the wording. Fuck. I needed to nail this one and move on. Oh well. Up next, Chunk 1: Joke 2. Since I messed up Joke 1, Joke 2 starts with no momentum. Even less than no momentum, actually, because the audience just saw Joke 1 tremble and shake like a newborn calf and now they're uncomfortable. Now me, as I'm saying Joke 2, I'm re-running Joke 1 in my head, figuring what what went wrong. Except that Joke 2 is also a newborn and needs 100% of my attention. I can't be distracted by the fumble in Joke 1 as I'm saying Joke 2 because- FUCK, I did it again. Stumbled on a word. Damn. All right, keep going. Chunk 1: Joke 3. Here goes. No, wait. What am I saying? That's Chunk 2: Joke 4. Fuck! I can't go backwards. Is that the light?

I'm trying to create a waterfall, but right now I'm pushing a glacier. Every few nights, there's a set where it all comes together (Thank you Sage Standup) and I see that for all the steps back, overall, I'm more than a few steps ahead.

But man, this hurts.

Tick, tick, tick

I'm at the Roasting Plant on 12th St. If I still did my coffeehouse reviews (link courtesy web.archive.org) , this place would get an A+. At 8:15, I had a guest set at New York Comedy Club- got one new tag out of it. I put in avails for about five other clubs tonight and got nothing. At 11:45, I'm re-auditioning for a club where I was a regular before KilBaby was born. I remember the night I decided to stop calling in for spots, in Sept of '06. I was eight and a half months pregnant and I had a 1:20 AM spot on a Tuesday. The show was running about 30 minutes late. A few years earlier, I'd been consistently getting up before midnight. After Tough Crowd got canceled, my spot times began to inch past the witching hour. I don't know why, was it me, or my lack of heat? I just recall being onstage that Wednesday morning, thinking, man, if I can't move out of the 1 AM block when my water's about to break, this is where I'm doomed to live forever.

So long ago.

For this time, I can swallow my pride. Re-introduce, re-audition. Go up late, or last. It's ok, I got jokes to work out and a babysitter who's willing to stay late.

I hope I look back and see this as a happy, creative time. I'm doing lots of open mics and under the radar shows, polishing new material. Bombing, actually. I feel like a special op who has a limited amount of time to disable a multiple nukes. When a joke becomes consistent, I can cross it off my list of premises and move onto the next one.

Update, 1:31 AM. Passed! And another wave of resentment falls from my shoulders.

Harlem Sweet Home

My little man rocks. This is the fourth apartment his mom has dragged him to since September, and we have one more to go. We had a great sublet in Venice, an insane sublet in West LA, our own place in Culver City, this month's place in Harlem, and June/July's place, also in Harlem. He's always friendly to the new neighbors and he can fall asleep in anyone's bed. So I didn't mind his post playground meltdown today, face down on the hardwood floors of the high ceiling-ed, pre-war apartment that we are calling home for the month of May.

He earned it.

This is my Hail Mary pass. I'm in NYC for two months, to work out material for a potentially awesome thing. That's all I can say. And if it doesn't work, I will have blown through about five grand for nothing. But it already feels like something because forward motion always does.

We drove up to San Francisco, to see my parents and so I could do a few spots in the city. I got a last minute, one day gig on Monday afternoon, so I flew to LA, early in the morning. My mom was in the hospital, and my Dad can't watch a 3 year old all by himself, so I landed at LAX and started emailing babysitters from an agency.

"Hi, we've never met, but a mom I've also never met gave you five out of five stars and right now, that's good enough for me. Would you care for my son? When? Well, how about in ten minutes? Great."

My return flight was for 4 PM. I got to the airport early. United had another flight, with empty seats, and wouldn't let me fly standby without paying a $50.00 fee, even though my 4 PM flight was going to be delayed by 90 minutes. "That's our new policy, ma'am," said a helpless gate agent, "it started May 1st."

I arrived at SFO at 7:30ish, and drove straight to a show at the Cafe Royal, on Post and Leavenworth. I pulled out my moleskin notebook- did I ever mention that after about 20 years of Mead Composition books, I made the move to moleskin last June and never looked back? I'm still size shopping. I started with the extra large, tried a small, this time around it's a medium.

Then I headed over to Club Deluxe at Haight and Ashbury, only to discover I'd lost my Nano, or left it at Cafe Royal. What would I record sets with in New York? My Nano, my Nano!

I was upset. Way too upset. Then I realized I was actually upset about six real problems in my life, all of which had compressed themselves into files small enough to fit into an MP3 player.

"Found yr Nano," read a text I got hours after I landed at JFK. Someone lovely soul turned it in to the owner of the Cafe Royal. Who does that anymore? I'm so happy people like that still exist and I'm not surprised that a couple of them live in San Francisco. The show's host, Cara, going to send it to me.

I still got 6 other problems in my life, but a Nano ain't one.

Back to Harlem

Me and my man are spending summer in New York. For May, we secured a sublet next to his old daycare on w. 141st, and in June and July, we'll live in central Harlem, in a 2000 square foot apt, with a washer/dryer. "W/D in unit" is no big deal in California, but in NYC, it's huge. It's Liza Minnelli in 1971, it's Lady Gaga in 2009. Fucking gangster. I'm in NYC to work on my act. I want some 3-5 spots-in-a night nights. My life has changed so much recently, I feel invigorated about stand-up again. So much more to talk about.

Kilbaby and I have spent a lot of time in the Bay Area in March and April. I did spots and he was my parents' grandson. Why do I still feel fourteen years old around my mom? I respond to everything she says like an asshole teenager.

"Laur..."

"WHAT? God, Mom, leave me alone!" I slam the door to my old bedroom and stare at my David Lee Roth poster. He was supposed to save me from all this.

KilBaby got a buzz cut, against my wishes. Actually, I was not even allowed to protest, I just got a cell pic after the fact. No curls, no locks, nothing to wrap around my fingers as we sit on the A train. I ran my hand over his head today and practically cut my palms on the harsh little stems of hair. My curls, my curls.

We're growing it wild this summer.

Six wasted months

My former swim coach is doing forty years in prison for sex crimes against underage female athletes. A friend of mine, who I've known since she was 10, appeared on a 20/20 segment about USA Swimming. Charges against Andy King go back thirty years, before I swam for him at San Ramon Valley Aquatics. (Go Seawolves!) Other coaches knew, the body governing the sport knew and they looked the other way because he was considered an effective coach.

I haven't sorted out all my feelings on those five years of my life, so I probably shouldn't be blogging about it. But I thought I'd drop that on ya. This year so far... August: leave my beloved Harlem for a job in LA. October: find emails from my boyfriend's other woman. January: pretend everything's normal at my work computer while I read that my childhood coach was convicted of child molestation. Late January: the job ends three weeks after I put renters for my NYC apt. March: West coast furniture shopping on Craigslist.

So far, April has been a bore.

I have big plans. I want to blog more, and furthermore, I will call it blogging, not writing. I miss my little Tuesday habit. I want more roadwork, with KilBaby in tow. I want us to have one fun year together, traveling the country, before he becomes goes to kindergarten and becomes a man. I want to stop obsessing about the ex's affair and just move on. It happened, it's over, it's done. It is surreal to discover someone's been leading a double life. A completely different life in another city. An affair didn't occur to me until right before I decided to check his email. I could have discovered their burgeoning relationship in May of '07, if I'd checked my cellphone bill. I ordered years worth of bills from Verizon, I could graph the highs and lows of the entire affair if I knew how to work Powerpoint. Over 300 calls in June of '08, I think. What was I doing that month? Did I wonder why he was on the phone so much? Did I ask who he was talking to? Did I believe him? I can't remember. A baby blurs everything.

If I had spent that energy writing a pilot, I'd have... a pilot. Better than nothing. What a waste of six months. Hundreds of hours and dollars, only to reaffirm the sad fact I discovered on Oct 25th.

Onward.

Long time no see

What's up?

It's been while. Lots has happened. The LA job ended, two weeks after I sublet my apartment in NYC for a year. So now I'm here. Culver City. It's cute, it's got a great school district and a park right down the street. KilBaby can ride his little trike there in about 5 minutes. There's washer/dryer hookups in the kitchen. My own washer and dryer.

Oh God.

This collection of apartments were built by Howard Hughes, for his workers. They are cute, and generous in size. Old, but classic. We move next week. Currently, KilBaby and I are in our second furnished sublet, and we really can't wait to sleep in our own bed and sit on our own couch, both of which we will buy on Craigslist. And when I say "we," I mean "I." KilBaby doesn't give a shit, he's three. As long as there's a stretch of open floorway for him to run a train on, he's happy.

The personal life is grim. October 25th, my life turned into a Carrie Underwood song. Discovered that KilBaby's dad had a cheatin' heart. Went ballistic when I found out, and I'm still ballistic now. It's like a third arm, my rage. I have to tuck it into oversized jackets just so I can get through the day. I talk about it onstage, I have to. The only thing that keeps me from committing murder is the hope that someday all this fury will make a great chunk. Kept alive by comedy, I hope he appreciates it.

I had some good news this week, but I can't go into details and I don't want to jinx it. Crap, I probably just did. Forget I said anything. Cut this in post, and let's just end on killing the ex.