MY SHORT CAREER AS A PERFORMANCE WRITER

My friend Herb is a singer-songwriter. He composes sensitive ballads, then sings them on open-stage night in a coffee house. People love the way he spills his guts over a catchy tune.

My friend Wanda is a performance artist. She comes up with avant-garde conceptual pieces, then eats 50 bananas, nude, in an art gallery. People love the way she’s nude.

My friend Stan is a mime. He conceives a simple story, then tells it wordlessly in a mime bar. People love the way he leaves the stage through an imaginary window.

I’m a writer. Writing is a lonely profession, and I’ve always envied the way Herb, Wanda, and Stan get to go out and perform their art in front of people.

So I decided to become a performance writer. For a venue, I chose Inky Drinky, a saloon where a lot of writers hang out. I convinced the owner to let me give it a shot, telling him that I would invite a lot of my friends.

It was a Monday night, which is usually pretty dead there, but there were maybe a dozen people sitting at tables in the back room, along with a dozen of my friends.

There was a small stage at the back of the room, where I had set up a table, a chair, a lamp, my laptop, and a cup of coffee.

I had chosen my stage outfit carefully. I wore a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows, khaki pants, and penny loafers. I accessorized with horn-rimmed glasses, a pipe, and a beret.

The owner introduced me, to medium applause (12 out of 24), and I got up on the stage and sat down. I was nervous. Show Biz!

“I’d like to start with a haiku I wrote in college, called, ‘Now Let’s Tap the Keg.’ It ran in the college newspaper.” I cracked my knuckles, took a sip of coffee, and started typing from memory. 17 syllables later, I finished, and my friends cheered. Wow, this was exhilarating!

“This next piece is a limerick, titled, ‘There Once Was a Guy From Secaucus.’ It’s unpublished. So far, anyway.” The crowd watched as I typed out the five lines. and when I finished, my friends clapped warmly.

My third selection was too long to memorize, so I had to read it to myself as I typed it anew. “Here’s a little something you may have seen in the Neighborhood News, called, “When Will They Fix the Pothole in Front of Gerry’s Gelato?’”

About halfway through I could sense that the crowd was getting restless, so I cut the ending short and segued directly into another limerick, the saucy, “There Was a Young Lady From Nassau,” but the audience couldn’t tell the difference, and assumed I was still writing about the potholes, so the response was tepid.

I decided to shake things up a bit. “Any requests?” I asked.

My friend Stan, in whiteface for a mime gig later, called out, “How about the thing you had in that poetry anthology?” It was a very sad poem, and as I typed, Stan broadly mimed crying, his shoulders heaving up and down as he wiped away invisible tears. A few people clapped when I finished.

“Any other requests?”

“Make a sandwich,” shouted a woman in the back. “Writers make sandwiches now and then, don’t they?”

“That’s a good idea,” I said, “but I didn’t bring any sandwich ingredients.”

“Maybe the kitchen would have some,” someone else suggested.

“No, that’s okay. Maybe next time.” (I was already thinking there would be no next time.)

“Sharpen a pencil!,” yelled a heckler.

“Clearly, I’m not using a pencil,” I said. Then I thought I should shoot back at him with a zinger, but I hadn’t prepared any zingers since I didn’t anticipate hecklers.

I had lost the crowd completely. People were starting to leave, even some of my friends. I had one final trick up my sleeve to try to win them back

“I don’t usually do covers,” I said, “but for my finale, here’s my rendition of a real crowd-pleaser that I memorized in high school, Rudyard Kipling’s stirring poem, ‘Gunga Din’.”

I launched into the five epic verses, typing away furiously, theatrically, and with feeling. But people continued to stream out, and by the time I got to, “Though I’ve beaten you and flayed you…” the back room was empty.

I grabbed my laptop and my pipe and went home. My career as a performance writer had ended quickly. Would a sandwich have helped? A pencil? I guess I’ll never know.