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Shows:
September 9th: Garden Comedy!
September 21st: Picture Day at The Crow
September 29th: Sam Salem headlines the Yoo-Hoo Room and I am there too!
Hello Sternal Journalists!
Sorry to be so (so!) late in feeding you the Sternal Journal this week, but I have been “busy” with all sorts of Edinburgh Fringe related activities. I will likely also be late this week, so the next edition will come in on Wednesday-ish, and then next Sunday we’ll be back to your regularly scheduled programming and still not have missed a week in over three years.
The Edinburgh Fringe related activities I was busy with include but are not limited to:
Performing my show “Julian Stern Keeps Trying” once a day for ten days.
Lamenting the fact that, by doing only ten shows; I am a lesser performer, human, and entertainer than all the folks who are doing the full 24(ish) show runs.
Never quite shaking that feeling despite everyone including me telling me that I should.
Dropping into the theater around 5pm every day and asking if any tickets have been sold and most of the time none have.
Reassuring the very nice young woman Sara who has to be the bearer of this bad news every day that it’s okay, and I really do thrive on this sort of pressure so it’s actually a good thing and she shouldn’t feel bad; it’s not her fault.
Remembering that it’s *my* fault and, though I do thrive on pressure, I don’t need quite so much to thrive and would appreciate a bit less.
Having a couple great shows, many good ones, and two meh ones.
Getting very drunk one night and getting a little drunk every night except for the night after the very drunk night.
I also, in an item that feels too wordy to bullet-ize, had a successful run with my sign pictured in the last Sternal Journal (the one that read “HARD TO FIND LOCATION, TERRIBLY ATTENDED, BUT A GREAT SHOW”). Here is another picture of it:
It was not successful in the viral way these sorts of things naturally desire to be successful: someone tweets or retweets or shares it, thus making it a big buzzy feel-good situation with lots of press and ultimately a sold-out remainder of the run.
No, the audiences remained small but/and mighty (and I do mean mighty!—I had some really great shows and got everything I needed in my run from a performance and exploration standpoint).
And I’m not even talking about the real and awesome audience members the sign did bring in, some of whom became fun new acquaintances or collaborators, and some of whom actually recognized me from last year(!!) and said they still sing Chicken of Misery to each other all the time (making me a folk legend, I believe).
But no, the success I found was just in the actual act of walking around with that sign. Countless people (probably 11—I have trouble counting to 11) asked to take pictures of it, some stopped to chat about it, and many, many, many made eye contact with me and chuckled.
This birthed, for me, a new thing that I will (hopefully not too insufferably) call Quiet Viral, OR (definitely insufferably) QuiVi (gross!). Similar to that way-too-happy evangelist in LA who you see at various intersections across the city dancing with massive headphones and an even more massive cross, and the way he just makes you chuckle even though you know he most likely has some creepily fundamentalist views you disagree with? And it feels like a private moment, but you know some people have also experienced seeing him?
I was that! I became a tiny piece of the lol-this-is-fun-and-omg-this-is-magical fun of the Fringe. I was a literal walking joke and shared experience (viral) that nobody directly knew they were sharing (thus quietly).
And look—it’s very easy to judge a Fringe experience by the success of your show and whether you “gained ground” professionally and artistically over last year, but if I continue to do this virtually every year as I hope I can, there will inevitably be years that feel like a one-step-back-in-advance-of-hopefully-two-steps-forward.
I’m not even saying that’s what this was for me this year. But regardless of where this year’s Fringe put me on my career trajectory, I think the performance aspect that will set this year apart from others deep in the future will be walking around town with a sign that made people laugh and smile even if they were by no means ever going to come to my show.
After all, if all of them had responded to the sign, it probably would have been a sold-out run and then there would have been press about it and bla-bla-bla and it would have been actually viral, which I will happily accept in the future but was very happy to experience the quieter version of this year.
I am again going to speed through EdFringe recommendations, but give you links this time: The Grandfathers (theatre! Being shortlisted for awards! Like an abstract All Quiet on the Western Front); Legally Blonde (musical! Had not seen! If you love the movie, you’ll love it!); The Jew Romaine Experience (stand-up! Josh is selling out every show and deservedly so!); American Idiot (Musical! Was very weird to see my adolescent Green Day-fueled fantasies played out vividly by Scottish 20-somethings, but also incredible); Avenue Q (so many musicals! I binged musicals this week and was very happy to finally be able to see all of them. The puppet sex I’ve heard about for decades was worth the wait); Bear With Me (LOOOOVED THIS! Only one more night on August 23rd); Crap Ballet (Clown/sketch. This one really took me back to being in the on-point zaniness of a midnight UCB show in the early aughts); And Then The Rodeo Burned Down (theater! Very cool meta two-hander about the process of creating art. Very different, but played with similar themes and mechanisms as Asteroid City and in a way that connected with me a bit more).
Alrighty! That’s all for the week! Sending love! Go be viral, but ssshhhhhhh.
Julian