The Proverbial Experiment

Here's The Proverbial Experiment in all it's playlist glory.  Hopefully.  Leave a comment if it stops working.

Suh-moking

I should be writing stuff for the show which is now 8 days away, but the Law of Wanna-do-this-instead has come down upon me with it's litigious might.

A friend of mine is putting together a collection piece (what a clumsy and vague explanation, you'd swear art was one of my cultural blind-spots) about smoking, specifically people's experiences or memories of it.  This is what I wrote.

*****

The piano cuts out again, abruptly.  The melody crashes short in an ugly bark of mashed keys.  Deep-set, pin-prick eyes glare imperiously out of their wooden container, the frustrated countenance of the music teacher is a physical extension of the dilapidated vertical piano.  Criticisms explode in place of the jaunty number of only seconds ago; shrill, piercing, heard but unheeded.

I'm only in the choir because I am a good boy.  I was asked to join, I agreed, like a good boy is supposed to.  It is a slow process of discovery for me.  My discovery is that I don't enjoy the regimented specifics of the big choir.  Singing becomes significantly less fun when I'm not allowed to warble wildly wheresoever my voice wants.

The class is split along alto/soprano lines, being a young group, tenor and bass hardly factor.  I'm sure there's something more societal and less biological in how the alto/soprano divide dovetails so perfectly with the male/female divide.  Or more specifically, male/female+camp males.  The girls undergo a grinding repetitive practice of their soaring soprano, like unfeasibly laborious angels.  The boys are trusted to behave in the back.

Mistake.

If I've learned anything from my time growing up as a boy, it is this: boys are not at peace quietly waiting their turn.  They are hardwired to be as rowdy and infuriating as is humanly possible without prompting all-out infanticide (kids in Herod's time were really annoying).  We talked about wrestling, and just as surely as icing sugar leads to cake, talking about wrestling leads to wrestling.  I am now 23 years old, and I still feel that I am only a pose and a dramatic glance away from a running lariat at any given moment.

As ex-housemates of mine would explain it, the teacher "lost her fucking bin" when we got too loud, her mahogany visage crumpling into fury as though portraying the effect of woodworm in time-lapse.  There's no way to plead wrestling-based innocence when your legs are tied to someone else's in a textbook figure-of-four leglock.  The teacher's tirade raged on, as legs came loose and we got to our feet.  My back was to the teacher, while my friend faced her head on, wearing his best "I'm disappointed in myself" face (copyright Conor Sampson (2010)).  I saw this as a personal challenge of mischief, and while he maintained his theatrical expression, I locked eyes with him, and under the shrieking crescendo of a bollocking, I narrowed my eyes in a broad parody of what I imagined cowboys to be, raised my hand to my mouth, and took a big old toke of my imaginary cigarette, rebellious nonchalance personified in glorious mime.  It is still possibly the funniest thing I have ever done.

He laughed, we got in worse trouble.

This is the closest I have ever come to smoking, and the closest to ever being naughty.

bAdvertising Poster

Oooh, doesn't this look all nice?

TPE 0004: Home is Where You Hang Your Hat

The series that will run and run.  Here is the very fourth episode.

I hope you like it.

acrecomedy@gmail.com
www.theacre.net

bAdvertising

I figured I should finally write a little something here to commemorate the fact that come the end of this month, we of The ACRE will be celebrating our first live show.  We've done live stuff before, in our ones and twos, but this will be the first time we've collectively written an hour's show and will be performing it off our own impetus.

All the live work I've done before has comprised of doing a turn at someone else's night, on a bill of acts unrelated to me.  I'm finding it considerably more daunting to be putting on a night of which the main attraction is meant to be us.  My relationship with the Facebook event page is best described as neurotic, "What do you mean you aren't attending, Person-I-Vaguely-Knew-in-School!?  You fucking cock!" etc.

And on the other side of things the fact that there are actually confirmed attendees fills me with dread when I am holding a 10 minute script which is meant to be exactly 6 times longer within 3 weeks.  It will be.  I am going to write the hilarious fuck out of that script.  When I'm done with it it won't even know it was born.

Yes, yes, self-indulgent passive-aggression, we get it.  What is it about?

The show is cleverly hurriedly cleverly called bAdvertising, which is 1) concise, 2) amusing, 3) a clever play on the iProduct way of naming things and also 4) sums up our basic stance that it is bad.

We're running it in the Gartholwg Lifelong Learning Centre, so we are writing it as a mock adult learning course, which is apt, and is a conceit we hope will cover any sticky spots in the script ("Hay, this bit is educational, that's why you aren't laughing!").

There will be at least 1 actual joke.

I suppose I am documenting this here for posterity and to placate my own worry that though I am not specifically writing the show at this point, I am at least doing show-related work.

On the off-chance that you, the hypothetical person reading this, is within reasonable distance and of a desire to come and see it, all the details can be found here.

Now, I am going to pull a pad and pen out and actually write for it.

"Knock knock".  "Who's there?"  "Advertising."  "Advertising who?" "".

I'll finish that one off later.

TPE 0003: The Forbidden Fruit is the Sweetest

Third installment of The Proverbial Experiment.  These videos are my attempt to show commitment to an idea.