NYC Part 3: Polly Brazens It Out

So I took to the open mic circuit in NYC with the intention of doing as many gigs as possible in one day…. on the wettest Monday since they invented the week.

The first wet venue I turned up to, the Village Lantern, I was told. ‘Sorry, you got the wrong day. They’ve moved it to Wednesday.’ The next venue, the Comedy Village on West 3rd Street was above an Irish bar. The venue was closed but the bar was open. The friendly Irish barman took me under his wing and plied me with large vanilla vodkas to steady the nerves while we waited for the club promoters to show. They didn’t.

A New York comic I had met earlier told me he would get me a gig that night and to call him after six. I kept trying, but the phone just kept ringing out. So I texted him, then I called him again, then again and again and again. Finally I called his wife. That’s the last time a guy does that to me.

The next venue was a strange little bar on Bleecker Street with sawdust on the floor and a fat hostile waitress who’d clearly had a personality bypass. ‘You’ve got to order a drink, or else you have to leave’, she told us. ‘Us’ was now a cosy foursome; me, Clare, Jackie and the Irish barman from the last venue who had finished his shift and was up for the crack. 

This gig was a haphazard affair. Anyone at all could show up – and clearly did – and put their name on a list by the door to do a spot. The promoter was a weathered white guy named Dax, with dreadlocks down to the floor. At six foot three, and the wrong side of 50, I’d say Dax hadn’t seen a shampoo bottle, let alone a pair of scissors, since the devil was in short trousers.

I was there early so my name went at the top of the list. ‘Great, I thought, we can slip off to the next venue soonish, if I’m on first.’ First, after Dax’s own band, after Dax’s bunch of bad Beatles tribute band mates, and after a strange girl named Wilma with really bad breath who had now adopted us as her new peer group. When she got up and sang what sounded a bit too like ‘Smelly cat…oh smelly cat’, we knew it was time to sneak out the back door.  Had there been a back door…

But I was there to perform so feck it, I was going to. I went up and took the mic and started singing ‘Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds’.  Then said, ‘I thought this was Beatles karaoke night.’ My group of three laughed but the audience wasn’t listening and the bad Beatles band carried on packing up their equipment behind me… so I felt compelled to comment on this – David Attenborough style.  ‘It looks like a guitar the male is holding… a symbol of his cock…  that he likes to play with as much as possible’. My audience of 3 were falling about at this stage and the rest of the room had started to take a small bit of notice, but I think it was probably more my short skirt that was raising the eyebrows. 

One woman just carried on talking regardless so I brazenly got down off the stage, mic in hand, walked up to her, tapped her on the shoulder and said into the mic ‘Hi there, excuse me, but I was talking first, do you want to take the mic, if you’ve got so much to say?’ That shut her up. I finally got into my material, and the audience started to come round, but there were so many weirdos there, I was genuinely afraid to make too many rude jokes, in case I was followed home by a rapist. So that was my set cut down to about three minutes.

We arrived at the final venue of the night, The Bowery Poetry Club at 10.30. Sign up time was 10pm so I went down as number 13 on the reserve list. Unlucky for me that night. The O’Debra Twins host a storming night there every Monday and right enough the place was rocking. MTV were there filming some kid whose dream it was to be a beatboxer, and the audience was filled with production bods and proud mothers. At midnight I decided to call it a day, safe in the knowledge that I had missed the opportunity to perform for an edgy NYC crowd and MTV. Bummer. Well, I suppose two New York gigs in a weekend is not bad.

Pxxx