The Hannibal show! (Patreon)

Producing is a bit like giving birth in that you spend a lot of time and energy working to create something and you spend a lot of time dreaming about how great it's going to be and telling people about it, and then something HORRIBLE happens and then, hopefully, the result is so good that you forget about that horrible thing.

With producing, the horrible part isn't really *supposed* to happen. Ideally, you set everything up, you do the show, and everything goes as planned. But no plan survives contact with the enemy and my enemy has always been Reality. Reality is the thing that makes your host sick, your venue have a black out, a different person drop out the show, day of, every week for several months in a row.

This time the horrible thing was our venue, four days before the show, mentioning that "Oh, yeah, BTW, we're in another location with another name and we don't have a stage." I'm pretty sure they just forgot we were doing a show there.

Luckily we made it work. (Once you've had audience members go home to get flashlights so you can perform during a blackout, you really start believing in the magic of theatre.) But I definitely had some moments of asking myself "Why do I do this?" Not just when rushing to the new venue to make sure it was usable. But also when working to make the costume, get the raffle prize together, make disturbingly realistic gingerbread people, or holding the house for half an hour while we searched for playing cards to use as emergency raffle tickets. Because it's not a Mary Cyn show if it doesn't start at least a half hour late.

But then we did the show and it was MORE THAN worth it. It was so good and weird and beautiful. And the crowd just fucking loved it. 

And I realized that, while I may have some ambivalence about burlesque and producing, What I want to do is *this.* Making beautiful, creepy, art, by, for and with Beautiful Creepy Weirdos. I don't think I can make a living doing that (definitely not *just* that.) But, despite only having about 25 people in the audience, this show paid for itself. And maybe that's good enough.