My big stage debut

I'll have a version with HQ audio recorded with professional audio equipment from the front of the stage posted at a later date (that one will go to YouTube), but for now, here's a Facebook video of me doing my comedy routine yesterday with the Raspberry Jam Band:



I don't do the best Fudd in the world; that's for sure. I wanted to be sure it was loud enough on the mic too, which didn't help.

Many thanks to Will Perkins for holding my camera.

All Iranian ballet dancers have tremendous ears, which melt in the nitric acid splendidly

That was the first sentence of one of the "word-by-word stories" a bunch of us used to do online in the early and mid-1980s. I thought it might be fun to start one here. What do you think?

There are rules to follow:

• You do not add punctuation after your word. Instead, the person entering the next word decides whether to put a comma, period, semicolon, colon or dash after your word. (Example entry would look like: ", and".)

• Yes, sometimes you just have to write "a(n)" or "the". It's a boring job, but someone's gotta do it.

• If you enter your word but find that someone else had written one at the same time and beat you to the punch, it is your duty to delete or edit your word to ensure that the sentence still makes grammatical sense (logical sense is entirely optional!).

After a while, I will compile the words into the main post and purge the individual entries, to prevent the comment list from becoming unreasonably long.

I'll leave the first word up to whoever wishes to begin!

Musical challenge

Although I never received any musical challenges from the "Keeper's Monthly Musical Challenge" thing on Paul's blog, either because he has begun working again (yay!) or nobody came up with any good ideas (boo!), there is, in fact, a big musical challenge coming up for me.

Saturday, I'm going to be rehearsing with the Raspberry Jam Band for a performance the following weekend of a musical comedy routine that I wrote many years ago but never have performed because it requires a musician who knows the routine.

The big challenge is that I haven't been on stage since acting class in 1990 (and even then it was just for the small class, so never for a full theater audience), and I've never performed on-mic, other than the PC or my camera with their auto gain control.

It's also been a while since I've done my Elmer Fudd voice... or Scooby Doo... But I think I can manage.

You see, bandleader Julia wanted me to perform with the band (as thanks for providing and composing music for them to play) after hearing how well I can whistle. But then in the course of casual conversation, she heard me do a bit of We Will Rock You as Mickey Mouse (yes, casual conversation with me can be strange -- actually I was mentioning how I thought of making video of me doing that, but then Wayne Allwine passed away and I thought it might be bad taste since my Mickey is his Mickey), so she thought maybe I could sing Lulu's Back in Town as Mickey, which I did a bit of on the spot to show that I could.

A couple hours later, though, I suddenly remembered this musical comedy skit that I had in my head, and asked if they play Red Rose Rag. They didn't, she said, but they'll learn it. I've sent them the "script", and we'll see how it goes in rehearsal this weekend. Then next weekend's Sutter Creek Ragtime Festival will be the moment of truth. If it goes over well, we could do the skit again in November at the West Coast Ragtime Festival.

Hopefully I'll have somebody hold my camera and record it at Sutter Creek.