THE BURLESQUE SHOW (&C.)...

As this is written, I am waiting for the Oregon Justice Dept. to tell me whether they want to have my job interview in Salem (where their headquarters is) or in Pendleton, 200-plus miles away (where the job would be). Don’t know when the interview will be, but I have another one Monday in Portland. And a job test in Portland tomorrow—I’ll drop off more posters for the Insomnia Coffee Co. gig in Hillsboro while I’m at it.

All part of re-inventing myself, I guess. I think city management is probably out as a career now—the only interviews I’ve gotten for those jobs have been where a city manager who knew me was picking the folks to be interviewed, and abovementioned city managers are never the ones doing the actual hiring. I think I won’t have one of those jobs again unless I have that all-important college degree, I can’t get the degree without going back to school, and I have to—I think—have a decent-paying job to afford the classes. (Unemployment just changed their rules—again—to allow one to go to school while still drawing unemployment benefits. They used to prohibit that. I wonder if I can take advantage of it?)

The plus side is I can expect to have more time to play music. I want to push that as far as it will go, and until recently there never was the time. I will have to put into practice everything I’ve learned about economizing, because there will still not be enough money to do anything fancy.

Post-mortem on the Burlesque Show was Sunday. I think everybody’s committed to doing another show, but it will have to be done a bit differently, because the last show didn’t make any money. It wasn’t that we didn’t have a good crowd (and I don’t think anyone was turned off by the $8 gate fee), but the rent the Hawthorne Theater charged was pretty astronomical, and that alone ate up all the money, and then some.

We will do the next show in a different (and cheaper) place. We need a venue that can accommodate Lanolin’s fire-dancing stripper act—the Portland Fire Marshal doesn’t allow that sort of thing just anywhere. Ideally, the venue should be free; as a trade-off, we’d have to do it on a weeknight, but that might not be bad—there’s a lot of competition for the entertainment dollar on Friday and Saturday nights, and not many places to go the rest of the week. We could actually get a bigger crowd on a weeknight.

My suggestion that the show-long plot tying all the acts loosely together was good (and also unique), but that the dialogue needed to get sparser the more inebriated the audience got, was echoed by some others. They’d also like more acts (i.e., some additional performers), and some of them will go hunting and see what they can find and rope in.

I didn’t make my pitch to have a full band perform some of my songs (though I still think it’s a good idea), but did tell Mary-Suzanne, who runs a comedy showcase at a club downtown, that I was interested in being part of one of her shows if she thought I’d fit in, and I reminded “ringmeistro” Whitney that I’d sent her the two “Joe Show” videos. One “sideways” approach to breaking into the Portland market is through the comedy clubs; a lot of what I do is classifiable as comedy (it’s even classifiable as standup comedy, since I’m standing up when I do it). I’m not sure how long before our next meeting.

I am going to be busy for the next few weeks, and not just with job interviews; Chris is in for a Failed Economy Show sequel, so I need to find us a lead player and we need to practice. Need a couple more songs, too. I’ve got Al David’s “Poverty Blues,” and maybe we can use Stan Good’s “Gimme Couple Billion of Them Bailout Bucks”—I don’t think we had that in the last show. Maybe there’s a couple more of mine that can be stretched to fit a Failed Economy Show theme.

Joe