Secret in Minneapolis

My apologies for the lack of a post last week. I was in the middle of a run of my most recent solo show, The Big Secret. It was really well received and even got two stellar reviews—which is impressive, considering getting a short run reviewed in the first place is nearly impossible. So that was all great.

But it’s a very heavy show with a lot of big emotions, both for me and the audience. One audience member cried at me for about ten minutes after a performance, and there’s a feeling that, since you’ve made them feel this way, you have some responsibility to stick around and let them get it out. Still, after this run, I felt a lot of compassion fatigue. After the last show, I fell twice—bruising my palms and shins—and in between those falls, Cyndi and I got into an utterly pointless fight. So I ended the run bleeding and angry for no reason.

All of this is to say that I need a better strategy for dealing with the emotions of the show—especially since I got into two Fringe Festivals coming up this summer. One of them is the Minnesota Fringe, which was my first out-of-town festival back in 2016. I was incredibly nervous about doing it, full of anxiety. As the date grew closer, then my flight came, and then I was in Minneapolis, staying in a stranger’s home in a city where I knew no one—I became convinced I had made a huge mistake.

This is not unusual for me. I always feel like I’m in over my head. Growing up redneck and then venturing out into the world, you often have this feeling that you don’t know the right way to do anything. It can seem like there’s a secret way of moving through the world—one that they impart to all the kids from good families who go to college. And in some situations, this is very true. But it’s not true nearly as often as I think it is. Which is every minute of every day in every environment I have ever found myself in. This causes me an enormous amount of anxiety.

How much anxiety?

Well, Cyndi and I had been in Minneapolis for less than twenty-four hours when my anxiety manifested in physical terms. We woke up in the guest room of a former Broadway producer—who had relocated to Minneapolis and now spent his retirement hosting out-of-town artists—and I noticed my back was sore. I don’t tend toward back issues, so I reached back and felt around. There was a painful bump. I asked Cyndi what she saw.

Cyndi, who had spent weeks at this point dealing with my mounting imposter panic, looked at my back and said, “Shingles. You have stressed yourself out so much that you’ve given yourself shingles.”

If you don’t know, shingles is a strain of chickenpox that sits dormant in your system until you get so stressed that it activates. Then it turns into a line of extremely painful blisters that wrap themselves around one side of your body in a straight line.

“This is bad,” Cyndi said. “Shingles hurt a lot.”

And they do. This is why Harrison Ford dropped out of presenting at the Oscars. They hurt so bad that professional movie tough guy Harrison Ford sat out one of the biggest honors his profession doles out.

Fortunately for me, we caught it early, and a teledoc was able to prescribe a retroviral that stopped it in its tracks. Still, three blisters had already emerged, and they were extremely painful. They also sat right where my shoulder bag hit.

The tragic thing? I went on to have a great time. The whole run was a raging success. Audiences came out, reviewers were very generous, and I made friends that I still have and will see again when I go back this summer. It was honestly a life-changing experience. I loved it.

But the entire time I was loving it, with every step, there was this stinging pain. A stinging pain I had brought on myself with my inability to manage how I was feeling. It lasted the entire festival.

So yes, I will need a strategy for this year’s show.