Robert related #3

Couple of things. Missed my 6am bus so next transport to the other side of the island is Mon morning. Rang Robert to apoligise, there goes the weekend. Oh well, shit happens.

Robert asked, "Where's this blog? People have been telling me you've been writing."

So I said, google 'Winsomes revenge' he was at the computer and he went straight there and the first thing he read [aloud] was "Robert is Puking." 

"Oh no, oh no" he muttered.

"Read on Robert" I suggested.

So now he's arrived and is sculking round my blog like a dishevelled mute potential assassin

pissed as I am we won't be spending halloween together.

Til next time.

Buskers revisited on Channel 10. Politics anyone?

 Buskers revisited on Channel 10.

---

THERE is a chance later today to re-live all the colour, excitement and laughter of the recent Coffs Harbour International Buskers and Comedy Festival.

This afternoon, Channel Ten’s new lifestyle program, Making Tracks Across Australia, which aired for the first time last week, will feature coverage of the Busker’s Festival.

Busker’s promoter John Logan said he had been told there will be extensive air time devoted to the event.

“They came and filmed on the Wednesday in the city centre and took in the action of many of the shows,” Mr Logan said.

“While we have featured in numerous snippets before, we are really proud to finally have the Buskers Festival highlighted in a major free to air program and prominently featured on national TV.

“We want everyone to watch it – they might even see themselves.”

http://www.coffscoastadvocate.com.au...stival-comedy/

So.....
Discuss, what are the chances of a transaction taking place wherein the worth of all this "free to air" footage is negotiated. 

Packaged as all TV is, to sell toothpaste and sundries. The content of TV production has worth.

If it's not directly transacted we go to secondary symbiotic advantages.
The festival gets publicity, the city gets publicity, all no loss assets,
The Production crew get free content of a professional quality.
The performers get?

"You might even see yourself."
I know that is out of context and directed at the public rather than any performer but that boils down to the advantage you gain.
That and poss a snippet of film and something else for the resume.

I've been waiting for this development. The staging of a festival as a means to create content for a subsequent media.

I believe it will lead to festivals going live online as well as on site in the future. Performers need to think about the ongoing worth of the content they generate that is used by others for their own financial schemes.

Otherwise vampires like channel ten and whoever arranged for this 30 minute cheap as fuck to produce because you don't pay the content providers anything program will continue to take advantage of the inability of those performers to recognise the worth of their content, their recorded shows as entertainment used to sell toothpaste.

Schools of thought.
"I don't care it's all publicity."
"I don't mind as such it's just being treated like some plonker while people make money off me without so much as a "thank you let me buy you dinner."

We need our own producer and we need to produce a televised or online group show every year and the hat is the google ad money or whatever company is prepared to affiliate themselves with the project to get at our audience.
/rant

Hollywood

Hollywood’s where people who haven't made it yet congregate.


A passage people have to successfully pass through, much like a lower colon,  prior to the end game in the high stakes mass entertainment gamble.

Those that make it get premasticated and fed as pap to the overly deodorized.

Those that don’t hang around leading high volume lives of increasing desperation.

It has every shade of extreme fashion intermingling frictionless by virtue of a common yet lonely greed and dissatisfaction.

Success being perceived as an ever morphing respite via the purchase of goods and services from the yearning  to fill the voids and vacuums that are in great part Americas cultural core. 

Lots of over-dressed  try-hards with just enough philosophy to confuse the unwary into presuming depth.

Depravity is the biggest section in the yellow pages here.

I’m having a wonderful time.

Entombed in the constantly teetering dynamic of a goth S+M after-hours club in Hollywood I sit behind the curtain.

No-one got tortured today, someone got tortured yesterday.

It was behind closed doors in the dungeon but I could still listen in.

I was tidying up around the place.

It was a long session, past 3 hours with peaks and troughs.

Alternate snuffling, passionate howling, a rigorous choreography of extreme discomfort.

On the third peak of applied pain he went to the next step in his self analysis

“Mummy..Mummy, oh no Mummy.” he mumbled

Pain/mummy/love whats new under the sun.

I continued sweeping the dancefloor.

I went in later to inspect the tools of the trade, they went beyond spanky spanky.

It was more your trussed suspension, industrial nipple-clamped, scrotum twisting, deep and rugged anal probe while being injected with substances that increased intensity at chosen crescendos kind of operation.

I read in the paper today of a little girl, 7 years old, who rang 911 because her friends had hurt her feelings.

I sit behind the curtain.

I should be sleeping, its 9am and the place usually closes between 6 and 8am

But this morning it sounds like theres extra efforts being made.

Theres an orgy happening.

Couches unfolded  flesh-slapping, moaning, encouraging words, various interwoven rhythms.

I could watch but I don’t,

 I could walk through and spectate but I don’t,

 I could part the curtain and peek but I don’t.

I just sit behind the curtain and listen.

Thankful really, that my life allows me such depravity surfing circumstances.

I’m an inhabitant, I let myself out a side door unseen, onto Sunset Boulevard.

Its hideously bright, stark unfiltered LA morning light. I walk 2 blocks to the 7/11.

I see the dapper, shopping cart pushing street person. He wears a clean pressed shirt every day and a tie. He panhandles reflexively and is unfathomably chipper.

He says “God bless you sir.”  He contains more gravity than I because for a moment I do feel blessed. For a brief moment I am not calculated  flotsam. 

On the way back from the 7/11 I meet the soul bleached gaze of a crack-whore whose expression contains no enticement or sexual authority but rather a candid searching  scan.

Her eyes slide off me. I’m too fresh.

I’m relieved and disappointed.

 I let myself back into the nondescript building across the road from Hollywood High.

Another full screen distraction

1.618 from scott pagano on Vimeo.

1.618 is a graphic short film exploring a world of lush mathematically inspired animations that convey both the mood of the dramatic musical composition and the pure beauty that can be constructed through the logic and structure of numbers [i.e., the golden ratio]. From epic landscape cinematography studying the patterns of the desert to complex procedural organic 3D animation, this piece works to create a dynamically powerful yet seemingly effortless blend of sound and image. The film was featured on Brian Transeau’s 2006 DVD release, This Binary Universe.

Scott Pagano | director, cinematographer, editor, animator, effectsBrian Transeau (BT), music | Ron Martino, producer | Production year, 2006

Regulars, Perth.

I had a 4 year relationship with this man. He had brain damage from a car accident in his youth and a walk that suggested a former broken hip.

He always wore the same hat.

A barrow Florist would give him damaged flowers and he would walk around the inner city giving them away.

(Who wouldn't sacrifice a bit of brain damage for the opportunity to walk round town leering quite openly at women, thrusting wilting flowers in their faces.)

His benefit to me was that he would always do the same thing,

He would limp slowly up to my corner, head down, seemingly oblivious to the audience and the rising tension until,

at the corner he would stop and without looking up raise his left hand high in the air

and flip me the finger.

He'd then limp off. He had great timing.

I could create a ball and spin it on my finger and then transfer it to his

knowing exactly when his hand would shoot up and the finger appear.

I remember I impaled a stuffed toy on his finger by its butt once.

He didn't like that.

I showered him with petals , he quite liked that

I bent suddenly as he passed and pretended he'd poked me in the eye with his offending digit, he didn't notice that one, even funnier.

Most of the time I just highlighted his one moment, he got his laugh and chuckled off.

He was a regular.

Another regular was a nurse 50s, she'd approach pretending to read and then squeal and jump sideways,

always got a huge laugh, she'd also sometimes borrow motorized carts from the hospital

and motor 3 blocks into the mall past me and swerve out onto two wheels,

she was a hoot.

I had another old woman that I could tempt to dance easily.

She'd light up in front of 200 plus people, dancing with the tall clown.

Another elderly woman who did a great job of acting angry and attacking me with her stick about once a fortnight,

I'd cower behind my flyswat terrified, she thoroughly intimidated me and the audience loved it.

She spluttered convincingly. We were both seasoned professionals.

Singapore pt 2 conclusion.

Part one is here
http://winsomesrevenge.blogspot.com/2010/10/singapore-pt-1-work-in-progress.html


So I return to the ‘Holiday Chalets’ to rest up, I’m pretty scary to look at.

I take the next day off, my vision condition is mending.

Day three and I thought I’d be all gung ho and depart from my circus based, street based stilt show and delve into the world of the human statue. After all, how hard can it be? Contractual obligations would be met.

I did it for an hour, I will never do it again. Some little kid undid my fly. I wanted to kill him. But...I was a statue.

It was on day three also a curious misfortune beset us, The currencies of Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia took a spectacular dive. Sending Dom to his contract for us where he noticed for the first time our payment was in Singapore dollars and not the Australian he’s presumed. Only about a 70% decrease in the value of our wages, never mind.

The next day I was gratefully on stilts again, my groin high above prying fingers.

Our job, and it was obvious no-one had ever thought it through, was to entertain crowds who arrived by the busload predominantly to watch the musical fountain. An only minimally majestic piece of colorfully lit plumbing that wooshed about to classical music inside a custom built ampitheater.

The kind of thing, going off as it did on the hour, that could construe, to people living nearby with holes in their heads, cruel and unusual punishment.

What became immediately evident was that our presence on Sentosa was merely a sop to having our promo on the posters. Appearance being part of the collective hallucination that is Singapore in which appearances are created like a bow of a ship to forge through the deep waters of the society leaving reality to be formed , less importantly behind the bow, which is always shiny and overpromicing. [In my limited experience].

The glitch in the system was the finely tuned ballet involving Tourguides holding different colored flags leading efficient Asian tourists past all and any distractive temptation towards the grail that was the musical fountain.
These tour guides would simply not brook any dilly dallying.
We, who were trained and efficient at creating stages and audiences in public , were reduced to watching as meta human caterpillars wove purposefully past.
The tourguides were scary, they were like screaming sergeants let loose on elderly folk.

The next problem that eclipsed the guides, the utter lack of any engaging point was to come in the second week. We were employed to work between four and seven, pm, six evenings a week.
By week two the ‘rainy season’ kicks in. One very distinctive feature of the rainy season is the monotonous precision of the daily deluge. It starts every day five minutes either side of four pm and finishes within the same varience around seven pm.
By week two it was set to rain for those 2 hours for the rest of the contract. Just a little miffing.

On the short walk home, every day after dutifully getting ready by four and cancelling by five past, I’d pass the cages containing the monkeys who split coconuts in their spare time. I had an excuse to feel self pitiful, I had a big hole in my head and was trapped in some Kafka like hell. I can remember feeling jealous that the monkeys had a more meaningful existence than I.

Our accom was surrounded by similar converted Japanese WW2 barracks and in these were housed a regularily replaced collection of Young Singaporian Born Again Youth.
They played guitar as badly as only a certain type of christian has the gall to do and sung folk hymns til four in the morning.

At seven in the morning, given it was fall and leaves tend to fall, a squadron of leafblowing imported laborers would meander through the neighbourhood. By nine, the first of the Christians would be up and at the guitar again.

The weeks dragged on, the hole in my head got better. I abandoned the job after our first scheduled payment was delayed. I flew back to Perth a couple of days before the six weeks ended guessing they wouldn’t even notice. They didn’t.

Our Friend Robert 2

Robert's puking, he's exhausted, he's having a wee lie down.
The tumor on his neck has got smaller but he still has to work to swallow and puking doesn't help.
So he's resting.
He's getting the shit kicked out of him but he still laughs when I say funny things.
He can't sleep lieing down and hasn't had a full nights sleep in over a month. The hospital bed he and kumi ordered hasn't turned up for weeks.

He's stoic and philosophical, his imminent survival has been rated at 50/50, which is like using numbers to say "who knows?"

Robert's disappointed that he's allergic to morphine, very disappointed.
Sailing off on a pink cloud appeals to him.
I choose not to tell him that if he overdoses the pink cloud will be more like the most intense systems overload he will ever experience followed by darkness and that he won't be alive for the rash. I don't feel it's in his interests to know this.

Dinner conversation involved suicide methods.
Jumping from a plane, drowning, shredding machine, the 'red mist' school of suicide in which you sought to explosively evaporate.
Robert returned to his present first choice which is the Devils Sphincter.
Robert and I had discovered and named the devils sphincter shortly before we risked our lives to look into its colon some years prior.

Part of Hawaii's coast is a live lava-flow meeting the sea. Robert and I had hiked a couple of miles across lava deadlands at sunset to go exploring in the danger- zone.
What we found, about 200 yards inland, above some active lava-flow moments from the sea, was a convex hardened dome of lava with a hole at the top that glowed with a white hot heat.
We each did it, one after the other, we tip toed up knowing the thin ground beneath could and would collapse eventually, knowing that below was a river of lava , but knowing also that it was worth risking death to sate the curiosity of looking down that hole.

So Robert is still looking at the sphincter as an option. Last week he invited me to die with him and his dog that bites people by molten suicide. I declined. So he bought it up again and I told him to consider that perhaps the lava at that point was very shallow and he just landed on his face. I could tell he hadn't thought about that because he laughed.

We then went on to discuss the willpower involved in securing a plastic bag over ones head and over-riding every self preservationary impulse as you consciously suffocated. We put that one in the"Too Hard" basket.
Pass the salt.
Robert is beyond salt, he has no taste buds, they have been irradiated, They might recover if he does.

I got Gazzo's number from Nick and Robert rang him in England.
It is well known in certain circles that the safest way for Robert to express love for Gazzo is by insulting him to his core periodically and usually publically. Roberts chosen method of affection outreach has, over the years manifest in bouts of vitriol sent in Gazzos direction. Easy to misinterpret but there it is.
So they talked on the phone and that was a highlight for Robert.

He concedes he may get through this. At the same time he notes it's not death that worries him so much as dieing. He doesn't want to die slowly and feels that he is but recognises he may not be.
You know that old chestnut.

His truck is looking gorgeous and cute and roars into life. It still remains to be tested in that it's never gone over 20 miles without breaking down the entire time Roberts owned it.
He drove me to the bus-stop 200 meters from his front gate in it. Next week we'll take it further.

So it would seem our friend Robert lacks for new and interesting things.
I'll just leave this here...
robert nelson
one six dash two zero six six Keaau Pahoa Rd
Pahoa HI nine six seven seven eight dash seven six zero two

singapore pt 1 work in progress

The first thing that struck me about Singapore was a Bannister knob at speed.
It hit me above my right eye.
No?
While Singapore might not have greeted me with open arms the intensive care unit was open and in lue of any formal greeting. They simply fixed the gaping wound in my head and put me to bed next to some old fellow who, it was explained to gaggles of med students who passed through, was going through a multi-organ meltdown and was on palliative care, pre expiry.
He was an indian guy, he’d toss and moan. Background soundtrack, dieing Indian.

I’d got off the plane and 3 of us, Andrew Elliot, Dom Ferry and myself met up and were taken to Sentosa. Sentosa is an island, apart from a bridge that connects it to Singapore itself. It has a musical fountain, caged monkeys who split coconuts, a very large sculpture at it’s highest point of a “Mer-lion” [mermaids back-end, attach lions head, mystical emblem] a marketing ploy .

It also had a golf course and a tiki-bar that faced the refineries across the water and an aquarium.
I’d done some research, it used to be the graveyard for Singapore, it’s name used to be, ‘place where you bury dead people.” or something close to that in Chinese but that was thought not to be zingy enough for an amusement park and so it was changed and a mer-lion invented.I saw on a poster in passing that Sentosa was having a treasure hunt event which I found deliciously morbid. Don't dig too deep kiddies.

We were being employed to work it, performing for a retainer as well as being the first performers we knew of who actually had permission to busk which made the small retainer worth the risk.
These were some of the astute business choices I was making before I got my knock on the head.

We get driven from the airport and were being housed for 6 weeks in ‘Holiday Chalets’
These are actually Japanese WW2 Officers quarters with about 40 additional coats of paint.
Another factor that was to become critical was that the stairs were all different heights.
Get there 11pm, chat til 1am, I get up about 3 to go to the downstairs bathroom which was outside the air conditioned humming bedroom we were all sleeping in, stumble on the stairs, put my arm out, get my underarm hooked on the rail and careening the length of the stairs before bashing my head on the large irregular piece of hardwood knob at the bottom and then falling into the landing twitching and having and extending puddle of blood form beside my head.
HELLO SINGAPORE!
So no memories but Dom had heard a noise and investigated. He’d not failed to notice I was a bleeding, twitching shadow of my former self and had rushed the 200 meters or so to the island police bungalow and summonsed an officer who walked the distance back to look at me, still bleeding, still twitching before concluding, “Yes, I think an Ambulance would be apt.”

I wake up the next day, there’s some indian next to me fretting about in a coma. I have 26 stitches in my forehead, both eyes are swollen, I look like a disgruntled Panda. When I move my head it takes split seconds for my vision to calibrate the movement. I presume this means my balance is shot and wonder about my stilt career. I wonder also where the meter is that is recording the medical expenses and who will eventually pay it.

A doctor did his rounds, surrounded by a gaggle of students. I found out the guy next to me wasn’t expected to live out the day and that I had been brought in bleeding from the ears but they couldn’t find the fracture after repeated xrays so had just stitched the hole in my head together.
Good to know.

My employers, who I would grow to hate with a brooding molten fury but at this stage were the only link I had with reality, arrived. Calming me by covering all expenses and suggesting it may have been a drink related accident. I let that slide.
I was to be let out that day, The day I was supposed to begin working.

I was in scramble mode, I’d put makeup on over facial injuries before, the swelling was going to be problematic but with whiteface and a tankhelmet and glasses I might just be able to pull off that highly fashionable, ‘deformed panto’ look.
Stilts were out, I had no idea that this faulty inner ear thing of mine, where my vision was a moment behind my eye movement, would not be permanent and I had a 6 week contract to fulfil.

It was only later I realised this first day in the intensive care unit was the happiest day in the weeks to come.

Another, very deft NZ clown. [In it's broader sense]

I've known and seen the Wizard of Christchurch, now NZ, beginning almost 30 years ago.

He's a very astute and calculated performer, he expouses his own counterculture while embracing a formulated misogynist position while also proclaiming the overall advantage of the rigid sexist and classicist Victorian social era.

He performs outside the cities central Church of England Cathedral.

Here is his website. He has his own army that goes to battle against allcomers.

He does raindances with a 100% success rate [so far]

His website is interesting, heres his mission statement with a jump to his site afterwards.

I am pioneering the use of the Internet as a postmodern, conceptual, art form. It began twenty-five years ago when I designed an aesthetic universe which includes modern physical cosmology as a special case of my own.

My cosmology is not just a material phenomenon, but includes me as an existing cultural being acting out the role of an independent wizard-creator-of-reality. The "cultural engineering" required reached an important stage in 1990 when the Prime Minister appointed me official Wizard of New Zealand.

It is ultimately a subjective and interactive "meta-narrative". It is like a modern role-playing game except that it does not take place in segregated playtime in a segregated play-space but in real historical time and space.

The art work is "in process" and would only be completed should I ascend/levitate out of my own creation or should a more powerful wizard be able to include my cosmology, including my place in it, as a special case of his or her own. I also assume that my art work would self destruct should I die, undergo a religious conversion, or fall under the benevolent or malevolent emotional "spell" of a woman.

The art work is global and all inclusive through my web-site in the world wide web together with e-mail interaction. It is an English art work, not only because English is the language of the net and language is a major determinant of conceptualisation, but because I accept the fact that I am an historical being embedded in that particular culture and not an objective, superhuman observer.

http://www.wizard.gen.nz/intro.htm

Quick interview with me.

To you, what makes a great clown performance - if you were in the audience. what are 3 or 4 things that must be present for you to rate a clown performance "great"?

These are all personal answers, I'm just speaking for myself obviously.

I look beyond the physical skillset and watch for 'risk and redemption' because that to me illustrates the commitment the performer has to exploring the dynamic of clown or any performance.

Risk and redemption is the conscious puncturing of the audiences faith in you, it raises the dramatic tension not so much in the performance but the room or venue itself. Then the performer takes that and with mastery relieves that tension and redeems hjim/herself and in so doing further cements the trust the audience have. Each time you do this you push the perimeter of what the audience will accept further out. It becomes harder to do consecutively because of this and it is my personal litmus applied to clown.

Dirty Fred is a master at this, Leo Bassi is a master at this, Tony livingspace, Bobarino Gravitini, Peter Post, also employ this gambit woven into their shows.

I'd be looking at character also, empathy. Do I have any. Is the clown solid or brittle, is it skills based, in which case it's just cabaret using the clown form and I'm not so interested because while I admire physical skills and use some myself clown to me is about empathy more than admiration.

Having been streetbased for a large portion of my proffession I look too at the interaction between performer and audience. If it is a stage piece without interaction I look for the clowns pacing to see if it's rote or flexible, I look for variations.

That's three things.

Mostly I'm looking at the quality of the relationship the clown has.

When you walk off stage after a show and it was the most incredible show you've ever done, what 4 things did YOU accomplish?

I made people cry with laughter, [passive aggression at it's finest]

I felt a lot of love.

I explored a structure of my own making to create laughter and celebration out of passing foot-traffic, I accomplish pride.

I conveyed my worth to strangers who reinforce it by donating towards my work. I accomplish the means to carry on.

Does it make a more impactful show if you can take the audience through a range of emotions ?

Which is tastier, a peanut or a 12 course meal?

What led you to clowning? when did you first know you wanted to be a clown?

Philosophically I was drawn to both mime and clown in my teens as I tried to work out as you do at that age, what contained within my culture was real and what was simply fluff reinforced by societies collective hallucination of itself.

I didn't trust language itself, too slippery, I can wrangle words purty good but I was more interested in the quality of silent communication. I thought it had the potential to be both pan-cultural and perhaps if I were lucky, profound.

I saw that clowns are allowed to take liberties, they are allowed that role as long as they can handle and master the situations they create. I found that very seductive as I'm playful and wanted to be so on my own terms.

Do you wake up as a clown?

Do I exist without an audience? yes.

How has clowning changed you , personally?

As a male I'm much better at makeup than most. :)

I have a lexicon that includes, status awareness, body language, tone, pacing and subtext. I perceive tension because it's my job to create it in small part and as such I am sensitive to it, it's a factor in comic timing. These things all bleed across.

Describe how you interact with the audience.

I pretend I can barely tolerate them, they see through it but it's funny.

I submit passing pedestrians to indignities and my audience watches and laughs. Or I do a stage piece which is usually more skills focused with some emotional attachment. Or I do some conceptual piece of whimsy and the audience interact with their own curiousity more than anything.

Is it necessary to create anarchy? can you do a show that is safe and nice?

That's a very polar question. One thing to bear in mind is that to a real degree you are a technician, another thing to bear in mind is that the collective reality of a show is firmly rooted in the minds of your audience. You can make them hear words articulated by a squeaky doll simply by mouthing those words as you make the sound. Sounds incredible, but I watched Hoopal do this night after night and it was eyeopening. I too heard the words in my head that did not exist.

Anyway, anarchy, maybe, more likely moments between studied impulses that seem like anarchy to an audience.

Anarchy's a tricky concept, socially it's always been vague and in absolute terms the Heisenberg uncertainty principle suggests that Anarchy is a subatomic constant.

I have nothing against safe nice shows,

What is the funniest thing that ever happened on stage?

I've had a few things that could go here but the best ones are all me suffering, dancing into an overhead fan in Edinburgh, vomiting on a japanese audience.

The funniest things in the show to me are those moments where someone shucks off their anxiety and plays in some way with me and the audience roars it's approval.

I could list moment after moment. I won't though because I can't afford the time right now.

How do you filter your impulses when you're performing or interacting with the audience?

You kind of evolve behavioural templates, the borders of which have been defined by past experience.

I filter my impulses determined by my perception of where the audience are in their relationship with me, am I still flirting with their approval? or am I at the next stage once I've seduced them, of perhaps taking them somewhere new.

Who are some of your idols? and why?

Bassi, Grock, Butterflyman, Dirty Fred, there's lots of others I draw from but I tend not to idolise, [as it can be really painful when you divorce.]

What reaction do you get when you tell someone you're a clown?

I tend to say I'm an adhesive chemist, it's just easier.

What do you do, on stage, that makes you a great clown?

I own the fact that I inhabit this role naturally.

What rules do you have about interacting with the audience, touching the audience?

I don't have an overt sexual aspect, I can be excessively romantic but I never express any libido of my own. I will mimic a dog and hump a lampost like someone's leg but that's the dogs libido not mine.

Have you encountered clown fear? how do you deal with it?

I try and amplify it for the amusement of others, these people cannot be cured, they can still be useful in the production of comedy however.

Is connecting with the audience the most important thing you are trying to do?

I have to connect with them so that they can connect with each other and become one temporary collective celebratory animal.

You know that scene where the dads laughing his head off but still remembers to glance across at the family and mum and the usually surly teen and the two younger kids are laughing and as are everyone around you.

That moment of freedom for the dad and everyone as they find themselves unexpectedly celebrating in a crowd or audience.

That's the most important thing I am trying to do.

Is there a delicate balance between brave and daring and not offending the audience to the point of alienation?

See answer one, "Risk and redemption"

Touching moments - what have people said to you after a show?

"I haven't been going out because I've been very depressed but I dragged myself out today to join the world and I saw you and watched you and you made me laugh. Thank you very very much for showing me I still can."