Very busy weekend

01:27:2003
Friday night I was organising the Blunt Club's first ever film 'n' comedy show, Saturday was the second of ---y's 4th birthday parties.
Everyone who didn't make it (due to distance, lack of money, lack of time, prior commitments or sheer bloody laziness) has been on at me to tell them how the Blunt Club went.
Well, it involved organising a fuckload of stuff (3 carloads, from 4 different people's flats and houses) to converge on the venue, a crumbling old Georgian building on Mare Street in Hackney which has a fantastic '60s era wood veneer and vinyl covered seating interior.
Our Tech guy ---y and tech girl ----n set up some nice psychedelic visuals while I pieced together our sound system and ---l sorted out the mountain of props, which included a life size mannequin, two wine glasses, some horrendous chequered golf trousers and a russian fur hat.
When everything was set up we opened the doors... and two people came in.
20 minutes later our audience had doubled. Now we had 4 people and had taken £20 on the door which was enough for one minicab for one of the door people.
Luckily the rest of the punters drifted in around the posted start time, so we delayed 20 mins or so to fill the place up a bit. Finally we started and people were treated to a cavalcade of films and live comedy which was only slightly marred by constant technical fuckups- some of which were my fault (providing a CD with some crucial music which I had burned on my computer and not had time to test- needless to say the fucker didn't work, forgetting some of my lines during the sketches, rigging some tie-clip mics with wires trailing off stage which kept tangling up and causing untraceable feedback, rambling on during the film intros trying to be funny and failing)
Some of the fuckups were ---y's fault (not playing music when there should have been music, playing films when there shouldn't have been films etc etc), Very few fuckups were ---l's fault, but then he quite sensibly kept away from the technical side of things and concentrated on trotting out some of his classic characters, and ---n, our other sketch actor, and --m and -o our door people pretty much did their jobs down to a tee.
So... the highlights of the evening (for me) were:
Golf Thewlis live on stage. - Paul brought Golf out who got very nervous and tried to do a guess-the-film-from-the-drawing game which went quite badly wrong and ended up with him cursing various audience members.
Lau Tzu walks on eggs (film) - always gets a good reception.
The Pulfrich movie - a 3D effect which drew genuine gasps of amazement from the audience.
The Live Sketches - which may have been beset by sound problems, a low howling feedback which we couldn't find the source of, and a bit muted audience response, but were generally applauded for the balls it took to do live stuff on stage (and do filthy things with a golf club which I found personally embarrasing)
Mick - the film and live - The film of Ilford's finest taxi driver got a huge response- as did Mick himself when he came out and did his 'saucy bingo' which I pissed myself laughing at.
The films by other people which we had carefully selected and got a generally better response than our own stuff.
And in between the live stuff we had a chance to chat with various friends, spouses and new fans- some of whom, if truth be told, were a little scary.
Then at 12.30 the long derigging process took place. What with the venue people breathing down our necks and our general state of disrepair at this point of the evening it wasn't our favourite part of the show- but some shit has to be done and we all pitched in not only packing it all up but schlepping it all back to the 4 flats/houses from whence it came. I got to bed at 4am after getting lost in north Hackney and finally shifting boxes of the stuff into the hallway on my own...
NEXT SHOW MARCH 7th! (2003)

Oh yeah, and on saturday we had a party for Lily's 4th Birthday. Loads of screaming kids, temper tantrums, presents, crisps, cake, cups of tea, freak outs, the whole deal. Saturday night I finally put all the Blunt Club stuff away, cleaned up the kitchen and then rewarded myself with a smoke in front of Attenborough's 'The life of Mammals' which was great as always.
Sunday I slept.


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