Jaded Optimist Coloring Book

After reading my Sorry Sorry blogs, my dear friend Loren Niemi emailed me privately to see if I was ok. Loren, and anyone else who reads this blog: I’m ok. I have been singing the blues for the last couple of months and I would be telling a great big fib if I said that lo and behold, the blues have washed away this sunny Monday AM. They haven’t. More or less. Life has its ups and downs. I surely know that at least as much as the next person. Sometimes the downs overwhelm the ups, as has been the case with me recently. The good news is that there are concrete reasons for this most recent chaotic journey. I am an empathic person. I have always been such. I was warned in my teens by my guardian at the time that I felt the pain of others too acutely. He was right about that. Perhaps other things as well. These down times will pass. I am not yet suicidal. I’m actually too narcissistic to be truly suicidal. For that I have Mr. Bojangles to thank. So, it is a new day and the sun is shining and the humidity is low and life is not too bad. I will be going to a Moth slam in NYC tomorrow night and hopefully my muse will have returned before I get up on stage. I suspect it has already found its way home.

Further thoughts on the topic of storytelling: there is a place where stand up comedy, sketch comedy, personal narrative, and mythology intersect. I’m not sure where that place is, but wherever it is, that’s where all forms of storytelling meet. It’s a place where the teller, comic or whatever takes off his/her ego and stands before and apart of a group of listeners and shares what is inside and needs to come out. Somewhere in the delicious chaos known as a Fringe Festival, this place is found over and over again usually to the delight of the audience and teller alike. It’s not always profound, but it is almost always worth grabbing onto riding off into the sunset with (and yes, this is a dangling preposition. Get over it!).