For 7 years, I had a dream to do stand-up comedy, but I never got beyond the stage of fantasizing about it because I stutter, sometimes severely. Besides the fear of stuttering in front of a large group of strangers, I couldn't see how I could be successful in an art where timing is everything.
Well, I still stutter, but I decided to practice a short stand-up act and perform it at the National Stuttering Association convention (a.k.a. "Stutterpalooza") in Nashville. The extremely bare-bones version of the story is that I performed my routine at the closing ceremonies in front of a few hundred people. I told myself before I took the stage that just getting up there, no matter how it went, would be a success. Just between you and me (okay, and Tibor too) I also secretly wanted to make their spleens explode from laughing. I got nowhere close, but I got enough laughs and compliments afterwards that I'm thinking about giving it another shot.
I have a lot more to say about the experience, and the conference itself, but after replaying a tape recording of my act several times and watching the emotion and memory bleed away from it with every playing, I'm not sure I want to replay it again, even if the replaying is in a different medium.
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