Writing Challenge #23 - Embarrassing Guitar (Write Nov. 23)

Hi folks

22 writing challenges down.

Only 8 to go!

We had our first minor snowfall here in Minneapolis the other day.  
Not much of it left the next day even partway into the morning, but winter’s knocking at the door.

Let’s warm up our hands and keep on typing.

On to the day’s challenge…


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Challenge #23 - Embarrassing Guitar

Write Nov. 23rd - or earlier if you like
Due: Sunday, November 24th, 12pm noon Central Time
(1pm Eastern Time, 11am Mountain Time, 10am Western Time for the US Time Zones)



So, one of the things I’ve been wondering about lately is how you represent embarrassment onstage.

Because a person’s embarrassment is such an internal thing - you can get it in books or movies or TV because you can get into a person’s head in pretty easy, sometimes overused, ways.

And of course, an audience can be embarrassed in sympathy for a character in theater.  They can see a situation and imagine themselves in the middle of it and cringe in response.  So that’s close.

But actually being inside that emotion for a character on stage, that’s tricky.

Why was I thinking of this, you ask?

Well, it turns out that all musical acts at Threshold Theater fundraisers which are not drag-related are cursed.

No, really, they are.   
Cursed.
They always end in some form of musical disaster.

Three years ago, we had some fabulous drag comedians who also did a little song on the side and they were delightful.  That same year, the musician who had signed up to be part of the fundraiser had to bail on us at the last minute because they were sick.

The musician felt really bad about it and so enthusiastically signed up to be part of Threshold’s fundraiser the following year.

We all lived to regret this decision.

That year, I don’t believe there was a drag element to the entertainment, though we did have a very entertaining lesbian stand-up comedian.  And she had to go on earlier than planned, because the music act didn’t show up.

They didn’t show up early, prior to the start of the event, as requested in order to get a feel for the room and maybe do a sound check and bring in their equipment before we opened the doors to those attending the fundraiser.  Rude, but not a deal breaker.

The musician kept texting they were on their way, and they’d be there shortly but they just continued to… not show up.  So we kept shuffling the order of the entertainment.  There was the stand-up comedian.  There was bingo.  There were readings from upcoming scripts we’d be featuring in the new season.  There were the breaks to let people bid on silent auction items.

In the midst of all this the musician did finally show up - and then proceeded to have an emotional meltdown when none of their tech worked.  They had a computer that didn’t work, and sound files on a memory stick that wouldn’t play even on someone else’s laptop, and then of course they had to take a while to set up the keyboard and speaker they had, which did at least work, for all that good it did us.

And then it kind of became the entertainment equivalent of a hostage situation.

Because Minnesotans don’t want to be rude.  
Plus they were there for a fundraiser so they wanted to stay until the end to see if they were victorious bidders in the silent auction.

But the musician was genuinely terrible.  
I mean, clearly they were having a bad night.  
And it was original songs so it’s impossible to be entirely sure, but it certainly felt like everything was just slightly off-key, both the keyboard playing and the singing.  
It didn’t feel like a choice, it felt like a mistake.

And they just… kept… attempting to play.  And attempting to sing.

Dude.  Read the room.  End the set.

At one point he referenced the fact that his next song was inspired by recently reading the novel “Giovanni’s Room” - and I don’t think no one responded because they hadn’t also read the novel (I have).  I think everyone else was having a similar response to my own thoughts which were, “Please leave poor James Baldwin out of this.”

Every time the musician launched into another song I thought one of our company members was going to have an aneurysm, they were so furious.  

And I was just desperately trying not to laugh.  
Because I wasn’t laughing at the musician,
I was laughing at the escalating absurdity of the situation.

To this day, I only need to say the words “Giovanni’s Room” to set someone off in peels of laughter at a company meeting.  
And again, James Baldwin didn’t sign up for that.

The set finally,
mercifully,
ended.  
We still insisted on paying the musician,
and we haven’t seen them since.

And then, this year, it was my turn.

We did have a drag performer again this year, Deb U Taunt, and she was remarkable, doing both a comedy routine and three Sondheim songs live, “How Could I Leave You?” “Send In The Clowns” and “The Ladies Who Lunch.”  Her voice and perfomance were just jaw-droppingly good.  Set the bar for the evening incredibly high, nothing else touched it.

The evening also featured still more silent auction bidding, and bingo, a reading of the first scene from the upcoming spring production of my play “Spellbound” and ended with a really spirited and funny queer improv group performing in iambic pentameter as No Fear ShakesQueer.

But before we got to the improv troupe, we all thought it’d be a good idea if I performed the song featured in “Spellbound” (since I’m currently the only person who knows how to play the guitar for it, and sing it).

I am not a performer, but I’ve been shoved up on stage by my guitar teacher at numerous music student showcases in the years pre-pandemic, and I’ve been passable.

Also, I know the song backward and forward, I’ve been working on a demo recording of it, I played it for the Zoom staged reading we did during the pandemic during the spots in the script where the development of the song is featured.  I have played it during songwriting classes as an example of what I’ve done from a previous songwriting class, when we’re all going around and sharing.

I hadn’t performed in public for a number of years, due to the pandemic, but this was going to be a friendly audience, it should have been easy, right?

I even played it out back behind the venue several times through just to make sure I had it in my fingers before I then had to wait for over an hour while all the other bidding and bingo and scene reading and that fantastic drag performance happened.  And then there was going to be one more round of bingo and then finally, I’d go on.  Bingo the first time took forever so I nipped off to the men’s room quickly.  I wasn’t gone long but I returned to find the bingo game was suddenly and very rapidly over and now I was supposed to hop up on stage and get playing.

I am not exaggerating when I say that it was terrible.

Easily the worst performance - acting, singing, playing guitar - of my entire life.

So at least we got that out of the way.

For some reason, even though my brain is well aware that a G chord is featured in nearly every line of the song - and I had the music in front of me - neither by fingers nor my brain would allow me to play a G chord.

And my training from all previous showcase performances has been - just push on through it.  No one is expecting perfection so don’t put that on yourself.  Just get through it.  No matter how badly you think it’s going, don’t stop, don’t double back, don’t falter, don’t draw attention to your mistakes, all of that will only make it worse.  Power through to the end.

Now, if I hadn’t had that training and previous experience, and I’d been thinking clearly, I would have stopped, since it was a completely different kind of event, and said to the audience, in relation to the play and its characters, and their relative levels of proficiency on the guitar,

“I am more a Micah-level guitar player than an Auggie-level guitar player, and Micah would stop and look at the music rather than try to perform for you, and the music would be the better for it, so I’m just going to focus on that, if you’ll bear with me.”

And I would have really read the music in front of me, not tried to do it from memory, and included all the G chords, and wow, it would have been so much better for everyone involved.

Instead, I just pushed through the damn thing, singing it correctly, even as I failed to play the guitar correctly and dropped the G chords and thus was playing the wrong chord a good fifty percent of the time, and it only snowballed the further I pushed into the song.  So the melody and the supporting guitar chords never matched up after about the first 15 seconds or so.

It was, however, not a hostage situation.  It was just the one song.

It was the longest three minutes of my life.  But it was only one song.

The audience was, I’m sure, just as mortified as I was.

Upside, they will never suggest that I play for an event for Threshold again.

And the bar is set very low for the next time someone accidentally hears me play guitar - they will be stunned to discover I can actually do it.

Downside, I had to stay in the room, with everyone, for an entire 20 minute improv comedy set.  And give the performers my full attention and focus, even though I was dying inside from embarrassment.  I watched, I laughed (they were quite good), and I pretended no one else was in the room or looking at me.

And then I had to get up on stage to help announce some of the winners of the silent auction items and had the bidders their sheet so they could go pay for their stuff.

And then I had to pack up my gear and get it out to the car - which I did by myself because I could not make eye contact with anyone.

I even drove a friend home from the event and we did not discuss it.  We talked about quite literally everything else.

To this day, no one in the company has mentioned it in conversation, even though we did a post-mortem on the fundraiser at the next company meeting.

I haven’t even brought it up with my guitar teacher in our lessons, even though a number of our lessons prior to the event were focused on getting ready for it, and he can testify to the fact that, boy, can I play that damn song.  It sounds great.

Just not that night.

Non-drag musical acts at our fundraisers are cursed.

So I’ve been thinking about embarrassment, and how you manifest it onstage.

Because it’s a very potent emotion.

So play around with some element of that.

Or, as always, just ignore this, write whatever you want and turn it in by the deadline.

Just write something… :)


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If you’re not interested in this prompt, you can

try 2021’s challenge #23: Hidden Histories

Or try 2022’s challenge #23: Location, Singer, Poet

Or try 2023’s Challenge #23: The Vanishing Point

Or, you know, just ignore the prompts altogether and write whatever you want - as long as you’re writing and turning it in by the deadline, that’s all that matters for the challenge :)


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And because we call can get in our own way so easily, here’s some words of reassurance on the basics of this month:

Friendly Reminders - Answers To Common Questions:
(Follow the links to read me expounding on these items :)

Don’t Stress About Writing A Full Play

Don’t Stress About FormatDon’t Stress About Sticking To The Writing Prompt

No.  Really.  I Mean It.  Don’t Stress About Sticking To The Writing Prompt

Don’t Stress About Finishing An Idea (You Can Add Later)

Don’t Stress About “Succeeding” or “Failing”

Don’t Stress About What You’re Turning In Each Day

Don’t Stress About November 28th (however you recognize the holiday weekend)


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How to submit your work for Challenge #23

You have options.  They are:

Save your script as a PDF or Word Doc and send as an attachment to an email sent to ThresholdWritingChallenge@gmail.com

OR

Copy and paste your script in the body of an email and send it to ThresholdWritingChallenge@gmail.com

OR

Post your script online (as a Google doc, or in a blog post, on your own personal website, etc.) - email a link to this script to ThresholdWritingChallenge@gmail.com
(If you’re going to Google doc route, just make sure to have the document public, or give permissions to our email address to open it)

When emailing us, make the subject line of your email - Challenge #23
(That just helps us sort through the email more quickly)
(Or, you know, just reply to this email if you want :)

OR

Post the link for the online document option noted above in the comments section below on this very blog post for today's challenge on our writing challenge blog



Write Nov. 23rd - or earlier if you like
Again, this is: Due: Sunday, November 24th, 12pm noon Central Time
(1pm Eastern Time, 11am Mountain Time, 10am Western Time for the US Time Zones)


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And, just to reassure you, no, we are not going to be sticklers about you following these directions down to the minutest detail - the important thing is that you write, and then that you share it with us, so we can keep track of who’s writing every day.

Also, no, there is no penalty for finishing and submitting early - but it also isn’t a race, so give yourself all the time up til 12 noon Central Time on Sunday to write if you need it.  When you’re done, you’re done.

Again, remember, it doesn’t need to be great, it doesn’t even need to be responding to this prompt (the prompt is just there so you’re not staring at a blank screen to start with no idea what to write about :)

Doesn't even need to be complete - you could have the beginning or the middle or the end of an idea, maybe two out of three but not all, that's still fine. This is all about getting things started, you can write more later.

You have 7 more days to build on whatever you come up with today, if you want.

Just get anything on the page, even if won't make sense to anyone else, as long as it make sense to you.

It just needs to be something.


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And that something can be:



Lights up.

A non-drag musical performer gets up on stage at a Threshold Theater fundraising event.

It does not go well.

Lights down.

The End



That’s always your escape hatch, every day.

That’s your base line.

Build on it.

Have fun.

Don’t stress.

Make an impulsive decision and run with it.

Breathe.

You’ve got the day.

Just write.

And take good care of yourselves, and each other.