Broadband Communications
By Milt Abel | September 18, 2011
Broadband Communication
I’ll share a confidence: I’m a bit nervous about an upcoming show this Tuesday morning, September 20th. It isn’t that it’s a morning show; I did a morning performance several years ago for a radio station in Sacramento, KGBY, that was one of my best experiences on stage. To be fair, I should mention that Sacramento show was an annual, Xmas ‘thank you’ to the fans of Y92, and was years into the tradition, so the theater in the round was packed with eager fans. They were enthusiastic to the point of nuts because there was also a special guest, a gothic-looking young man who had almost won American Idol -and he could sing, beautifully. I can’t recall his name, I can’t stand to watch those competative/talent shows. Take away the exploitation of artists’ dreams and insecurities and you have to call it a variety show. The singer’s name was one of those single-syllable affairs like Ant, or Sting, or Wasp, I just remember it meant a pest that could hurt you.
No, my anxiety about this coming Tuesday’s show is because of my long hiatus from stage, four weeks off. Not a voluntary break, either. I just wasn’t offered the work, or I turned down the work I was offered, because it wasn’t going pay as well as the work that… wasn’t offered. It’s not all gloom; I was able to see the first three games of my son’s senior year of high school football. The previous two entries of this blog talked about those games -and the third game, this past Friday, Canby High School had it’s first victory. Probably because he personally scored two touchdowns. Here’s a picture of me with the scoring machine immediately after the game. He looks great and I look like I volunteered my hair to clean the mud out of all the players’ cleats. The fact that the game was played on a new, artificial turf, and there was no mud, explains the extra disheveled and frustrated look of my ‘do.’
Stand-up comedy, if you forgive some of its outrageous content, is a very subtle art. It takes years to get any good at it, and even with that investment people fail. Four weeks is a long time between picking up a microphone. It’s a little bit of a reprieve to put it in context; four weeks out of a 30 year career is like a one quarter of one percent, or 3 1/2 minutes out of a 24 hour day. But a lot can happen in 3 1/2 minutes, or not enough. I just hope, as I take the microphone this Tuesday, I speak into the proper end of it.
Making Tuesday morning trickier still… it’s a private function. A corporate date. I’m to be the comedic relief at a conference among Western telecom companies as they circle their wagons and pow-wow over what to do with impending FCC rule changes that favor telecom giants over local broadband providers like themselves. I’ve got a 45 minutes general session slot between the meeting titled “Searching for Ways to Conserve Resources – Ancillary Benefits is Just a Start’ and their lunch break. Weep for me.
I’ll pull it off. Confidence is more than half of this show business game. Talent is the other half. And being good at math probably takes up the rest. My level of confidence is completely up to me, and in the end, the truth of truths is, I’d rather succeed than fail. (Can you sense the looker room pep-talk? Think of it as being the fly on the wall inside my brain about 2 minutes before I take the stage this Tuesday)
I’ll do alright. The only questions is ‘how alright’? I know some information about the internet, about broadband, and I have the conference’s agenda in front of me. I’ll write some jokes just for them
“I have a local telecom provider where I live. Very local. It’s two oatmeal boxes connected with a string. When I asked for broadband they gave me a thicker string.”
I may use that, I may not. I’ll float around the stage and try not to be a pest. I don’t want to have to change my name to Moth.
Topics: comedy | 1 Comment »
New Paint
By Milt Abel | September 11, 2011
New Paint
I attended another Friday night football game, this one just two days before the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11/01 attacks on the U.S. Because of the closeness to that anniversary, before the national anthem was sung, the stadium announcer requested ‘a moment of silence in honor of the victims’. The game was held in Portland’s Jeld-Wen Field, where the city’s former triple A team played and the current home of Portland’s professional soccer team. A large, well-lit stadium, oversized really, for a couple high school teams to go at it. But is was a beautiful summer night, and my son plays fullback.
During the moment of silence I was tempted to make some noise. I am no fan of all the reverence and sanctity poured over that tragic event. The observed remembrances, thick on this Sunday the actual ten year anniversary, are not unlike the effects of alcohol; it causes the maudlin to be more maudlin, the angry to be more angry. I think we all would have been better served if the announcer has a requested ‘a moment of silence to think how we can be kinder to one another.’ But that doesn’t sell beer or tee shirts, doesn’t get people worked up to make irrational decisions like flying planes into buildings or invading other countries and ending up killing people just as innocent as those in the Twin Towers.
The alcohol analogy goes further: maybe this all could have been avoided if a few people woke up in the morning, a day over a decade ago, and said to themselves, “Today I’m not going to fly any planes into any buildings.” One day at a time.
There’s a favorite parable I like to tell about hanging on to things; how appropriate or inappropriate that practice might be: Two monks are walking through a forest and come to a rain-swollen river. A old woman needs help crossing and asks to be carried. The young monk declines saying, “We are forbidden to touch women.” The older monk, the teacher, says, “Hop on,” and carries her across. The two monks continue in silence the rest of the day until the young monk can’t stand it anymore and asks, “How could you touch that woman when it is strictly forbidden?’ The old monk says, “I put the woman down on the other side of the river. You are still carrying her.”
Ten years ago, when I first heard the news of the 9/11 attacks is was over the car radio. It was so extraordinary that I thought it was a hoax, like the War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938. I was going to the local hardware store to get painting supplies. My wife, a good friend, and myself spent that day painting our kitchen with the TV on and listened to unfolding and tragic consequences throughout the day. That was ten years ago. It’s time for new paint.
Topics: comedy | please add Comments »
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