Pissed off

That was the shit­ti­est gig ever. Thank you to the hand­ful of people who showed: sleazemon­key, nuwishas_tail, drjon, mireille21, thunderfoot23, why_lederhosen, ana­chrono­clast.

The pro­jector they assured me would be there wasn’t there. I checked with them on Friday that they had a pro­jector. They said yep, no probs. If I’d known there was going to be a hassle, I could have bor­rowed the pro­jector from Mel­bourne Uni. I was *there* half an hour before the gig. All I needed was a car, and we could have had it. But since I don’t have an after hours key, that wasn’t an option after the fact. Then when someone went to get one from another venue, it required stick­ing to the ceil­ing and no one knew where the inputs were. Then when nuwishas_tail stepped into the breach (three thou­sand thank yous) to try and help fix stuff, it still didn’t work. The main person who was sup­posed to be organ­ising all this had just not bothered to show up. Great.

So, we star­ted the gig an hour late. Dorothy Porter asked to go on first. Okay, she’s the star, we were run­ning late because of me, the organ­isers agreed. She hadn’t said hello to me at all before the gig, but that’s to be expec­ted, I was run­ning around like a chook trying to get my damned pro­jector work­ing to dis­play the slideshow I’ve spent this entire god­damned week put­ting together in every spare moment I have between jobs. 

But then, she just left, straight after her bit. I’m really unim­pressed with that. I think she would have the cour­tesy to stay and hear us too. Espe­cially since I’m an ex-stu­dent of hers and I was so flattered to be on the same bill.

Anyway, finally went on, did okay, poems went down well, but I was just so drained and exhausted and the whole thing was just such a let-down.

And hardly anyone I invited came. Thea rang to say she was feel­ing ill, which is fair enough, but this was my big travel poetry thing, a year after I returned, finally all together how it was sup­posed to be. And I sent e‑mail to maybe 100 people and posted it here which is another 50 Mel­bourne people and of that whole crowd, maybe 7 people showed up, I’m pretty demor­al­ised by the entire experience.