Savvy Granny - How my mom knows more than I do

While I was away in London, my mother grew up.

 She’s a 71 year-old Margaret Thatcher matriarch of the Portuguese community within Cape Town’s Northern Suburbs, with fellow residents from as far afield as Paarl travelling down to get their age-old sequin dresses hemmed and stitched by her soft and wrinkled yet experienced hands. She doesn’t quite skateboard down steep hills or listen to thrash metal locked away in her bedroom but, like a teenager squabbling to her parents for the next Nokia, she seeks out new experiences with youthful aplomb.
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Comedy is not jazz background music for your conversation.

So tonight I had the joy of opening up Comics@Work at the Armchair Theatre in Observatory, and a small table began to talk amongst themselves.

Which is fine for any Tom, Dick and Harry comedian, as it portrays a lack of enthusiasm for the comedian and the show itself on most occasion, and it is up to the performer to entertain the crowd to a point where everyone's attention is suddenly transfixed at the silliness, the punch lines, the charisma.

But knuckleheadedness reared it's fat, ugly, greasy sonofabitch head tonight with this table.

What began as simply each comedian getting slightly distracted by this group of fascist actor/jobless knowitalls turned into an all-out conversation throughout the entire show, with compere Christopher Steenkamp having to request their silence at the interval for the second-half, only to be met half-heatedly with a biligerent "no", like the man himself held the crown jewels of England between his legs and his own ass was made from gold and reeked of nutmeg.

After the show, a stand-off occurred where said compere (balls to the max) confronted them once more and a shouting match occur, whereupon said Crown Jewels man gave a comment I will never forget:

"Hey, freedom of speech, k?"

As a comedian pointed out so thoughtfully tonight, they basically sat there talking about their amazing yet fruitless and wasted lives with the comedy as jazz music background. Thank you, actors, thank you so much for belittling the spoken word craft that you cannot succeed in yourselves. You'll be seeing at least some of us in magazines touting our comedy shows and DVD's long before you get to be extras in porn films as pot-plants.

Comics@Work

Going Offline: Day 54 - Going Online

I know, I know, ironic huh? Nelson harped on for ages about his addiction to Facebook and wanted to get off it as it was so time-consuming and affected his relationship with other people, his performance in work, and wrote a few short blog-posts bleeding his heart to the wide world of human beings about his fragile ego needing a rest from a virtual fashion show of people's lives.

And then he's back on it.

Well, if you haven't seen by now, I'm in South Africa spending time with la familia, my dad having been ill for so long and me wanting to be around him before time runs out. But since 2 weeks ago, this I can see will impact greatly on my career in the videogames industry, fragile and precarious as it once was before.

And now, I need Facebook...to contact people.

For all my good intentions of shooting the proverbial shit with my dad and the rest of his brood, no one needs a producer in little ol' Cape Town, and I found that out the hard way after 2 months of being strung along by someone. It's time to step up, get off my bum-bum, rewrite my Curriculum Vitae and become a full-fledged rat-race chaser, doing whatever odds and ends necessary to pay for petroleum for a run-down ve-HIC-le that will take me places for work purposes AND for comedic endeavours.

In terms of Facebook, that means being exposed to people again, promoting comedy shows and varying my repertoire, talking to long-lost "pals" and convincing them that I'm a gorgeous good-looking, charming little piece of ass-et that you can't do without.

AND THEN I'll be offline, keeping my head down.

So, you can call me a hypocrite for being weak-minded...OR you can stand-up and say, "Nelson...there's a guy that needs a handyman, I'll send him your number."

Yes, yes you can do that.

But for now, feel free to listen a little to my set at the Chilli Bar Comedy Show happening Thursdays in Soutfield. Go on, do it.

Discovering a forgotten email...

Like Nazi gold, an undiscovered Da Vinci or a £5 note in your pocket, I get the same elation out of coming across an email I had either a. forgotten or b. totally missed out, or even c. discovering the details of a previous email account you hardly used, only to find dozens if not hundreds of messages from former acquaintences long forgotten trying to reach you.

Just the other day, I was clearing out my Facebook messages from people trying to reach me (yeah, cos I is so popular, psh) but it's true, I was, honest, truth be told.

And what do you know? There's a "other" section I had never noticed.

This small treasure trove contained a dozen or so little tiny pleas for attention from people I hardly remembered or forgotten about, some I hardly know or others that aren't even on my Facebook friends list. It was quite sweet to even find someone famous emailing me in November about hooking up, and the feeling in my gut to hastely reply to let them know I'm pretty much alive, well and eager to meet for cake and ideas.

That makes me feel geniunely guilty of being obsessive with attention myself. I do enjoy communicating with others, but the thought of a small, tiny little message lost in the ether of the digital world waiting for me to find it, like lost treasure or a message in a bottle floating towards me from an island far, far away, inhabited by a lonely and pathetic man with a big beard (with exception, a Turkish woman with a beard), excites me somehow. I get put into action, having to respond as quickly as possible, writing a little note of acknowledgement that EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK, I AM SORRY I DIDN'T RESPOND BEFORE BUT NOW HERE I AM, WE CAN CHAT, TALK TO ME, DON'T GIVE UP!!

So have a gander, people, check your "other" section under Messages (just click on the Message line and it will appear below it), you might find some gold you didn't realise you had. :)