"...I'll be taking up valuable restaurant real estate for several hours. How do you say "ha ha" in Dutch?..."
Westin Blues, Dec 1, 2004
I hate the Westin and the feeling is mutual.
Hello, this is Laurie Kilmartin, (sort of) live from Rotterdam, which is in the Netherlands, also known as Holland. I'm taping a tv show here tonight. It was a last minute gig.
My confirmed itinerary wasn't emailed to me until Monday night, and I read it as soon as I got home from two weeks in Seattle and Austin. I flew from JFK at 6 PM the next day, arrived at Amsterdam at 7:45 AM on Wednesday, got a ride to Rotterdam, which is an hour away, checked into a hotel at around 11 AM, slept through the whole day, got picked up at 6:30 PM, drove back to Amsterdam to do a warm up spot at open mic, going up second to last on a show where not one comedian spoke English and everyone smoked.
The guy running the open mic snuck up on me three different times during the evening , telling me to "just have fun." Thank you for the advice, three-years-in-comedy.
I'm doing nine minutes, they'll edit it down to six. I have to talk slow, because while everyone here understands English, they need a few extra seconds to put it together. Even if it's as bad as
The World Stands Up, at least I know I can stay composed. By the way, that series finally aired in October. We taped it in January and everyone but Ben Bailey tanked. It took some poor editor 9 months to add laughs to all those sets.
How many times do I have to say it, people? Stand up comedy is meant to be seen live, in a club. The best way to showcase comics on TV is to do something where they can be themselves, like, maybe in a roundtable kind of setting, with host, say a quick-witted Colin Quinn type, and talk about the issues of the day.
Oh wait, never mind.
I'm staying at a Westin. You've seen those commercials, where white men in their forties treat themselves to
simply the best during a business trip. It's breakfast time in Rotterdam, and the Westin's target audience is chowing down. Accents, business chatter, suits, ties and me with in sweat pants and my pajama top, writing in an old Powerbook, with the Tom Shales' book about SNL on my table. The waiters realize that I am here to stay for a few hours and have already begun to ignore me.
The coffee here gets cold, fast. Westin, you may be four stars, but you ain't the IHOP. My only consolation is that I sat at a table for four, overlooking the window and I'll be taking up valuable restaurant real estate for several hours. How do you say "ha ha" in Dutch?
I'm not a tourist. There are lots of things to see here in Europe, but the only thing I want to see is my cranberry red bed in Harlem, lumpy from the contours of my snoring boyfriend covered in pillows, because he sleeps under them, not on them.
Next week, I guess.
I'm lonely. There is no in-room internet access, so the cost for
one hour of surfing in the business center of this luxury hotel is (any Reader who is standing is advised to sit down) 36 dollars. Long distance phone calls are completely out of the question. I finally got a calling card that is good only at a pay phone, and the nearest pay phone is across the street in a
train station. At least half of the English tv channels are in Dutch, and my sleeping schedule is completely off. So far, I've slept through every daylit hour. All I can tell you about Holland is it's always night and there is no communication with the outside world.
My manager called on the way to the airport, to tell me I'm doing the Aspen festival. Longtime readers may remember that several years ago, I flew myself to Seattle to showcase for and be turned down by the Aspen people, and in successive years have been unselected for various reasons, but now I am apparently everything that I've never been before, and who can resist me?
Finally I'm a hot property, now that I'm too old to put on tv. Thanks, show business!
The priority is to plump up the ole writing packet with things besides Tough Crowd sketches, so I can get something going. Careers in show business really are that vague and nebulous. A month or two ago, I met with someone who wanted show ideas off a very vague concept. I pitched one she really liked.
Flesh it out, she told me. I did, writing out character details, and a few episode summaries.
Great, she said,
write a pilot, so I can have something to show my boss.
Sure! I'll just write a pilot, or as I like to call it, a 22 minute sketch. Twenty two is the about number of first drafts I have written of this pilot. Each draft is two percent funnier than its predecessor, which means today's edition of the show is 56% funny. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, and the only thing that's keeping me going is I didn't know what the fuck I was doing when I wrote my first sketch at Tough Crowd, and that seemed to work out ok. And I've met enough writers to know that many of them don't know what the fuck they're doing, they just won't admit it on their website. So it's our little secret, Reader. Shhhh.
