Speak Up on Saturday night was a brilliant show. If you stayed home to watch another true crime movie on Netflix or take a bath, you made a mistake.
As Elysha said to our audience, “You came out of your house. You put on your nice clothes. Good for you!”
And it was worth the effort. Four incredible storytellers joined me onstage to tell stories on the theme “Do Over.”
Far more entertaining than anything on television.
Two of our storytellers, Amy Mahoney and Chion Wolf, had graced the Speak Up stage before, but the other two, Will Thomas and Rocky Ross, were new to our audience.
Rocky came all the way from California to perform in the show.
Happily, we had a sold-out audience for these talented performers.
Elysha and I have been producing shows since the spring of 2103 — well over 100 in all — in venues all over Connecticut, but I never take the community that has formed around our show for granted. As I welcomed the audience, I asked for a round of applause for those who had attended a Speak Up show before, and then a round of applause for our newbies.
About two-thirds of the audience were veterans, but at least a third were Speak Up virgins.
Even more astounding, I don’t know most of the audience members at our shows. Truthfully, almost none of my close friends ever attend a show, so although I have made friends through Speak Up, and I see regulars show after show, most of the faces I see while I’m telling a story are new to me.
Five new people introduced themselves to me at the show, including a couple who recently arrived in Connecticut from Los Angeles who were happy to find storytelling alive and well in the Hartford area.
Great people who love storytelling, live entertainment, and sitting amongst a community of people with shared interests.
Maybe some of them will become great friends in the future.
Also, my actual friends apparently suck.
On our way home from the Patriots game yesterday, Charlie commented on how cool it was that his parents had created this thing that so many people seem to love.
I’ll hold onto that for a long, long time.
Speaking of Charlie, he has now joined the show. In addition to setting up and breaking down the sound equipment, he now plays before the show and during intermission. On Saturday, he improvised on his electric guitar, but in the past, he’s played both electric and acoustic and sung.
Here was my favorite moment of the night:
After intermission, I performed a storytelling improv for the audience, both to teach them a storytelling game I invented and use in workshops as well as show them what “Matt and Jeni Are Unprepared — a storytelling improv show I perform with Jeni Bonaldo — looks like. I took three prompts from the audience (toilet, shoelaces, and hotel) and told a story about entering a hotel above a liquor store in South Carolina in 1993 and seeing the faint chalk outline of a murder victim in the carpet.
It was a story I had never told before onstage, though when I asked Elysha if I had ever told her the story, she said, “I heard you chose the hotel prompt and knew exactly what you were going to tell.”
It’s great to be married to someone who knows you that well.
But there’s the thing:
Jeni was in the audience on Saturday. She was one of the rare close friends who actually attended the show, so I thought she could do an improv too, so the audience could get a real picture of what our show is like.
But Jeni refused. Despite asking her again and again earlier in the day, she sat in her seat and did not budge.
So when it came time for me to turn the show back over to the audience, I asked for a round of applause for the first-half storytellers and then, “Not a round of applause for Jeni for refusing to perform for us.”
Other than two or three traitors, the audience complied. A spattering of pathetic claps but otherwise silence.
I’ve never asked an audience to not applaud someone before. More than 15 years spent performing around the world, and that was first for me, and perhaps a first ever.
When I texted Jeni the next day to both make sure she wasn’t too annoyed with me and also taunt her, she responded with:
“That was awesome.”
So she gets an F- for failing to take the stage but an A+ for recognizing the beauty of the moment.
You never know what you’ll see when you get off your ass and attend a live performance.
On Saturday night, you would’ve heard stories about adoptions gone both wrong and right, an unexpected complexity of divorce, a fascinating career pivot a quarter century in the making, a sarcastic version of the Pledge of Allegiance, and a student’s life changed thanks to a little spaghetti.
Plus a story about a chalk outline in a Myrtle Beach hotel room, a 14-year-old boy’s electric guitar, and Elysha’s brilliance and hilarity as our emcee.
So much better than anything you could’ve been doing at home.
