BOSTON, HOME OF THE WORST TEA PARTY EVER. YANKS HAVE BEEN MAKING BAD TEA EVER SINCE. THEY SEEM TO THINK IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH CHUCKING TEA BAGS INTO COLD WATER.
I am cranky with everyone at rehearsal. Must be careful. Don’t want to end up like Captain Bligh on this voyage. First I snap at Peter for asking me for the sixth time to put “Money Song” before “Penis Song.” He is quite wrong, and I am quite tired of explaining why, but there’s no reason to go outside the boundaries of civilized discourse. Then I go off at Gilli when she reasonably wants to tell me what lighting areas to get into. Snappy, snappy, snappy. I must be having feelings of abandonment. Quite easy to do when you’ve been abandoned. I apologize later to both of them, but that’s not fucking good enough, is it? Back to being the twelfth nicest Python. However, we do get a lot done in the allotted ninety minutes of rehearsal and we sharpen the show and polish some things that were getting sloppy, and it’s just as well, because it is a Sunday night in Boston, we are not full and though they are joyous and noisy we need to go after them and grab them. The encore bucket is busy from the start. I have to stop people coming up onstage before I can get on with the show. They are throwing money at me.
There are a dozen eBay winners in the audience who have been conned by the greedy bastard promoters into bidding outrageous sums for front-row seats, free merchandise, and “special opportunities.” These usually involve some kind of backstage “meet and greet” that are currently all the rage in showbiz. I don’t know why they don’t just go all the way and let them buy tickets to fuck us. [Because who would pay to fuck you, you geriatric old bastard?—Ed.] I decide to bring them up at the end of the Bruces and have the audience abuse them. This is jolly good fun. The audience get right into it at once and yell abuse at these poor innocent folks who have paid so much to be here. To give them a break I get them to sing the Bruces’ song, which they join in heartily. Jen takes a picture of them all onstage. Then I release the tiger. (Kidding.)
Hmm, so this is comedy lap dancing.
At the post-show signing, a man said to me, “Thank you, because I don’t think you’ll be coming back.” And that sounded right to me. I don’t want to be an old drama queen and start with the “Farewell Tour” and “That last chance to see” bullshit, but on the prednisone night, the night I felt off, I glanced in the mirror and had a sudden vision of myself as Archie Rice, a character in John Osborne’s play The Entertainer. Archie Rice is a sad, old music hall entertainer, condemned to a declining life on the vaudeville circuit, endlessly repeating his old jokes. Magnificently and memorably played by Laurence Olivier in the movie, this vision was chilling enough to make me realize that I never want to get anywhere near there. I think this voyage is for me. It’s about turning sixty, about nostalgia, about remembering old friends, and getting out and seeing the world before it’s too late. Peter has already observed that we seem to be reviving vaudeville on this tour. At the moment the show is still new for me, elevating and uplifting, thanks to the audience. But there is that specter in the mirror, an old man wearing too much makeup. So yes, he’s right. I probably won’t be coming back.