moving
We don’t move for a fresh start, for a slower pace of life, for the opportunity to be closer to family. We move because if something doesn’t change, I will kill myself. I think this periodically - I want to kill myself - and then I think it so many days in a row that I say it out loud to my husband. I say, Okay, maybe you’re right, let’s go to Wisconsin.
We move quietly. I suppose there were a few things the quarantine was good for. I know people who wrote novels, people who lost weight, people who got out of unhealthy relationships. A pandemic is not a time to have a baby, and it’s also not a time to move. No friends to help carry furniture. My husband ordering a yellow bucket hat with a plastic shield on it for our baby to wear in the airport. I wear a mask, my baby wears a mask, my husband drives our Prius and our dog three thousand miles, and yes, I’m jealous of him for this, too, but I’m still breast-feeding (is this why I want to kill myself?).
I don’t want people to know we are moving. For one, is it really moving? Or is it just keeping me alive? Secondly, I’m embarrassed. Moving means giving up. Moving means leaving the game. Moving means your dreams are dead.
“None of those things are true,” my husband tells me. Part of me believes he’s right, but not all of me, and so we do not tell anyone, anyone, that we are moving. When it does come out that we aren’t in LA, I tell people it’s temporary. We are visiting my parents. We were going crazy. This, they understand.
In August, we go back. It’s for a few weeks. Finally, without a choice, I fumble through the truth. We’re in Milwaukee now, maybe we’ll come back to LA one day, I’m still a comedian, I still want to write for TV, but I just got so depressed. Everyone is kind and understanding, but I question the veracity of their words. Nobody needs to be in LA these days, they say. YOU THINK I’VE GIVEN UP, DON’T YOU? I want to shout back at them. Of course you can still do comedy in the Midwest, they say. YOU DON’T ACTUALLY BELIEVE THAT. NO ONE STARTS COMEDY IN LA AND THEN MOVES TO WISCONSIN THAT IS FUCKING BACKWARDS.
Our time back in LA coincides with “Names Night” at The Comedy Store, a night where they celebrate the comics who got passed in the last year, whose names have now been painted onto the front wall of the Store’s facade. There are some very famous names on the wall - Eddie Murphy, Louis, Chappelle, Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Burr - and even though there are also a bunch who are not household names, people you’ve likely never heard of, it means something to be up there along with some icons. Whether or not people know your name, if it’s on the wall, you’re still part of the Store.
I got passed at the Store in January of 2020. I enjoyed three months of being a Paid Regular before the world shut down. They’ve posted the lineup for the last night the Store was open; I was supposed to have the final spot in the Original Room, but my husband told me it would be idiotic for me to do a set when a global virus was on the loose and I was six months pregnant. Looking back, he was right, but I do wish I had done the set.
I hear there used to be more tangible markers of “making it” in comedy. Doing Conan, for example. But I knew that things had changed, that the pathways to success had become murky and difficult to pin down. Some talented, hardworking people didn’t get agents or showcases or festivals or TV shows, but some so-so people did. But certainly there were still some guarantees! Certainly after I get a spot on TV, maybe I won’t quit my day job the next week, but it’ll mean something! Certainly after I get passed at the Store, someone important will see me, someone famous will take me on the road. Certainly after I write for a TV show, more writing jobs will come my way.
And perhaps my momentum would have continued had a pandemic not halted the existence of stand-up. Perhaps things would’ve been more promising. But the fact is that I’m here, outside of Milwaukee, teaching middle school, doing open mics, raising a baby, wondering if I’m still depressed.
During that visit in LA, a couple comedians came to hang out one night, and one of them brought her boyfriend, Nick, who’s not a comedian. Us comedians eventually got to commiserating about the state of our careers, how things we thought would help us actually led to nothing, how we love comedy but also what are we doing? And Nick, who’d been mostly quiet during this conversation, piped up and said, “You know, though, most people don’t ever get to follow their dreams.”
I’ve thought about Nick’s words a lot since this night. In this comedy pursuit, things are often unfair; it’s not a meritocracy. And yet, being in the game, even being able to pursue this thing that I love, I am also very lucky. Even if it’s in Wisconsin.
Right?