{"id":4120,"date":"2012-03-11T20:41:45","date_gmt":"2012-03-12T00:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/?p=4120"},"modified":"2012-03-11T20:41:45","modified_gmt":"2012-03-12T00:41:45","slug":"eeyore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/11\/eeyore\/","title":{"rendered":"Eeyore"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After the last StorySLAM I hosted, Jeff and I planned to get together and debrief, but we never got around to it. So a couple days ago, I sent him my thoughts, namely:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Even though no host likes to do the &#8220;How&#8217;s everybody doing tonight?&#8230; I said, <em>How&#8217;s everybody doing tonight?!<\/em>&#8221; thing, and no audience member enjoys answering the former with a &#8220;Wooo&#8221; and the latter with a &#8220;<em>Woooooooo!<\/em>&#8220;, it serves a purpose. It raises the energy in the room. It gets people feeling. It opens the audience up to the possibility of enthusiasm. So it needs to be done. I needed to give the listeners the space to get excited, early. (They got there. It&#8217;s just took a minute.)<\/li>\n<li>The evening is about the storytellers. I was so nervous about getting my bits right that I forgot to highlight the people who had put their name in the hat. I would go up, do my piece, get the scores, and announce the next storyteller, which on paper is what I was supposed to do, but at the end of the evening, it felt disjointed, like two separate events, my part and their part. Jeff is very good about listening to a story and, for his next bit,\u00a0riffing off it, whereas I sit in the front row <em>looking<\/em>\u00a0at the storyteller and working up some serious butt-sweat. I can&#8217;t possibly pick anything up and run with it because the story is completely drowned out by the freight train that&#8217;s barreling through my head.\u00a0Plus, even if I could quiet the locomotive, I have precisely zero improv chops. I cannot come up with stuff on the fly. The few lines I tried to do off the cuff that night, I flubbed. Thinking about improvising a whole three-minute segment&#8212;oh god, I just dry-heaved. So I need to either work on that or figure out another way to showcase the storytellers better.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When we spoke on the phone the next day, Jeff told me about an email he received when he sent out the promotion for the upcoming event. Apparently, a woman wrote something like, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to try this again. We&#8217;ve been there twice when the blond woman [I&#8217;m blond apparently?] has hosted, and she made it all about herself. We like it better when you&#8217;re hosting.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s true:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>It was only my second time hosting.<\/li>\n<li>Hosting is hard.<\/li>\n<li>I worked my ass off to prepare.<\/li>\n<li>Lots of people told Jeff I did a great job.<\/li>\n<li>Lots of people told me I did a great job.<\/li>\n<li>One woman didn&#8217;t like what I did.<\/li>\n<li>Jeff said he disagreed with the woman, thinks I&#8217;m awesome, and wants me to host more shows.<\/li>\n<li>This woman and I are saying essentially the same thing, though my view of it is a little more forgiving and generous. (Hers: she made it all about her; mine: I was so goddamn nervous I couldn&#8217;t see straight.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>But, man, this kind of thing sends my day right into the shitter. Why does one random woman&#8217;s negative opinion trump all the positive?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After the last StorySLAM I hosted, Jeff and I planned to get together and debrief, but we never got around to it. So a couple days ago, I sent him my thoughts, namely: Even though no host likes to do the &#8220;How&#8217;s everybody doing tonight?&#8230; I said, How&#8217;s everybody doing tonight?!&#8221; thing, and no audience &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/11\/eeyore\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Eeyore<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-call-me-crazy","category-first-world-problems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4120"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4130,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4120\/revisions\/4130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}