What Is My Show About?

I had a show last night in Berkeley and it went better than expected. I performed 90 percent new material and that is always so nerve wracking because I don’t know what I have until I have an audience. Stand-up comedians tend to have a notebook on stage when they try out new material, but I am no stand-up comedian, so I memorize everything and hope for the best. Besides, reading a script on stage really slows me down. I am a tactile person, and I need to use the space as much as possible.

So, what’s next, now that I wrote and performed “Part 4” of my one-woman show “All the Great New Things to Come”? It means I finally have to start putting all the material together that I have been working on for over a year and come up with a 55-minute show for fringe festivals.

What is my show about? I wish I had a clever elevator pitch, but I don’t, so here is a list of ideas of what my show is about:

1. It’s about rediscovering my San Francisco Bay Area roots. I am a fourth generation Bay Area native. In 2020, during the shelter in place mandate, I started going through a family photo album my dad had given me years ago. Not only are there pictures, but there are letters written from my Great Grandmother who was born in 1893 in San Francisco. I have now become obsessed with my family tree.
2. It’s about me being obsessed with genealogy and trying to fill in the gaps of my family tree and looking for the locations where my ancestors lived in San Francisco and Oakland. Some houses are still standing, but some were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Some were torn down when the freeways were built. I used to fall asleep in history class in high school because I didn’t understand what it had to do with me. Now I get it.
3. It’s about me trying to prove that I am not a tourist just because I go to Union Square in SF during the holidays.

But I don’t know how to market this show. It’s so Bay specific. Will anyone care outside these walls?

Over the last month I have been posting on social media like crazy and trying to understand algorithms and advertising. I really don’t know what I am doing.

Turns out, my cat videos get more views than I do.

What’s a Gen Xer to do? I used to work in Casting back in the 90s, and actors back then were not expected to be camera operators or editors, just actors. Now we all have to be cinematographers and have perfect lighting, and my apartment has terrible lighting.

Alright, time for me to get back on Ancestry.com and here’s one more pic of what you really want:

Travel Back in Time with Me

FIRST THINGS FIRST: I will be performing a NEW excerpt of my solo show, “All the Great New Things to Come” on Monday, August 18th, at the Marsh Berkeley. There will be four storytellers total (20 minutes each) and I go on second. GET TICKETS HERE.

I emphasize NEW because sometimes people think they’ve already seen my show, but the truth is, it’s always changing, as I’m constantly tweaking it. However, this upcoming performance has 90% new material. And that’s a little daunting because I don’t have muscle memory with it yet. It’s also getting to be towards the end of the piece -so trying to catch the audience up briefly with transitional language is always a challenge.

Even though I have probably written about 90 minutes of material, I want to cut it down to about 55 minutes so it’s eligible for fringe festivals, and when I say fringe festivals, I just mean the San Franciso Fringe Festival because this is a Bay Area story and I don’t know if anyone outside our borders will get it.

The fantasy though, if I dream big enough, is for it to be a television series because 55 minutes is just not enough. There are chapters and chapters of Bay Area history brewing in my brain. But will anyone care? So many television shows take place in New York City. Mine would take place in San Francisco and the East Bay. A girl can dream, can’t she?

My second cousin asked me what the topic of my show was, and I recognize that saying “it’s about me rediscovering my SF Bay Area roots as a fourth-generation native“, isn’t enough. It’s not catchy, it’s not a pitch, and it’s certainly not an angle. I don’t know how to sell it or even describe it half the time. And I loathe self-promotion on social media. The cranky Gen-Xer in me rears her ugly head.

So why am I writing it? Because one day in 2020, during the shelter in place mandate, I found a photo album my father had given me years ago that included letters written from my Great Grandma Katie about growing up in the Bay Area during the turn of the century and she used words and phrases like “horse-driven-streetcar” and “1906 earthquake” and I was whisked away.

So come to my show on August 18th in Berkeley and travel back in time with me.

Bay Area Ancestors:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

It’s All Relative

Something that surprises me when I am on Ancestry.com is how other users don’t get back to me when I message them. I find that we have a mutual ancestor, they’ve made their family tree public, yet when I contact them, they don’t respond. Except for this one fourth cousin in Ireland who reached out to me first. I was totally happy to confirm some information about my Great Great Grandma Honora, who passed away when my Great Grandmother was only 2 years old. I have my letters and my research and am willing to help anyone who has questions– but other people aren’t as enthusiastic. There’s even one guy in San Francisco (so close by) who has uploaded a lot of the same census records and newspaper articles that I have – I mean, we are clearly related, and yet he doesn’t get back to me. I thought people got on these sites because they wanted to find out more about where they came from. Am I wrong?

I have pages and pages of these DNA matches

It really does trip me out when I realize I share DNA with all these strangers. This means I have partial relatives just walking around, and I wouldn’t know we were related if I met them on the street. Which reminds me of this episode of 30 Rock:

She’s on a date with this guy and she notices he has a picture in a frame of her Great Aunt. And he says…

Which begs the question- how many people have pictures, let alone, even know, who their grandmother’s cousins are? I only know those names now, because I have been doing research, but I don’t think I ever met them when they were alive. Or if I did, I was too young to care or keep track. But that’s beside the point, and it makes me wonder. Have I ever been on a date with a relative and I didn’t even know it?

Friday, January 10, 2025

• 

• 

• 

•