Female Half seeks advice

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on March 18th, 2010

You may have noticed that we haven’t been posting a lot lately. We’ve been busy. Very busy.

And the Female Half has been dealing with an injury. Initially, when she slipped on the ice, she was told she had an “elbow effusion.” Now, it turns out, 5-1/2 weeks later, to be a fracture. (An appointment with the orthopedics folks tomorrow will reveal just how severe and just what measures will be taken to correct it.)

Like we said– we’ve been busy.

And both Halves of the Staff are headed up to NYC on Monday. We’ve been invited to audition for Last Comic Standing. Over the past six seasons of that NBC show, we’ve said some harsh things about it. We never said though, that we wouldn’t audition if given the chance. (In fact, two years ago, The Male Half was practically tricked into auditioning for LCS during a “secret taping” in Atlanta with then-host Bill Bellamy in the house.)

Throughout all of our coverage– harsh or not– we’ve always tried to be fair and we always stressed that we sincerely wished that the show could be… better. (And we believed that it could be.) Well… it seems that folks are making an effort to make it better.

Word on the street is that this year the show will be different from past years. Different how? One thing we hear repeatedly is that it will be more “comic-friendly.” That’s the phrase that keeps popping up. Hmmm…

The Female Half is mildly wigged. For weeks now, she’s been relatively calm and surprisingly unwigged by the prospect of performing in a largely empty room for “a maximum of” two minutes in front of a jury of her peers. (In this case, it will be Greg Giraldo, Andy Kindler and Natasha Legerro.) But as the date approached– and her crooked, throbbing arm didn’t revert back to its old self– she has grown anxious.

But in that time, she has gone up onstage repeatedly and killed– wearing a sling… and doing about 90 seconds of material that references the elephant in the room. She’s made no attempt to hide it. She’s embraced it. To great effect.

But an audition for a network television show is certainly different.

What does one do with an arm that won’t straighten out? Do you go up there and pretend like nothing’s wrong? Do you audition in a sling? Do you wrap it, straighten it out as best you can and try to audition while ignoring the excruciating pain? Should one try to play it like there’s nothing wrong– in essence, hide it– will the brain be too concerned over the ruse? Will it be too preoccupied with the lie? Will this affect her performance adversely? Should she acknowledge it and do material about it? We’re only talking two minutes here. There’s already a crazy amount of things to consider when one goes up amid a low-key, highly-charged, high-stakes circus like the one that surrounds such try-outs.

So many questions.

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