Highs and Lows

The Private Show ...great stage....lousy audience (they arrived later).
Santa and the kids.

Santa at the Chico Christmas Craft Faire.

Blistery, foggy start of the day at the Chico event...it stayed this way all day Sunday...and people actually came and watched our show.

It's amazing how the same show performed identically a thousand times to a thousand audiences gets different reactions. The only real variable in our show is the audience. A great audience can make the show seem more incredible than ever. A bad audience can make it seem a lot less good than it really is. By bad audience I am referring to a group of people who are not in the mood, too busy with their obnoxious kids, obnoxious kids, a couple of people too busy visiting with each other and their talking disrupts others, bad weather causing discomfort, a bad smell or distracting sounds disrupting people, a drunk or a heckler trying to be disruptive, etc etc etc.

Last week in spite of very cold weather small crowds formed to watch our show at the Chico Christmas Faire....parent and kids alike were courteous and kind. Kids obeyed their parents.

Contrast that with tonight. We performed a private event for a large company that has it's own showroom. The setting was awesome. And we thought the crowd would be similar to last year when we had a great audience. Turns out the crowd was twice as large as last year and they brought more kids this year. (It was a company family party). These kids had to be the worst behaved kids outside of Minnesota. They were filthy, noisy (in a bad way), disruptive, they blocked people's views by standing on chairs, they grabbed, ugh!

Then there was the loud noises from the bounce house blowers. The folks in the back visiting with each other and a couple of smaller problems with their sound system and we had the making for a lousy show. I mean we performed our show spot on the same way we always do. the same show that gets us booked over and over again by clients. The show that take us around the country and sometimes abroad.

Highs and lows.

Still I am thankful for the booking and thankful for the kind people who did enjoy the program and the invite back next year (I guess it wasn't as bad as I thought...but my standards are very high). And I suppose this experience helps me to appreciate the good audiences we have been time and again blessed with.