When the worst happens

This past weekend at Sherwood Forest Renascence Festival was absolutely great, except for one small thing.

For those of you who don't know, I'm performing out at Sherwood, three show a day. Everything always goes very smoothly, until yesterday.

For my second show of the day I'm on after the Bedlam Bards, a wonderful set of troubadours who do some incredible performances. Well yesterday, they had a huge crowd, the biggest crowd that they've had all year. People are singing along and having an grand ol' time, so I decide to sit and talk with some friends while I wait.

Well as soon as the Bards are done, their crowd scatters, and as I walk up to the stage there is no one in sight. Not a problem, I think. I've built up crowds from nothing. Well I start hawking and calling to people but there's just one problem: there aren't any people. Anywhere. At all.

So after about ten minutes of hawking I have one person waiting for the show. So I start and do my routine (luckily some of the kids from one of the shops happened by for the participation part) and halfway through my cups routine, she leaves. Let me say that again: she leaves.

As she leaves, another person sits down. So now I have done half a routine for one person and am about to do half a routine for another. So what do you do?

The simple solution is to finish out the set, smile, and walk away, which I did. I didn't hat him, I didn't perform the bill to lemon I normally do, I simply finished the cups routine, thanked him for watching, and left.

Why not hat him? Well, first he wasn't there for the first part of the show. Normally this isn't a big deal, but because there was no audience, he was the only one there for a minute of magic. Secondly, and this is the most important: my show is based on audience participation, so without it, there isn't much of a show. So I feel it's tacky to ask someone for a tip based on a show I know was crap.

The best thing to do when something like this happens is to just bounce back. Make the next show bigger and better, put all of your energy into it and see what happens. For me, my next show was fantastic.

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