Acknowledgments by Becky Lucas

Author:Becky Lucas [Lucas, Becky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2021-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

The worst gigs of my life: part two

Some years after the Mexican food franchise fiasco, my manager asked me if I wanted to do a couple of regional gigs over the course of a week or so, starting in Longreach, Queensland, for an initiative being run by the local council. I said yes, because the money was good and, like all things I say yes to that I end up regretting, I reasoned that it couldn’t possibly be that bad.

The gigs were a comedy competition, which was supposed to be a way of getting the community involved in the performing arts. The way it worked was that each night we’d travel to different towns where anyone could get up and do five minutes of stand-up comedy, then Luke Heggie, another comedian friend, and I would decide who was best on the night and they’d be invited to compete in the grand final. After the competition bit of the night, Luke and I were then required to perform twenty minutes of our own acts. Though I was nervous about performing for a mainly older, conservative crowd who’d grown up on cattle country for the majority of their lives, I thought it could be a good chance to get away. It was only when I was handed a box of Vegemite, which was to be the prize for the winner, that I realised what I might be in for.

When we arrived in Longreach, we were picked up by a disgruntled council worker called Kevin, who, upon meeting us, started bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t get any comedians ‘from the television’ so he ended up having to book us. In complete silence, he drove us to the place where we would be performing on the first night, already angry at us for being, in his mind, not up to the task. The venue was essentially a large shed masquerading as an RSL, but really it just seemed like a place where people could bash each other undercover if the rums didn’t sit well with them.

There was a woman in thongs who managed the bar. She could have been anywhere between twenty or ninety-eight years old – with her diet of beef and Winfield Blues, it was pretty hard to tell. She showed us the performance area they’d set up for us, which was complete with a tinny microphone that didn’t so much amplify our voices as warp them so we sounded as nasal as the locals did.

The only entrant on the first night of the competition was a woman called Big Jules, who for some reason lunged at me as soon as we walked into the building, then apologised immediately. She then began lurching around and bobbing her head up and down, while screaming at her beer. Then she stopped, looked at the bar fridge and called it a cunt.

Everyone seemed to know her and, as most small communities do, they’d accepted her as one of their own and treated her with

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