Thirty Shows of Being Bad at the Microphone

My partner at the time took off to do his own thing. He didn't like combining circus style anything with what we were doing. He was the emcee for all of our shows. The team was like, Joseph, what are you going to do about this? And I'm like, who else could jump on the mic?

So I picked up the microphone and I sucked. I sucked bad for like 30 shows, out of 110 shows the following summer.

I still had the nervousness and the butterflies before I would go on stage and pick up a mic. I'd say things and people wouldn't respond to it, or I'd make a joke and it just was flat. I'd think, okay, I'm not going to say that ever again.

It took 30 shows for me to get comfortable. After that I kind of had it down.

I need to be able to relax and be comfortable. I need to make sure I'm not eating the mic, but I need to be able to hear me clearly. Or the mic's too hot and I freak myself out.

We'd come in and I'd be setting up the speakers and the mic and the show, coordinating with the client and the performers, and sometimes I wouldn't even have time to sit down and take a breath before it was time to go. I realized pretty quickly that if I could take a little time and say, hey everybody, leave me alone, I need some me time before we kick this thing off, I would do a lot better. I wouldn't be so scattered.

Half the time I was trying to record them, because I could never remember what I said when I got off the stage. Full-on blanking. Sometimes I'm just rattling in circles.

At the time I think it was the pure necessity of the company. I would go to other shows and see them not open up the show. They would just start dancing, and nobody is controlling the flow of the show, and there's dead space and audience members looking around at each other.

I realized that as a public figure, as somebody who is a leader in the industry and as somebody who is picking up the microphone, we have a very big responsibility for what we're going to do with it. The emcee who is picking up the microphone really controls the tone of the whole evening. It sets the vibe.

With all my practice of sucking badly, I had to start to really focus on what is the impact that I want to have, and then plan backwards from there.

I haven't had stage fright performing for a long time. But picking up a microphone and speaking to people is way different than performing something on a stage.