What Would Beyoncé Do?! Page 14
Rules when meeting your ex:
You have to look better than him.
Hide the fact that you may have grown a tache
No crying. If you feel the need to cry, stay away from the cocktail menu. Nothing turns an ex-boyfriend off more than your tear-stained, cosmo-dribbling face.
Keep it short, plan a time, and stick to it. None of this ‘ah we spoke for hours’ bullshit. Make it an hour max and leave politely. If you really both want to, you can arrange to meet up another time.
For the love of God, don’t fake a new boyfriend. He knows, babe. He’s also seen your Twitter, don’t you worry.
To be honest, I was exhausted by the whole relationship with Klaus; I didn’t really care what I looked like. I dressed casually and did my make-up nice and I met him in a café; it was the same but different. He didn’t have the same warmth towards me. Even though he was there in the flesh. Here is the man I had been crying over for months. Here he is.
I don’t get it, he’s in front of me and I am OK. I started to think maybe Klaus wasn’t the problem, maybe Klaus was never the problem, maybe it’s what Klaus represented. I stayed for about half an hour. I told him about my comedy club for kids, Musical Bingo and the gigs; I didn’t mention Christmas or the antidepressants. When I left, I went to hug him but he reached out his hand for me to shake, so we ended up doing this weird fist bump exchange to say goodbye. There was no synchronicity left.
I called Katerina immediately afterwards. If only I had recorded the meeting with Klaus (I hate it when you forget to record your conversations with an ex) (I have never recorded a conversation in my life). Like you want to explain verbatim what happened but you keep forgetting the details so you just do a general low-down. Problem with that is then you spend the rest of the day calling back every few hours with updates as you remember. ‘Hi, me again, I forgot to mention, when he ordered a latte and I ordered a cappuccino, I asked the girl to stir in two sugars first, and he kinda smiled, what do you think that means? Do you think it’s because he knew that’s how I have my cappuccino? So like he remembers that? Do you think he’s missed me ordering cappuccino? Do you think that’s why he smiled? Because he misses me? Well he can’t be that happy if he’s missing me. I hope he misses me, I must have meant something to him. Or do you think it was a “My new girlfriend doesn’t order coffee, she only drinks only juices, oh yay, thank God I am with my juicy girlfriend” smile? OK, great chat, thanks, bye.’
That night, on my fifth phone call, Katerina said, ‘Luisa, I have noticed something, and I wanna ask you, now brace yourself, listen carefully, you know when you saw him, did you cry?’
‘No.’
She laughed so hard,
‘Er, what’s so funny?’
‘Those drugs are goooooooood!!!’
16.
GETTING IN FORMATION
If you are not feeling good, please go and seek the help that is out there, because there is help and you deserve to feel better in your own mind, body and skin. Happiness is a baseline we should be setting our lives from. It’s not a privilege, it’s not something that is found in the right job, clothes, partner. It is an inner knowing, an inner strength and peace that comes from understanding the relationship we have with ourselves. It is so valuable and worth investing in.
You would not think twice about going to the gym and spending £30–75 a month on gym membership. If you had a constant tummy ache you would go to the doctor. Mental health is the same. I want to see that same kind of value and investment in our mental health because it is just as important.
My mental health was tiring, it was making me feel physically tired and vice versa. I was learning how easily my physical health affected my mental. I was run down and exhausted with emotional stress. I needed to put my mental health first and stop dismissing it as something that was not a priority.
The antidepressants were helping me. The gigs were also helpful, really helpful, and talking about Klaus made it feel easier. People were laughing, really laughing.
Stand-up gave me something to focus on that was good for me. I was beginning to think about the next Edinburgh Festival. I had done kids’ shows, two-handers, improv shows; the next obvious challenge was to do a solo show. My debut solo show. But was I capable of doing that for an hour? Who would want to listen to me for an hour? What would I have to say that’s funny for an hour?
I started preparing my solo show. I wrote to several agents but didn’t get a response from any. Some comedians will tell you that in order to do well in Edinburgh, you need a good agent, a good PR and a good venue. At the time, I believed this to be true. I didn’t have £12k to pay for a venue, so my only option was to stick with the free fringe.
So how would Beyoncé approach a free debut show? I have to work like Beyoncé. What would Beyoncé do? If I did have a big agent and a PR, what would they do for me? That was it! I decided to work on the premise that I was my own agent and PR; whatever I imagined they would do, I had to do for myself.
First I needed a title. That was important, as I needed to attract an audience who wouldn’t know me from Adam, so a title is the first step. Lots of comics use their name in the title, usually within a pun, which I think is useless. No one cares about a pun on your name apart from you. Unless you are famous, or your show is all puns, in which case knock yourself out.
I needed a title that would get people in and tell them who I am. No one is going to come to the ‘Luisa Omielan’ show, nobody knows who I am. Plus Omielan is really hard to say. Christina Aquillera never had this problem. Yes I intentionally spelt ‘Aguilera’ wrong just to prove my point. Guys, it’s my book. Although I don’t know why people struggle with Luisa, hello there is no ‘O’ in Luisa. Beyoncé doesn’t have this problem.
I love Beyoncé. I have always loved Beyoncé especially from her DC days. I had motivational Post-it notes on my wall, one of them said ‘You have the same amount of hours in a day as Whoopi G and Beyoncé.’
It’s obvious, call it ‘What Would Beyoncé Do?!’ And it needs the question mark followed by the exclamation mark because it’s a question and a statement. AMAZING!
No brainer. ‘What Would Beyoncé Do?!’ Yay, this meant that I could make it feel more like a Musical Bingo gig. So whenever I got bored of my own jokes, I could play a Beyoncé song, perfect, my kind of show. And it means that it immediately attracts the right kinda audience, because if you like Beyoncé, you are gonna like me, and if you don’t like Beyoncé, well then I’m probably not going to like you either. Perfect!
Now I needed previews. Previews are show rehearsals in front of an audience. You can go see someone like Michael McIntyre, for example, do a preview and it’s basically a chance to workshop new jokes and material. I wrote to all the comedy clubs, all the bookers I knew to see if I could put on a preview of my show. This is where having an agent would help as they could book you lots of previews.
Now most comedians do anything between three and ten previews before they take their show to Edinburgh, and then often they continue to workshop the show throughout the festival. I did not want to be one of those people. I wanted to go to Edinburgh with the show as strong on day 1 as it would be on day 26. I wasn’t in a position to be lazy or to wing it. I needed to make an impact from day 1.
I tried booking previews with the clubs – the Stand, the Comedy Café, the 99 Club, the Comedy Pub, the Boat Show – but none of the big clubs would give me a spot. Very few gave me the chance to 20 minutes, let alone a whole hour. I got a few ten-minute slots at clubs, but people didn’t take me seriously enough and without an agent it was difficult. So when it came to booking previews, I had to get creative.
Eventually a guy called Mark who runs the Top Secret Comedy Club in central London offered something. He ran his club from 8 to 11 p.m. and suggested that if I wanted to, I could do a spot before or after the main show – at 6 or 11.30 p.m. Afterwards was out of the question as I would have no way of getting back to Farnborough, so 6 p.m. it was. F
rom then on, every Tuesday at 4 p.m. I would be in Covent Garden flyering office workers, trying to get them to come in and see my work-in-progress show. I couldn’t afford proper flyers so I just printed it out on A4 on the HP all-in-one printer at my mum’s (I knew it would come in handy sleeping on that photocopier). I got four on one piece of paper and chopped it up.
I wrote all the jokes I had ever told out on Post-it notes and put them in front of me. Somewhere in amongst all these notes was my solo show.
My first couple of previews I played to approximately four people. Nevertheless I persevered and was there every Tuesday like clockwork, and my title really helped. It was a free show and people could watch it after work and before meeting their friends for a drink. By my last preview I had 100 people.
For the rest of the week I decided to go outside of London. I went to the Brighton Fringe Festival and performed the show ten times. The audience loved it, especially girls and the gays. This was fast becoming my USP when I was flyering: What Would Beyoncé Do?! A stand-up comedy show for girls and the gays! I wanted to perform in different cities and not just play to a London audience, so I started getting in touch with gay bars around the country. It worked; I ended up booking previews in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle and Birmingham. I would arrive early and flyer outside, the bar would make money from audiences buying drinks and I would perform my show for free in their function room. I’d record the whole thing on my cheap little Canon camera and make notes on the train home.
I bought a radio alarm that had an iPhone dock and a little remote control and used it as my speaker; I would plug it in near the stage, dock the iPhone and then use the remote to play the music. Plus I could keep an eye on the time; at the moment the show was running to 40 minutes, it needed to be 55.
Initially the format of my show went as follows. Pick up a Post-it note, tell the joke, and if I got stuck, put my iPhone on shuffle and see which Destiny’s Child song played next. For example, I would talk about getting dumped and then press play on the remote and ‘Girl’ would come on. That was it. It was an ambitious and unique way of working and it wasn’t until ‘Bootylicious’ came on during my suicide section that I thought perhaps my format needed reviewing.
It wasn’t until after about ten or so previews that my friend Suzi suggested the obvious. She had been picked up by a massive agent and had a director helping her with her show, so she would often give me tips from what they discussed.
‘Why don’t you structure the show into sections? For example put all your bits about body image together, then put all your jokes about love in another section . . . Then when you have your sections, you can match the songs to them.’
Genius! Why didn’t I think of that? Well the answer is pretty obvious: I don’t have an agent and I can’t afford a director. Lucky for me I have friends that can. As I started to put my Post-it notes in order of theme, I genuinely believed my show was meant to be, because as soon as I wrote down all the sections, the rest took care of itself . . .
Falling in love jokes CRAZY IN LOVE
Body image jokes BOOTYLICIOUS
Being unemployed jokes INDEPENDENT WOMEN
Being depressed jokes HAPPY FACE
Getting dumped jokes SINGLE LADIES
It was as if Beyoncé had written the lyrics knowing that I wanted to make a stand-up show about them. It was effortless, like it was meant to be. Beyoncé is my spirit animal. This was genius, plus it made so much more sense than hitting shuffle.
I took the show up to Sheffield and got there early to check in to the Travelodge and walk up the high street. I needed a new look as I hated the short bob; so I walked into a salon and got my hair permed. I had always wanted one, and if not now then when? I’d only heard horrible things about perms, but as luck would have it, it totally suited me. It was gorgeous and perfect, Whitney Houston 1980 eat your heart out.
I walked past a charity shop in Sheffield where they had a clothing rail outside and something glittery caught my eye. Among the items of clothing was this really loose, glittery gold shirt. It was like a size 16 old granny’s shirt but it was pure gold glitter, and I loved it. It cost £6. I thought, this is very Beyoncé and bought it then and there. Half in jest and half because it made me happy to look at it.
As I headed back to the Travelodge, I ended up in this fancy expensive clothes shop, where all the dresses were like £40, so I started looking on the sales rails and found these black and white woolly ski trousers. They were high-waisted, thick, warm and just ridiculous. I rushed to try them on and they just fit like a glove. Something about them made me really happy; they were fun trousers. And I loved them. At that moment in the changing room, I had a brainwave. I grabbed the charity shop glitter top, tied it around my midriff to accentuate my boobs and teamed it with the woolly trousers. I don’t know how and I don’t know why but to this day, it is one of my favourite outfits of all time; it just worked.
Here in the middle of Sheffield, wearing something that really shouldn’t go but totally did, I had found my show outfit. A perm, woolly trousers and a second-hand granny shirt. For some people, this is just another day in the life of a middle-aged Yorkshire woman. For me, this is my Beyoncé alter ego. Hello Luisa Fierce. Perfect. (See the front cover of the book.)
Things were just falling into place. It felt like it was meant to be. I was loving the journey I was on; it felt like the universe was rewarding me at every step and saying, ‘Yes, keep going, do more of this.’ I liked that.
A few years ago in Edinburgh I had seen a kid graffiti-ing one of the main strips in the city centre. It looked amazing. To try and get official posters up in the city cost a fortune, a couple of grand at least, so I’d paid this kid a fiver and asked him to graffiti the title and time of my two-hander show. The graffiti lasted about a week and was great cheap advertising. At the time, I took a picture of myself posing next to the graffiti with a can, pretending it was me that had done it. The picture got a lot of likes and lots of comics commented on how cool it was.
I had always remembered that picture. I loved the image and wanted to recreate something similar for my solo show artwork. I googled a few graffiti places and called around, eventually getting in touch with a lad who had seen me at Musical Bingo. He met me at the South Bank in London with his cans and even brought a camera with him. He spraypainted the wall with ‘What Would Beyoncé Do?!’ Then I put on my show costume – woolly trousers and gold top – and sat underneath the title with a can. He took the shot. Bingo. The first shot we took we nailed it. This was the poster image. Bright, colourful attitude, and Beyoncé would be proud. I paid him £75 and got excited about ordering my new posters.
I sent out press releases with my new image and tried to get journalists to come and see the work in progress; often newspapers would run features on shows to look out for in Edinburgh. But again I didn’t get a response.
I emailed agents but heard nothing. I emailed PR companies saying I had this show called ‘What Would Beyoncé Do?!’ that I thought was really going to do well in Edinburgh and would be an easy sell with that title. I emailed one PR 13 times. What can I say? I was very persistent. I wasn’t disheartened, as my audiences were loving it. And what’s that expression? Beyoncé wasn’t built in a day? No, not that one . . . To Bey or not to Bey? No, not that one either . . . Build it and they will come. That’s the one.
I kept previewing and previewing and previewing. I even found a place for my cow impressions, which surprisingly worked and helped give the show light relief after my sad Christmas story. I liked that the show was developing moments where I could make people cry and then laugh immediately afterwards. I loved creating this emotional rollercoaster. It’s good to cleanse the audience’s palate.
Now in the early days, I would finish my show by crying on the floor to Adele, and then I would say, ‘Guys, I know we love Beyoncé, but my true hero is Cher.’ I would then disappear behind a curtain and pretend to get Cher. She was never there. But the aud
ience didn’t know that. I did, because I would be devastated every time. Hoping she would miraculously appear. I saw her do it at a concert once. ‘Follow This Bitches’ then she disappeared behind a curtain. It was epic and worked really well. But that curtain wasn’t upstairs in the Caroline of Brunswick. So instead the conversation behind that curtain went like this:
Me: Hello Cher! Cher? Cher, are you there?
Me: Oh hi Luisa, it’s me, Cher.
Me: Hi Cher, the audience are desperate for you to come out and sing your classic hit.
Me: ‘Turn Back Time’?
Me: Not that one.
Me: ‘Heart of Stone’?
Me: Not that one either, Cher.
Me: ‘Main Man’?
Me: That’s on the B-side, Cher, only your true fans know that song. *Pumps fist out from behind the curtain in celebration of being a true Cher fan*
Me: OK Luisa, what song do they want?
Me: They want your smash hit . . .
At this point, I would come out and ask the audience what they wanted a song about; it had to be something everyday, like a spatula or a flannel or buying milk or having a wash. They would shout out random suggestions and I would quickly pick one then head back behind the curtain to carry on the illusion and prep the best-selling female of all time.
Me: OK Luisa, I guess I will come out and sing my hit single for you, ‘Why Don’t You Have a Bath?!’
I would then improvise a song whilst doing a Cher impression and make up lyrics to ‘Why Don’t You Have a Bath’. I thought this was genius and most importantly, it made me laugh. Unfortunately it was only ever me laughing. Well, me and Cher.
By the way, Cher, if you are reading this, I love you and have many rivers to cross, you give me such emotional fire, and I would make love on a rooftop for you. Hopefully this proves I am a true fan and you and I both know that I should have called my show ‘What Would Cher Do?!’ But someone told me if I did that I would only be playing to middle-aged gay men. Hey, I love the pink pound but I just can’t pull off a leotard or straddle a cannon.