Garden Party

I got up early this morning to prepare for tonight, and when I say prepare, what I mean is "watch Session 9 and see if it's as scary as the trailer makes it appear". Which it wasn't, although that only took me 90 minutes to discover.

It's a psychological thriller/horror that gives the game away very early on, although if you read the Wikipedia page the plot suggested there seems to take a stupidly unambiguous and yet unambiguously stupid interpretation of a fairly ambiguous film. It does have its moments, but it drags quite a bit near the end and seems to throw away a lot of its potential. On the other hand, it's quite amusing that in a film where the four main characters are busy trying to reach an impossible deadline, they hardly do any work. All their time is taken up with eating lunch, or buying lunch, or buying pot to smoke, or smoking. It's a wonder any asbestos ever gets removed.

Anyway, having watched that, I got in a mad panic and rushed off to Sha Tin, where the world and his dog were milling around outside the railway station for no apparent reason apart from because they could, and from there to Fanling to record a greeting for a friend's wedding.

(They're having the wedding in the Bahamas, which is monumentally inconvenient if you're in Hong Kong, but via the wonders of technology we can record ourselves drinking and yelling encouragement for their nuptials. At this point it must be said that my new Canon is a wonderful, wonderful tool for video, and possibly quite ridiculously over the top for the task it's employed for. But more on that another day.)

After this, we rushed back to Central and I went to prepare for the charity wine-tasting I was MC'ing. This was in a terrible venue for comedy, although a quite pleasant one for a wine-tasting: a garden is never good for comedy because the noise from the audience just floats away into the sky, but it was a lovely triangular space, decorated with silent auction prizes and lots of lights.

Not that I had to do much comedy, really: my main role was to give away prizes and encourage more bidding, and then get out of the way while a jazz band played. I started nervously, but hit my stride by the middle of the evening. We had about sixty prizes to raffle off, and a suspiciously large number of them turned out to be electric fans, or baskets of miscellaneous kitchen goods.

I was a bit worried that taking the mickey out of the prizes would offend, but people seemed to like my over-the-top glee and excitement as I brought forth each new electric fan. When a winner had failed to turn up and I suggested somebody else should have their prize, I even had an excited woman rush forward to say she'd collect it for him.

Learnings from this:

A spotlight would have been nice: as it was, me and Amy, the teacher from the school who was helping me with my duties, looked like just a random couple standing on some steps.

Both of us having microphones, and no place to rest the bucket full of raffle tickets, made it a bit clumsy. By the end we'd got round this by having somebody else hold the bucket, but that could have been clearer.

Amy would wait until I announced the prize, then delve into the bucket. Since we had so many, she probably should have started picking while I began my verbiage.

But these were small issues: just things to remember if I get invited back next year. All in all it was a lot of fun, even if I didn't get more than one glass of wine to drink, and I was exhausted from all that standing up, and I didn't win a single electric fan, after presenting at least ten to various lucky winners. Maybe next time, eh?

It also showed that for a gig like this, material is fairly irrelevant: nobody will be listening for clever wordplay, so you may as well just get up there and be cheerful for ten minutes and make sure everyone is happy. Certainly nobody came to punch me, and I didn't catch on fire or fall off the stairs, and at no point did my fiancee deny all knowledge of my existence. Job well done, I think.