Every person's life is an unfolding narrative, with its own cliffhangers and unexpected revelations. We've decided to prove that point by asking everyday people to let us write about their lives. Two weeks ago, women's basketball coach Maggie Lonergan said goodbye to Magazine readers and her team at Catholic University after learning that she and her husband would be moving to Vermont. This week, we meet Greg Estrada, an office manager trying to establish himself as a force in stand-up comedy.
Episode 1
Before dawn, Greg Estrada unlocks the patio shed and rummages through his tools of laughter. He shoves aside a microphone stand and heaves onto his shoulder a sandwich board that reads, "Live Stand-Up Comedy Show Tonight."
Nerves trembling, Greg read from a clipborad of scripted jokes. Most of them terrible.
(D.A. Peterson)
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Three times a week, he wakes up before 5 a.m. and, after driving through the darkness, puts his sandwich board outside one of the venues where he produces amateur comedy shows. On this morning, he slides the sign into his beat-up Nissan pickup parked outside his condo in Chevy Chase, Md. His hair is disheveled, his shirt rumpled and untucked. He's heading for Dr. Dremo's Taphouse in Arlington, and he mocks himself for being awake at this hour. "It's miserable," he says with a cheeky grin. It'd be really miserable, though, if no one came to the show tonight. That's why he puts the sign out so early, so passersby will see it all day long.
Three years ago, at 38, Greg says, he had a midlife crisis. Being an office manager at Professional Carpet Service, the family business his parents founded in 1960 whose main customer is the federal government, wasn't enough. He has worked there on and off since he was a teenager. And, while he feels no special love for carpeting federal office buildings, the responsibility has fallen to him because none of his four siblings has taken an interest in the business.
One day he had a stunning realization. "I'll be dead soon," Greg remembers telling himself. Not that he was sick or anything. He just wanted more from life than carpets could offer: "I've got to make my mark on the world. I've got to do that thing I've always wanted." And that thing was stand-up comedy.
Though he'd longed to do stand-up since he was in high school, Greg had never summoned the courage to perform in front of an audience. As a kid, he suffered from what he calls "horrendous, disfiguring acne." After the acne cleared up, he faced deep scars that affected more than his appearance. For 20 years, social situations crippled him with anxiety, he says. Telling jokes to a crowd was unthinkable. But in his late thirties, Greg underwent numerous plastic surgeries, radically transforming his appearance.
Soon he started frequenting a comedy club in McLean, where he found the guts to take the stage during an open mike under the pseudonym Curt Shackelford. Nerves trembling, he read from a clipboard of scripted jokes. Most of them were terrible.
"Growing up, we were so poor my mom had to use her own urine as a facial astringent," he told the audience. "I swear to God, her own urine. But now that we're rich, she can afford to use other people's." Greg now cringes at the joke and remembers how badly it bombed. "I got this one . . . drunk girl in the back who screamed out, 'That's disgusting.'"
He had always considered himself a funny person, but "I realized that being funny at a party or being funny on a date has nothing to do with being funny on stage."
Week after week, Greg returned to the club, always introducing himself as Curt Shackelford. After a while, he says, he actually started making audiences laugh. Yet there was always competition for scarce stage time. Often, other comics beat Greg to the sign-up sheet, and he had to wait another week before standing in the spotlight. The only way to guarantee himself stage time, he says, was to start producing comedy shows of his own.
Now Greg is bent over, wrapping a chain around a telephone pole and leashing it to the sandwich board. He looks up Clarendon Boulevard, outside Dr. Dremo's, and imagines how his sign will lure passing motorists back for tonight's show. He can only imagine, because it is still so early that there's not even a whiff of traffic. "Welcome to the dark underbelly of show business," he says. Is that a joke? A complaint? Depends on who's speaking, the comic or the carpet guy.
-- Tyler Currie
