The shows have been going very well at the MGM. We now have our seating capacity at exactly 666, so all is well with the world. It just seems right. We've been sold out every night and a couple nights we had no comps. All our friends are sick of us. My ankle is doing better, and that makes the shows really fun for me to do.

I've been a little bugnutty lately. I've been, how shall we say, loose on stage. So, last night for "Polyester," I asked for a kid. A kid in the back raised her hand. She said she was 11, I told her to run down to the stage. She arrived and she had one of those foam braces on her neck. Well, I know how Polly ends and that didn't seem good. It seemed it would hurt the trick. I started to say we couldn't use her with the neck brace and she said she could take it off. I did a faith healing joke and then took some time to think about it on stage. Teller and I had a little talk. Teller was a bit up in the air, but seemed to think we should lose her and get another kid (we were lousy with them). I asked her parent or legal guardian if she'd be okay with the brace off and the woman said she just had a little muscle problem and she'd be fine. I did a whole thing on how I knew what the end of the bit was and it was going to just die if we did it with this kid. I was having a lot of fun talking to the audience about how the audience would react. I was just having fun. I went on much longer than I needed to (what's new?) and I laughed a lot. I talked about getting sued and how Teller was as to blame as I was, but I wanted to find out how the audience would react to the ending. I wanted to see how it would play. I was really interested in the idea of ruining the "experiment" by talking to the audience about how the audience would react. Teller was also playing it perfectly. We were doing that talking together thing on stage that I really like when we do. Teller was talking, but not miked and it was just perfect.She pulled the brace off and we got to it. I kept referring to the neck as we went through the bit. She was a cute, really smart little kid. She seemed to know the gag and she was with us on it. Now, I didn't really know what was going to happen, but I knew it couldn't be much. The kid was going to be okay, and I knew that I'd messed up the audience reaction to the point that we wouldn't know what was happening. When we got to the moment and wrapped the cloth around her neck, it was pretty great. The audience knew what we had been talking about and it all came together for them. When it was time for the trick, we were worried enough that we were a little timid and we hurt the trick a bit, but not too much and it did give the show a great vibe. It was something that was obviously just that night. The reacted and listened to themselves react and, I guess if you hadn't heard me set it up, it was probably not that different, but they had all heard me. I was happy with the way we played it and we did call backs the rest of the show. "The MGM is a big corporation that wouldn't allow a big nut to take a neck brace off a child and wrap cloth around her neck."

There's no punchline to this story, I mean, we didn't end up killing her. We autographed the neckbrace after the show and that was about it. But, it was one of those fun live things.

Penn

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