#also apparently my queue is empty oops

[jediiwrites]

I’ve added another grad school to my list of grad schools I’m applying to.

[noodlenutter]

i met my childhood idol TWICE this weekend and i dont think im gonna be the same ever again

super longwinded and probably kinda cringey/obsessivly detailed post under the cut

ok so when i was 11 there was a show on cbbc called mission 2110 and the main character, caleb, was this cyborg dude w a robot arm and headset and he was fighting against evil robots who’d taken over the world, and most importantly, he was played by stuart goldsmith. 

i saw a sign around uni for a comedy show at the basement, york, by (you guessed it) stuart goldsmith. so of course i had to go, if only to make childhood-me happy

i turned up alone and Very early. i waited outside the venue for a while and saw stu leave and go for a walk around york but I wasn’t 100% sure it was him so i didnt approach him then

when we finally got in i sat on the front row between a group of elderly people and a drunk hen party - as soon as stuart got on stage, he started his introducing himself/the show, talking about the venue and warming up the crowd spiel, but instantly froze when he saw the hen party (he was surprised that they were there and kept sort of forgetting his train of thought and going back to the fact the entire front row was a hen party, cos they’re not his usual audience)

he started the gig and im not gonna go into huge detail about that in this post cos there’s no way i’d do any of it justice thru words (plus theres gonna be a tour dvd sometime ;) ) but at some points he interacted with the audience (usually the front row) so i’ll mention those 

the first Direct Interaction was when he spat directly onto my shoe while talking. he looked right at me, stopped his joke, and said ‘yes, i know what just happened. i know. it was Entirely Intentional.’ and kept going as if nothing had happened at all (it was fuckin hilarious cos no one else even saw it happen so the crowd was like ?????)

& for the part where he asked about jobs, he asked me and i said i was a student so he firstly asked what i wanted to do after - but straight away asked what i studied. i shrugged as a response to what i want to do after the degree (cos who knows lmao) but he took that as a response for what i study and made some quip about me not even knowing what i study n how that’s just a Typical Student Thing isn’t it?

(apparently when robots take our jobs, psychologists will be replaced by tape recorders on legs)

during the break (NOT an interval) i was talking to the people beside me (not the ones in the hen party) about york and scarborough and floods and bands and everything, they were so nice 

not much happened in the 2nd half of the show (other than the fact i almost CRIED laughing, honestly that dude is SO funny), but he said he was gonna hang around afterwards to sell tshirts and say hi to people, so i decided to ask him about cbbc’s mission 2110 (which was my favourite show ever and also the place i know him from)

so, after he’d told his last joke (one about raisins, which i remembered on the drive home and had to pull over cos i was laughing so hard i thought i was gonna crash the car), he said goodbye and got off stage etc etc, i queue up to say hi. straight away he reaches out to shake my hand & say ‘hi mate, thanks for enjoying the show’, that kinda thing

i asked him about m2110 and his face LIT UP, i thought he was gonna hate me for reminding him of it but he was happy and said that was his dream job, all the robots were played by his street performer friends, and he cant wait for the day that one of the kids from the show turns up to his gig

i asked him for a photo after that and he was like ‘yea, of course!! ill even do the pose!’ and put his hand to his face like caleb from m2110 did (im grinning at the memory while typing this, its such a dumb photo but i look insanely happy and he looks exactly as i remember caleb looking)

i asked how m2110 ended (i never got to see the last ever episode), and he looked like he was going to tell me but when i said i hadn’t seen the last ep he said ‘i’m not gonna tell you then!!’ (cmon mate its been deleted off the internet for like 8 years now :(!! )

all in all i think the first show was just how a typical comedy gig goes, but the 2nd show things got different (in a good way)

i decided to go again when i found out he was going to be in leeds 2 days later, and i took my friend who was disappointed that she’d missed the first show

we got to the front row and had to sit directly in front of him (we were gonna sit a bit further across but other people wanted to sit there first), so when he came up on stage to do his intro he glanced at me, then snapped back to do a double take - ‘are you BACK???’ he asked, pointing at me, ‘you were in york the other day, weren’t you?’

i gave him a thumbs up, high enough for most of the crowd to see, and he grinned, crouched a bit and started talking to me about the york show’s crowd - the fact there was a hen party, how surprised he was about them, and then that the weren’t as rowdy as we both thought they were going to be - after a minute or so, he stood up again and said ‘this is more of a chat than a show, isn’t it?’ & got on with the show.

i honestly can’t stop thinking about the “what’s your name, where you from, where d’you do your howling?” part of the show cos it’s never something i thought of before, but every day since then i’ve screamed in my car to a song and it’s kinda therapeutic (he pointed at me when he asked about howling, he points at a random audience member for each question) (also SOIL) (also also the bit about wanting to do a mic drop but with a microphone made of meringue) 

in the break, the person behind me tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether it was different from york or better/worse than york, and whether i’d been a fan for long, etc etc 

after the break, stu got back on stage and thanked us all for coming back - then asked whether there were any ‘guilty empty seats’ next to anyone. the guy in the seat next to mine didn’t return after the break, so the person next to him and i pointed at the empty chair on the front row (he said something about how he respects that decision cos the guy came alone anyway) 

“shall we mix this part up a bit? could you shuffle these?” he asked, and gave me the flashcards while explaining how this part of the show worked (he workshops jokes from flashcards, they’re in a set order for every other show but he wanted to make it different for leeds, and so gave me the cards to decide the order)

i panicked a bit though cos I was so shocked, so i just shuffled them randomly instead of reading the cards and what they said (oops), and i put an interesting one on top - it just said ‘R’ in a circle and i couldn’t think what joke that would have been so i put it first.

i gave him the cards back and he looked at the top one like ‘uhh, no, i cant do this one first, that’s possibly the best bit of them all it’s gotta go at the end’ (which made me realise it was the raisin joke at the end of the show, so i told him how it really is because I had to pull over on the drive home it made me laugh so much - to which he fist pumped and yelled ‘now THAT’S a review!’)

before moving onto the content on the cards he talked about how he wishes he could go on stage to an audience who’s already ‘warm’ to him so he doesnt have to waste his 2nd best joke so early in the show, so he was planning ideas to get the crowd hyped before he even came out. he sat on the empty chair next to me and talked about how if everyone’s hyped enough then he’ll get a standing ovation etc etc, then stood back up, jumped on stage, and we all stood with him and clapped - ‘yeah, keep going!!! no one sit down! dont do it!’, after a few seconds i was losing my balance but i thought it’d be Funny if someone sat down, and Funny if that someone was me, who everyone knew had been to the show before. so i sat. 

‘NO!! she’s sat down! that’s it i guess, it’s over isnt it, alright then, you can all stop now i suppose’ (tbf i feel slightly bad for it BUT it made it all funnier anyway so it’s chill, i hope)

because i hadn’t looked at the cards every time there was an unexpected one he glanced over to me, ‘is this really what you want? you want this one?’, sighed ‘okay then’ and did the bit. the one about the squirrel (’you really want the fuckin squirrel one???’) kinda flopped cos it built off a previous one in york so he said that at least he’s learnt that it has to be in a certain order to be funny (youre welcome)

after the show when i went to say hi & thank you for letting me control the cards etc (i never actually said that cos i got distracted, ended up talking about how one of my twitter friends & her family is friends with him and his family but he asked who i was talking about and im like ‘uhhh i dont know her name we use nicknames online uhhhhhhh sorry’ lol), when he saw me he lifted his arms and went straight in for a hug (I HUGGED MY CHILDHOOD IDOL) & thanked me for coming back again so soon

i asked if he could sign something for me but all i had was a yellow envelope (’oh! a yenvelope!’) nnd a sharpie wrapped in tissues cos it leaks (’uhhhh lucy, why is it wrapped in tissue? oh, it leaks? well, if i were you i’d wrap it in something, maybe a tissue?’) & signed the envelope with ‘you are too big a fan! :)’ which is the most true thing anyones ever said about me, ever. he also asked if i wanted a photo or anything but i said i’d already got one n he was like ‘oh of course you do’ lol

anyway yea we left after that and i’ve been screaming internally ever since cos i never thought id ever even meet him but then i saw him twice in 3 days and he recognised me, let me influence the show AND hugged me. im still amazed. im in awe. stuart goldsmith is such a wholesome guy and im waiting (im)patiently for his next tour

EDIT: i just remembered that during the last joke i was laughing so much that i was crying and i was fanning my face, and he saw and was like ‘are you ok there?? you good??’ which made me laugh even more, jesus,