Last night I went to a benefit show for the Free Fringe starring Sean Lock, Robin Ince, Dave Gorman, Lucy Porter and several others. The show was a mixed bag, as you'd expect with so many performers. All the big names were great though.
The show was compèred by Daniel Kitson who, as compères tend to do, chatted with members of the audience. We were almost in the middle, on the front row. Guess who he picked on first? Me! Argh! I can't say I engaged in witty banter which had the audience in stitches, but compared to the other three people on the front I probably came out of it the best. Bizarrely there was another Andrew who was a computer programmer on the front row, and we ended up have an argument over which was best, Java or C++, with Kitson acting as the intermediary. Fortunately my "Java is slow" argument beat his "It's used by hundreds of people". One nil to me!
Being picked on has always been a concern of mine, but it wasn't as bad as I had anticipated. I'm not sure how I would cope if I were ever asked on stage though...