Unlimited Stage Time
Mars is not the normal route, and that’s a good thing.
Amy will be performing her stand-up comedy show, Eat Pray Cult, in Los Angeles June 7, 12, 14 and in Edinburgh most days in August. Tickets can be found here and here!
At a standard comedy open mic, you will hang out at a bar or a club or a pizza joint for three hours to get five minutes of stage time. If you, as a comic, attend four open mics a week, you will reach your proverbial 10,000 hours in just 577 years.
But all you really need, in order to practice your stand-up comedy, is a group of people willing to listen to your stand-up comedy.
Welcome to Mars College: a group of people.
I came into Mars with the goal of creating a one-hour stand-up show that I could submit to the Edinburgh Fringe. Edinburgh Fringe is a massive comedy and performing arts festival that runs for the whole month of August in Scotland. There are thousands of acts that fill up every nook, bar, cranny, theater, cavern, coffee shop, and under-bridge in the city. All the acts perform their show every day (same time, same place) for 25 days in a row.
To get accepted to the festival, I needed to secure a venue. To secure a venue, I had to convince the venue manager that I was funny and reliable enough to put on stage – for an hour every day – and to get butts in seats.
The longest stand-up routine I had created up to that point was 20 minutes. (And that was once during 2025 for a Martian Stand-up Night at the Range in Slab City.) I also had only started doing stand-up in earnest in Fort Collins, Colorado in October 2025, when I was doing three- and five-minute sets twice a week.
An hour is longer than three, or even five, minutes.
But being at Mars I was able to fast-track my progress compared to what I could have done in a traditional stand-up scene. (Or at least, we’re hoping – for my sake – that this is true.)
Of all the benefits of being on Mars, I think the most significant one is having easy access to interesting creative people with a lot of time on their hands. This is good for everything from working out ideas, to getting feedback, to having free-ranging deeply-engaged conversations at the breakfast table.
I was able to use the fact that I had access to this group of people to get myself to write and perform an hour of stand-up in the following ways:
We started a Freeside Open Mic.
We set up a rudimentary stage – some pallets, bamboo, and fabric – and put out calls for anyone who wanted to share anything they were working on. It was a chance to fail valiantly in front of supportive people. And, since I was helping to host it, I could have as much stage time as I wanted.
I ran regular co-working sessions.
We had a great co-working space this year in Mimos on Mars, a gift-economy coffee house where I used notecards to map out the structure of my show. I also held two-hour writing sessions twice a week. The first hour would be for individual writing, with check ins to make sure everyone was staying on track. The second hour was workshop time, where people could share and receive feedback. This meant that, if nothing else, I was at least working on my stand-up writing twice a week. (And it meant I got mentioned in The Guardian.)
My friends took my picture.
Part of getting a slot – and getting people into your show – at the Edinburgh Fringe is your poster. This is the photo of me that will advertise my show to the world. Luckily, at Mars, I had access to a great photographer (Chebel!) and a great makeup/wardrobe artist (Cat!) who also happened to be my friends.
I titled my show Eat Pray Cult, and I wanted the poster to be reminiscent of the movie poster for Eat Pray Love. Vincent mocked up a version using AI, which we used as a template to shoot the actual photograph.
Just for fun, I also put out a call to any Martian who wanted to pose nude in the background.
It would have been a lot of logistics and money to get a photographer, costumer, and seven naked extras to wake up early and drive way out into the desert to take a picture. But for us, we just rolled out of bed and did it before most people had had breakfast.
People sat with me while I worked out the kinks.
I was hitting snags – both in the material and in motivation – towards the end of the season. And I knew I wanted to have a whole hour done for finals. So I put three events on the calendar called - 20 minutes with Amy. These all ended up being at least an hour, but the point of them was to give me a deadline and force me to put some of my show out there.
A ton of people came. They listened to me struggle through the concepts, offered feedback, jokes, objections, and also just kind of babysat me through the creative process. I would not have gotten over that creative hump without them.
I put the show up for Mars finals, the Bombay Beach Biennale, and at The Range.
I did the whole hour for the Mars Final Open Mic. (I did badly!) Then I put it up on the last night of the Bombay Beach Biennale for a totally new, large, and very appreciative crowd. (I did well!) And then finally, I put it up for a third time at the Slab City Range – thanks to the coordination from my Martian friends (Andra and Jordan) who are also Slabbers. (I did badly again!)
There were at least a dozen Martians who had seen me perform at the open mics, the 20-minutes with Amy, the Biennale, and at the Range. These are people who are willing to show up for me and hear the same things six times. That’s crazy.
There’s this idea of the Artist – the solitary individual who looks inwards (or to nature) to capital-C Create. This is the idea of the Great Man or Great Woman (but, let’s be honest, usually man) who is so special, such a genius, so destined for greatness, that creativity pours out of them in a way we mere mortals will never understand. Aspiring artists just need to hope that they happen to be one of these people, happen to possess the innate talent and work ethic to really “make it.”
But in one summer in 1816, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley came up with both Frankenstein and the concept for The Vampyre. (And Frankenstein, according to Stephen King, launched a whole new core horror archetype.)
That summer, the friends lived together, read drafts allowed, critiqued each other’s work, argued, told ghost stories, ate together, slept together.
And it might be that those three people were, from jump, the greatest literary minds of their generation. Maybe it was an extreme coincidence that they happened to find each other.
Or maybe it’s to your advantage to create art among a group of friends, especially when one of you (Mary) has a dad who is a publisher.1
The Impressionists. The Vienna Secession. The Post-Punk Manchester Scene. The Inklings. The Wailers and Kingston Reggae. 1970s New York Counter Culture. The Neo Naturists. Monty Python.
…Mars College?
My inclination is to believe that all great, different and insistent art comes necessarily from groups of people, supporting and challenging each other. Their art a conversation rather than a monologue.
And finally, the other reason to come to Mars to do your art is…
Mars is something interesting to talk about.
My show is about Mars. I ended up calling it Eat Pray Cult because people are obsessed with cults.
And Mars is… pretty close. (Nudity. Foodbourne illness. Yoga.) But it’s not actually a cult. It’s an 80-person seasonal off-grid technofuturist protopia and decentralized intentional community. I kind of wish it were a cult, it would make it a lot easier on my parents to know what to tell their friends.
But I’ve been thinking – why are we as a society obsessed with cults anyway? We seem to have lost the optimism of the late aughts that gave us memoirs like Eat Pray Love. We’re over personal satisfaction and inner peace, and now we just want cults. The darker the better.
And of course the cults have got the sex and death stuff. Of course! Those things are fascinating. But I think stories about cults are also their own kind of escape fantasy. And that fantasy is…
What if I could live my life with some friends?
At Mars, you do. You’ve got a group of supportive, insistent, and creative people just… around. What might they help you make?
I got into Edinburgh!
I’ll be performing this August. You can buy tickets here. :)
And I’m also coming to LA!
If you’re in Southern California, I’d love it if you came to my show! I’ll be performing three times during the Hollywood Fringe Festival:
Sunday, June 7, 4:30pm
Friday, June 12, 4:30pm
Sunday, June 14, 10:30am
At The Activist Kitchen, 669 N. Heliotrope Dr, Los Angeles.
Tickets are pay-what-you-can, and you can get them here.
(The specific example of Byron and the Shelleys was pointed out to me by Alice Fraser, my friend and comedy mentor. Who runs weekly online writers workshops that you should join.)