Besides photographing birds, Fraz was also interested in being a performer. She tried her hand at being a singer/songwriter. She learned how to play the guitar and had a few songs that she had composed. This was how we started becoming friends.
However, her desire to succeed as a performer created a problem when we went to see live music. She would enjoy it for a little bit. Then, she would start getting jealous and question why we were watching someone play when she should be up on stage and the audience cheering for her. She would start making critical comments about the performer to me. "She's not really that good! Why do all these people like her?" These comments would start off as whispers and gradually get a little louder, enough that people close to us could hear her.
Since the singer/songwriter thing wasn't panning out, she decided to try her hand at stand-up comedy. Fraz was actually very funny and entertaining to be around. Abed noticed that when I was talking to her on the phone, I would spend a lot of time laughing. But she couldn't get that part of her personality to translate properly at comedy clubs.
I frequently went with her to the open mic nights on Sundays at the Comedy Store in La Jolla. Everyone who signed up would get to do a three-minute routine. What Fraz would do was spend a full minute singing. And I don't mean she sang funny songs or parody songs. She would do songs like "My Favorite Things" or "The Lonely Goatherd" from "The Sound of Music" and she simply performed them straight. She always wondered why she never got asked back to do longer sets. I told her what the problem was. The people who book at the Comedy Store were probably watching her three-minute sets and thinking, "If she spends one-third of her three minutes singing, she will spend at least three minutes singing in a ten-minute set. If we give her 30 minutes, she will spend ten minutes singing! We can't have that! People are not willing to buy that much alcohol to find her funny!"
She would also ask my advice on how to make her jokes better. I would give her some, but she never would abide by it. She just kept doing her own thing.
Fraz also tried her hand performing as a "Drag King." Drag Kings are women (mostly lesbians) who put on shows similar to Drag Queens. I saw one of the shows that Fraz participated in. Fraz would do her act wearing a cowboy outfit with a fake moustache. I have to say, I find Drag Queens far more entertaining.
Otherwise, Fraz and I were very good friends. We had a lot in common, including our taste in music. Another thing that we joked about having in common was our taste in women. I actually had to worry about her trying to coax away women I was dating. I had a tendency to not let them meet her. However, there was one time I tried to coax a woman she had seen, but that's a story for a later time.
While we were only ever friends, I did get the idea that she would have liked for us to have been more. But I have a feeling she didn't like the idea of being emotionally tied to someone she thought was a "loser" (even though she had less going for her than I did, and if she didn't have that trust fund from her father, she'd probably be dumpster diving). This, more than anything, including her attraction to women, kept us from being a couple.
In the meantime, you'll see Fraz make a few more appearances in this blog, but she will not take center stage, like my ex-girlfriends. Even though I'm certain that's someplace she'd like to be.
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