Tonight is the final night of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for 2007. Last night was the awards night. We were invited to a special invite-only VIP showpony room.

It turned out to be a hot, steamy glass box serving watered down cordial and cheesy rice balls. There's a photo of it here. We're the ones in the fish tank up the top.

We were invited because we were nominated for a Golden Gibbo Award, which we didn't win.

However, the jury is still out on the competition that matters: perhaps we will never know who won the inaugural Melbourne Comedy Festival Cartwheel Competition we held in Trades Hall last Saturday night, because in retrospect it seems there was no independent arbiter. Perhaps we should have noticed this at the time. Should documentary footage ever emerge, however, my money is on Michael Roper, whose technique (honed by years of aerobic dance training at high school) is close to a 9.5 in my professional opinion.

So, what does all this mean? It means the festival is over.

It means we have to go back to our real lives.

It means, in other words, that all we do for the next two weeks is talk about how much fun we had and bask in our retrospective glory.

To make this easier for everyone, here is a snapshot:

Over a thousand people saw our show over three weeks (14 shows).
One of those people was my grade 4/5/6 teacher!
We were reviewed very nicely in The Age, The Groggy Squirrel and The Pun.
Up until now, we had never been reviewed in a public newspaper, ever, by anyone, at any time.
Some of us were misquoted in the press and consequently have updated ASIO files.
Some of us were photographed looking like children with special needs for the local papers.
Our first festival show was nominated for an award.
There were 288 shows in the festival.
My favourite was ours
Because...

These people are now my friends. I choose to get the giggles with these guys.

So guess what?

After our final show (which was enormously fun) For We Are Young And Free was nominated for a Golden Gibbo Award. For more details, see the news items on our homepage. Here is a clandestine video recording of the shortlist being announced...

Dear Everyone,

Tonight is our final show in the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

For We Are Young And Free has had a fantastic run. Lots of lovely audiences, heaps of fun shows, nice reviews, great cast, gorgeous crew, and then there's me, skulking around getting nervous.

So. Here it is. You get one more chance. Come along tonight and farewell Emily, Miriam, Michael, Dylan, Stew, Vic, and... me... on the final night of my nervous skulking.

We plan to go out with a bang.

No idea what I'll be doing this time next week. Someone remember to call me. Please.

Here's my favourite celebrity again. We love you too, Paris.

... three nights to go until the end of our season. All let us rejoice...

They say the key to comedy is brevity and comic timing.

Brevity is something I sometimes have to work on, but for lessons in comic timing, I only need to consult my Real Estate agent.

Real Estate agents have fabulous comic timing. Mine called me in the middle of bump-in day (when I was quite literally holding a ladder with one hand a phone in the other) and asked could we drive a key around to the real estate office because they couldn't find theirs and they wanted to do an inspection of the house, as arranged (hilariously) two days previously when they called in the middle of a meeting I was having at the Law Foundation.

Honestly, I don't know how they do it. The amount of research required in order to determine the perfect moment to call... it's beyond belief. It's an innate ability. It's a skill you're born with.

They called this morning (on the first day of the final week of our show) and gave us 60 days notice, in which we have to find a house and polish this one.

There goes my post-show holiday.

There is officially ONLY ONE WEEK LEFT OF OUR SHOW!

If you haven't seen it, book tickets soon because we've been getting full houses and did I mention IT'S OUR FINAL WEEK!

I am so exhausted and can't imagine making it through this final week BUT I am also terrified of what will happen after this week, when I imagine I shall have to find something else to do with my time.

Possibly I will take up extreme sports. Nothing else quite compares.

This is my weekend:

1. Huge show to a sell-out crowd on Friday, witnessed by some of my most exciting friends who purchased me drinks with dreadful names and convinced me to eat cheap Chinese food and wobble home at midnight.

2. Went to "panel" a discussion on writing and stagecraft with women comedians, which was so laid back it generated into lunch.

3. Went to the Saturday show which was a nice audience, good chats afterwards.

4. Went to the pub after the show with the cast, some of whom were keen to come on radio with me later that night.

5. At some point in here, all cast members piked and went home to bed.

6. Stew and Rita and I went to triple R and talked crap for two hours on the (accurately named) party show. Lots of fun, although a little degrading for Stewart.

7. Tonight I'm going to Christina's show, Semi Rurual (yay!) and after that I'm going to some others, if I don't pass out from exhaustion in the next five hours.

Tomorrow... listless wandering about. Scheduled in from ten to midnight. Looking forward to it.

We had sign interpreters incorporated into our show last night and it was SO fun.

I want sign interpreters at my dinner parties!

It didn't hurt that we had a full house and I ended up sitting behind a pole and watching the sign interpreter translate things like "bikini" and "post structuralism" while role playing the entire show by herself (she made herself tall and broad-shouldered for the Dad character and tiny and innocent for Genevieve).

So much fun. Now I'm wishing I paid more attention, though, because I didn't see what "Dancing With The Stars" was in sign language. If anyone knows, do tell.

Thank you to the signers. It was a really interesting show, if I do say so myself. (Didn't see anything apart from the signer so it makes it okay to comment!).