I got an email today from reader Katie asking me to help her promote a friend and fellow reader’s forthcoming metal festival. Gladly.

There is precedent for this. If you have a metal band and I know for a fact you read this blog, it’s a pretty safe bet I’ll help you promote it. Most other bands too.

I do that partly because I assume all regular readers are pretty awesome and I’m generally happy to help awesome people share their awesomeness with the world. But mostly I feel so indebted to all the friends and family that indulged my own performances (in various pursuits) for so long that I feel compelled to, well, pay it forward a bit. So check out the Metal Suckfest.

Thinking about posting a link to that show — and thinking about why I should post it — got me feeling a bit nostalgic for the days when I actually did stuff. (Also at least a little bit depressed, since I realized it has been about five years now since I’ve done any regular public performing, which I always very much enjoyed. Maybe I should get back into that somehow.)

So in the spirit of nostalgia, the three most satisfying performances I can remember, in chronological order:

Ted Berg and Pizza Night, December, 2000: I did a lot of standup comedy during my first two years of college. I won some campus contest early in freshman year, and my class’ student government always booked me for the end-of-semester pre-finals events. The winter of my sophomore year I was charged with doing 75 minutes, which is really, really hard. There was to be free pizza there, guaranteeing a pretty solid crowd.

And — I apologize for the utter lack of humility here — I nailed it. I can’t even remember most of the material now and I regret that no one thought to tape it. I spent a ton of time thinking about it beforehand (instead of, you know, studying and stuff), and I worked out clean segues and callbacks to earlier jokes and all that stuff. And for that night, it just worked.

When you’re doing standup comedy and things are going well, it’s about the best feeling in the world. All I have is a microphone and I’m keeping all these people entertained! Awesome for the ego.

Some stupid conference, February, 2003: The guy who directed the jazz band at Georgetown also booked jazz combos for local events. A group of six guys from the jazz band made up his cheap-rate jazz combo. We were thrilled to be playing for any money at all, and at most of the gigs we could score free drinks during breaks. We played some cocktail hours at weddings and a bunch of catered receptions for business conferences.

The guy always insisted that we play for the entire length of time we agreed to play for, even if there was no one left at the event. I guess he had been burned on that in the past or something.

At the reception for some stupid conference, we were booked from 5-8, but everyone was gone by 6:45. We kept playing, but ditched the jazz charts to jam on band-room funk classics. Then the coolest thing ever happened: The catering crew cleaning up after the reception started dancing, and gathered in front of where we were playing for a spontaneous funk throwdown. It was hilarious and totally sweet.

Protocol show, August, 2006: Protocol played a particularly nerdy brand of eclectic funk, with lyrics about zombies and plate tectonics and songs in all sorts of odd meters and modes. We practiced a ton, though, and by the end of our three-year run we were pretty tight.

This was the second-to-last Protocol show. I had started my job at MLB.com a couple months earlier, and I used that as an excuse to quit the band. Truth is I thought it had run its course, and my living in Brooklyn made it logistically tough to join the other guys at practice as often as any of us would have liked.

This was our last gig at the Continental, an East Village spot where we played bi-weekly. Because it was our last time playing in Manhattan, we managed to draw a ton of people out — including my boss and a couple of new co-workers. We made our bizarre rock with as much enthusiasm and energy as we ever did, and people responded.

That was, incidentally, the night that inspired the mustache headshot that ran with my old SNY.tv column. We had a song called “Mustache,” which I sang while wearing a fake mustache. When I started writing the column, my boss feared I looked too young to be taken seriously and suggested I use a photo of myself in the fake mustache he saw at the show. Obviously I obliged.

OK, this is getting awful long but I shouldn’t brag about those successes without mentioning these three career lows:

DC Improv, February, 2000: Remember when I said how great it feels to put on a successful standup show? That high is not nearly as extreme as the awful feeling of utterly bombing. I was in college, so I made a lot of reasonably immature college-kid jokes about beer and porn and stuff. At my lone appearance at the DC Improv, I went on before Lewis Black, who does a bunch of political humor and draws a good and varied crowd in DC.

I told my first joke about porn and spotted in the first row a girl of about 14 sitting with her parents. I froze up. I managed to stumble through the short set, but it all sucked. Very lonely feeling, very sparse laughs.

Moo Shoo Porkestra, December, 2002: The Moo Shoo Porkestra played many incredibly fun shows, and I’d say it produced more in terms of total satisfaction than Protocol did. This one came during a snowstorm on a Tuesday night at the Tombs, a popular college bar near Georgetown. We were tired, we went on late, and by the time we finished, only my friend Scott (who sometimes comments here) was paying any attention. That’s actually the image that comes to mind when I think about how I owe it to the world to help promote other people’s shows: Scott, sitting behind his half-drunk beer at a large and otherwise empty table about 10 feet from where we were playing. So Katie, you should thank Scott.

Protocol show, April, 2005: I can’t remember the bar, but we played in a basement on the Upper East Side to a crowd of about 10-15 people. I had a hernia at the time and played the show from a stool. It sucked.