Photo supplied by Arvind Ethan David
Some 72 hours ago, David Baddiel, Stratford East and I launched our Kickstarter campaign, for Infidel - the Musical! In the weeks before this decision was reached, long debates were had. Was it odd, unseemly even, to be asking strangers and fans for money?
We knew it worked for Zach Barf, Amanda Palmer and Veronica Mars; there was an important difference between them and us... they were, after all, American.
Something in us, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural though we are, resisted the new normalcy of just plain asking strangers to give us money for our show. In just didn't feel the done thing. Just not British.
And of course, there was always the fear of public favour - what if our fans weren't as loyal as we had hoped. But in the end, it felt like we should - in the words of our fellow irreverently ecumenical musical, The Book of Mormon - Just Man Up and so we did.
And 72 hours in - and 6% towards our target, keep it coming guys! - our emotional responses remain complicated. We have all been working it, in the press and on Twitter and in appeals to friends and family, and the main emotion is an overwhelming sense of gratitude, each time the app on my iPhone beeps with a new backer or when a friend with a fertile Twitter following spreads the word.
It's a remarkable and humbling feeling receiving the unqualified, uncalculated kindness of others, over and over again, notified through the mundanity of a beeping iPhone.
But of course in the times in between the cheerful chimes of donations and retweets, come the silences - and those are humbling in a whole other way. We find ourselves reaching for long forgotten geometry and tracing the parabola of our fundraise, calculating frantically if our current rate mapped against historical kickstarter trends will result in success (too close to call as of now, so please keep giving!) and cursing ourselves and each other for every embarking on this very public exercise in ego demolition.
At base, though, our reason for putting ourselves through this is simple: The Show Must Go on.
We believe, in our quivering waters, that The Infidel deserves to be staged with all the bells and whistles, all the chorus girls and high-kicking Hassids we can afford. And to afford them we need you. So put our egos aside (we have) and please keep those donations coming.