Small audience, some awful comments and the meaning of "beer money"

I have heard many times that the life of a Fringe performs is all ups and down, a bit like the city itself. And my God if it's true. Yesterday I finished on a high note: in the afternoon I met Dizzy High, a regular compere with Laughing Horse, and he offered me to play the experienced opener in a new acts gig starting at 11.30pm. I accepted, even if I was a bit worried of facing a rowdy crowd, and I really stormed it. It gave me a nice confidence boot before today luchtime performance. The audience was much smaller, 1/3 of the room instead of 2/3. Among them, there was a lovely elderly couple of typical English Italy lovers, those who in Italy were brilliantly lampponed by the comic Enrico Montesano, who played an old English lady in Italy who found everything "molto pittoresco", very picturesque. There were also two young couples who really seemed to enjoy the show. The performance was much slicker than last time, but I didn't manage to get full laughs. When I was dismantling my stuff I overheard a middle age woman, who stayed in the room for the next show, saying that "this one was awful". The Italy lovers came to me after the show and asked in puzzlement why on hell I decided to become a British citizen. They seemed to be very disappointed by those aspect that sounded un-Italian, probably to their ears even treacherous. Well, I have a Union Jack on the seat of my Vespa and I call myself Anglicized, what were they expecting? The comedic equivalent of "A room with a view"? Bloody Italy lovers, if they like Italy so much why don't they move there leaving this country to those who really like it? Maybe I will fund the NBNP: Naturalized British National Party. I'm sorry, they were a really lovely couple and they made the effort to come to my show, it's not their fault if it wasn't the right one for them. I did the collection (£20) and somebody by mistake put the first coin in a used beer glass and the other followed suit. Which, I guess, gives a completely new meaning to the expression "beer money". Boom boom. Well, what can you expect on a down day?