It would be awesome if I were sitting around at a table in a diner right now, talking about comedy with comics. Instead, I am typing on my old, used computer, my cigarette smoke mingling with the pleasant smell of a Glade scented candle, the "Monk" series finale playing in the background.
I just got home from performing in an all-female stand-up comedy showcase called, "The Ha-Ha-Hotties" produced by The Edge Comedy Club at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts.
It's the second time I've done this showcase. I love it because there is a great comfort in performing with the same gender. Age and weight jokes are parr for the course. But even though I find it comforting, I am still challenged by the other comics, which is so healthy. And like all healthy things, I hate them when I am experiencing them, but so grateful for the results.
I was intimidated by the looks and ages of the other women, but at the end of it all, it was the range of material that scared and inspried me. Ultimately, it was all the other comic's material that made me laugh.
I've been doing performing stand-up comedy consistently since this summer, since July or August. I am such a newcomer, such a babe, an old, tattooed babe, in the comedy woods.
This past June I turned 40 years old and for the year leading up to my 40th birthday, the idea of trying stand-up comedy was in my brain. The thought turned into a fear, an obsession and after some mulling it-over, prayer and counsel with friends, it turned into a goal. I've never had a real goal in my life. I've done some things, and finished some of those things even. But outside of a man or getting wasted, I've rarely pursued much.. Mostly I've fallen into things I like. But I'm funny, and I've come to realize that this is my skill and it's almost my duty to try to craft, shape and deliver being funny.
I wish my life were different in many ways as I pursue being a stand-up comic. I wish I didn't have to work a day job so I could stay up late and go to more open mics. I wish I had started younger. I wish I didn't have to wrestle with my own immaturities of making studio time for my writing. But I cannot change these things, aside from getting fired from a job I am lucky to have and often enjoy. I wish I would have watched the "Monk" series when it first aired on television.
I have the stuff to try it right now. I just pray that I increase the momentum and go somewhere with it, arriving just as I am.
Really fucking funny.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Quality Problems
Someone, somewhere is getting bombed.
My neighbor, my neighborhood, are no exceptions.
Alright, I don't mean bombing in the sense of war. I'm talking about getting a snoot-full.
I live in a very trendy? hip? active? yes!- active neighborhood in Chicago. There are a lot of bars and restaurants. This is a good thing overall except for the fact that everyone of them puts an outdoor cafe on the sidewalk and the availability of simple walking space has been chewed up and swallowed.
It's not entirely outdoor cafes that have taken up the sidewalk. There are 14 different varieties of parking, loading zone and tow zone signs, giant planters and public sculptures. And waiting to be seated outside, getting edified on the myriad of parking challenges and wondering "what the hell that big red thing outside of Burton Place is because it looks like a giant crab claw and does that mean they serve seafood, oh they don't!"- are gaggles of people. Tourists, the drunken-fist-fighting-tube-topping-$65 dollar-flip-flopping-shiny, happy post-college party crowd, the swarthy and sinister valet mob, the double-wide stroller yuppies in all their Northface fleece-laden entitlement who are teaching their kids to ride bicycles and scooters down the sidewalk while walking large pure-breed dogs, botox, boob-jobbed-cigar-smoking denizens of the Viagra Triangle who wander over to Old-Town for something different to do. They are chewing up the thoroughfare. Also idiot joggers, not idiots for exercising but for including Wells St. on their fitness route and bands of poor kids from the nearbye housing projects destroying the newspaper boxes and littering. Let's not forget them. Oh, and hostile, singing, poetry-reciting panhandlers that smell like pee. Them too.
Let's just say it takes 15 minutes on a sunny Saturday afternoon to get to Walgreen's 2 blocks away.
Here is a little diddy I wrote for the all female sketch comedy troupe I was in called BLAIRE. The song was an observation about a similar northside Chicago neighborhood where I often work and how all the small businesses, the charm and diverse ethnic food that used to be there has been replaced by one particular moronic, faux-ethnic, establishment. I will not name the specific faux-ethnic endeavor for fear of of being labled a faux-racist. Instead I will let the heavily veiled title and lyrics speak for themselves.
It's called "Irish Bar"
In villes of Wrigley
Where girls are jiggly
And beer flows flat from the tap
Lay me down
On that Lakeview ground
In a puddle of puke and crap
For I am drunk
A sodden slam-drunk
In my backwards baseball cap
Oh let me lie here
Oh let me die here
Bellied up to an Irish Bar
I take my Miller shite
My Marlboro lite
And I can't find my f***in' car
But worry no more
We'll just go next door
To another f***in' Irish Bar!
You get the idea.(Thanks to Annie Rubino for the language of the Miller/Marlboro verse.)
Back to the hazards of Old Town.
After gearing up for the regularly occuring obstacle course that is the block of Wells St between North Avenue and Schiller St, getting zen and focused with my with my game plan-BAM! I forget that there is an art fair, wine-tasting event or block party right outside my door and I find myself haggling with some dick-head frat-guy security guard over whether or not I'm going to pay 5 bucks to get in so I can go buy toilet paper and Splenda on the next block. Sometimes I argue but mostly I take LaSalle St.
Okay, I'm bitter, tired and have poor time management skills when I run errands or this wouldn't be an issue.
Despite the grousing in this post, I am not the psycho who keeps ripping out the flowers out of the flower boxes in front of Orso's and the frame shop. I'm always sad when that happens.
Honestly, I am lucky to live here. I could live in a lot worse places with war and land-mines tearing my community to bits. I could live in a blighted area with no commerce, with rampant street crime, and economic desperation slapping me in the face every minute of everyday.
It boils down to wishing my chunk of the city was a little quieter when I'm trying to watch "Hung" or "Design Stars" on On Demand while walking a brisk pace on my treadmill.
My neighbor, my neighborhood, are no exceptions.
Alright, I don't mean bombing in the sense of war. I'm talking about getting a snoot-full.
I live in a very trendy? hip? active? yes!- active neighborhood in Chicago. There are a lot of bars and restaurants. This is a good thing overall except for the fact that everyone of them puts an outdoor cafe on the sidewalk and the availability of simple walking space has been chewed up and swallowed.
It's not entirely outdoor cafes that have taken up the sidewalk. There are 14 different varieties of parking, loading zone and tow zone signs, giant planters and public sculptures. And waiting to be seated outside, getting edified on the myriad of parking challenges and wondering "what the hell that big red thing outside of Burton Place is because it looks like a giant crab claw and does that mean they serve seafood, oh they don't!"- are gaggles of people. Tourists, the drunken-fist-fighting-tube-topping-$65 dollar-flip-flopping-shiny, happy post-college party crowd, the swarthy and sinister valet mob, the double-wide stroller yuppies in all their Northface fleece-laden entitlement who are teaching their kids to ride bicycles and scooters down the sidewalk while walking large pure-breed dogs, botox, boob-jobbed-cigar-smoking denizens of the Viagra Triangle who wander over to Old-Town for something different to do. They are chewing up the thoroughfare. Also idiot joggers, not idiots for exercising but for including Wells St. on their fitness route and bands of poor kids from the nearbye housing projects destroying the newspaper boxes and littering. Let's not forget them. Oh, and hostile, singing, poetry-reciting panhandlers that smell like pee. Them too.
Let's just say it takes 15 minutes on a sunny Saturday afternoon to get to Walgreen's 2 blocks away.
Here is a little diddy I wrote for the all female sketch comedy troupe I was in called BLAIRE. The song was an observation about a similar northside Chicago neighborhood where I often work and how all the small businesses, the charm and diverse ethnic food that used to be there has been replaced by one particular moronic, faux-ethnic, establishment. I will not name the specific faux-ethnic endeavor for fear of of being labled a faux-racist. Instead I will let the heavily veiled title and lyrics speak for themselves.
It's called "Irish Bar"
In villes of Wrigley
Where girls are jiggly
And beer flows flat from the tap
Lay me down
On that Lakeview ground
In a puddle of puke and crap
For I am drunk
A sodden slam-drunk
In my backwards baseball cap
Oh let me lie here
Oh let me die here
Bellied up to an Irish Bar
I take my Miller shite
My Marlboro lite
And I can't find my f***in' car
But worry no more
We'll just go next door
To another f***in' Irish Bar!
You get the idea.(Thanks to Annie Rubino for the language of the Miller/Marlboro verse.)
Back to the hazards of Old Town.
After gearing up for the regularly occuring obstacle course that is the block of Wells St between North Avenue and Schiller St, getting zen and focused with my with my game plan-BAM! I forget that there is an art fair, wine-tasting event or block party right outside my door and I find myself haggling with some dick-head frat-guy security guard over whether or not I'm going to pay 5 bucks to get in so I can go buy toilet paper and Splenda on the next block. Sometimes I argue but mostly I take LaSalle St.
Okay, I'm bitter, tired and have poor time management skills when I run errands or this wouldn't be an issue.
Despite the grousing in this post, I am not the psycho who keeps ripping out the flowers out of the flower boxes in front of Orso's and the frame shop. I'm always sad when that happens.
Honestly, I am lucky to live here. I could live in a lot worse places with war and land-mines tearing my community to bits. I could live in a blighted area with no commerce, with rampant street crime, and economic desperation slapping me in the face every minute of everyday.
It boils down to wishing my chunk of the city was a little quieter when I'm trying to watch "Hung" or "Design Stars" on On Demand while walking a brisk pace on my treadmill.
It's clear that I fit right in where I live.
Ghandi said, "If you want the world to change, be the way you want the world to be". So I am going to do what I want the chattering whiskey kitties on their cellphones blocking the 2 inches of free space in front of Subway and the delirious wino who is sitting on the stoop and singing loudly just under my window as I write this to do.
I'm going to shut the f*** up and move on.
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