Mostly true stuff…

Comedy has challenged my emotional homeostasis, toughened my resolve, allowed me to cut my teeth, albeit sometimes on my own skin, provided intellectual buzz, and, introduced me to like-minded thinkers who reconstruct my core. It has also given me more laughter than I could ever imagine. For the record: Three of my most memorable sets:

Las Vegas, March 2008 – AJ’s Comedy Tavern:

Kenny Chesney wails from the juke box in a place where second-hand smoke goes to die, along with broken dreams, and battle-weary livers. Blackened windows and doors suggest anonymity along a dark stretch of highway where dead bodies are conveniently dropped in the dead of night. There is no audience. Just a line of aged men, bereft of a future or even plans…like…say, tomorrow? Ashtray and drink their only companion, they sink their gaze into a vortex of spinning fruit and neon.

The show’s producer turns off the music. The comics assemble into a faux audience. No flicker of acknowledgement from John Deere patrons. I realize that, other than one employee, I am the only woman in this bar. I am also the only person, in the history of AJ’s Tavern, to ask for a Pinot Blanc. There is no Pinot Blanc.

We begin. The comics are filthy. Some are funny. Every six minutes, a drunken, Hawaiin shirt-clad patron staggers across the room and plugs in the juke box. Reba fills the air. The MC stomps across the floor and yanks out the cord in a silent fit of fury. This in/out dance proceeds during the entire show. After the show, this patron will be beaten up by a large, heavily tattooed bartender. This bartender is six-months pregnant.

I do my comedy set as another inebriated local slow dances with himself in the front row. Fellow comics laugh, applaud. I close on a decently solid joke after a ten minute set. Trepidation has turned into giddy satisfaction. It’s not about the set. It’s about feeling wildly uncomfortable, being so out of my element…and, yet, staying with it. Doing my best…when every minute seemed like a fortnight. This is…what I did.

Post-set, I knock back five whiskeys, shoot some pool, break a cue over an extreme fighter’s head and leave. This is…what I felt like doing.

Stay tuned.

Two more ‘Most Memorable Sets’ to come…..

I remember the long, lonesome walk to school each day during my childhood years. I always took the railroad tracks. The railway crews had cut a path four times wider than the tracks themselves, and over the years it had filled itself with wildflowers and grasses – fireweed and milkweed, goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace, harebell and goat’s beard – so that I walked along the rails each morning as if walking through a meadow. By September, when everything was in seed, the seed heads shook their contents over you, the burrs clung to your clothes. Some days, thousands of milkpods would burst open, triggered by the sun’s searing heat; thousands of small, silent explosions repeating themselves in salvos down the miles of track. On those days I walked through clouds of silken down drifting about like smoke in the morning breeze….

Wait a second…

This is someone else’s memory.

 Never mind.

Tonight.

Yuk’s.

8:30.

Me.

Practicing my ESL.

Escapism as a Second Language.

~

Election Promises:

Providing higher education by building taller schools.
Instituting English, French and illiteracy as Canada’s three official languages.
Tearing down the Rocky Mountains so Albertans can see the Pacific sunset.
Abolishing the environment because it’s hard to keep clean and takes up so much space.
Ending crime by abolishing all laws.
Gradually phasing in, over five years, the British system of driving on the left with large trucks and tractors first, then buses, with small cars and bicycles being last.
Banning guns and butter, since both kill.
Making the Trans-Canada Highway one way only.
Counting the 1000 Islands to see if the Americans have stolen any.

.

I miss the Rhinoceros Party.

~

My plan for life…

To spend less time in shopping malls,

and more time in Planetariums.

~