Great Scott, the show I do every Friday, had been empty, and I wasn't really in the mood for comedy.
But I had a show at IB's nightcap and so I went and did it.
I did the exact same set I had done previously to a very good response at the Studio on Wednesday. But this crowd was different. There were only about 9 of them, and I managed to say something that offended each and every one of them in 7 or so minutes.
I opened with a bit about St. Louis, where I pick on it a bit. The woman sitting directly in front of me is from there.
I add a jab about Blue Collar Comedy in which I take a dig at the south. They are also represented in the crowd.
Finally, I do a bit about wheelchairs on the subway. Somehow, I miss that the other woman sitting right in front of me is in a wheelchair. You know what sucks the air out of a room? Insulting a woman in a wheelchair.
I learned a lesson here, of course. You should pay more attention to your audience. I do want to stress how aware I am that this is on me.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
My graduate show - "The Person I Don't Like Isn't Here Right Now"
Last night was really special for me.
I performed in a graduate show for the Improv Asylum Training Center, a production culminating almost a year and a half of training. And we killed. It was a great show. The sketches hit, the improv was on the money, the audience was in it. I've never felt better that I did taking that last bow at the end of the night.
The highlights of the show for me were all involving the same terrible audience member. A drunk meathead who was trying desperately to be funny and an asshole, while failing at the former, was selected for the interview structure, where he was to tell Jonah who it was that he didn't like and why. He said his name was Chris and that the person he didn't like was named Jay. The reason? "He was still breathing." He was trying not to be helpful and the crowd pretty quickly turned against him. This is comedy gold. My castmates and I proceeded to hammer on Chris for a solid 7 or 8 minutes. So fun.
At the end, he kept talking during our outro, allowing for a cutting remark from me to close the show that got huge laughs. I felt great.
Afterward, a lot of audience members came up to let me know what they thought of the show, and I was really happy to hear it was all positive. It was particularly gratifying to have improvisers I know and respect giving us all positive notes on the show.
Now I just want to do more of it. I want to be on stage all the time. And I want that kind of audience. A full room makes such a difference. The night before our grad show, Don't Tell Mimi did a show at the Burren which, while not nearly as well attended, still had a full audience, and it also felt really great. It just feels like that's where I'm supposed to be all the time.
I'm really excited about this summer. I have a lot of improv, sketch, and stand-up stuff coming up, and I'd honestly rather do that than sleep.
I performed in a graduate show for the Improv Asylum Training Center, a production culminating almost a year and a half of training. And we killed. It was a great show. The sketches hit, the improv was on the money, the audience was in it. I've never felt better that I did taking that last bow at the end of the night.
The highlights of the show for me were all involving the same terrible audience member. A drunk meathead who was trying desperately to be funny and an asshole, while failing at the former, was selected for the interview structure, where he was to tell Jonah who it was that he didn't like and why. He said his name was Chris and that the person he didn't like was named Jay. The reason? "He was still breathing." He was trying not to be helpful and the crowd pretty quickly turned against him. This is comedy gold. My castmates and I proceeded to hammer on Chris for a solid 7 or 8 minutes. So fun.
At the end, he kept talking during our outro, allowing for a cutting remark from me to close the show that got huge laughs. I felt great.
Afterward, a lot of audience members came up to let me know what they thought of the show, and I was really happy to hear it was all positive. It was particularly gratifying to have improvisers I know and respect giving us all positive notes on the show.
Now I just want to do more of it. I want to be on stage all the time. And I want that kind of audience. A full room makes such a difference. The night before our grad show, Don't Tell Mimi did a show at the Burren which, while not nearly as well attended, still had a full audience, and it also felt really great. It just feels like that's where I'm supposed to be all the time.
I'm really excited about this summer. I have a lot of improv, sketch, and stand-up stuff coming up, and I'd honestly rather do that than sleep.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Springtime! Stuff I'm doing!
It's springtime again. The air smells nice, the trees are blossoming, the beers are getting lighter.
As such, I have again hit my annual "time to do natural things" binge. Let's see if I can maintain it this year.
For starters, I got a garden plot at the Clark Cooper Gardens in Mattapan. The people there seem like lovely folks, and I found immediately how bad I am at manual labor and planning. I went to till on Thursday morning, and suddenly realized that a potting shovel wasn't going to be quite enough. I borrowed a spade from the compost pile, and after about 20 minutes and about six of my four hundred square feet, I was done.
To aide my efforts for tomorrow, I have purchased a hoe, shovel, and metal rake. I intend to put a solid hour or two in before going to work so on Monday I can plant a lovely garden of lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, basil, summer squash, and green beans.
I also finally opened the bread maker my grandparents gave me for Christmas. It's making a loaf right now. Watching dough rise is sort of awesome.
It's also time to start beer brewing again. I haven't really done it since October, so I ordered ingredients for an American ale from Northern Brewer today, and am looking forward to results. This coincided with the drinking of the last homebrew I had left. Totally a coincidence.
That's what I'm up to. Pictures will come as things start to happen.
As such, I have again hit my annual "time to do natural things" binge. Let's see if I can maintain it this year.
For starters, I got a garden plot at the Clark Cooper Gardens in Mattapan. The people there seem like lovely folks, and I found immediately how bad I am at manual labor and planning. I went to till on Thursday morning, and suddenly realized that a potting shovel wasn't going to be quite enough. I borrowed a spade from the compost pile, and after about 20 minutes and about six of my four hundred square feet, I was done.
To aide my efforts for tomorrow, I have purchased a hoe, shovel, and metal rake. I intend to put a solid hour or two in before going to work so on Monday I can plant a lovely garden of lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, basil, summer squash, and green beans.
I also finally opened the bread maker my grandparents gave me for Christmas. It's making a loaf right now. Watching dough rise is sort of awesome.
It's also time to start beer brewing again. I haven't really done it since October, so I ordered ingredients for an American ale from Northern Brewer today, and am looking forward to results. This coincided with the drinking of the last homebrew I had left. Totally a coincidence.
That's what I'm up to. Pictures will come as things start to happen.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
President Obama addresses credit cards
I recommend watching this brief press conference with the president, who is addressing a huge part of the credit crisis that directly effects most Americans: that of the credit card companies.
As is, credit card companies can change your interest rates with virtually no notice. I myself just had my interest rate increased from 14.99% to 19.99% even though I've always paid on time. It's nice to see Obama sticking up for the little guy here, as I feel like we've seen enough of the government going to bat for the mortgage lenders and "to-big-to-fail" crowd.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Personal experience and universal health care
My mother had a stroke yesterday. It wasn't too severe. I think she'll be fine.
The problem is in the meantime, she's out of work. Since she was laid off not too long ago, and has yet to find any replacement job full time, she's at a part-time job that doesn't pay for sick leave. She also lost her health insurance when she was laid off. She could have bought COBRA, but she couldn't afford it. It was hard enough just to keep up with her rapidly inflating mortgage.
While it is not a reality yet, it is highly probable that this incident, should she survive it, will equal economic ruin for my mother. She will most likely lose her house and may end up in bankruptcy due to the piling thousands of dollars in medical bills, provided the Rhode Island state government doesn't step in.
This, in combination with my late sister's struggles with the health care system, which among other things attempted to tell her she was no longer suffering from the incurable and terminal illness that ultimately killed her and thus cut care due to a clerical error, has led me to wonder how it's possible that we as a people still accept the idea that health care is a commodity.
I am not going to go through the economic breakdowns about how universal, nationalized health care is cheaper in the long run for businesses and individuals. I'm not going to go through how we can spend enough on the military to blow up twenty earths a year but we can't maintain the well-being of a continent. Nor will I entertain those ridiculous reactionaries who claim that the Canadians, French, and British have to wait for months for treatments and how they all hate their system. I know this not to be true. I've spoken to numerous individuals in each country, and it is notable that removing health care is not in the platforms of any of those nations' leading conservative parties. I'm talking morals.
The United States prides itself (often appropriately) as the leading moral beacon of the earth. We've had a few bumps along the way, but the values of this nation are fundamentally stable at first glance. They are also primarily Christian. I am not a Christian. I am an atheist. That said, I have a rather developed moral compass developed from years of exposure in the Protestant church I grew up attending and my Catholic grandparents. I got the gist. To my understanding, Christians are supposed to look after their fellow man. So how is it that in a country that incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than even China and has a military budget exceeding every other country that has ever existed, how is it that we can't pay for health care because it's "too expensive?"
Of course it's expensive. It's a scientific system jammed with technology with the sole purpose of keeping people who are not healthy or alive healthy and alive. If we value life so much, why can we not revert those nickels and grands that are so feverishly spent on nuclear arms and anti-abortion organizations to pay for the well-being of our neighbors? Why is a fetus' life more valuable than my mom's?
The problem is in the meantime, she's out of work. Since she was laid off not too long ago, and has yet to find any replacement job full time, she's at a part-time job that doesn't pay for sick leave. She also lost her health insurance when she was laid off. She could have bought COBRA, but she couldn't afford it. It was hard enough just to keep up with her rapidly inflating mortgage.
While it is not a reality yet, it is highly probable that this incident, should she survive it, will equal economic ruin for my mother. She will most likely lose her house and may end up in bankruptcy due to the piling thousands of dollars in medical bills, provided the Rhode Island state government doesn't step in.
This, in combination with my late sister's struggles with the health care system, which among other things attempted to tell her she was no longer suffering from the incurable and terminal illness that ultimately killed her and thus cut care due to a clerical error, has led me to wonder how it's possible that we as a people still accept the idea that health care is a commodity.
I am not going to go through the economic breakdowns about how universal, nationalized health care is cheaper in the long run for businesses and individuals. I'm not going to go through how we can spend enough on the military to blow up twenty earths a year but we can't maintain the well-being of a continent. Nor will I entertain those ridiculous reactionaries who claim that the Canadians, French, and British have to wait for months for treatments and how they all hate their system. I know this not to be true. I've spoken to numerous individuals in each country, and it is notable that removing health care is not in the platforms of any of those nations' leading conservative parties. I'm talking morals.
The United States prides itself (often appropriately) as the leading moral beacon of the earth. We've had a few bumps along the way, but the values of this nation are fundamentally stable at first glance. They are also primarily Christian. I am not a Christian. I am an atheist. That said, I have a rather developed moral compass developed from years of exposure in the Protestant church I grew up attending and my Catholic grandparents. I got the gist. To my understanding, Christians are supposed to look after their fellow man. So how is it that in a country that incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than even China and has a military budget exceeding every other country that has ever existed, how is it that we can't pay for health care because it's "too expensive?"
Of course it's expensive. It's a scientific system jammed with technology with the sole purpose of keeping people who are not healthy or alive healthy and alive. If we value life so much, why can we not revert those nickels and grands that are so feverishly spent on nuclear arms and anti-abortion organizations to pay for the well-being of our neighbors? Why is a fetus' life more valuable than my mom's?
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Generally bright liberal mouthpiece makes painfully right-wing mistake
I'm a fan of Keith Olbermann. I've been watching him since SportsCenter. I even suffered through a few episodes of The Big Show. I appreciate his ability to inject even a shred of intellectual criticism and even the most slightly literate tone to the sea of ill-educated punditry we, the people of the cable news watching republic are submitted to regularly.
It is with this in mind that makes me so angry about something Olbermann said last night on Countdown. While discussing Rush Limbaugh's (and maybe Bill O'Reilly's) support of the death penalty for drug possession in Singapore, Olbermann refers to the practice of hanging drug traffickers in the country as "dictatorial" and "socialistic." The former word is apt. The latter is not.
Let's review what "socialism" actually means, shall we?
According to Dictionary.com:
so⋅cial⋅ism [soh-shuh-liz-uhm]
–noun
1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
2. procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.
3. (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.
The only of those three definitions that may even suggest that hanging would be sanctioned under socialism is the third, and that's only if we believe that "communism" is the same as "Communism." As we all recognize that a movement that uses a name isn't the same as the lowercase words they use (examples: Republican vs. republican, Democrat vs. democrat, National Socialism, or Nazism, vs. nationalism and socialism), using Stalin as an example to back up that socialism supports the hanging of drug dealers is similar to suggesting that FDR's New Deal made America a Communist country.
This is a buzzword. It is a word with positive meaning that conservatives have been beating up for a century.
Let us review further:
Public schools are a socialist program.
Federal loans for college, also socialist.
Social Security. It's in the name, for Christ's sake.
Public roads? Totally socialist. If we were a truly capitalist nation, they'd all be private roads.
But they're not, because some things should be socialized, nationalized, collective, available to everyone. Among them is education, health care, and transportation. In almost every civilized society, they are. Most are here.
The point, then, is that Olbermann, by using the word "socialistic" in a negative manner, as he did, lent credibility to the conservative position that "socialism" is "bad." He's feeding the same monster that has eaten words like "liberalism," "progressive," "Left," "intellectual," "educated," and "ivy league," and turned them all into so much waste.
A man so aware of the power of language should not make this kind of mistake, and while I'm certainly being nitpicky, I won't accept my side to make this mistake. The illiterate masses, the dittoheads, and the intellectually bankrupt accept this kind of nonsense. We're better than that. It often leaves us in the minority, but it also makes us right, which is always better than Right.
Today I drowned in arbitrary bureaucracy
On Saturday, I ordered a new phone from AT&T. The phone was not cheap. I also paid for 2 day shipping. It is now Wednesday. I still do not have said expensive phone.
Let me explain.
Apparently, AT&T does not ship on Saturdays. Their literature does not make this clear, but I'll accept that it is not a business day, even though UPS, their preferred freight company, does work that day.
So I thought it was going to get here yesterday. It didn't. So I called UPS.
"Can I have my package delivered to my office tomorrow instead of my house. I know I won't be there tomorrow for a few hours."
No. Apparently, UPS needs to fail to deliver at least once before shipping it somewhere else. A stupid rule for sure, but fine.
"Do you know when in the day it will be delivered, because I'll be out for a few hours midday."
Yes. It would be delivered some time between 9am and 7pm. So realistically, the answer was no.
I was gone today from 10:40 am to 1:25 pm. The delivery attempt occurred at 12:16. Of course it did.
So I called again.
"Hey. I was told yesterday that if you failed to deliver this package today, you could ship it somewhere else tomorrow."
Untrue. Whoever told me that was wrong. AT&T doesn't allow customers to change addresses. They have to do it.
So I called AT&T.
They can't change the address until UPS fails to deliver 3 times and then sends it back to AT&T. Nevermind that all someone at AT&T has to do, according to UPS, is call UPS. They don't do that. They "can't."
So ultimately, because of this totally ridiculous policy, I have to take tomorrow off work if I want to get a phone before the end of next week. This is particularly awesome because tomorrow I'd have made a lot of money, whereas today, had UPS told me they wouldn't be able to help me today either, I'd have taken today off, when I made no money and knew that would be the case.
Also, I can't go pick it up at UPS, because their closest pick-up location is in Norwood, which is 2 or 3 cities away from me. Totally logical that they don't have a pick-up location in Boston. I mean, we're only the largest city north of New York. Totally logical there.
When my contract expires, I'm switching to whatever company uses the United States Postal Service.
Let me explain.
Apparently, AT&T does not ship on Saturdays. Their literature does not make this clear, but I'll accept that it is not a business day, even though UPS, their preferred freight company, does work that day.
So I thought it was going to get here yesterday. It didn't. So I called UPS.
"Can I have my package delivered to my office tomorrow instead of my house. I know I won't be there tomorrow for a few hours."
No. Apparently, UPS needs to fail to deliver at least once before shipping it somewhere else. A stupid rule for sure, but fine.
"Do you know when in the day it will be delivered, because I'll be out for a few hours midday."
Yes. It would be delivered some time between 9am and 7pm. So realistically, the answer was no.
I was gone today from 10:40 am to 1:25 pm. The delivery attempt occurred at 12:16. Of course it did.
So I called again.
"Hey. I was told yesterday that if you failed to deliver this package today, you could ship it somewhere else tomorrow."
Untrue. Whoever told me that was wrong. AT&T doesn't allow customers to change addresses. They have to do it.
So I called AT&T.
They can't change the address until UPS fails to deliver 3 times and then sends it back to AT&T. Nevermind that all someone at AT&T has to do, according to UPS, is call UPS. They don't do that. They "can't."
So ultimately, because of this totally ridiculous policy, I have to take tomorrow off work if I want to get a phone before the end of next week. This is particularly awesome because tomorrow I'd have made a lot of money, whereas today, had UPS told me they wouldn't be able to help me today either, I'd have taken today off, when I made no money and knew that would be the case.
Also, I can't go pick it up at UPS, because their closest pick-up location is in Norwood, which is 2 or 3 cities away from me. Totally logical that they don't have a pick-up location in Boston. I mean, we're only the largest city north of New York. Totally logical there.
When my contract expires, I'm switching to whatever company uses the United States Postal Service.
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