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30 minutes timed writing GO. 

Last night we had a Date Night, which we sorely needed, and the plans were good. I'm tempted to write a public blog post reviewing this, event, but I hate writing reviews which are not positive. so I would have to do a lot of thinking first. 

We went to see John Hodgman at Underground Arts. Being fans of the Judge John Hodgman podcast and fans of his work in general, we were excited about it, and probably more fangirly than usual, like looking forward more to any possible meet-and-greet afterwards than to the actual show. 

Underground Arts is a fairly good venue, but at 12th and Callowhill, the surrounding area is mostly parking lots and warehouses that seem to have been turned into loft apartments and offices. so it feels a little lonely and creepy to walk around at night. The club is in a giant basement, so it has that creepy-underground-club vibe; although it's very clean, the walls seem scraped, and it's all concrete everywhere. I'm generally okay with this. The lighting and decor seems thrifted and very DIY. Probably the most exciting piece of furniture is the faux electric chair that you find on your way to the restrooms. 

They serve food, but all I saw was large baskets of fries being ferried through the crowd by a waitress who looked like Wednesday Addams' cousin Friday. The drinks were roughly Center City prices; $5 for a PBR, $6 for a well drink, and they had a row of recognizable brands like Pinnacle and Jameson,which I didn't bother to ask about. I got one vodka and Sprite to keep things easy. 

There was seating, stackable plastic and metal chairs, but by the time we got there, it was full. I went around one corner to check the side seating, and it was clearly the people who'd arrived at 6pm. To be honest, it looked like the faculty of Swarthmore College. 

After about 20 minutes of standing on a concrete floor, I wanted to go over there and say that I was a rep from NPR's development team, and say that any top-level donors to WHYY or WXPN should follow me for a secret meet and greet. I figured at least ten would fall for it, and maybe I could lose them in the building somewhere so Vince and I could get seats. 

I'm glad I wore my Doc Martens, but I was pretty uncomfortable by the time the show started. We were standing behind the last row of seats, about a 40-foot distance, with nothing to lean on.  That being said, it was crowded and the audience was enthusiastic. 

It also was the kind of crowd where you could figure out a demographic really fast. It's not often that I feel like I'm not white-educated-liberal enough, but this was one of those times. At one point, Hodgman made a joke about "when you get enough white people in an enclosed space, they tend to turn on each other," and people laughed because it was true. 

So, Hodgman doesn't really do punchline comedy, it's what I think marketing reps would call "observational humor." It was about 85 minutes of storytelling, followed by him playing a couple of songs on the ukulele that the audience would sing along with. he played Road Runner by Jonathan Richman, and Rocky Top Tennesee, which I didn't know, but I was happily singing along with. 

here's where things felt weird. he basically talked about his summer vacation and his summer vacation homes. he has an inherited house in Western Massachusetts, and a purchased vacation home in Maine, in addition to his home in Brooklyn. The comedy reminded me of a story I heard once about Richard Pryor, how when he started peaking as a comedian, his humor started becoming about experiences he had riding in his limo on the Sunset Strip, or dealing with stalker fans he might or might not have slept with, things his audience couldn't relate to because of the wealth gap. 

So, on the one hand, he tells this story about how awesome it was so go swimming with Jonathan Coulton in Western Massachuetts, and it was a beautiful story about inhibitions and personal freedom and nature. and then the punchline was how fun it was to get recognized by some young fans afterwards. 

then he tells this story about being in Maine and dealing with his son being bullied by the local super-wealthy super-waspy summer people at the local yacht club, and how weird and creepy the divide between rich vacationers and poor locals is, and how painful and punishing the climate and geography can be. and he's sort of trying to be the participant-observer, straddling the working class and vacation class, but ultimately it feels weird because he's able to "save" his son by the sheer fact that he's been on The Daily Show, and has similar status to the kids' mother whose husband works in finance. 

and all I can think of is the people who would harass me when I worked at Ticket Philadelphia, who would use the word "summer" as a verb. and having to take it. 

So basically, here's how his material works. If you're someone who loves pure storytelling for its own sake, wordplay and sentence craft, juxtaposition of odd ideas and story elements, this is your kind of show. Not often enough do you hear material where the laugh line is "Shirley Jackson." But, if you're going to stand on a concrete floor for 90 minutes in a very crowded basement, with no pain relief besides a plastic dixie cup of ice, soda and a splash of Bankers'  Club Vodka, it might not be the best way to receive it.  

he said toward the end that this was new material. I was slightly disappointed at that, because on some website it said he was doing to do I Stole Your Dad, a rehearsed show he did several times last year, which includes his impression of Ayn Rand.  I wasn't expecting to hear "how I spend my summer vacations." 

there was a wonderfully twisted bit of logic at the end about how he and his wife were pressured into buying a boat, along with their two vacation houses, that lapsed into some storytelling that combined H.P. Lovecraft's and Shirley Jackson's styles in a way that was extremely clever, amusing and chilling, but by then I was forcing myself to stay tuned in to ignore my sciatica clamping my left thigh into paralysis. 

I have to order some more books from Powell's so I can have a Powell's Box, so I can put it on top of my printer so Mo can sit in it, instead of sitting next to me while I type and poking at me. 

We left as the applause was starting, because we were both aching. We were also dumb enough not to eat before the show, so we were starving. So, no, we didn't stand in the meet and greet line, and the elevator pitches I practiced in my head in the car on the way there so maybe he can help me find an agent are still filed for later elevator pitches. 

(if you think that's nuts, I know a woman, extremely talented, smart and skilled, who was so involved in practicing her theoretical Tony Awards Acceptance speech one night while driving that she missed a NJ Turnpike exit and ended up driving around in the dark for an hour trying to find her way back. if you don't have an awards acceptance speech practiced, you don't have goals.)

here are some take-aways from the experience. 

1) I have to stop being so hard on myself and just trust that my voice is unique, and uniqueness, craft and determination (on the characters' part) makes a good story. if this guy can get up there and talk for 90 minutes about how it was such a stupid decision for him to spend a lot of money on having a vacation paradise, then there is nothing wrong with my sketch about the woman whose mom worships Barbra Streisand. 

2) On waking this morning, Vince said, "I've figured it out; John Hodgman is Garrison Keillor for people born after the baby boom generation." 

3) if I go to see John Hodgman again, I am going early, and bringing my knitting, a hip flask, and at least a cup of almonds in a ziploc bag. and ibuprofen. 

I saw Laurie Anderson perform once at McCarter. In the performance, she said that a year or so earlier, she had sort of run out of ideas and needed something to fuel her art, so she got a job at a McDonald's in Queens. It gave her a lot of material, about class, race, privilege and the economy. Then September 11th happened, and she changed the next show she wanted to do (although this story was in the post-9/11 show that I saw, so it certainly didn't go to waste).  The story culminated in a bit where she talked about how people she knew in real life, people from her Manhattan art world, would come to the McDonald's where she worked, and she'd try to wink at them, to signal that she knew them, and they would look right through her. 

I think that sometimes when artists who mine their own experience for storytelling get a little too famous, they end up telling stories about touring, or their vacations, or airplane jokes, or things to which only other touring artists can relate. because they're so busy working that they lose sight of other experience. I think that's when it's time to get a job at McDonald's for six months or a year. 

Okay. Today we're finishing the podcast so we can submit it to Soundcloud for approval (argh), and I need to clean the basement and deal with the catboxes. I really wish I could get an e-mail saying, "hey, (theatre company) is interested in your play," so I could be bucked up by some ego boost while I scoop and shovel cat poop. 

I thought of a horrible, horrible prank, and it could so easily be played on me, so I'm just going to tell the prank idea here. That way a) nobody will try to play it on me, b)if it gets played on someone else, I won't get blamed for it, because why would I explain the prank and then do it? 

My original thought was this:
Your mark is a working musician. The more pompous the better. 
You send them an e-mail from the assistant to the assistant for let's say, David Bowie. He's doing an extremely small tour of very small clubs only for people on a fan club mailing list, and he wants a local backing band for each venue. he's playing at, let's say, The Tin Angel, and there's a contract with legal mumbo-jumbo and gag orders and stuff that your mark has to sign, but if he signs, he gets told to go to a particular studio to rehearse with David Bowie and the other local musicians that will make up the backing band. You send some sheet music or charts or something for them to practice with, maybe some midi files of chords. 
You dangle the carrot that tracks from each show may go into a live album. 

So, your mark preps some material, let's say 30 minutes' worth to make it even more annoying. They show up at the rehearsal studio, and nobody's there. 

This is where you can be as cruel or bizarre as you want. Send them to a warehouse in a deserted neighborhood, or a clean, brightly lit rehearsal studio in a nice neighborhood, with lots of moms picking up and dropping off their kids for flute and oboe practice. I think the second option would be more fun, because you can have whoever's working the front desk say, "I have no idea what you're talking about," while recording your pompous musician insisting they're there to meet David Bowie. 

I think this prank could easily be played on me, by changing only a few variables. All you'd have to do is send me an e-mail saying that a theatre company to which I've actually sent something passed my script on to another artist or company that I admire, and tell me to go somewhere for a meeting to discuss the script. Next thing you know, I'm at the offices of the Roundabout, fresh off a Bolt Bus, tearfully insisting that I'm there to meet Todd Haimes and Jill Rafson. 

OKAY. That's enough out of me for right now.