An Evening with Silent Bob

I figure at the rate I'm going, I'll be caught up on my cultural literacy by 2020.

The only problem will be that by doing that, I'll have missed out on the next eight years.

But I can't worry about that.

As part of my effort to catch up, I found myself at the unlikely location of Bottoms Up for a staged reading of "Clerks" by 9:55 Comedy.

It was a fundraiser for the Fan Free Clinic and billed as "a chance to see 'Clerks' as it was never intended."

How better to see it?

This is the group that regularly does stand-up at Pie and while I'd heard from a friend that it could get pretty hilarious, I'd never checked it out for myself.

Instead, here I was ready to watch a bunch of comedians act their way through the 1994 Kevin Smith classic.

About which I knew next to nothing, making me the exception in the room.

My partner-in-crime (for the grasshopper must experience the new with a worldlier one) and I took a table in the second row.

Settling in for the long haul (a day at a convenience store) we ordered a bottle of Camelot Pinot Noir.

Since it had been years since I'd been to Bottoms Up, I had no idea that they now did anything but their trademark thick crust pizza.

I saw that my namesake pizza, the Karen, was still on the menu and made a case for ordering it based on its ingredients: sausage, onions, spinach and ricotta.

Hell, I'd like that combo no matter what the dated woman's name was on it.

A large spinach salad with bacon and eggs tided us over and suddenly there was a clown called Vulgar standing in front of the room and removing his clothing.

You know, because that's what clowns do before "Clerks," it turns out.

By the time he was down to a vest, short shorts and fishnets, the reading was beginning.

He returned periodically to hold up signs setting the scenes ("catharsis," "denouement" and the like) and make some absurd commentary like, "Rage against the machine, bitches!"

It was laugh-out-loud funny coming from a man with a clown smile painted on his face.

As a first-timer, I had no reference point for the original, but I found lots to laugh about.

This group of comedians was acting their way through this 1994 script (when, I'm guessing, most of them were still in elementary school) like hilarious pros.

I was surprised to see a non-comedian friend in the production, although he's an actor (albeit one who'd stepped in at the eleventh hour) so last-minute line learning was well within his capabilities.

He played multiple characters, including one as a customer who reacted to hearing how many times clerk Dante's girlfriend had orally pleasured other guys.

"Thirty seven!" Dante tells him.

"In a row?" he asks incredulously. The room roared.

After our Karen pizza, we indulged in a brownie sundae while watching the travails of the mid-90s lifestyle in Jersey.

Not far into the reading, I realized that a lot of the people sitting around us were saying every line out loud.

Every line.

Things like, "Aside from the cheating, we were a perfect couple" and the recurring "Bunch of savages in this town."

Listening to the slacker jargon of a generation, I realized that I was seeing "Clerks" in a perfectly appropriate way: low key, D.I.Y and in a roomful of people who loved it.

Considering these were non-actors except for one, they did a surprisingly good job of pulling off the reading.

Dante was suitably passive, Randall's smarminess was a thing of beauty and the drug dealer Jay was so over the top cliched and funny as to be an act unto himself.

But credit goes to the entire ensemble because for a story that takes place entirely in a small store, it never lagged for a minute.

And at the end of the evening,  $200 had been raised for Fan Free Clinic.

But more importantly, much more importantly, I'd finally added "Clerks" to my cultural touchstones, although, granted, nearly two decades late.

"I'm not even supposed to be here today!" Dante laments over and over.

Got it. Finally.