I could see it beginning last night.
A simple supper at Garnett's with Mr. Wright on a Wednesday evening turned out to be a standing room only valentine's eve kind of a vibe. Our server - wearing a heart-red cullotte dress - confirmed my guess that we were likely surrounded by early celebrants.
The multi-day extravaganza that is Valentine's Day was upon us and we'd just come for food.
Or at least I had, since it's a holiday not high on my hit parade, though Mr. Wright later unveiled a non-Valentine's Day envelope of his own.
Walking with Mac this morning after two days of road trips for me, we crossed one of our usual corners on the way to the river, only to intersect with an ex of mine. Howdy, stranger is about all I said as we kept moving, but on the way back, two different strangers wished us a happy Valentine's Day.
Grocery shopping meant dodging wild-eyed men seeking flowers, cards and balloons and by the time I finished, I'd talked myself into going directly to Nate's Bagels. Semms they'd baked pink everything, sesame and poppy seed bagels in anticipation of hungry lovebirds (or just the expectations of the masses), but they'd already sold out of the pink everythings.
Since I was there to indulge myself, I didn't really care what color the bagel was. Priorities, people.
Once home from Nate's, I found my annual valentine in the mailbox from Holmes and Beloved. For as long as I've known this man, he sends me a kiddie valentine in a small red envelope inside a large white envelope addressed to me. He always signs both their names to demonstrate his aim is true.
And although I'm not at all into a big celebration on this day, I did need to get out after an intense day at my desk. That's how I ended up walking over to Coalition Theater - past couple after couple framed in the windows at Max's - to see "U Up?" aka a Valentine's Day sketch comedy show.
Turns out lots of people wanted to see comedy about love, courting and romancing tonight and most of them had been wise enough to order tickets online. Not me, so I put my name on a waiting list behind one other couple and sat down to wait.
There were sketches of all kinds from a Millennial Dating Game show where the woman had to pick from three guys she's already hooked up with to Trish and Dave's Extreme Date Night, which was a Bird Box date night ending with a lot of blood and bumping into each other.
Life without you is like a broken pencil. Pointless.
Multiple were the sex talks we witnessed, from one with Star Wars characters (spoiler alert: it involves a bikini and biting the head off a giant slug) to Harry Potter getting the talk from assorted teachers including Voldemort the virgin. Even the Terminator stopped caressing his Nerf gun long enough for his Mom to explain how babies were made. Naturally it involved a picture of a woman he'd never met.
I like that you're obsessed with me.
"Dine Another Day" involved James Bond and Doctor Killmore losing their dates when they can't stop battling for rhetorical dynamic dominance with each other and behave properly date-like. That meant lines like, "Mr. Bond, looks like you have a license to kill...conversation!" as his date stalks out of the restaurant.
You are the nuclear accelerant to my heart.
One of the smartest sketches involved a couple pulling out their argument card decks, using whatever card would help them best their mate in verbal sparring. He pulls out the "turn the table" card or the "spread the blame" card and next thing you know, she resorts to pulling out the "trap" card. You can imagine how that ended.
Tell me about your fiancee, the tuxedo salesman asks. "She likes music, naps and lunch, just like me."
For the "Divorce Doctor" set, couples were looking for reasons to consciously uncouple so they could celebrate the myriad pleasures of being divorced. When one woman took issue with her mate for buying Miracle Whip instead of Duke's mayonnaise, it was in pursuit of a divorce. Heated words were exchanged, with the woman yelling that Miracle Whip doesn't have enough oil in it to be called mayonnaise so she's outta there.
"Speak it!" a guy two seats down from me called out passionately to the couple. He doesn't care about them breaking up, just about mayo superiority.
Richmond, taking their Duke's seriously since 1607. Valentine's Day, not so much.
Showing posts with label coalition theater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coalition theater. Show all posts
Thursday, February 14, 2019
Saturday, September 15, 2018
Throwing the Chihuahua
Turns out we're currently a sanctuary city.
All I knew when I left home was that it was raining lightly and I needed to be entertained. Walking past Gallery 5, I saw a young band knocking on the door, asking where to park to unload their equipment (I could've told them that). At Saison Market, I saw a guy smoking a cig under the awning and futher on, through the window, I could see a man on a table being tattooed. The clutch of valets at Max's were bored and teasing each other.
Inside, I could see the bar was empty. If that's not a sign, I don't know what is.
The bartender poured my Espolon and the manager - whom I'd seen on my walk this very morning - greeted me for the second time today. After the bartender asked how we knew each other (the early Balliceaux days) we lighted on the subject of fashion.
She bragged about how fashionable her leopard print roller skates with the red wheels are (and I don't doubt it), sharing how she'd put them on the day they arrived and skated around her house for four hours to practice. I don't have that kind of room in my apartment, but then again, I never could skate, so it's a moot point.
I left there at 7:56 ("Cutting it kind of close, aren't you?" the other bartender asked when I said I had an 8:00 show to go to) but since I was only going a few doors down to Coalition Comedy, I still managed to be early.
The room was pretty crowded for the final installment of "Made-up Movie," an improvised film of which I'd seen none of the previous episodes. I wound up between a woman saving three seats for friends (only one showed) and two brothers from Raleigh who'd escaped Florence's impending doom by high-tailing it to Richmond.
When the one seated closest to me mentioned that they were originally from New Jersey, I asked why they'd moved to Carolina. "The weather, mostly," he said with a grimace. Since I had some recent Jersey cred, I shared that I'd gone to Wildwood for the first time in March and been wowed by the roller coaster on the beach because I'd never seen one before.
"You know we don't have those on all of our beaches, right?" he asked solicitously.
The next question out of his mouth was about how long I've lived in Richmond. Telling him it had been 30 years seemed to impress him. My question to him was about where they'd eaten beforehand.
"The back door at Tarrant's," he said, mistakenly putting the emphasis on the second syllable, like ta-RANTS. "My brother likes hole-in-the-wall places." I gently broke it to him that said hole-in-the-wall is attached to a good-sized restaurant with several sibling eateries and unless he'd ordered off the back door menu (fish tacos, fried chicken, fried fish sandwich or pizza), he'd missed the mark.
Nope, they'd ordered off the main menu, but the good news was they'd loved their food, so it went in the win column.
After he asked what I did, of course he had to ask for restaurant recommendations, dutifully noting them in his phone. When he asked for good bars, I had to explain that we don't have just bars in Virginia, but I could suggest some lounge-y places to imbibe if he was interested. He was.
Finally, the show started with a pair of guys improvising sets based on bad movie theme songs we heard a snippet of. And by bad, I mean singers like Bryan Adams and Peter Cetera. You know, the kind of singers that the army would play at top volume as a torture method or to force bad guys out of their hideaways.
Highlights included a discussion of why saying "gambling bookie" is redundant and the hilarious non-sequiter, "That's my fault because I threw a chihuahua at her?"
For the main event, the made-up movie, the audience was asked for a song lyric as a starting point. "I was gonna go to work but then I got high," one guy yelled out immediately.
"Somebody was ready," the group leader said, shaking her head and leading her crew offstage.
Easily the most amusing recurring segment of the movie involved an old grandpa who, cane slung over his shoulder and at the ready should he need it, was guarding his family's ice cream store. If anyone dared approach it, he'd demand the password. Sometimes, he'd just poke kids with his cane to scare them off.
Eventually, an 8-year old boy comes by and begins talking to him about how awful childhood is these days. "Life as a kid in the '50s, what was that like?" he eagerly asks Grandpa.
"My Mom would kick me out of the house at 5 a.m. and lock the door," he told the young whipper snapper. "I'd be out all day playing with rusty stuff. I'd come home at 11:00 at night and had to find food for myself."
I was rolling on the floor laughing (definitely more so than some of the younger people around me) and the youngster was mesmerized by tales of the glory days of childhood. "Wow, I've never even seen 11 p.m.!" he gushed. "Did you ever get to smoke cigarettes in bomb shelters?"
When the old man can't take the fawning anymore, he tries to get rid of the kid, first by giving him a pack of cigs and pointing him towards his bomb shelter. Then, it was, "Here, kid it's a rusty can. Go play!" Naturally, the kid cuts himself badly, thus ensuring the best kind of unsupervised childhood.
Hearing, "You're going straight to juvey, kid," sounded straight out of a '30s crime movie about kids gone wrong.
There were other subplots, one about a strip mall cop with an overprotective mother and one about a woman with too many ferrets and too much time to talk to them. One had to do with two college roommates, one a stoner and one a good girl, at least until she succumbs to stoner life ("Every problem has a solution and it usually comes in a bottle," she says, cradling a prescription of Oxycotin) which, of course, involved a 311 song being sung by a cast member from the sidelines.
And funny as all that was, and it kept the room laughing pretty much nonstop, nothing compared to the moment when Grandpa's long-estranged son shows up at the ice cream shop in disguise. When Grandpa tells him he recognizes him, the son explains he's stayed away because of the way his father treated him.
"But I've always been proud of you, I'm still very proud of you," the old man tells his son. And what does the son do? Wait for it: he tells his father to say it again and pulls out his phone to record the admission.
Now that's some seriously hysterical improvisation. That's Seinfeld-worthy observational humor right there. What good is hearing the words you've craved since childhood, the words that mean more to you than anything, if you don't have a video clip of it? I mean, did it even happen with no video?
And that's exactly what I'd told the Raleigh-by-way-of-New-Jersey guy when he'd asked why I was at Coalition. I always laugh when I go, sometimes a little and sometimes a whole lot.
When you mock the obsession to give up real life experience for the sake of online documentation, there's nothing funnier. Why? Because that's real life. And after all, they say comedy is just a funny way of being serious.
Beats playing with a rusty can.
All I knew when I left home was that it was raining lightly and I needed to be entertained. Walking past Gallery 5, I saw a young band knocking on the door, asking where to park to unload their equipment (I could've told them that). At Saison Market, I saw a guy smoking a cig under the awning and futher on, through the window, I could see a man on a table being tattooed. The clutch of valets at Max's were bored and teasing each other.
Inside, I could see the bar was empty. If that's not a sign, I don't know what is.
The bartender poured my Espolon and the manager - whom I'd seen on my walk this very morning - greeted me for the second time today. After the bartender asked how we knew each other (the early Balliceaux days) we lighted on the subject of fashion.
She bragged about how fashionable her leopard print roller skates with the red wheels are (and I don't doubt it), sharing how she'd put them on the day they arrived and skated around her house for four hours to practice. I don't have that kind of room in my apartment, but then again, I never could skate, so it's a moot point.
I left there at 7:56 ("Cutting it kind of close, aren't you?" the other bartender asked when I said I had an 8:00 show to go to) but since I was only going a few doors down to Coalition Comedy, I still managed to be early.
The room was pretty crowded for the final installment of "Made-up Movie," an improvised film of which I'd seen none of the previous episodes. I wound up between a woman saving three seats for friends (only one showed) and two brothers from Raleigh who'd escaped Florence's impending doom by high-tailing it to Richmond.
When the one seated closest to me mentioned that they were originally from New Jersey, I asked why they'd moved to Carolina. "The weather, mostly," he said with a grimace. Since I had some recent Jersey cred, I shared that I'd gone to Wildwood for the first time in March and been wowed by the roller coaster on the beach because I'd never seen one before.
"You know we don't have those on all of our beaches, right?" he asked solicitously.
The next question out of his mouth was about how long I've lived in Richmond. Telling him it had been 30 years seemed to impress him. My question to him was about where they'd eaten beforehand.
"The back door at Tarrant's," he said, mistakenly putting the emphasis on the second syllable, like ta-RANTS. "My brother likes hole-in-the-wall places." I gently broke it to him that said hole-in-the-wall is attached to a good-sized restaurant with several sibling eateries and unless he'd ordered off the back door menu (fish tacos, fried chicken, fried fish sandwich or pizza), he'd missed the mark.
Nope, they'd ordered off the main menu, but the good news was they'd loved their food, so it went in the win column.
After he asked what I did, of course he had to ask for restaurant recommendations, dutifully noting them in his phone. When he asked for good bars, I had to explain that we don't have just bars in Virginia, but I could suggest some lounge-y places to imbibe if he was interested. He was.
Finally, the show started with a pair of guys improvising sets based on bad movie theme songs we heard a snippet of. And by bad, I mean singers like Bryan Adams and Peter Cetera. You know, the kind of singers that the army would play at top volume as a torture method or to force bad guys out of their hideaways.
Highlights included a discussion of why saying "gambling bookie" is redundant and the hilarious non-sequiter, "That's my fault because I threw a chihuahua at her?"
For the main event, the made-up movie, the audience was asked for a song lyric as a starting point. "I was gonna go to work but then I got high," one guy yelled out immediately.
"Somebody was ready," the group leader said, shaking her head and leading her crew offstage.
Easily the most amusing recurring segment of the movie involved an old grandpa who, cane slung over his shoulder and at the ready should he need it, was guarding his family's ice cream store. If anyone dared approach it, he'd demand the password. Sometimes, he'd just poke kids with his cane to scare them off.
Eventually, an 8-year old boy comes by and begins talking to him about how awful childhood is these days. "Life as a kid in the '50s, what was that like?" he eagerly asks Grandpa.
"My Mom would kick me out of the house at 5 a.m. and lock the door," he told the young whipper snapper. "I'd be out all day playing with rusty stuff. I'd come home at 11:00 at night and had to find food for myself."
I was rolling on the floor laughing (definitely more so than some of the younger people around me) and the youngster was mesmerized by tales of the glory days of childhood. "Wow, I've never even seen 11 p.m.!" he gushed. "Did you ever get to smoke cigarettes in bomb shelters?"
When the old man can't take the fawning anymore, he tries to get rid of the kid, first by giving him a pack of cigs and pointing him towards his bomb shelter. Then, it was, "Here, kid it's a rusty can. Go play!" Naturally, the kid cuts himself badly, thus ensuring the best kind of unsupervised childhood.
Hearing, "You're going straight to juvey, kid," sounded straight out of a '30s crime movie about kids gone wrong.
There were other subplots, one about a strip mall cop with an overprotective mother and one about a woman with too many ferrets and too much time to talk to them. One had to do with two college roommates, one a stoner and one a good girl, at least until she succumbs to stoner life ("Every problem has a solution and it usually comes in a bottle," she says, cradling a prescription of Oxycotin) which, of course, involved a 311 song being sung by a cast member from the sidelines.
And funny as all that was, and it kept the room laughing pretty much nonstop, nothing compared to the moment when Grandpa's long-estranged son shows up at the ice cream shop in disguise. When Grandpa tells him he recognizes him, the son explains he's stayed away because of the way his father treated him.
"But I've always been proud of you, I'm still very proud of you," the old man tells his son. And what does the son do? Wait for it: he tells his father to say it again and pulls out his phone to record the admission.
Now that's some seriously hysterical improvisation. That's Seinfeld-worthy observational humor right there. What good is hearing the words you've craved since childhood, the words that mean more to you than anything, if you don't have a video clip of it? I mean, did it even happen with no video?
And that's exactly what I'd told the Raleigh-by-way-of-New-Jersey guy when he'd asked why I was at Coalition. I always laugh when I go, sometimes a little and sometimes a whole lot.
When you mock the obsession to give up real life experience for the sake of online documentation, there's nothing funnier. Why? Because that's real life. And after all, they say comedy is just a funny way of being serious.
Beats playing with a rusty can.
Saturday, November 11, 2017
It's Alright, It's Okay
If this is fall, I rest my case.
For months now I've had to listen to how eagerly everyone wanted autumn to roll in, for it to be sweater and scarf weather, for the heat and humidity to go away. Now that you all got what you wanted, I find myself waking up today to find that's it's 42 degrees and today's high is 43! Not acceptable.
How is it that Monday I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and today I have on leggings, two layers of tops, a sweater, a wool coat, scarf, boots and gloves? How can it be that all my windows were open when the week began and now they're all shut, with storm windows lowered behind them?
I'll tell you how: flippin' fall is finally here, with the moldy leaves to prove it.
All I can say is, I hope all of you are happy. I'm not. Granted, there are other reasons for that (and that's another blog post, one that only the few see), but this frigid air and gusty wind need to go.
Cold and crabby about it, I landed at Citizen, which turned out to be just the thing on a night like this. The place was warm, fragrant with good smells and hopping, no doubt in part because both Dylan and John Cleese are in town tonight. As a bonus, the affable chef came by to say hello.
Giving black bean and cheese pupusas a swipe of tomatillo salsa, I tucked into them, appreciating the complementary crunchiness of the curtido on the side, while eavesdropping on the next table, two of whom were planning to run the marathon tomorrow.
Good luck with that, I'll wave as I walk by.
Tasty as the pupusas were, I've had them before, so for my main course I chose a special of rockfish over a tomato-based stew of potatoes, onions, garlic and wilted kale for something new. The moment I got a whiff of that warm, well-seasoned broth, I started to thaw and once I began sopping the broth with bread, I could almost forget the unfortunate season that raged outside.
If that sounds a bit over-dramatic, consider that my Dad's nickname for me as a child was Camille for just that reason.
But laughter was what I needed, so I finished out the evening at the Coalition Theater for "Project 27," an improvised long-form spoof series on '70s spy movies. The 27 comes from the ages of the skit's three main characters - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison - when they died.
Tonight, they were sent on a mission by Agent X to apprehend the Russian female agent Natalia, who, along with the evil Dr. Money, plans to blow up New York and then go dig up the gold he buried in Dover, Delaware. Natalia plans to rocket toward safety listening to the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" because she loves to dance.
Whether the subject was disco, orgies or drugs, Dr. Money would just shrug and remind us, "Hey, it's the '70s." Right on.
Because our heroes were rock gods, there was a fair amount of comedy about heroin and tripping, with one of Jim Morrison's best lines (comparing tripping and tryptophan) all but drowned out from so much laughter. There were times when the cast could barely keep from cracking up at each other, it was so hilarious. As audience members, we didn't even have to try.
Besides, I was there. If it was the '70s, nobody would remember either way.
For months now I've had to listen to how eagerly everyone wanted autumn to roll in, for it to be sweater and scarf weather, for the heat and humidity to go away. Now that you all got what you wanted, I find myself waking up today to find that's it's 42 degrees and today's high is 43! Not acceptable.
How is it that Monday I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and today I have on leggings, two layers of tops, a sweater, a wool coat, scarf, boots and gloves? How can it be that all my windows were open when the week began and now they're all shut, with storm windows lowered behind them?
I'll tell you how: flippin' fall is finally here, with the moldy leaves to prove it.
All I can say is, I hope all of you are happy. I'm not. Granted, there are other reasons for that (and that's another blog post, one that only the few see), but this frigid air and gusty wind need to go.
Cold and crabby about it, I landed at Citizen, which turned out to be just the thing on a night like this. The place was warm, fragrant with good smells and hopping, no doubt in part because both Dylan and John Cleese are in town tonight. As a bonus, the affable chef came by to say hello.
Giving black bean and cheese pupusas a swipe of tomatillo salsa, I tucked into them, appreciating the complementary crunchiness of the curtido on the side, while eavesdropping on the next table, two of whom were planning to run the marathon tomorrow.
Good luck with that, I'll wave as I walk by.
Tasty as the pupusas were, I've had them before, so for my main course I chose a special of rockfish over a tomato-based stew of potatoes, onions, garlic and wilted kale for something new. The moment I got a whiff of that warm, well-seasoned broth, I started to thaw and once I began sopping the broth with bread, I could almost forget the unfortunate season that raged outside.
If that sounds a bit over-dramatic, consider that my Dad's nickname for me as a child was Camille for just that reason.
But laughter was what I needed, so I finished out the evening at the Coalition Theater for "Project 27," an improvised long-form spoof series on '70s spy movies. The 27 comes from the ages of the skit's three main characters - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison - when they died.
Tonight, they were sent on a mission by Agent X to apprehend the Russian female agent Natalia, who, along with the evil Dr. Money, plans to blow up New York and then go dig up the gold he buried in Dover, Delaware. Natalia plans to rocket toward safety listening to the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" because she loves to dance.
Whether the subject was disco, orgies or drugs, Dr. Money would just shrug and remind us, "Hey, it's the '70s." Right on.
Because our heroes were rock gods, there was a fair amount of comedy about heroin and tripping, with one of Jim Morrison's best lines (comparing tripping and tryptophan) all but drowned out from so much laughter. There were times when the cast could barely keep from cracking up at each other, it was so hilarious. As audience members, we didn't even have to try.
Besides, I was there. If it was the '70s, nobody would remember either way.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
