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Comedy Karma and the Connecticut Comedy Nightmare

I have been delinquent in my blogging duties this week for a variety of reasons, but I am back on this glorious 4th of July to celebrate that most American of professions… stand up comedy.  July will be the busiest month of my year so far and it kicked off with a July 3rd feature gig at Foxwoods for my buddy (who will become “one of my best friends” once he hits it big, which is what all comedians seem to do these days), and hilarious comedian, John Moses.  He asked me to feature for him for one night (he is the feature for someone else the rest of the weekend).  The gig only paid $50, but John was driving and he thought it was a good opportunity to get me in front of the people from Comix to possibly get work down the line.

Side Note on John – he is an extremely talented comic, hard working and like me, someone who is not caught up in the mutual admiration society that has become the world of stand up comedy.  He just does his work, makes people laugh and moves on to the next opportunity or job.  But, at the risk of sounding like what I hate, that is why John is one of the few people I trust in comedy.  So I headed up to Foxwoods with John and his fiancée.  I lugged my podcast equipment to record an episode with John before the show, but in a sign of worse things to come the drive took about 6 hours with holiday traffic and we arrived only 30 minutes before show time.  No time for the podcast.  Not even time to ice my shoulder from lugging aforementioned podcast equipment.

The club at Foxwoods, Comix, is really nice and just walking around the casino I kept thinking two things – one, I wish all the casino gigs I got were not one-nighters and two, I wish I was not a struggling comedian because I would love to go to a casino for a nice weekend vacation.  Being a comedian is like being permanently on a working vacation.  You are not tied to an office, but you are always sort of working on stuff.  I was taking two vacations a year when I had a regular job.  I have not travelled anywhere that was not comedy-related or family visit-related in 4 years.   So if you consider play station marathons vacations then I am the most relaxed man in the world.

The gig went great.  I did 22 minutes, taped a really solid set, sold a CD to the one guy who was buying merchandise from anyone and also had J-L fan (and Dexter superfan from Tuesday’s podcast episode) Jon Butler show up to the show with a buddy.  Then the booker came up to me in the green room and told me he enjoyed my set.  Perfect – done.  Good set and even at $50 I was going to turn a profit on the gig.  And then Comedy Karma (CK?), like some sort of villain from a Stephen King novel, intervened. Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (this could have also been a pick-up line he told to his side action referring to his penis)  Well according to J-L Cauvin, the arc of comedy is sad, and bends towards fu*king you over.  Here is a timeline of what happened from that point on:

9:52 pm – I accompany John and his fiancée to Fuddrucker’s next door to the club for dinner.  I ate at the club already, but the two of them were starving and with John willing to drive me 1 hour to the New Haven train station I had no intention of being pushy.  Important detail: the last Metro North train to NYC from New Haven was scheduled to leave at 1135pm.

9:55pm – a woman cuts in front of John and his fiancée on the Fuddrucker’s line.  This is a great move that people should try more often, especially women.  I have been cut on line several times in my life and I do what most people do – I huff and I question and I semi-speak up, but then I sort of reach a confusion level where I half doubt if I was ahead of the person on line, simply because the conduct of the person cutting is slightly out of my frame of normal behavior that I know how to respond to.  The three of us did that to this woman’s cutting.  She took two minutes with her order.  Like The Usual Suspects you will want to review this timeline when you finish this blog to see all of the things that contribute to its tragic ending.

10:18 – Dinner is finished.  Just as we are saying goodbye to John’s fiancée who is headed up to the room, John realizes he left his valet parking ticket up in the room.

10:26 John hands the ticket to the valet

10:31 I get in the car with John.  I turn on the GPS and it is giving me an estimated 1144pm arrival at the New Haven Metro North station.  What then transpired was the first installment of a potential film franchise known as The Crass and the Furious, starring John Moses as Paul Walker and J-L Cauvin as Vin Diesel.  John Moses proceeds to shed 12 and a half minutes off of that time, all in a 2001 Malibu.  The unfortunate part is that he needed to shed 13 and a half minutes for me to catch the train.  When we arrived at 1136 pm there was no sign of the train.  John had basically pulled a Rocky I – he made it closer than anyone thought possible, but in the end Comedy Karma had received just enough help from a Fuddrucker’s skank and a momentary lapse in valet card placement judgment.

11:52pm We decide to look for a bus station to see if there are any midnight buses.  My GPS leads me to just a random public bus stop in West New Haven, where skinny black and white men wear lots of tattoos and no t-shirts at night. We arrive at the bus stop at 12:01 to see that it is a bench with a Rite Aid in the background.  Despair begins to set in.

12:07 We drive back to a La Quinta Inn, which had a sign out front saying “Rates from $95 a night.”  Considering I needed something walking distance to the train in the morning this was the most affordable choice.  I have stayed in La Quinta Inns before.  They are a solid chain, but not all La Quintas are created La Equal.  This felt more like a housing project that had been converted into a La Quinta Inn.  I go in and the lobby (and as it turns out the hallways) have no air conditioning.  I sign up for a room and John Moses says to me “You can’t quit comedy… not like this,” apparently reading a look of despair on my face that Helen Keller could have seen.  I bid him safe travels and went upstairs to my room.

12:20am If you have seen the movie Heat then you know the character Waingro (also cinema’s best representation of comedy karma).  He is a psycho who ruins everything for Robert DeNiro and when DeNiro has a chance to escape he decides to pay back Waingro, which eventually seals his fate.  This hotel and hotel room felt like the hotel in Heat where Waingro murders a prostitute. The room is sweltering so I turned the air conditioning on full blast.  I waited until my body had reached a decent level of cooling and then pulled down the sheets to reveal (no exaggeration) blood stains and some grey-ish brown streaks.  So in fact a murder may have actually taken place here, or at least a miscarriage.  Needless to say I slept on the other side of the bed.

12:47am I look up on Amtrak.com the trains in the morning.  I might as well travel in modest style home if I am already losing significant money on this trip.  And then what I saw truly horrified me.  There was a 12:35 am Amtrak for $39 that I had just missed and had forgotten even ran. It reminded me of the Stephen King movie The Fog, where Thomas Jane opts to kill his son in an act of mercy before he starves to death, only to have help come minutes later.

2:00am I fall asleep, ending the nightmare.  Well played Comedy Karma.

For more opinions, comedy and bridge burning check out the Righteous Prick Podcast on Podomatic or iTunes. New Every Tuesday!

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Aging Gracelessly

Brett Favre has become a big joke to many sports fans with his inability to stop playing football and pronounce his name correctly.  This is often the case with great athletes, unable to hang up the cleats or sneakers or skates because their lives have had no other real goal or purpose other than excelling at sports.  But that is excusable in a sense because to attain the level of excellence they have achieved they had to be single minded from a young age and dedicated beyond reason to get where they are.  Sort of like Michael Jackson minus the all the abuse.

But it seems to me that from Facebook and fantasy sports to Harry Potter and plastic surgery our culture is obsessed with staying in our teens and twenties no matter what.  And to compensate for this, we’ve begun to add the words “classic” and “historic” to things that have not really obtained classic or historic status in any objective sense of the word.  Harry Potter is not a “classic” as is printed on the book covers.  And unlike its true classic predecessors, The Lord of The Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, which have withstood a test of time, Potter has no deeper meaning or societal commentary that is usually necessary for something to gain elevation beyond pop relevance.  But to justify our culture’s unwarranted obsession with things puerile and fleeting we tag them with words like classic so that instead of feeling vapid we feel like part of something important.  And boy do we live in a golden age of importance!

Ipod now refers to the regular iPod as “iPod classic” – how many decades was Coca Cola in business before they threw classic on their beverage.  Watching the E! channel against my will yesterday I heard Ryan Seacrest make a bold proclamation that the cast of Dancing With The Stars this Fall was the largest in the show’s “History! ” It just seemed to cheapen the word History.  I think of History in terms decades and centuries, not in terms of a few television seasons.  To say nothing of the fact that the word “star” is still a misnomer for this show.

At this age I was already "classic" in today's terms. As opposed to the bow tie look, which was and is classic in the more traditional sense.
At this age I was already “classic” in today’s terms. As opposed to the bow tie look, which was and is classic in the more traditional sense.

Fame has always been fleeting and cheap, but even by that low standard it feels like we are actually living through a time where the value of celebrity is being downgraded.  If he had known what we know now Andy Warhol might have re-stated, everyone will get their 2-3 seasons of fame.  Like the Kardashians.

But to quote DeNiro from Heat, there is a flip side to this coin.  While older people are trying to resist maturity, their kids, left under the watchful and protective eyes of cell phones and the Internet, are in a hurry to leave childhood.  I watched Big yesterday, the film with Tom Hanks.  And in it he plays a 12 year old boy who likes playing with toys and does not know much about girls, etc.  It was a fun, humorous film and completely unrelatable to kids today.  Nowadays to get a kid to act like that and have the audience believe it, it would have to be a 7 year old, because by 12 Josh Baskins c. 2009 would be sexting on his iPhone and encouraging Elizabeth Perkins to do that thing he saw in a porno.

If I were to make a satirical film about the future it would just feature a society filled with people who looked 24 – some would be 13 year olds trying to look and act older, neglecting the fun and innocence of youth; others would be 58 trying through surgery and fashion to look younger and neglecting the wisdom and quality that can come from a long and fulfilling life.  Then there would be a group of 24 year olds going, “What the fu-k is going on?”  And it will star Seth Rogan playing all three since he is the only actor in his 20s who acts like a teenager, but looks much older than he actually is.

The Empire State Building was built around 80 years ago in 14 months.  I look around Manhattan and see buildings one-fifth the size taking five times as long to build.  Technology serves a legitimate function, but I feel like our culture in general is taking major steps backwards, while the bells and whistles of technology give us the appearance of progress.  As my Uncle is fond of saying, “Don’t confuse movement with action.”  Right now it feels like our culture is making a lot of movement, but not much action.

Now back to my Nintendo Wii.