If I’m chewing on an artistic or technical problem late at night, I’ll go to bed and then toss and turn and keep half-waking up and mulling over the problem and possible solutions. One in ten times this happens, I’ll wake up with a great solution to the problem, fully realized. More often, however, it goes like it did last night. I went to bed thinking about how exactly to edit the opening to a new Blewt variety show we just filmed. Around 3am (I checked the clock, thinking it was almost morning) I started to think that a puppet or animated cotton work glove would be a great mascot for the show (let me be clear, the show has nothing to do with gloves and none appear in the show). Over the rest of the night, in this dream state, I worked out an entire mechanism for building a wireframe inside a glove, propping it up in front of a green screen, and then stop-motion animating it. In the morning, I realized that a) I’d re-invented the Hamburger Helper glove and b) that this was the dumbest idea ever in the history of ever.

About a hundred years ago (well, around ten) I was occasionally working with a corporate comedy group called Chicago Comedy Company founded by old friends Andy Eninger and Steve Matuszak and when they opened a theater in the suburbs, of the same name, I sometimes performed there as well. Five years ago, another good friend, Lillie Frances, bought the company and theater and I started performing more often. The name of the theater was changed to Laugh Out Loud (which frankly makes a little more sense for a place in the suburbs, though it is still true that most of the performers drive out from Chicago). I stopped performing at the theater back in 2010, but this weekend is the 5th Anniversary and the theater is celebrating with a weekend of Alumni shows. I’ll be performing in the Friday, 7:30 “family-friendly” show. Tickets are just $5.

Laugh Out Loud Theater
601 N. Martingale Road
Streets of Woodfield, Suite 171
Schaumburg, IL

I thought freelancing would mean blogging galore, but instead it’s a lot of running around working for other people (I mean, who knew, right?) and being, for example, two weeks late talking about a big race like the Solider Field 10. Anyway, we did talk about it on the podcast (also late) and Erica blogged the heck out of it—for good reason, it’s the longest she’s ever run in her life and I’m really proud of her.

A postscript: a lesson learned, don’t try to do math right after a race. I tweeted that this was a PR for 10 miles, but in fact I was three minutes faster last year. Oops.

Official Results:
Time: 1:39:33
Pace: 9:58
Place: 7094 / 12537
Place in Age Group (M, 40-44): 607 / 868
Place in Gender: 3813 / 5337

WGN has posted clips of the several bits we did with and for Shatner: providing him with various Star Trek tableaux as he walked from his green room to the studio, making up the audience for his interview, and fielding a scifi trivia team to face off against Shatner. And Tom Abraham’s Gorn stuck around to help Smarty Pants and some kids build a balloon car.

This is not my first time hanging out with the man:

Erica, Kristen, Claire, Shaun, and I all ran the Rave Run 5K last weekend. It’s an untimed novelty run with raveish music and (some) lights along the course. It was fun, but in the podcast we get a bit nitpicky about how it didn’t quite live up to its own hype. But hey, when else do I get to paint my fingernails.

• Erica’s photos

For day-to-day use I wear Skull Candy Ink’d (w/ Mic) because they are cheap (I find them on sale for less than $10 fairly often and buy in bulk when I do, because I’m hard on headphones) and they’re pretty good at blocking outside noise, which really helps on the train. But that feature makes them terrible for running—they block too much noise and I worry I’m going to miss some insanely fast cyclist grunting “left!” or a mother who just lost her stroller yelling the traditional “my baby!” and get in a wreck.

For running and cycling, then, I usually wear the white ear buds that come with iPhones—they’re actually kinda crappy at keeping out background noise, which is good for me, and I like having the little mic/control so I can pause music quickly to be able to hear even better. Right now I also have in the mix some crappy earbuds that were a promo item from Brooks at the last race expo I went to. They don’t have a control, but they were free. That’s a thing for me—I’m hard on headphones, but I’m really hard on running headphones. If I don’t catch them on something and end up stomping on them, then my sweat corrodes them into non-functionality.

I’ve never tried any of the hook-over-the-ear or whathaveyou type headphones. Sorry!

warmly,
Fuzzy

So if you’re a subscriber to Time Out Chicago, issue #425 showed up in your mailbox today and page one greeted you with that handsome bunch up there. This is the last print issue of the magazine, and most of the pictured staff have been laid-off, including myself. Friday was my last official day with the company, though I’m doing a little bit of contract work, helping the new reduced staff get transitioned into their new roles as primarily a web team instead of print journalists. But as Frank Sennett, our outgoing Editor-in-Chief, pointed out in his Afternoon Shift interview yesterday, it really is an amazing crew for a website and I don’t doubt that they’ll continue to be an important part of the Chicago cultural landscape.

As for me, it was great being on the Masthead of TOC for the last seven months (especially right next to such a good friend), but I’m off to new adventures of my own in the Chicago cultural landscape. I had put the word out on Facebook and Twitter (and obliquely, here) that I was looking for a job and a lot of great friends pointed me at various IT jobs. I’m not ruling out a regular IT position, but TOC has made me very picky—I’ve been spoiled. Until that perfect job comes along, I’m going to try putting together various freelance gigs and see how that goes. Friends have been very generous in that regard as well, and I already have gigs lined up in a variety of my talents: IT, web work, video editing, photography. If someone would come along with a job as a ‘beardy guy’ I’d be just about set.

So our good friend Jose Gonzalez, who is, seriously, just one of the finest human beings on the planet, was out in Chicago for CIF and he stuck around in town a few extra days to see even more improv and got a slot in Kevin Mullaney’s Hump Night show and invited a number of people to play. It ended up being Jose, Shaun, Shaun Clayton, and I playing and I have to say that I had a ton of fun. With very little warmup or discussion, we all clicked and played a form called “going where the winds of improv carry us,” which is to say we dicked around. And yet we actually told a somewhat coherent story. Of sorts. Anyway, it was a bunch of fun. More photos from the evening are here.

Erica and I reviewed the race for the podcast.

Official Results: Time: 49:40 Pace: 10:00 Place: 17,734/33,219 Place in Sex: 9,741/13,988 Place in Division (M40-44): 1,238/1,810

*5 miles, more or less, for you metric-phobes.

Update: sorry about the auto-play. Changed to link.

I had decided to take pretty much the entire year of 2013 off from performing, to concentrate on the early-morning hours that training for the Iron Man will take up. But the Noah Ginex Puppet Company was once again accepted into the Chicago Improv Festival (they have a whole Puppet Improv category this year) and the rehearsals and performances fell nicely into the training dip after the marathon and before my hardqore IM training starts. And Erica is directing the group, so I’d just be sitting at home alone if I didn’t participate. And I love the group, both the humans and the puppets—we’re doing a thing where our puppets are established characters, in new situations from the improv suggestions. Above you can see Henrietta, who is a pretty, pretty princess and not afraid to let you know that.

So, next Friday and Saturday, April 5 and 6, you can can see NGPC performing at the CIC (1422 W Irving Park, Chicago). Tickets are $15.

So, this is going on, I guess. Didn’t I (kinda) go through this last year? Anyway, I’ll just leave this lying around over here, just, you know, for giggles.

If you would like to join our team for the Rave Run 5K (Saturday evening, April 27, 2013, here in Chicago) we are “Robot Lazer Kittens”. Registering as part of our team saves you $5, which does not stack with the $5 coupon in the Active.com email that went out today. But hey, kittens.

The really good news, I think we can all agree, is that I can finally stop self-asterisking whenever a marathon comes up and I say “I ran the Chicago Marathon, just not all of it, but they called it off mid-race, but I wasn’t going to finish anyway”. Anyway, now I can just say, “yeah, I ran the 2013 New Orleans Marathon”.

New Orleans was as wonderful as it always is. That was actually a bit of a problem on Saturday, the day before the race, because we were staying right in the French Quarter and the temptation was to walk around all day and see everything. Mid-afternoon I had to be a jerk and made us go back to the hotel so that I wouldn’t wear out my legs. We did bring back a pretty good haul of street musicians’ CDs, the best of which is by Yes, Ma’am.

Sunday morning we got up super-early and walked over to Cafe Du Monde for a super-healthy pre-race breakfast of beignets and coffee. Funny story, at Cafe Du Monde when you ask for a “half-caf” they think you mean half-black coffee, half-cafe au lait, not decaf. I thought we might see some other runners who would think that was a good idea as well, but at 5am I think we were the only customers in the place who weren’t still up from the night before.

The race is part of the “Rock ‘n’ Roll” series of races and they really did give it that vibe. The National Anthem at the start of the race was played as a guitar solo by Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, who was running the half-marathon distance. There were band stages almost every mile along the route and most of the bands were pretty good, especially the New Orleans-style brass bands like Big Fun. Crowd-support was a little sparser than in Chicago, but the organizers had also scattered groups of middle-school cheerleaders between the aid stations. They had all dressed up in different “Rock” themed outfits: eighties, KISS, as actual LPs, etc. The best was a group that were dressed up as “Rock-n-Roll Grannies” and they’d tell runners that “your gramma is proud of you”. It was very Fantasy Grandma.

The route is a great tour of New Orleans. The first leg goes out into the fancy neighborhood along St. Charles, which is part of the Mardi Gras parade route, so the trees all have beads stuck up in them. Then a loop back into the CBD (Central Business District) and then through the French Quarter. The halfway point is at City Park and is, I think, a rather cruel part of the route. The majority of the racers (13,500 out of 16,000) were running the half-marathon distance, so they peel off to finish and the road was suddenly a lot more empty. And then the remainder of the marathon route is a big out-and-back up to Lake Pontchartrain and as you pass the park on the west side you can see (at least, if you’re as slow as I am) much faster runners who are finishing the whole thing.

Anyway, up to the Lake it was, and through another fancy neighborhood of big houses, and then back down to City Park, where my sweetheart was waiting for me. And a very nice medal. And a crappy beer.

Run-wise, I made a few mistakes that led to some pain and slowness that I think could have been avoided, especially given how successful my 20 mile training run in New York went. The biggest was simply that I went out too fast. I was telling myself over and over, from the start of the race, to stick to a 12-minute mile pace, and to take plenty of slow-downs and even walks. But I had my headphones out, to be engaged in the ambient music and the runners around, and so I wasn’t getting my Nike+ info every mile. And it’s easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of everyone around you. So I ran the first 7 miles at about 10’30” per mile and it just knackered me out. By the halfway point I was feeling worse than I had at the end of 20 miles a few weeks before, and I was starting to have some knee pain. At 4 and a half hours, I had to give myself a little pep talk when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to finish under my, completely imaginary, 5 hour goal.

BUT. I ran a marathon and had a great time doing it. And I was mostly free of pain by the next day. Mostly. And we had a whole extra day in New Orleans to enjoy with our dear friend/relatives Chad and Elizabeth, who drove over from Jackson to hang out with us and take us to great eating spots like Domenica and Cochon Butcher (the latter of which we enjoyed enough to sit out in the rain to eat our lunch).

• My Photos
• Erica’s Photos
• Our podcast
• Erica’s blog post: Part 1 Part 2

Official results (PR): Time: 5:25:54
Pace: 12:26
Overall place: 2228 / 2610
Place in sex: 1270 out of 1416
Place in division (M, 40-44): 238 out of 256