FuzzyCo

If you've ever seen Bare perform, you know that basically I carry the show while Shaun stumbles around and breaks off parts of the stage. In a similar fashion, Shaun has somehow managed to get the fine folks at NetherRealm Studios to let him hang around while very smart and talented people make video games. Maybe they are amused by the grunting noises he makes. In any case, those aforementioned talented folks have released the latest of their fine pixel-based products today. Mortal Kombat* is available today for Xbox 360 and PS3. I don't even really like fighting games (sad, but true) and even I had fun playing a demo of the game.

* This is one of those reboots where the latest version just gets named the original name, ala Fast & Furious, the fourth film in the The Fast & the Furious series. This is the ninth game in the MK series.

Photo by Stacey Gordon.

First off you should know that Chicago has two major airports: O'Hare and Midway. But there's an easy heuristic I keep in the back of my head: if I'm flying Southwest, that's Midway, pretty much anything else is O'Hare. But it's important to check your itinerary anyway. And I did! I booked a flight out to Phoenix for the tenth annual Phoenix Improv Festival and the cheapest/least painful wake-up times was a kinda crazy multi-leg set of Delta flights with different connecting cities on the way out and back (note that last part—it's a plot point). I looked at the itinerary and definitely saw the words "O'Hare".

So, Friday morning Erica kindly got up early and drove me out to O'Hare. She dropped me off at the Delta departure curb and headed off to work. I walked inside, pulled out my boarding pass (which I had printed out at home, but hadn't actually looked at) and noticed for the first time that I was supposed to be departing from Midway. (I would be returning to O'Hare, and that's what I had seen) I tried calling Erica, but she was being a safe driver and not answering her phone. So I went downstairs and got in a cab. Thanks to Erica's good planning, I was at O'Hare with plenty of time (had my flight actually been there) so there was just exactly enough time to get to Midway. Theoretically. If no one else was on the road.

But fortunately, my cab driver seemed to take my problem as a personal challenge. He was one of those aggressive cabbies that everyone else on the road hates (myself included) and drove about 80 mph the whole way down 294. At one point, he was following pretty closely behind a car that suddenly flashed its rear-window cop lights and the driver flipped us off. The cab driver slowed down until the state trooper pulled over the speeder in front of him and then we were right back up to 80. And when traffic on 55 looked a little heavy a few exits before the Midway exit, the cab driver exited rather suddenly and went barreling down city streets for the last few miles. In case you're wondering, with TriState tolls, it's a $61 cab ride from O'Hare to Midway (and of course, a grateful Fuzzy makes that an even $80). So, there goes any savings from my crazy flights.

But, the good news is that I arrived at the gate just moments before they started boarding. And at least on the Chicago–Atlanta leg I was in an exit row. Winning!

But the real winning was getting to visit our old friends in Phoenix. Back in 2003, Shaun and I applied to a small festival in Phoenix that was just in its second year, and only its first year of having non-Arizona groups perform. Logistically, the festival was a bit rough (Shaun and I being forgotten at the airport that year was part of the inspiration for PIF's excellent "den mother" system) but all the people we met were so wonderful that we kept coming back year after year. In nine years, we've only missed two years of the festival. We've seen the festival get better and better and the Phoenix improv community grow stronger and stronger. They're currently this close to opening a new collective improv theater, The Torch, so I can't wait to see that next year. And all the folks we've met over the years just continue to be the sweetest and loveliest group we've ever known.

Over the years of doing the festival, we've generally been in one of the later time slots. This year, just to mix it up, Shaun asked if we could go earlier. The reply came back, "Well, the earliest time slot would be during the 'Family Friendly' show on Saturday afternoon—would you want to do that?" Sure! Everyone I've told about our slot has had an incredulous look on their face, but c'mon, we don't have to swear all the fu… I mean, all the da… I mean, all the time.

Right before the show, I was nervous as all get out. We'd had a greasy sports bar lunch (okay, okay, it was Hooters) which wasn't helping settle my stomach at all. And, just between you and me, Shaun and I haven't performed together in a little while. But standing in the wings while The Jesterz were finishing up their show, Shaun and I did a silly warm-up exercise that we've been doing for years and it instantly calmed me down. That is, I suppose, why we do those silly warm-up things.

We decided to do our "Pageant of History" form, old for us, but which we don't think we've ever done in Phoenix before. We got a suggestion of Arizona's* own Doc Holliday, I read his Wikipedia entry's intro paragraph aloud (thanks to the Herberger for the free Wifi) and we were off.

An interesting experiment that the festival was trying, partly thanks to that free wireless, was embracing the distracted and disconnected nature of today's modern audience. So the host each night asked people to turn off their phones' ringers, but then invited the audience to tweet during the shows using the hashtag #pif10. You could scroll back through the tweets from a group's show and see what parts of the show had resonated with multiple audience members. So, at the bottom of this post, is the relevant Twitter stream from during Bare's performance (in normal chronological order, rather than Twitter's reverse-chrono).

Otherwise, the whole weekend was a delightful time of catching up with old friends, making new ones, and watching some pretty-good to great improv. Somewhat unusually for a festival, I didn't see a single bad show (that's not anything against anyone, it's just that festivals are always such an odd mix -- with enough groups, someone is bound to have an off night, being travel-tired and/or hungover doesn't help, etc. etc.).

(Oh, and before you go, photos!)

* We should have realized that he lived in Arizona, given where we were. You'll see a tweet below that references that Shaun set the OK Corral in Kansas.

Last weekend I was down in New Orleans for the New Orleans Improv Fest—we did Bare on Friday and the Neutrino Project on Saturday. It's hard not to have a good time in New Orleans and the trip didn't disappoint.

For some reason (or reasons, Obama was in town on Thursday and there was a big Giants-Saints game on Sunday) travel was really difficult to book and expensive. Going down we had a 4 hours layover in Birmingham, AL. We sat in an airport bar the whole time and our stay exactly coincided with the 3 hour balloon boy saga. Coming back we tried to get out of town a little earlier, which just ended up meaning that we were in the New Orleans airport for 7 hours.

Bare did the first NOIF back in 2004. The second was to have been in 2005, but was canceled by Katrina. And then for the last two years Shaun has been in England.

We also took down the bare minimum crew to do the Neutrino Project—Shaun, Starcevich, and I on cameras, Inda in the booth, and just two experienced actors: Kristen from Chicago and Alison drove over from Texas. We picked up four actors from other groups at the festival: Grace Blakeman from ComedySportz New Orleans, Jessica Arjet and Kristin Firth from Firth & Arjet of Austin, and Kate Adair of La Nuit in New Orleans. With just a half-hour of "this is how the show works and things you might want to think about for acting on film" they all dove into the show and we produced a really good show.

Other than that, it was a lot of good food and hanging out. And drinking. And food.

Matt from Storm Surge Photo was taking pictures all weekend and got some great shots:

Shaun meets a new friend
Bare
Getting the Neutrino Project objects

Shaun and I went out to Norfolk, VA this last weekend to do a show at the 40th Street Stage that had been set up by our good friends Matt and Trish Martin. As a bonus, a bunch of family was coincidentally in Williamsburg and we were able to hook up for lunch on Saturday and then my folks came and watched Shaun and I teach a workshop. We also ate a bunch of good food and did some fun old-friends-hanging-out. Wanna see?

Yvonne Zusel reviewed the Saturday night 9:30 show of the Phoenix Improv Festival for the Phoenix New Times. As the title of this post might suggest, I think Bare has a new pull quote...

When you think improv, typically you think Chicago, home to Second City and Improv Olympic and the training ground for comedians such as Tina Fey, Mike Meyers and Chris Farley. So again, I had high hopes for Windy City improv troupe Bare, a two-man group that ended up being just moderately funny. Profanity can be used to good effect in moderation, but too much of it signals laziness, and Bare relied on it just a little too much during their set. The best of the set? A throwaway bit with a wife asking her husband to take a picture of her next to a cactus. "It's Arizona," he answers exasperatedly. "There are cactuses everywhere."

(via GoPIF)

I'm sure there are better* photos, but here are a couple of shots of Bare during our festival-closing slot on Saturday night (via the GoPIF twitter stream):

* No offense, GoPIF.

Due to some Pastor of Muppets-related confusion and a lucky coincidence of Shaun's travel schedule, you have the rare chance to see Bare, our two-man improv group, tonight at 8 pm at the Playground (3209 N Halsted, Chicago).

Shaun has not performed any improv in a full calendar year (our last Bare show was in July of last year) while I've been performing more than ever. What kind of hideous train wreck might this evening be? What terrible things will said? Can our friendship stand the strain of this upcoming show? Or will we, as we have all-too-often in the past, pull brillance out of our desperate asses? Only one way to find out -- come see the show!

Homey Loves Chachi and Mort perform on the same bill and tickets are a measly (measly!) $10.

For the last couple of years, my two-man improv group Bare has been performing more outside of Chicago than at home. And now that Shaun's in the UK for six months, we likely won't even be doing many shows anywhere. Which makes it an extra-extra special treat for all three Bare fans that we're doing a show tomorrow night (Saturday, July 7, 8pm) at the Playground. We're talking about bringing back Pageant of History -- though we're willing to take requests (Hotel? Small town? Who would do that? Actual Theatre?).

Mustang Repair and Homey Loves Chachi are performing on the same bill and all three groups will joining together to perform a Dream for a silent auction winner from the Playground's recent 10th anniversary celebrations.

Photo by Michelle Edwards

The Phoenix Improv Festival is, I have to say, the friendliest of all the improv festivals I've been to. For example, every ensemble gets a "den mother" assigned to them -- a local who will pick them up for the airport, get them to the shows, and fulfill requests like "take me to a tattoo convention" or "we need a construction hardhat and some Jagermeister". Also, everyone gets a gift bag that, in addition to the usual info sheets and maps, always has something handmade and special. Last year it was coloring books and this year it was finger puppets. (Note to self: take picture of awesome finger puppet.)

Last year, we took the Chicago Neutrino Project (with plenty of assists from Detroit and local folks) out to the festival. This year, we didn't get/have to do any such thing, because there's a Phoenix Neutrino Project. Graciously, in the Neutrino Nation spirit, they let Shaun, Greg, and I sit in with them. I don't know how the show went (they promise a Google Video of the show sooner or later) but I can tell you that I had the most fun and felt the most relaxed I've ever felt doing a Neutrino Project show. It was so awesome to just sit back and trust that other people were running the show.

Friday during the day Jose, the friendliest of all the friendly Phoenicians, organized a surprise trip to Fuzzy's Pizza. Oh, you.

Friday night we had our Bare show. Bare has performed at every PIF that has had non-Arizona groups (that is, 5 of the 6 PIFs) and we've got, if I can say without modesty, a bit of a reputation in Phoenix. We do always try to bring our A-game and to consciously try new things. We had worked out a format for our show over the few weeks before the festival, something that involved a fair amount of sitting around talking. At the last minute, we realized that we had been scheduled to open for Bassprov, whose whole (excellent) show is two guys sitting around talking. So, it was back to the drawing board, since we're not dicks. (Really, we're not :-) We tinkered around with our ideas a bit and ended up coming up with a modified Living Room. It was crude and vulgar and bickery and went, as best I can tell, pretty well.

This year, not only did I take pictures, there's a Flickr group so you can see everyone else's pictures as well.

These two guys, Eric and Filup, are doing some sort of promo gig where they're driving across the country in a Chevy Aveo to go to LA and "make it big in comedy". They hooked up with the Phoenix Improv Festival and actually were the MCs who introduced Bare. Above is their video, with a 1-second glimpse of Shaun. I'm just off to Shaun's right, so just picture that in your mind and I'm sure you can imagine how the show went.

Do I have friends in Phoenix, Arizona who aren't already involved in the Phoenix Improv Festival? If so, they should be informed that Bare will performing at 8:30 pm tonight (Friday, May 11) with Bassprov.

Another way we were spoiled when we arrived in Phoenix was with an official festival goody bag. There were schedules, guides to local eateries, toys, and a festival coloring book, with a page for each group in the festival. Our two pages were:

by Michelle Edwards of The Remainders.

It's true, you know. I do like photography. And Shaun does like strip clubs.

by The Original's Jacque Arrend

This is the secret story behind an otherwise ordinary Neutrino Project publicity photo.

Saturday morning brought some pressing news -- Lo-Lo's Chicken and Waffles, my annual Phoenix after-show dining spot -- was now only open until 10 pm, so if I was to get in some chicken AND some waffles, it was going to have to be now. Troops who were conscious (I guess the second poker game went until 7 am) were rounded up and breakfast was had. Man, I love those waffles.

We got back from Lo-Lo's just in time for me to go teach my workshops. Originally, the workshops were scheduled to be taught by Shaun and I together, but we decided that it would make more sense for both of our careers if I concentrated on teaching workshops and Shaun concentrated on hanging out by the pool. Well, it made sense the way Shaun explained it.

In any case, I had a great time. The first workshop was full - 12 students - and we cranked through the mass of information I was trying to jam into their heads about making bold character choices. Of course, I have no idea how much value any of them got out of it, but it felt really productive. For the next workshop, I guess I had lost some students to the Bingo Jam, so I only had 3 people. Intense would be the operating word for this session, as we went the full two hours, meaning everyone was up for 2/3 of the time.

Post-workshops, I had to run back to my hotel and change to get over to the venue for our Bare show.

The Phoenix Improv Festival spoils the performers unlike any other festival I've ever been to. They pay for all the performers' hotel rooms, which, frankly, is the best you're do financially from a festival unless you're a headliner at a huge festival. Every group is assigned a "den mother" - a local person who can drive you around and help with any questions or problems. And they're incredibly patient with our unreasonable requests and last-minute changes. This year, for example, Shaun jokingly asked for two custom t-shirts for Greg and Starcevich, and they produced them. And when, on Friday afternoon, we decided that our show would be a combination of Hotel and Screwed (our version of Michael Delaney and Andrew Secunda's Nailed Down) and so we would need two pairs of extra-large shoes and a drill, Jose just said, "I think I know where we can get those."

"Jose," I said after Shaun was done with his laundry list, "if I was running a festival, I wouldn't take that kind of crap. That's a ridiculous list."

But, Jose produced, and so half of the show was slow, patient near-us conversation between two characters, and the other half was a frentic, absurd mass of at least a dozen characters, each running off their own suggestion. We ran back and forth between the two sides of the stages, occasionally occupying both sides of the stage at the same time. That, Shaun and I agree, was the only part of the show that didn't work. It was easy enough to be by yourself on the Hotel side of the stage, but on the Screwed side it was really difficult to get into the rhythm of our conversation alone. Anyway, I give the show a B+.

And then we were getting ready for our second Neutrino Project show. I do feel a little bad that I didn't see more of the other groups, but it really did feel like I was always getting ready for- or recovering from- a show of my own. So, I missed all the groups between Bare and Neutrino Project. Sorry.

During this break, Shaun blithely told Kristen and Chuck, as though we did it all the time, "Go knock on some neighborhood doors and see if we can film in someone's living room." Well, they went wandering around the immediate neighborhood of the theater and found a house where they were holding public garden tours. Zing, and yay for Shaun's chutzpah.

I did my set of scenes with Alison and with Matt Martin. Matt is now an Air Force Major, but back in the day he was already a part of National Velveeta before I joined that group, and he introduced Shaun to improv at a summer camp they were both counselors at. He also co-founded, with Shaun, Bare Essentials, the group that eventually transformed into Bare. So it was cool to be back performing with Matt.

Greg, as usual, was the only one of us who got to see the whole show and he said it was even better than Friday's. So yay.

Here's how you know I was really busy all weekend -- I hardly took any photos. Selections of the ones I did take are in a Flickr set.

Kristen Freilich also has a Flickr set of 65 photos.

And Kevin Patterson has posted an astounding 656 pictures from the festival (there's also a smaller set of his best 65 shots). He even took pictures of the Neutrino Project while it was being projected.

It seems I didn't pack my camera USB cord, so pictures will have to wait.

On the plane here I went through the festival schedule and realized that a) I'm going to be in Phoenix just a bit less than 48 hours and b) in that time I have three shows, a tech, and am teaching two workshops. So there's not going to be much time for sightseeing.

There's an official festival coloring book, with pictures of all the groups to color in. It's pretty freakin' awesome.

Yesterday we did our first of two Neutrino shows. Greg, our usual arbiter for such things (since he's the only one of our group who sees the whole show) says it was pretty good. I'm just going to have to trust him on that, because nobody pushed record on the VCR. Sometimes I really try to let go of my control-freak-iness and then something doesn't get done because I didn't do it... Anyway, I climbed a tree for my scene, and ended up 'stuck' there for the rest of the show. I 'fell' out of the tree right at the end of the show, but Shaun was already fading out the shot and so didn't get it. Ah, improvised film.

After our show I watched Apollo 12 do a really spectacular show and then the up-since-4-am-chicago-time hit me all at once, so I regretfully went back to the hotel and took a nap. But what's important at a festival is not the shows, but the partying, right? Well, anyway the crew came back to the hotel and woke me up and we went over to the Bikini Lounge. Four years ago when we started coming to Phoenix, the Bikini Lounge was an empty, grimy little dive bar. Now it's a super-crowded, grimy little dive bar. Yay, progress.

At the bar, Jose said I needed to come next door to The Trunk Space gallery and see a show. Indeed I did need to see that show. Travis Nichols does some amazingly cute, fun art. Art is fun! Yay, art!

OK, I'm off to get some breakfast to have energy to teach some workshops. Oh, impressionable minds, bend to my will!

Shaun and I are headed to Phoenix, AZ this weekend for the Phoenix Improv Fest. This will be our fourth PIF (and I believe we've performed at every PIF that featured performers from outside Arizona).

Also coming along with us are some of the Chicago Neutrino Project cast. Last year we realized that Election Show 2004 was going to be performing at the PIF, and that Election Show had a strong overlap with the Seattle Neutrino Project cast. So we put together a special combination cast Neutrino Project show for the festival.

This year we're bringing along some of Detroit's Neutrino Project cast and pulling some of Phoenix's finest improv actors to create another All-Star Neutrino Project.

Bare performs Saturday night (4/22) at 7:00 pm
Neutrino Project performs Friday (4/21) at 7:00 pm and Saturday (4/22) at 10:00 pm

All shows are at the Viad Center (1850 N Central Ave, Phoenix, AZ)

I'll also be teaching two workshops on Saturday afternoon at 1:30 pm and 4:00 pm. The workshop listing says I'll be covering "Risk Taking Performance: Break out of safe choices, focus on you as a performer, and learn to better take care of yourself on stage. Decide what rules apply to you and which don’t." Which sounds about right.

Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks has won Gamespot's "Most Surprisingly Good Game" of 2005. "We thought it would suck and it didn't!"

It's crazy-last-minute, but Bare will be performing tonight in... 2 and a half hours, at the Playground Theater (3209 N Halsted). It'll be our first time on stage together since the Phoenix Improv Festival. Eek.

It's exactly like that.

Even when he's just typing, Shaun swears a lot.

(From the MKSM "Fight Night" chat.)

If you haven't gotten your fill of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks reviews yet, you can find links to tens of them, and a composite score, at GameRankings.com: MK:SM for XBOX and Playstation 2 (many of the reviews are platform agnostic, but some are not).

I'm also, umm... happy?*, to report that with the release of his game Shaun is out of "working 100 hours a week" mode and into "sleeping in until 10 am, then heading into the office to send Fuzzy 'Bare should go to this festival' emails," so you should see Bare performing out again soon.

* I'm happy for him, but it was kinda nice having the place basically to myself for half the year. When's your next game start production, Shaun?

Visiting us is enough to drive a man to blog: Chirping Octopus (aka Ben Waldie).

IGN has reviewed Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks and given it a 8/10. Not bad.

Well, Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks has gone gold (that means, it's done and been sent to be manufactured and shipped to your favorite games store) and so the endless interviews with Shaun and Ed and previews of the game are giving way to reviews. And so far they're coming in pretty good. Playboy Magazine gave the game four rabbits. Need I go on?

The game is due in stores next Tuesday, September 20. I pre-ordered the game so I could get my lil' Jin figure. I only wish it were a talking action figure so it'd be like having Jin with me at all times. Forever.

Shaun had been planning on taking some time off once the game was done and maybe just riding his motorcycle around for a few weeks. But things changed in the world and as soon as the game was finished, he filled Ol' Crumple Zone up with water and power bars and headed for the Gulf Coast to help however he could. He txted me yesterday that "NO really is a mess... Basically martial law. Headed to baton rouge red cross." Wish him well.

Shaun sent me an email today asking if I had any pictures of him suitable for using in a magazine or on websites for his MKSM interviews. I went back though my photo archives looking for appropriate pictures. Now, most of the time I take a picture of Shaun it's because we're out-on-the-town, usually at an improv festival, and most of them are completely unsuitable for professional use (though I would have said that about this one...). And since I'd gone to all the work of making a gallery for him to pick shots from, I'd thought I'd share with you the Best of Shaun, 2001-2005.

As MK Online notes, this interview Shaun did with Gamecloud "doesn't touch on very much that hasn't already been revealed". In fact, some nights Shaun falls asleep on the couch and starts telling Mustapha all the features of Shaolin Monks: "Multi-directional Kombat system... mumblesnort... set in the world of Mortal Kombat 3... snore... Multalities... grandpa, why are you wearing a penguin-suit?... Ko-op mode..."

More swearing and typos from Shaun in his second Developer Diary about MK:SM.

Shaun didn't like the picture that MK Online used to illustrate his Developer Diary, so he had them replace it with another one. The new one is cropped down from a picture we like to call "Shaun over-indulges". Drink, check. Smoking and pizza, check, check. T-shirt for violent video game, check. Vapid expression while watching someone do bar karaoke, check check check.

Shaun has a blog. Sorta. He's doing a Developer Diary about Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. The first entry catches the reader up on 2 years of development. You can tell it's really Shaun and not some marketing droid by all the misspellings and swearing.

Shaun is about to do a live interview with Gamestop about the game he's producing.

Update: It's the 12 pm clip entitled "A Man Called Reggie" (not, oddly enough, the 11 am clip called "Midday with Midway") and Shaun comes in about 28 minutes into the clip.

Photo by Michelle Edwards

The Phoenix Improv Festival, as I mentioned, rocked. All of the organizers and volunteers were great -- shout outs to Bill, April, Darin, Stacey, Jose, and Mark for making our stay so enjoyable -- and we did (I say humbly) pretty-good shows and I had fun teaching two workshops. And super thanks to Michelle Edwards for taking some cool pictures of Bare. Yay!

I came back from Phoenix and was thrown into the maelstrom of CIF, and Documentary South rehearsals, and Erica moving in and so I've just managed to get my photos sorted and now posted. Enjoy!

Hello from the party suite of the Phoenix Improv Festival. One of the great things about this festival is the hotel arrangements -- we're all in the same hotel and the festival has a suite with drinks and this computer and a poker table and snacks. The hotel management, I understand, did screw up on the reserved block of rooms, so there are non-festivalians on each side of the suite, so we have to play the "shush" game, where every few minutes as the volume of the room escalates as everyone tries to talk over everyone else, someone will notice that the volume has gotten a little extreme and start a "shhhhhh" that lowers the volume for 10 or 15 seconds.

We did Neutrino AND Bare tonight. The Neutrino Video Project went well -- it was all Chicago shooters (me and Shaun and Starcevich) and a combo cast of Chicago and Seattle and Jose from Phoenix and special guest sit-in Ali "True Porn Clerk Stories" Davis. (And Greg Inda came out from Chicago too, which made me super happy that I could just trust that the in-theater tech would be taken care of and I could run around with my team worry-free.)

It was a little odd to do a Bare show so soon after the NVP -- despite what I just said, I do kind of ramp up the stress for a NVP, jumping around all jittery before the show (there's sooo much that can go wrong technically in this show, especially in a new venue) and then the show is so tight and frantic, so I was pretty wiped after the show. But we did have a full show between the NVP and Bare (Joe Bill's Scramble and Baby Wants Candy) so Shaun and I were able to run back to the hotel to drop off our gear and grab a burger at the BK next door and chill out a little. And then I chugged a Pepsi and a Reeses' Peanut Butter Cup (just one) in the dressing room to get my energy back up right before we went on stage.

We were trying something kinda new tonight -- I won't bore you with our long-form meanderings, but we wanted to focus on a longer scene and it did end up that almost the whole thing took place at a single church service (from the excellent suggestion "the woman at church who sings too loudly") with a cast of about 10 characters. And Shaun got to punch Jesus.

OK, I should get off. I have to teach a workshop or two tomorrow before I fly back to Chicago for 5 hours and then fly off to New York. Busy week.

Well, I'm going to be told to "turn off all electronic devices for landing" very shortly, but we'll see if I'm as fast a typist as Steev "Demon Fingers" Gadlin.

I'm on the plane to Phoenix for the Phoenix Improv Festival this weekend. I'll be doing two shows this weekend, both on Saturday, both at the same venue: The Playhouse on the Park Theater on 1850 N. Central Avenue.

Bare, of course, is my two-man improv show that I do with Shaun Himmerick. This will be the third time Shaun and I have been to the PIF, and we've all ready decided that after our experiment in boldness last year, we're going to do a light and crowd-pleasing batch of improv for Phoenix. Anyway, when we do our show at 11 pm, we'll still be coming down off the high of doing a Neutrino Video Project at 8 pm.

Shaun and I produce the Chicago version of the NVP (there are now casts in 4 cities, and I heard a rumor of a fifth the last time I was in NY) and when we found out that a number of the Seattle NVPers were going to be in Phoenix also, we proposed to the PIF organizers that we could put on a Neutrino Video Project. They accepted, and we started the fun work of organizing this very tech-heavy show between two different producers and in a third location (it's the little details -- I'm still not certain how far it is from where our tech booth will be to the projector -- did I bring enough cable?). But I am really excited that we'll be joined by the Izzos, who I haven't seen since they moved up to Ann Arbor to start their own improv venue, the Improv Inferno.

In Phoenix for PIF. Composed longish post about same on plane, but ultimately defeated by elbow of Hefty McHeftsalot. Went out until 2:30 am (late, but do-able party time) but it is (body/Chicago-time) 4:30 am -- very late (plus drinks). Sleep now.

Tonight Bare will be appearing at the Bird's Nest Bar (2500 N Southport). Let me mention, as I always do, that the wings are great -- try getting a mixture of the teriyaki and hot sauces -- delish. And the last time we performed at the Bird's Nest we saw someone do their first set of stand-up comedy ever and rock. Will it happen again tonight? The only way to know is to show up...

And... the first PBR is on me!

As I write this, members of all four casts of the Neutrino Video Projects (Chicago, DC, New York, and Seattle) are likely sleeping-in in DC, resting up from last night's performance of the Neutrino All-Stars to do it all again tonight. I wanted to be there, but it had looked like my day job needed me all day Friday. By the time we figured out that it wasn't as crucial a day as we had thought, I couldn't get a plane ticket for any sort of reasonable price. Oh well, it means I get to do the CCC show at The Playground tonight.

We're getting geared up to do something similar in Phoenix next month. Last month when Shaun and I were in Miami performing as Bare at the Miami Improv Festival, we got chatting with Election Show 2004 (whose cast overlaps quite a bit with the Seattle Neutrino Project). "Doing any other festivals this year?" "We're going to Phoenix." "So are we!" "We should do a Neutrino down there!" "We should!" "Let's go stand outside because we're in Miami and it's warm!"

So, we contacted the organizers of the Phoenix Improv Festival and they leapt at the chance to have the critically acclaimed, world-renowned Neutrino Project performed at their festival. Leapt, I tell you.

It's been interesting planning this. Getting ready to do a show this technically complex in a far-off city, with cast and crew members I've never really worked with before, has gotten me to get off my butt and get some things formalized I hadn't before. I made a tech plot that shows what plugs into what in the theater! It's something I've scribbled on countless pieces of scrap paper trying to explain the show to people, but now I've got a shiny PDF with boxes and lines and everything.

It also got me to do the sort of FuzzyCo Media Blitz(tm) that I know how to do and always plan on doing when we go to a festival, but somehow I never quite get around to it. "Oh, the festival organizers will do publicity," I always think. And it's true, and I'm sure the PIF is doing an excellent job with the press. But at some level, press attention is something of a crap-shoot of what happens to catch the eye of what particular editor on a particular day. Like how after Steev went on WGN to promote Don't Spit the Water, the sports anchor was so tickled by the DVDs of Silly Faces* and Silly Dances that he's been using them, including prominent displays of the URL, as intros and outros to his segment for weeks.

So, I bugged April, the PIF's press coordinator, for her Phoenix press contacts. She sent over a list with phone, email, and website contacts -- very 21st Century. I looked up mailing addresses for all of them** on the crap-shoot theory -- if April had already sent them all emails, maybe a physical thing in their hands would be a different stimulus that might get a response.
I sent out 19 envelopes with press kits for both Bare and Neutrino Project in each one, and everybody got an extra goody targeted to their market. Radio stations got an audio CD with Shaun and I doing his "Big Tony, Little Tony" sketch*** and audio clips from three Neutrino scenes. Newspapers got a data CD with high resolution photos of Bare and the Chicago Neutrino Project cast. And TV stations got a DVD of a Neutrino Project show. (I was planning on making a "selected scenes and best-of" DVD, but I decided timeliness was more important, so that got shelved for the moment and I just duplicated an entire show.)

So... tell everyone you know who lives in Arizona. Saturday, April 16, 2005 at The Playhouse on the Park Theater (1850 N. Central Avenue, Phoenix, AZ). The Neutrino Project (with Cog) at 8 pm. Bare (with Hemi & The Buzz) at 11 pm. Whee!

*Featuring 60 seconds of *my* silly face.

** Well, almost all -- if you happen to know the mailing address for the Phoenix-area Clear Channel stations, wanna pass that along?

*** Yes, sketch not improv -- I'll grimace at you when you call my improv a "skit," and then happily turn around and exploit that confusion when I'm doing PR. Sue me.

photo by Speedy Hoerner

There are photos from Friday night's Don't Spit the Water, including Shaun and I as Eduardo Salacious and the Indescribable Horror (not "Unthinkable", as listed on the page). Is my girlfriend the best ever or what?

Spurred on by Jill's note today that Jesse had posted some pictures from Miami, I got off my duff and put up a gallery of some of the shots I (and Erica) took at the Miami Improv Festival 2005.

Jesse Parent, of JoKyR and Jesster, has posted some photos from the Miami Improv Festival.

We're in Miami! The Miami Improv Festival is ticking along and we're ticking along with it.

The best part is that it's 70°out! We sepnt the day walking along the ocean front at South Beach (it looks just like Vice City!). Though, come to think of it, we never actually walked over to beach. We had a great lunch, though.

Last night we did our show which, judging by the kind words afterwards, was pretty good. After the shows we all went out to a karaoke bar with half a live band (it was odd) and at 4:30 am Erica got to live the dream -- she sang "Miami"* in Miami. Woo-oo.

OK, time for a disco nap before the shows tonight.

Hey, I'm performing in a variety of shows over the next few weeks!

Friday night (January 28) I'll be at The Playground (3209 N Halsted) at 8 pm, performing with Chicago Comedy Company and James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub Party. Yes, my kickball team. Six of us on the team are improvisors, so Rene signed us up at The Playground for a guest slot. (Feast of Pedro and Inside Vladimir will also be performing.)

Saturday night (January 29) I'll be back at The Playground, but for the midnight show -- the Belmont Burlesque Revue. Shaun and I will be "Gerdes and Himmerick" -- our vaudeville-esque comedy duo. The shows features a variety of musical, comedy, magic, and burlesque performers.

Monday night (January 31) Shaun and I will be Bare, our two man improv show, at the Bird's Nest Bar (2500 N Southport). We're up with some stand-up comedians and another sketch or improv group. The wings, as I often mention, are excellent.

And then next weekend, it's a (semi-)tropical getaway! We'll be doing two Bare shows at the Miami Improv Festival. Thursday, February 3, is my birthday, so come to that show. Yes, fly to Florida and come to my show for my birthday!

Because we knew that our Sketchfest show was going to be a one-time-only kind of dealio, we planned ahead and it's one of our best documented shows. We had our friend Michael Starcevich come out and video the show (a two camera shoot!) and Aaron Gang came and shot a bunch of stills. I've combined Aaron's shots with ones Erica and I took backstage for a sketchfest-a-photo-rama.

The crew backstage

(Right after the show I went straight home to pack for a work trip to New York and that's been keeping me busy for the last couple of days. I'm sitting in LaGuardia right now waiting for the plane home and I finally have a few minutes to write this*.)

Mustapha prepares for his first role

Well first off, let's talk about* a one big difference between a sketch show or a play and the improv that I usually do -- the day of. With an improv show all I have to do is make sure I'm dressed nice and then show up at the theatre an hour early or so, mainly so that the house manager or producer doesn't have to worry about whether I'm going to show up (it happens -- people flake). With this show, not only did it occupy most of my free time for the month up to the show, but it completely occupied the day of the show with last minute printing out set lists and organizing and making sure props were in bags and so on and so forth. But the time we were packing the truck to leave for the theatre I had already put a day's worth of mental energy into the show.

Shaun traded his station wagon for a pickup truck this summer (and I got rid of my beast of a 30-year-old sports car) and we had so many props and a live cat to transport, so we decided to make two trips. I drove Shaun over early with a load of props and then came back for Mustapha and Erica.

And forgot the jackets.

The jackets that Megan slaved over for weeks. The designed-then-redesigned jackets. The I-bought-a-new-leather-jacket-just-for-this-show jackets. The start-off-the-show-with-a-bang jackets.

Erica even asked "Do you have the jackets?" before we left the house the second time and I answered something along the lines of "Of course (I'm wearing a jacket)". Because I was. Wearing a regular jacket.

Panic!

I gave Brian and Megan the keys to our house and sent them off to get the jackets. Which, of course, induced more panic (on my part, anyway) that if they were delayed, we wouldn't have the jackets nor Brian and Megan to play their parts.

The dancers backstage

Shaun and Greg go over the tech

Oh, and Greg had had a simple request for the tech setup. He was going to be running both light and sound cues by himself but he had discovered that the CD player in the tech booth was behind him as he sat at the light board. He had asked that I bring a small CD player that could be placed beside the light board so he wouldn't have to turn around. I forgot that, too. We suggested that he recruit the Sketchfest-provided tech guy to run the sound cues off his verbal commands.

Well, Brian and Megan made it back with the jackets and Greg (I found out later) recruited Rachel Michalski, Superpunk's tech goddess, who had come along to see Superpunk do their 30 second bit in the show. Ten minutes before Rhythm Method finished we were escorted from the conference room where we'd been hovering into the just-off-stage dressing room.

And then we did the show.

Patrick Brennan MCing

And it almost all worked. And what didn't work (sound cues, mostly, and Mustapha freaking out a little more than we expected him to, and me staring blankly at Shaun for a solid 10 seconds when I spaced on my first little dramatic speech before I remembered it) all seemed to fit into the motif of the show, about our partnership and our show falling apart.

People were wowed by the dance (which got us off to a great start) and tickled by Ben's bumps and confused by all the interruptions to the show and they actually laughed at many of the bits, even the ones that we just wrote so that Don could interrupt them.

I never set out to do anti-comedy or anything, but Shaun and I seem to be pretty good at shows that leave the audience half-amused and half-wondering how much of what they had just seen was real.

All in all, I was happy with how the show turned out. I don't think we'll be doing it again any time soon -- too many people and things to organize. And I'm not sure Mustapha will want to do the show again.

Erica and I took some shots backstage and then Erica snuck out and took some shots of the opening number, so that's what I've got here. Aaron Gang came to the show and took shots throughout, so I'll put up a gallery of those as soon as I get them.

My hottie girlfriend sitting around being hot

And hey, thanks to Tom and Kate for coming to the show (I happened to see them after/before the show -- thanks to you, too, if you came to the show).

We did the show!

The tech only got 10% screwed up, Mustapha only freaked out a little bit, and just now I got up to walk across the room and my legs were weak, but we did the show.

Pictures and more later.

• Hymie McTavish and an Elvis Impersonator (288K mp3)
• Space Ninja Delicatessen (380K mp3)
• Three Hookers, a Math Test, and a Kitten (304K mp3)
• Fat Southern Senator (296K mp3)
• Montage (1.6M mp3)

The Chicago press is full of Sketchfest articles this weekend and we get a few nods:

Newcity says, "Highlights include performances by Chicago's FuzzyCo ..."

Chicago Reader says, "Rhythm Method and FuzzyCo. These are two local groups."

And MicrocinemaScene has reviewed Dancing With Gaia, that indie film I was in. About my contribution to the film the reviewer says, "Featuring ... Fuzzy Gerdes ..."

Kittyloaf finished the jackets and for all of the problems she had, they came out great. There are little christmas lights all around the back, with a battery pack in each pocket. And the whole back section is just glued and velcroed on, so we can turn them back into regular jackets, or have her do the original metal-stud idea later.

We had our tech at the Theatre Building last night. Because they have to get through tech rehearsals for 80 or so groups, we had a strict 45 minutes. As I had feared, we were "that group" and had to beg the next group for 5 minutes to run through the dance at the very end. Otherwise, it went about as well as could be expected.

And that's the last time we'll see the whole cast until Sunday at 5:00 pm. When we'll, you know, do the show. Eek. Just 7 or 10 props left to find or build, and Shaun and I should run through the show another 20 or 30 times. Wheee!

Update: Oh, and completely redo the sound cues CD (a bunch of the cues can be consolidated, we discovered, and I had left off two sounds).

A couple of years ago I was the Sketch Stage venue manager for the Chicago Improv Festival. I sat up in the tech booth and made fun of any group that had tech requirements more complicated than 'lights up/lights down' -- "They have to know that they're coming to a festival, which means they have no familiarity with nor control over the space and we're on an incredibly tight schedule."

Pot, allow me to introduce kettle.

We have 47* sound cues in our show. (I know this because I finished editing and assembling all the sound cues tonight. Add "sound designer" to the list of credits I won't bother giving myself in the program.) We have dancers, a cat, a couple bags of costumes and props, and leather jackets with battery-powered Christmas lights on them.

We did also, however, have our first* all-cast rehearsal tonight. Nobody was off-book and people kept goofing around, but I felt really good about it. These are all people we've worked with before on high-stress projects like the Neutrino Project and they've always come through. I trust them not to let me down.

It was a holiday weekend, but for us it was also one week before the show (and just a few days before our only full-cast rehearsal) so we kept fairly busy.

Thursday night they let us out of the office an hour early, so Shaun and I headed out to do some costume/prop shopping. We stopped at Strange Cargo and ordered some custom t-shirts for the cast and Superpunk and looked for a Tiny Tim hat, but couldn't find one. Then we drove out to Fantasy Headquarters where we found tons of the incidentals we needed -- toy guns, bunny and elephant mask, ninja hood, etc, etc. We've been planning to invest in a bear costume (Why? Why not -- what can't you do with a bear costume?) an we looked at the ones they had, but we discovered that Fantasy HQ only rents them. Somehow it seemed to me perfectly reasonable to spend $700 for a bear costume and use it for a 30 second bit (but have it for any future uses) but completely unreasonable to spend $85 to rent it for a 30 second bit.

Friday during the day we headed over to the Arabesque Dance Studio to meet with Michelle from Lavender Cabaret and two of the other dancers. Michelle was doing the choreography for the opening number and we had given her freedom to either have us stand around on stage while the dancing went on around us, or to make us part of the dance. She opted for the later and we had a full two hour dance rehearsal learning the 2 minute dance she'd choreographed.

Saturday and today we just did some run-throughs off both the show and the dance number on our own. I made a first pass at a program -- Sketchfest is likely to have a program for the whole festival, but so many people have contributed to this show I wanted to make sure they got some kind of credit.

And Ben Taylor dropped off a CD of more "bumps" (little musical introductions to the scenes). We had had a big miscommunication about one of them (the one that needed to be the shortest, say 2 secs, was the longest, about a minute and a half) but I'm sure he'll have a new one for me tomorrow. After I post this I'm going to make a first pass at putting together the sound cues CD.

Whew.

Oh, and tomorrow night we're doing a set at the Bird's Nest Bar (2500 N Southport) where we'll likely be trying out some of the scenes from the show. Have I mentioned enough times how good the wings are there?

Ben Taylor is emailing me a "bump" right now to intro a scene of the show. And Kittyloaf made good purchases at Joann's. And I'm about to meet Shaun at Strange Cargo to start a whirlwind prop and costume-buying tour.

I can show you the emails where Shaun said, "I can rehearse any night this week except Wednesday." So I made a date with my lovely girlfriend. And when Shaun came home at 8 pm and said, "so, you want to rehearse now?" I said, "nope". And went out and got some dinner.

This is not to say that progress is not being made. One of the scenes in the show is adapted from a scene we improvised in a show at the Toronto Improv Fest a few years ago. At one point in the scene Shaun turned on a "radio" and the pianist who was accompanying us began playing Stairway to Heaven and it ended up becoming a central part of the scene. So Shaun commissioned Liz to record a solo piano version of Stairway. After some back and forth in which we discovered that although we said we wanted a John Tesh sound, what we were really asking for was a Jim Brickman sound, Liz just delivered four different versions of the song.

Kittyloaf has been having rougher going with the leather jackets. She says that she has now done enough research that she knows how to make us Dice Rules-style jackets, for pretty cheap. Just not before the show. Evidently, every leather supplier in the U.S. closes for inventory at the end of the year and then takes a generous New Year's holiday. So she and I did some brain storming on the phone last night and now we're looking at a stop-gap featuring silver lam�, christmas lights, and rubber cement.

So, I'm talking all about the process of putting together this show we're doing at Sketchfest because that's one of things I do here at FuzzyCo -- give you a peek behind the curtain of what it takes to produce a show. But I realized that I want to emphasize that I'd really like you to come see this show. I'm proud of what we've put together in a fairly short amount of time and this level of spectacle (a cast of 15! dancers! a cat!) is going to be a one-time deal, not to be repeated.

Bare at Chicago Sketchfest
Sunday, January 9, 5:30 pm
(with Rhythm Method)
Theatre Building Chicago
1225 W Belmont
$12 (Ticketmaster)

I see that I have a small stack of postcards that will get you $2 off the ticket price (so ask if you run into me), or that you can download a PDF of the coupon.

Living in the same house as your performance partner can be a double-edged sword. On the one edge, we're very familiar with each other's rhythms and thought-processes, which makes us really comfortable with each other on stage. On the other edge, it can be really difficult to stay focussed for meetings and rehearsals, because we're in our house, which doesn't feel as special as a rehearsal in a separate space (and it's where all our toys are).

Last night we actually had a great meeting/rehearsal (though Shaun did have to yell at me a few times not to go check my phone's text messages). We made a big list of all the props and costume pieces we still need to get (and it's a big list) and made some progress on the sound cues for the show. And then we did a complete read-through of the show (doing funny voices for the parts of the other people in the show) both to start getting familiar with the script and to get a sense of the timing of the show. It looks like we're right on with the time -- about half an hour for the whole show (which is good since that's how much time we get).

Then tonight we were supposed to rehearse, but our friend Karl was in town so Erica and I took him out to dinner at Moody's and drank a pitcher of sangria, and when we finally got back to the apartment, Shaun and Jin were there watching 007 Days of Xmas and we all got sucked in and before I knew it it was 10:30.

But then Shaun said "Hey, let's do a quick read-through" and we went into the kitchen and read through the script. And Jin came in near the end, which is where his big scene is, so he got to read it with Shaun and I got to do a little "this is how I visualize the blocking of this scene, you move over here and when you get to the end of this line, just shuffle over to him here". And I was a little surprised -- yesterday when we read through the script I could tell it was reasonably funny, but it didn't seem hilarious. Tonight we started recovering our natural rhythms, instead of just reading the words off the page as though they had been written by strangers. And, gosh darnit, if it doesn't seem pretty funny to me now.

And Erica did find some great plastic samurai swords at Uncle Fun for a buck a piece. Score!

Erica is headed to Uncle Fun this afternoon to find a ninja sword that won't actually kill Shaun when I stick him with it.

And Kittyloaf seems to be having some problems with the jackets. Which I blame on me, for not getting her the jackets earlier.

We're in another of those short periods where Shaun and I are both in town at the same time (he just got back from LA, I'm on my way to Mississippi tomorrow) so last night we had a meeting with Frankie and Michelle from Lavender Cabaret, who will be supplying the dancers for our sketch extravaganza. A productive meeting -- we kept asking for the moon and Michelle kept saying, "that should be doable."

We also made progress on costuming. When Shaun has played Elvis in the past (which has been fairly often) Shaun has had enough hair that he just does it up in a pompadour. But he shaved his head a few weeks ago, so he went out and found a terrrrible Elvis wig. I think it's gonna be high-larious.

I also met with our costumer-to-the-stars, Kittyloaf, who is using her Belmont Burlesque costume-accenting skills to decorate two leather jackets for us. (Thanks to The Alley for having cheap leather jackets. And to Shaun for re-buying one of his own jackets, because he thought he had lost it, because I had hung it up. In the coat closet. Cough.) Our design reference for these jackets is the Dice Rules jacket. Yowza. We'll see what Kittyloaf comes up with.

And I've sent out a short press release to some of our press contacts. The folks at Sketch Fest are doing a bang-up job (Shaun has already done a couple of phone interviews that they hooked up) but it never hurts to get your name out there. (And speaking of both that bang-up job and the getting out of names, congrats to Superpunk (guest stars in our show!) for being listed in Chicago Magazine as one of five groups to definitely catch at Sketch Fest.)

Shaun and I actually had a day when we were both in town this weekend (he's now off in LA for another week) so we sat down last night for a four hour script conference where we ironed out a bunch of the major issues with and disagreements about the script for our sketch show at Chicago Sketch Fest. We got something set that we can email out to the cast.

Yes, the cast. For our two-man sketch show, we've recruited a cast and crew (with a lot of overlap) of 15. This is going to be spectacle with a capital TACLE.

Now I've got a prop list a half a mile long I'm out looking for. And musicians to work with. And a press release to send out. Shaun's got dancers to coordinate and rehearsals to schedule. Yay fun!

photo by Erica Reid

Here's Bare doing our standup at the Bird's Nest on Monday night. It shows off two things -- we started out in shirts and ties and ended up in our undershirts -- because that's comedy. And you can see how great the lighting (or rather -- the light) is at the Bird's Nest.

I think the show went fairly well. Especially for a Monday night in the back room of a bar with Monday Night Football blaring in the front room.

Tonight is your last chance to see Don't Spit The Water, the "crazy live game show" that Erica is in. The Playground (3209 N Halsted) at 10:30 pm.

Tomorrow night I'll be on stage with CCC at The Playground (still 3209 N Halsted) at 8:00 pm. Mustang Repair, The Party, and Homey Loves Chachi also perform. I can slip you a 2-for-1 if you ask.

Monday Bare will be... OK, let's back up half a step here. I've been improvising for (eek) 14 years now, which means that for 14 years I've been having this short conversation: "So what do you do?" "Improv comedy" "Oh, like stand-up?" "Not really."

Well, this Monday I have to change that conversation a little. Because Shaun and I will be doing stand-up comedy at the Bird's Nest Bar (2500 N Southport). The wings are great and our jokes will be pre-planned.

Well, not quite a month later, I've posted a bunch of pictures from Bare's trip to the Southern Improv Festival in New Orleans.

Bare will not be performing at The Deuce tonight. Oops.

However, we will be performing at The Playground (3209 N Halsted) on Saturday night at 8 pm. I'll also be performing with Chicago Comedy Company in the same show, so you'll get two doses of Fuzzy for your $10 (and I can slip you a 2-for-1 coupon if you let me know ahead of time).

The paying audience was still light last night (by my count - 3 non-performers) but Bare (that is, we) had a fun time last night at the Bird's Nest Bar. We were pretty vulgar and a little too standy-around-talky, but we had plenty of energy (which I was worried about because I seem to be coming down with a cold or something). Oh, and you wanna know too much information? In the middle of our first scene a big chunk of earwax dislodged in my right ear and was rattling around and I was afraid that it was going to be bouncing around in there for the whole show and would really throw me off. But I barely had time to work up a good worry about it and it flew right out of my ear. Hooray.

And here's a bit I threw in for Erica (who was one of the three audience members) that no one else seemed to catch -- Shaun asked in a scene if he was hallucinating or if I had a bird on my shoulder. "You're not hallucinating," I said, "that's Flip." Get it? Flip. The Bird. Flip the bird? That was Erica's parakeet who recently passed away. RIP Flip.

And Dan and I went to the Bird's Nest straight after work so I had plenty of time to eat an order of their excellent wings. On the recommendation of the only-guy-at-the-bar-when-we-got-there I tried mixing the hot and teriyaki sauces. It was, as promised, tasty.

Bare will be performing at "The Harmony" at Bird's Nest (2500 N Southport) again this week. Last week was a little rough because there was hardly anyone there (perhaps because it's Monday, perhaps because game 6 of the Sox-Yankees was on at the same time, perhaps, perhaps). So let me entice you out on a Monday night with... $1 tacos (haven't tried them, but they're just a buck!), really good wings (did try them -- they're great), and some comedy. And Mort, who I substitute-coached for Dan, will performing also, so I'm looking forward to seeing how that lively group does.

Here's the complete lineup from the Bird's Nest mailing list.

Subject: 10/25 - This Monday's "The Harmony" Line-up (Bird's Nest @ 8pm)
A scary-good show just in time for Halloween. Come out tonight to see..

Jeff Grace - Back hosting and doing stand-up
Mort - Harmony regulars bringing more high energy improv
Nick Vatterott - Stand-up with an improvisors flair
Bare - Returns for another week of improv
Dave Odd - Not for the politically correct

"The Harmony" Comedy Night
Every Monday @ 8pm
The Bird's Nest
2500 N. Southport Ave. (2 blks north of Fullerton Ave)
$3 at the door
$1 Tacos, $2 PBR and $3 Coronas

Will telling you what I'm going to do this weekend influence what you might do this weekend? I can only hope.

Tonight (10/21) I'm headed to the opening night of the Camenae Ensemble Theatre Company's Can You Hear Their Voices? at Steep Theatre (3902 N Sheridan). Erica's in the show, so I am assured it will be amazing. The show runs Thursday to Sunday through November 21, so you'll have plenty of chances to see it.

Friday night (10/22), I'll be picking up my topic for the Fast Forward Film Festival and then heading over to see FuzzyCo's musical director Ben Taylor play with Marydee Reynolds at Martyrs' (3855 N. Lincoln Ave), opening for the Twinemen (featuring ex-members of Morphine). Ben sez "It'll be some stripped down rocking, sort of swampy, all good. Come on down, or up as the case may be."

Saturday night (10/23) is a full one. At 8 pm I'll be on stage with Chicago Comedy Co at The Playground (3209 N Halsted) (Diva, Ohio, and Malice also perform). Meanwhile, the short film that I will have made Friday night and Saturday for the Fast Forward Film Festival will be playing at Wesley Kimler's Gallery (2046 West Carroll). And at midnight it's back to The Playground for the Belmont Burlesque Revue (I'm not performing, just supporting).

Sunday night (10/24) I have a date. Go find something to do on your own.

Monday night (10/25) (OK, I realize we're not techinically in the "weekend' anymore, but work with me here) Bare will be performing at Bird's Nest Bar (2500 N Southport) with 3 standup comedians and another improv group. We did this same show last week and I have to say that it was a little rough, mainly because there was hardly anyone there (it was game 6 of the Red Sox-Yankees series). But you can help change that. And let me entice you with a cheap $3 cover, $1 tacos, and $2 PBRs. And great wings. And I'll probably be so happy to see you at the show that I'll buy you one of those $2 PBRs.

Fresh off our appearance at the Southern Improv Fest (howdy y'all!) Bare will performing at the Bird's Nest tonight. Here's the info from the Bird's Nest:

Oct 18th - Tonight at the Bird's Nest -- 8 pm -- Gender Balanced Comedy

3 male acts, 3 female acts. This is the Title 9 of comedy showcases!
Come out this Monday night to see...

Ken Barnard - Hosting this week and doing stand-up through the night
Bare - 2 Man Improv show debuts at the Harmony
Kara Buller - Returns after a hilarious set last week
Robert Buscemi - Harmony regular unleashes his unique world view
Tracy Tedesco - Opened for Puppetry of the Penis in August
LEGATO - All female improv troupe returns to the Bird's Nest

"The Harmony" Comedy Night
Every Monday @ 8pm

The Bird's Nest
2500 N. Southport Ave. (2 blks north of Fullerton Ave)
$3 at the door
$1 Tacos, $2 PBR and $3 Coronas

I'll be appearing in the closing show of the festival -- an Armando featuring some special guest as the monologist -- Sunday night (10/17) at 11 pm.

In all honesty and modesty, Bare rocked the house last night. I can't find wifi in New Orleans (drinking - yes, internet - no) so pictures and a complete description of how much we rocked will need to wait until I'm not typing on my phone's tiny keyboard.

Bare also has a couple of shows coming up here at home in Chicago.

Next Monday, October 25, we'll be at the Bird's Nest Bar (2500 N Southport). The show features three standup comedians and two improv groups.

And the Wednesday after that, November 3, we'll help you unwind from the election with three other two-person improv groups at The Deuce at The Playground (3209 N Halsted). And it's cheap! $2!

And then that Saturday, November 5, both Bare and Chicago Comedy Co are performing at The Playground, so you get two doses of Fuzzy Gerdes-ness for your $10 (I can hook you up with 2-for-1s if you ask nice). Jovial Hayes and Atticus Finch also perform.

This weekend Bare will be down in New Orleans for the first Southern Improv Festival. The Festival runs from Thursday to Sunday and features groups from all over the country. All the shows start at 7 pm and are at the Jewel Theater and Gallery located at 2134 Magazine St., third floor, at the corner of Jackson Avenue.

Bare goes up Friday night at 7 pm.

The November issue of Game Informer magazine features Bare's Shaun Himmerick with his day-job-hat on in an article about the new game he's producing, Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks.

Danny's Tavern in Wicker Park is a house that's been converted into a bar. It still has the comfortable feel of hanging out at a house party (though evidently back in the day you could hang out in the "kitchen" or on the back balcony). It's also the the site of a monthly reading series. A couple weeks ago, my old Kids Around the World teammate John Beer emailed me and asked if Bare would be interested in doing a special comedy version of their reading series. "Sounds great."

Shaun and I (and Erica) showed up last night promptly at 6:45 to discover that place was still locked, so we had some chicken (a little dry, but tasty. excellent mashed potatoes) at Nick's Pit Stop around the corner.

Back at Danny's, we met John's co-host (whose name I unfortunately can't remember). "Here," he said, pointing to a small area beside the DJ booth, "is where we usually put the readers. Will it be enough space?"

I looked around. It was enough space -- one of our first shows was on a stand-up club stage that was about 5x10' -- but I was a little concerned about how dark it was -- candles and two lamps with yellow bulbs and a single yellow-bulbed track-light were all the light in the room. It was hard to make out his face. "Can it get any brighter in here?" I asked.

"Actually," he said, "it gets dimmer. But people's eyes adjust."

Sigh.

And, actually, the show went fine. John and his co-host managed to swing one more track light at the "stage". We kept the jumping around to a minimum and concentrated on verbal humor. And the audience was very attentive to our mangling of the life of James Joyce. And we got to say hello to Jessa.

But still. "It gets dimmer." Lordy.

A late plug is better than no plug, I suppose. Gapers Block (one of several fine Chicago-oriented blogs) just added a plug for tonight's Danny's Reading Series featuring, cough, cough, Bare. (Thanks to Jessa for plugging the plug.)

Photo by Cholley Kuhaneck

Bare performed at the Gong Show this weekend. An hour before the show we changed our minds about the act we were going to do. So we showed up at the theater with a box of snaps and a couple ideas. Shaun wrote a stand-up routine about sex and dating and then I used the snaps to negatively-reinforce him whenever he swore. Which was, as usual, a lot. Pow. Pow pow pow.

We didn't win, but on a night full of gonging, neither did we get gonged. That's a victory in my book.

On the off chance that you're a Bare fan in Memphis and had already blocked off September 2-5, you can unblock those dates because the Memphis Comedy Fest has been cancelled.

Here's Shaun and I, outside The Playground just before The Deuce last night. Picture with one of my many craptacular little digital cameras (this was the SiPix Blink, if'n you care).

I've just added a performance to the list above -- Bare will be performing this Wednesday (June 30) at The Playground's The Deuce -- a show that showcases two-person improv groups. There are two of us -- check. And we do improv -- check. Done and done.

It used to be a staple of Bare shows: two old cranky guys who'd end up kung fu fighting super-slow-and-creaky old guy style. Good thing we don't do that anymore, because truth is stranger than improv.

So, Friday night at the festival, they started the night off with a showing of Cesar Jaime and Jeff Pacocha's documentary about Del Close, The Delmonic Interviews. Somehow, I had never seen the film before, but Shaun has seen it 5 or 6 times. That night he mentioned that watching the film always depressed him because it made him think about what he was or wasn't doing to advance "the work".

And later that night I happened to overhear some of the Tucson improvisors discussing who was going to performing the next day. "Well, there's those guys from Utah and there's Bare." "What are Bare like?" "Oh, a friend of mine from Chicago told me that they're, you know, crowd-pleasers."

Crowd-pleasers? Is that an insult? A compliment? Just accurate? I mean, we do strive to entertain the audience. We are, modesty aside, pretty funny. Is that bad?

In any case, on Saturday night when we were trying to decide what to do for our show (Hotel? Small Town? "Who would do that?"? Pageant of History? (which we will be doing this Wednesday at The Playground's Motel 6)) I jokingly threw out "Actual Theatre."

Actual Theatre was a show we developed two years ago with director Don Hall. It was an improvised show that centered around the real relationship between Shaun and me. We used personal monologues and (long) scenes that were usually half-a-step from reality to explore our often-contentious relationship and build to an exaggerated argument which would end when one of would get so angry that we'd storm out of the theatre. And that'd be the end of the show. We did a run at WNEP Theatre and really felt like we accomplished our goals for the show. Good friends of ours would leave the show asking Don if he thought we could do the show the next week since this week "ended so badly."

After listening to (and about) Del for an hour the day before and having been mulling over that over-heard comment, it was suddenly attractive. If we did it right it wouldn't be crowd-pleasing, but crowd-affecting.

There were a number of good reasons not to do the show.

• we hadn't done it for two years
• We were the closing act of the festival, and it could be a very odd way to end the festival
• when we did do the show, Don was the maestro, calling scene changes and monologues with light and sound cues
• The audiences that came to see Actual Theatre at WNEP were prepared for, if not the exact show they saw, an evening of more dramatic theater than happy make-em-ups
• even if we did the show well, it wouldn't necessarily be fun for the audience
• there were some kids in the front row and Shaun said "I can't be 'emotionally honest' without swearing." Fair enough.

We tried to get some people to talk us out of it. We asked Jos� if it was alright to end the festival with a odd, maybe jarring show. "Sounds great," Jos� said. We called Don to ask if he thought we could do the show after two years and if he thought it was OK to do that to the festival. "A festival is the perfect place to do Actual Theatre! Have fun!" Don said. "Do it! Doooo it!" Jen yelled in the background.

So... it looked like we were stuck. I didn't want to go back to Chicago and tell Don we had wussed out of doing the show. We went out into the parking lot and worked out some structural changes to the show to accommodate the lack of Don or really any light control and to work within the audiences expectations. "No sense in warming up," Shaun said. We went back inside to watch JoKyR & Jesster. Their show ended all too soon (it turns out their was a miscommunication about pulling their lights and indeed, it was too soon).

And... we did Actual Theatre. The opening, movement to music, went better than we could have expected. The first loooong scene went so well that Shaun told me afterwards that he was considering trying to figure out how to indicate to me that we should just do that scene as a 40-minute scene and be done with it. But we jumped into the monologues that took the whole thing into a (controlled) spiral into chaos. At about 40 minutes, I asked Shaun if I could join him in his improvised car. "No," he said, "get out." "Fine," I snapped, and left the stage and the building and headed down the street to Fat Cat's for a shot and a beer and to wait for Shaun.

And... it worked. The show was, by turns, funny and confusing and dramatic. The next day people were still asking "Is Bare OK?" Whew.

Jesster's pictures from Phoenix

So... some more pretty pictures of Phoenix:

More unrealistically beautiful palm trees and blue sky.

Koi at the Chinese Cultural Center.

Windmill at the Castles & Coasters miniature golf. Which sucks, by the way, Far too many of those holes where you have to get the ball into a specific hole on an upper level and then it drops through a pipe into a lower level.

Apollo 12 invokes "comic book".

Bare begins. Thanks to Amy Carpenter for taking photos of Bare.

That first long scene, just sitting in chairs.

I'm usually the one taking the pictures, so I'm just enjoying having so many pictures of Bare to choose from.

Shaun does a monologue in the one well-lit spot on stage.

I lecture an imaginary class about working together.

I deliver a rambling monologue.

Things start to get ugly and chairs are thrown.

Shaun sits in his improv car and watches me leave the building.

Phoenix Day Two
Phoenix Day One

Woo-oo! More Phoenix

The sky is so blue here it's not realistic.

Of course Tommy C has a trunk full of puppets.

A monologue from Mark of Galapagos.

Dueling monologues from Men in Shirts.

Shaun starts off the 40 person jam at the end of the night. At this point there were 6 people in the audience, including me.

Chicken and Waffles! Lo Lo's had good chicken and one of the best waffles I've ever had.

Phoenix Day Three
Phoenix Day Two
Phoenix Day One

Well, we made it to Phoenix. Tonight at the festival was "Arizona Showcase" night with 6 Arizona groups, then a jam with Bare, Men in Shirts, and 5 randomly selected Arizona players.

It's late (4:15 AM Chicago time) so here's just a mess of pictures (sorry if you're on dial-up):

Shaun is here.

And so am I.

Jos� Gonzalez, Bare's "den mother" for the duration of our visit here.

Jos�'s sweet 1975 Pontiac.

Evidently, there aren't many restaurants open late downtown, but El Norte�o saved us from McDonald's.

I know well the trouble of keeping a multi-group evening on schedule. Each group's time left is projected on the wall, in rather large numbers.

The time is also visible to the rest of the audience, reflected in a large window. Oops.

Men in Shirts made it down from Detroit.

And, oh yeah, there were some groups performing. Here's Jester'Z.

The first neighborhood bar we visited tonight, Fat Cat's, had Magic Johnson leering at a lady.

And the second, Bikini Lounge, had tikis everywhere.

Phoenix Day Three
Phoenix Day Two
Phoenix Day One

Bare is headed out to Phoenix, Arizona tomorrow for the Phoenix Improv Fest and we just received the best "here's what you need to know about coming to our festival" update we've ever gotten. They included a weather forecast! I'm looking forward to this festival.

"acidic, but funny comedy of duo Himmerick and Gerdes" says Ray Koltys in his review of the last Belmont Burlesque Review.

Saturday night at "Midnight and a half"* Bare performed at the Belmont Burlesque Revue. (We performed as "Himmerick & Gerdes" because we thought that sounded more Vaudevillian.) We did some sketches from a book of Burlesque comedy bits that Megan had, and one original piece. Someone was supposed to take pictures, but they didn't. So I don't have any pictures of Shaun and me in oversized jackets mugging shamelessly. I took this one picture of Madame X from waaaay offstage with my little camera, and then I got caught up in remembering the set list.

* It's tricky to advertise a show after midnight -- we did have one person get confused because we had put "Saturday at 12:30 am" on the posters and they came Friday night, because it is, technically, Saturday once you get past midnight.

Shaun and I have been doing improv as Bare for four years now, and we have plenty of improv shows coming up, both in Chicago and around the country. But for the last year or so Shaun has been talking about Bare doing a sketch show. As part of pushing that along, we had our first meeting tonight with our new writing coach, Phillip Mottaz of Superpunk.

I haven't really written any sketch since the days of The Outliers. Shaun writes sketches all the time for CCC, but they tend to be so finely-tuned for a specific corporate environment that they're not really suitable for anything else. So I think we both have some work to do.

Another part of pushing the sketch show along is... booking shows. So Shaun has signed us to do a sketch slot at "Sunday Setlist" at Frankie J's on Sunday, April 4. Eek.

I finally got my photos from New Zealand organized and online. Somehow we didn't get any photos of our incredible hosts -- Mark Scott and Bill Scott. They put up with two Americans over-running their house, made us innumerable cups of tea, and helped us in dozens of ways. Yay!

Shows done. Rafting. Home soon.

Fuzzy

Well, we're half-way, show-wise, through our New Zealand trip. The first two shows went well. The house was about half-full for both shows, but the Covert is such an intimate space that it felt full.

This morning we had to get up early to go be on Breakfast at TV One. Wade told us before the show that we wouldn't need to plug the theatre name or number because they'd flash it up on the screen, but I guess they didn't. So we were charming as anything, but I'm not sure how it will translate into butts-in-seats.

Anyway, today I guess we're going scuba diving (life is hard, I know), then we have two more shows tonight and tomorrow night. We might sit in with Maestro on Sunday night, too.

Oh, and it's Friday here, but I guess it's Thursday afternoon in Chicago right now. So, Happy Thanksgiving, America.

Well, we made it. The plane flight was loooong, but we survived. We've had a relaxing start to the week, shopping yesterday and toodling around the coast in a borrowed car today ("stay left! stay left!").

Our first show at Covert is tonight at 8 pm. We did a radio interview on George FM with Peter Urlich this morning, so hopefully that'll put an extra butt or two in the seats. I froze doing "Alphabet" with Peter (what can I say -- I'm out of practice at short-form) but our friend Mark, listening in the car, said it didn't sound terrible.

Oh, and in case you've heard rumors back home in Chicago, WNEP is not closed. Not Closed.

It's been lurking up there in the FuzzyCo calendar for a while, but now it's the NextThing(tm): Bare is going to New Zealand. We'll be doing 4 shows over 4 nights at Covert Theatre in Auckland.

Sunday was our first real chance to relax in Toronto. Our hotel was on Queen Street downtown, so we walked over to Java House for breakfast (hmmm... stuffed french toast). I've now eaten at Java House every time I've been in Toronto, which has to count for something.

On the way home we shopped and shopped in all the Queen West hipster shops. I stocked up on Lush, of course. Fluevog had a sale going on and I ended up getting three pairs of shoes. I wore my new burgundy and rust Ivans to the shows that night, because no one else would have shoes like that, eh? Well, no one but Stacey and Phil of Big Belly who both have pairs. And Phil was wearing his, too. The search for an original life is difficult.

So, the shows that night were great, partially, I'm sure, because it was nice to finally be able to just sit back and enjoy someone else's show. By bouncing back and forth between the two stages I got to see All Jane No Dick (with special guest Zabeth Russell!) and Adrienne Frost's Wonderworm and Slap Happy (with special guest DJ!) and Dual Exhaust and goga and Jill Bernard's Drum Machine and Plain Cake Donuts (with special guests Zach Ward and Anthony LeBlanc!) and Big Belly (with special guests those shoes!). Whew. Then more dancing all night long in the Cabaret.

Sleep. Bus. Ticket troubles. (I shake my fist at you, Air Canada.) Finally, home.

Saturday morning, Beth and I were crawling out of our resective beds at noonish and contemplating the notion of breakfast when Shaun returned from a "run" on the hotel treadmill (he's training for the Chicago Marathon) and announced that he had remembered that Neutrino was scheduled for a tech time of 1:00 pm. Shaun and I had agreed to run tech for the Neutrino Video Projects, which as far as we knew was still scheduled for that evening. So, it was all hurry-shower and hurry-cab to the theater.

Where, hoo-ray, Neutrino was, indeed, waiting for us to show up. We've all done the show many times, so the tech set up isn't that hard, but it's always fun learning a new sound board. And I realised that I had left my bag-of-many-adapters back in Chicago, which made hooking up the Neutrino gear to the sound board a bit of a challenge. I ended up having to unhook the theater's CD player to get my setup to work. Which meant that I had to disassemble my setup so that other groups could tech, since nearly everyone else needed to use the CD player.

Which also made me note that the festival had, for whatever good reason, scheduled the three tech-heaviest shows all in a row. Most improv shows (like Bare, for example) have almost no technical requirements. Lights up at the beginning of the show, play a song while the group comes out, lights out at the end of the show. Neutrino Video Projects, the Beat Box, and Andy Eninger's One Man Seen all use lots of tech. Boxes of tech. Metric tonnes of tech. Oh well.

We dashed back to the hotel to get our show clothes, because Bare had been scheduled to a 10:30 mainstage slot that night, and then back to the theater.

The Neutrino show was nerve-wracking. From what we could see on screen, the actors all slipped into the form just fine, which was great considering that 4 of 7 actors in the show were sit-ins (Joe Bill, Adrienne Frost, Ted Hallett, and Tabetha Wells all jumped into the NVP). And the camera work was delightful. But after some tight timing, we hit a tape that was playing with jerky video and no sound. We stuck it in the other camera and it played fine, which made us figure that camera was bad. So we started using just the one camera to play the tapes. And then we hit a tape that wouldn't play in either camera. We were, I'll think it's safe to say, freaking out. Dan even brought in the camera it had been filmed on and it wouldn't play. Freak out city!

So after the show, everyone's saying "great job in the booth" and so on. Were they just being polite? Did they not notice that silent scene snippet we saw three times? Did they think it was experimental video? Or is the power of seeing the NVP for the first time ("They just made that movie right now. Pop. My mind just exploded.") so overwhelming that they really didn't notice?

Oh, and when the cast started watching the tape of the show (I tape the show. That is made up of tapes. Work that around in your mind for a while) the first thing I noticed was that I had misspelled Ptolemy's name in the credits. Sorry, Ptolemy.

So anyway, right when Neutrino ended, I had to rip half of my tech set-up apart so that The Beatbox could use the CD player. Then we had 30 seconds to breathe before Shaun had to run Andy's tech and I video-taped his show. And then, pant, pant, it was time for Bare.

Just a few weeks before the festival, we had finally gotten ahold of Joey "Accordion Guy" deVilla and secured his services as an accompanist for our show. Unfortunately, with the power outage and our show getting moved to Saturday, Joey was out of town at a wedding. Which meant that we had to rely on our own skills as improvisors to carry the show. We were doomed!

Well, except for the part where we're wicked awesome improvisors. We did our "Pagaent of History" form, where we do the life story of a famous person. We did Lincoln (the first suggestion we heard was Wellington, which I sadly had to turn down, because everything I know about Wellington is what I'm misremembering about Nelson). Lincoln, it turns out, was the child of a troll from the future. His most decisive moment was his momentous battle against a 40-foot tall Douglas (whom we wisely left un-first-named, because neither of us could remember "Stephen". I wanted to say "Frederick," but I knew that wasn't right).

So, I think the show went well. After our show, we were trapped backstage during the Johnny Lunchpail set. There's a door that leads outside from the backstage of the Poor Alex, but Shaun he was warned that horrible things would happen if we tried to go out that way. The only other exit from backstage was the stage. so we watched Johnny Lunchpail from a crack in the curtain. Physical is the word for those boys. Blue shirts, and physical.

As soon as we were free, I ran upstairs to catch Men in Shirts on the Cabaret Stage. Soon after their show, the rest of the festival came upstairs and we danced the night away. Hoo-ray for the night.

Friday morning we (Shaun and Beth and I) got up, took an uneventful cab ride back to O'Hare, where we caught an uneventful plane to an uneventful bus ride to our hotel. We weren't staying at any of the official festival hotels because we got a good deal on the Sheraton downtown, which is an easy subway ride away from the theater. Except, of course, that the subway wasn't running. Our cell phones weren't working, either, so we had to use (gasp) pay-phone technology to contact Tabetha (somehow, none of us had KPR's phone number with). That's when we found out that our show that night (that is, everyone's shows that night) had been canceled, but we were all invited over to Tabetha's house to just hang out.

A quick trip to an Internet cafe (pretty much the only net access we had all weekend) and a rolling blackout at our hotel later, and we cabbed it over to Tabetha's. (The cab driver of this first-cab-ride-in-Toronto-on-a-visit-where-we-were-going-to-be-dependent-on-cabs took us way out of our way and then had to ask directions of someone else at a stop light, which made me worried for the rest of the weekend -- fortunately the rest of our cab drivers were much more capable (though they did all take different routes from the hotel to the theater).)

Tabetha's was delightful. A ton of people stopped by to drink tons of Amsterdam and hang out. Joey deVilla, who had agreed to accompany us on his accordion for our Bare show, came by and charmed us all with his wit and accordion-playing-on-the-lawn. I think Joey made a couple of bucks at the party -- people just can't resist throwing money at a man playing the accordion. Late in the evening, Joey, Karen Wight of goga, and I went out dancing at the Velvet Underground. Joey feed me something called "Rev" that looked like Windex and tasted like soda. And had, evidently, plenty of vodka in it.

Pizza. Stumble home to the Sheraton. Sleep.

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 3:45 pm (Central Datlight Time), which meant we were boarding about the time the power went out from Toronto to Maryland. We got out on the tarmac and sat there for a half an hour before they realized this wasn't a transient problem and sent us back to the gate. Lots of people were trying to get on the 6:30 flight, which wasn't officially canceled yet. We sensibly believed a ticket agent who told us this wasn't going to be solved any time soon, got ourselves booked on a 9 am flight, and went home. Sometimes it's not that bad to be "stuck" if you're in your own town -- we went and had a great dinner at Frankie J's on Broadway. Given the adventures Jeff and others were having, I'm double-extra-happy I got to sleep in my own bed that night.

We're here! We were on a plane on the tarmac yesterday right when the giant power outage happened so we spent the night in Chicago last night. We made it to Toronto today, but I guess the festival is canceled for tonight. I've been told we'll be on tomorrow night, but I don't have any details yet. So... we're just enjoying this 40% powerless city. Drink the beer before it gets warm, my friends.

So Bare is on our way to Toronto this evening for the Toronto Improv Festival. International Festival, excuse me (I had to dig out my passport and everything). We're excited to see old friends and to meet new ones, etc. etc. But the real news is that Joey "Accordion Guy" deVilla will be accompanying us. On, you know, his accordion.

This is certainly not the first time we've worked with an accordion player. Jose Hirohito and his All-Girl Orchestra was built around Liz's accordion (which is actually my dad's old accordion -- he took lessons as a kid). Which is why we're so excited. Nothing says "good times" like an accordion. And improv.

Saturday night the NVP will be in town and Shaun and I will be running their tech. And then I'll be part of the "Jamboree Rock-Star Jam". Woo-oo.

Pictures from Bare's trip to St. Louis this weekend.

I've posted a gallery of pictures from our trip to the Phoenix Improv Festival. The Barrow Gang also has a gallery of pictures.

Bare has been invited to perform at the St. Louis Improv Festival on Friday, May 30. Look out, Missouri.

A strange, strange weekend.

Shaun and I went out to Phoenix Improv Festival this weekend. Ended up in a hot tub with Schadenfreude (who were in town for a different festival) at 5 am on Sunday morning.

Oh, and our show "blew the roof off" (just got that in an email from one of the Barrow Gang). So, good job us.

Special thanks to Jose for being the world's best tour guide, Travis for the beer, and Clif's dad for letting us crash in his hotel room.

If you weren't one of the dozen lucky people in the audience at the LAUGH benefit this morning at 10 am, then you missed Bare doing our whole show in nothing but a pair (each) of Sirens-logoed boxer shorts.

Jackie Stone said she'd give Shaun $10 if we did it, and we're never ones to pass up an easy ten-spot (even if we have to spend twice that to buy boxer shorts from the merch table).

After a while, I forgot we weren't wearing hardly any clothes. We were doing our "Pagaent of History" show, with the suggestion of "Stalin" and it was tricky enough to keep track of the actual details of Stalin's life and our invented history and what I (wasn't) wearing sort of fell by the wayside.

I've posted some pictures from our trip to Seattle last weekend.

Saturday we rocked, again. Can I say that? I just did.

Also, Neutrino rocked, especially for the rag-tag group it was (1/2 NY Neutrino, 1/4 FuzzyCo, 1/4 WIT). The only problem with the NVP was that Shaun's scene had him jumping around in a dumpster in the rain in a t-shirt, and it gave him an awful cold. I hope Bob, his scene partner in the dumpster, is OK.

Oh, and I guess all the NY folks are stuck in Seattle because of the snow in NY. Strength, NY friends.

Pictures up soon. Neutrino has a new web site. Love to all Seattle.

Friday was a very, very busy day. The two hour time difference from Chicago means that we get tired faster in the evening, but have trouble sleeping-in. So we got up and went out with four of the Neutrino folks to the Pike Place Fish Market. While I was off getting a coffee, the others decided they didn't want to wait for the fish sellers to throw fish in the normal course of their day, so they paid a guy $5 to throw a fish at Bob. Evidently, they think it was money well spent.

After a hearty fish-laden breakfast, we went off via the monorail to the Space Needle. At the foot of the Space Needle is "Fun Forest" -- an arcade and low-rent amusement park. We played Chicago vs. New York lasertag (Kurt had the highest individual score, but Chicago ruled on team score) and rode the little Ferris wheel and put Rachel on the carrosel and made fun of her.

Chicago vs New York Lasertag

Then we went over to the Experience Music Project and pretended to be a band and jammed in a jam room and danced in the disco exhibit.

Bare in the reflection of the EMP

And then, oh yeah, why are we in Seattle in the first place? Oh yeah, the shows. We had a Neutrino tech rehearsal and I was glad to see that it wasn't just me who starts a tech rehearsal by sending someone out to Radio Shack to buy all the cables I left at home.

The shows were good again, with the stand-outs being Jet City's Lost Folio (an improvised Shakespeare play) and (cough, cough, false modesy) Bare.

Yeah, we rocked. We decided to take off from that erroneous listing that said we did vaudville acts and we started the show with me juggling and Shaun eating fire. The eating fire went fine, but then Shaun escalated to breathing (technically, blowing) fire. We had forgotten to pick up some liquor during the day, so Shaun got the Rumpleminze for his fire tricks from a local bar and it's our suspicion that they watered down their liquor, because when Shaun went to breathe fire, he ended up just covering the stage with a fine mist of Rumpleminze, which made the floor sticky for the whole show. (We tried to find a mop in the intermission, but failed, and Uncle Elaine ended up doing a very physical show where they rolled around in our Rumpleminze mess a lot. Sorry.)

And the suggestion we got was "blast," which was perfect for our mood and led us into a bizarre world of Mexican stand-offs and Marlon Brando disguises and Miss Arkansas. ("My speech topic was that there's nothing anyone can't not do.")

Today's about to start off with more Neutrino rehearsal and we've got another show tonight. S-the-D, B.

Hello from Seattle! Shaun and I are here to do two Bare shows (Friday and Saturday at 10 pm) and sit in with the New York Neutrino. Tonight was all Seattle groups, and we saw some fine improv indeed.

Tomorrow the Chicago Neutrino Project will happen for the first time without Shaun or I. I'm sure they'll be fine, but we're both control freaks, so it was hard for us to leave. We both left lots of instructions that I hope the crew will just ignore and just do the show they know full well how to do.

Tomorrow morning we're off to see the market where they throw the fish.

I shouldn't look gift publicity in the mouth, but it seems that someone may have misread my figurative description of Bare as "two men who perform with the energy and presence of a ten-person group -- a ten-person group with some acrobats, a fire-eater, and a rock band in there somewhere" as literal. Caveat to the Pacific Northwest -- we don't actually eat fire. Or do (good) acrobatics. We're funny, though. And I can juggle. Note to self: bring juggling clubs to Seattle. I wonder if I'll have any problems carrying them onto the plane?

P.S. "Nurtino". Hee hee.

So many thanks... thanks to Will for setting the whole thing up and letting us sleep on his floor, thanks to Asaf and Karen and Hugh for coming up from New York, thanks to Norm and Brian for coming over from ImprovAsylum to play on Sunday night (because everyone knows how much IB and IA hate each other), thanks to Don for putting up the New Yorkers, thanks to Zabeth for taking Shaun to play pool on Sunday night so I could be sick and pack in peace, thanks to the brave few who took our workshop, and a special thanks to every who saw the shows.

I'm sitting in the basement/green room of ImprovBoston right now, while Karen Herr is leading a discussion on Women in Improv upstairs. We're going to be doing two shows tonight -- not too many years ago Shaun and I were mildly freaked out when we had to do a half-hour Bare show ("Just the two of us? On stage for 30 minutes? Alone?"). Tonight we're going to be doing 3 hours or so, all together. Shaun's taking a nap and I'm goofing around online, that's how non-freaked out we are now.

Tomorrow, Asaf Ronen is leading a jam with Shaun and I, Karen, Boston peeps I'm sure, etc., etc. Should be fun.

Shaun and I will be taking Bare to ImprovBoston this weekend. We'll be sitting in with their TheaterSports show on Friday (Dec 13), doing two Bare shows on Saturday (Dec 14), and sitting in with their Jam on Sunday (Dec 15). Some of our New York friends will be coming up and sitting in with the Jam, too.

We did a three-minute preview of our show at WNEP's Gong Show on Saturday. We came in second. Well, we tied for second. To be exact, we tied for second with a duo who spat hot chocolate on each other (there was a little more to their act, but not much). I think that's our new poster tag line: "Bare: voted equally entertaining as two guys spitting hot chocolate on each other".

Jackie Rosepal of Plain Cake Donuts sent me a bunch of pictures from Toronto and I've posted them. (And, of course there's my pictures still.)

I finally posted my pictures from last-last weekend in Toronto. For once, thanks to Asaf, there are pictures of me on stage!

Tomorrow morning Shaun and I get on a plane for Toronto, headed for the Toronto Improv Festival. If you live anywhere in Canada (or Buffalo) you should come see the show.