A Real Charity Case

As the Artistic Director of the UCB Theatre, I get a lot of phone calls and e-mails from people asking me to book their shows. Many of these people are fine comedians looking for a place to play. But every now and then, I get lucky, and a really insane person will call.

Mrs. V was one of those people ("Mrs. V" does not actually use "Mrs." in her stage name - she uses a more regal prefix - I just don't want her googling herself and finding this blog).

I also won't go into a lot of detail as to just how bat-shit crazy this woman is, but the "V" stands for "Vulva" and...this is her HEADSHOT:

The pinnacle of our pre-show dealings came when she called to tell me that CBS News wanted to tape her show and she wanted us to raise the $5 ticket price to $10 and give the extra $5 "to retarded children and their families."

Her words. Which she also printed on her show's posters, "Help us raise money for retarded children and their families."

So, what is this show? Why, it's a ribald, sexually-themed stand-up act in which Mrs. V reads the audience's sexual fortunes. Of course.

Needless to say, CBS News was not at her show. And no one else was either. Six people showed up. Six. Mrs. V raised a whopping thirty bucks.

One retarded kid somewhere is gonna get to go to Applebees.

But that didn't stop Mrs. V. She stuck to her principles and informed Mo in the booth that she would not perform unless the audience chanted her name. And she insisted on performing with a wireless microphone (the kind they used in RENT).

Of course, the UCB Theatre is in the basement of a grocery store, so...the wireless mic didn't work too well. Through the whole show, the mic only worked intermittently and she would hop around to find a place where she could get it to work with no feedback...while six of us watched her. Six.

Keep in mind, I decided immediately not to introduce myself, so Mrs. V had no idea I was the same guy she had been harrassing on the phone for weeks (and who she promised CBS News would be there filming the show). So when Gethard, Ben, Adam and I joyfully chanted "Mrs. V!" over and over again at the top of the show, she could only assume we were totally into it - and not the ironically detatched jackasses we really are.

After a minute or so of chanting, Mrs. V hit the stage and set the tone for the whole show with her first incredibly witty line: "I love it when you say my name when I'm coming...on stage."

And that was pretty much the show: a lady in a turban using a bad russian accent to make sex puns. Some highlights:

-Taking Adam's hand, she told him - "You're palm lines can tell me if you are introverted or extroverted...basically which kind of verted you are. You are (wait for it!) PERVERTED!"

-She mentally went through my wallet and found a condom in it! (She did this by putting both her hands on her turban and pretending to see my wallet in her mind). Then she discovered the condom was (wait for it!) expired!

If she had had a guy doing rimshots, it would have been perfect.

The hands-down best moment in the show came when she got two people to come on stage together. "I like to use a couple for this," she said. Then she had them recite tongue twisters and prescribed tongue excercises for the both of them. The excercise? They should french-kiss four times a day.

The couple started laughing uncontrollably. Were they embarrassed? Nope. They were - WAIT FOR IT! - brother and sister.

Not a planned bit.

Mrs. V froze. She looked at the ground. Finally she said, "This is fun."

So much fun!

In fact, this may be the most fun I have ever had in a theater. I laughed until I was literally in pain. And seeing something this devoid of irony or self-awareness or anything even closely resembling quality play out so pathetically - it was joyous.

That sounds like a mean thing to say - and maybe it is - but it was exactly like watching a Christopher Guest film, only it was real. Which would have almost made it amazing...if it wasn't so retarded.

It Couldn't Please Me More

Sometimes I think I'm addicted to shittiness. Not in my day-to-day life; I'm not a masochist or anything like that. But when I'm watching a show or a movie, I often wring more joy out of watching something truly horrible than I do something good.

An example:
When Kate and I were in the Bahamas, we saw the free show at the casino in the hotel next door to ours. It was called "Cabaret Tonight!" Indeed, the show was both a "cabaret" and "that night," so they rocked that pretty hard, but they definitely didn't aim any higher than fulfilling the basic titular definitions of the show.

The show was a mediocre mix of dancing, singing, stand-up comedy, juggling, and, that old cabaret standard...fire eating. And it was performed on a set designed with the basic theme of "What can I get for 50 cents?"

My favorite moments came from the three sad dancers gyrating to bad synth-pop on an ENORMOUS stage that swallowed them completely. They were just terrible dancers, and they all had looks on their faces like the prison warden had promised to electrocute them quicker if they danced for him first (except for the white girl who kind of looked like she thought if she really sold those moves, her career was gonna take off!).

"Cassie! You're late on the turn!"

Yes, that is a hand-painted version of Times Square on the back-drop with, inexplicably, nine rows of traffic roaring through it (and then, apparently, down some stairs).

But it wasn't all sad dancing! There was also a Bahamian stand-up comedian who told Reader's Digest-length jokes. Literally paragraph long set-ups with precious punchlines that my grandmother would have tried to remember so she could mistell them to her ladies prayer circle back in Pensacola.

I should also mention the soul singer, who was clearly the headliner of the show, really wasn't that bad, but every time she was introduced, the announcer would say, "Please welcome our melodious songbird!" For some reason, the term "melodious songbird" made me want to vomit my two-drink minimum into the announcer's mouth - so I've blocked her out.

But the fire-eater? I remember her. She was weird and overly theatrical - like she was trying to prove something. I imagine the director tried to tell her he was hiring someone else to be the "melodious songbird" and the girl wouldn't stop crying, so he said, "Well...what if you did some crazy shit with fire!?"

She actually didn't eat much fire - she mostly walked around in the audience with the fire on the end of a stick, scared people with it, then rubbed it on her body (the message being, "Look kids, fire is only scary when you're not the one holding it").

She was sopping wet with oil - not glistening - sopping wet. So the illusion and magic of "How does she touch the fire and not get blisters?" was kind of gone. It really is hard to make fire boring.

But the best - the best! - was the grand finale. The juggler who earlier in the show had attempted to balance a beach umbrella on his chin and failed miserably, returned to the stage for the big knife-throwing finale.

Now - this man could not complete a simple balancing trick earlier in the show, so why anyone would volunteer to go onstage to allow the guy to hurl knives at him, in a crappy casino, in a show with dancers that sad - is beyond me. But some idiot from Texas volunteered and they had the guy stand against a styrofoam wall with two big styrofoam blocks by his head.

STYROFOAM!

This was the kind of styrofoam they use to make those cheap coolers. It looked like they bought a new TV and said, "Hey, what if I threw knives at all this packing material?"

"Cassie! You're not in this part of the show!"

Now keep in mind, this was the FINALE of the show. We had already seen a woman rub fire on her face, so they clearly had to top that. But would they actually let some dude heave knives at some other dude surrounded by Dunkin Donut cups?

No. Of course not.

They put a blindfold on the volunteer. Then the knife thrower comically tiptoed over to the guy, stuck the knives into the styrofoam, tiptoed back, and yelled, "Ta da!"

Quite possibly the most disappointing finale since they realized the aliens were allergic to water in "Signs."

Even the audience, who earlier had almost rendered themselves completely insane screaming for the "melodious songbird," stared in silence, then quickly gathered their things and returned to the slot machines.

The sad dancers took their final bows to an almost empty theater.

NEXT ENTRY: "Cabaret Tonight" was free. For ten dollars, you get sex comedy for retarded people.

Beach Potato

Did I mention Kate and I went to the Bahamas?

We basically sat on the beach every day, sipped tropical drinks out of coconuts, and laughed mercilessly at those less fortunate than us.

Of course, the weather wasn't perfect all the time. It rained one morning pretty hard and kept us inside until 3pm or so.

But in our hotel room...the view was just a sweet.