July 18, 2021

Something In The Lawn

“There’s just something in the lawn. I don’t know if it’s the type of grass they used, or what.”

This was my review of the venue that I performed at last night. It was in Tina’s backyard. She calls the show, The Dope Room. Who is Tina? She is a comedian here in the local Sacramento comedy scene. Tina San Lucas. One of the most enthusiastic, multi-talented people that I’ve met in the scene. Great designer. I had never seen her backyard before. She said she had been working on it for a while. You could tell. It could have been featured in a magazine. There was a DJ, and probably at least 30 people in the crowd. Tina got the show started off by injecting some extra energy into the crowd. Then, to take it even further, she talked about anal sex and cocaine. It was one of those nights where you didn’t have to actually do it, all you had to do was talk about it. I was in the middle of the lineup. All of the performers were doing pretty well. Jacqui Pirl was on. I’m on another show with her on Monday. David Thorne. He’s been performing a lot, really hustling. After me was Alvin Duke, who I just met at the show. Man, that guy has a tough life right now. I hope things start looking better for him soon. The headliner was Marcus Mangham, a goofy guy from North Carolina.

I asked the crowd what they wanted to do. At first it seemed like all they wanted to do was drink. One guy even wanted to just go stand on top of one of the coolers. I met him after the show. He was tall enough as it was. Didn’t need the cooler. They were tired of laughing. But it just didn’t seem right, so I kept pressing them to see if they really did want to laugh. Finally they admitted that they did. For my set, I started out with a joke about Tina’s gold microphone. It was a VocoPro MK58-Pro, which I would imagine is supposed to be based on the design of the Shur SM58. I don’t know if Shur makes a gold one though, so if you want gold, you’ve gotta get the VocoPro. The joke didn’t end up being that strong. I just made up after Tina first pointed out the mic to me, so I didn’t really have time to re-think it. But I committed to it, and that made it as good as it possibly could have been. Then I did a couple of jokes about birds before going into the material that I really wanted to do, which was about the gingerbread house building party that I went to last Saturday. I think it worked, but in a weird way. There were periods of just me talking with no laughs that lasted a few seconds, but the crowd stayed with me through it to get to the end, and they seemed happy that they did. Then I piled on the deodorant monologue on top of that. I think they liked that one more. I ended with the bathroom material, which was relatable because Tina had a bathroom with a door from the backyard. She really thought of everything.