New Shows Countdown…

There’s still just over a month before I leave for Vancouver to perform “Jesus In Montana” at the Vancouver Fringe Festival.

But before that, I have plenty to do, including performing two new shows that I wrote (quickly) in the spring. It was something I called THE BARRY SMITH COMEDY PROJECT EXPERIMENT THING, and the idea was to write a brand new, one hour, solo, multi-media comedy show a week (then perform it at the end of that week) for four straight weeks, concluding with a “Jesus…” show. So, five different shows in five weeks…

They went well the first time around – sold out or nearly sold out houses for each one of the new shows, and we added an extra day of “Jesus” for that Sunday, which is a good thing, as they both sold out. And it was only about the middle of that week that I realized that the added Sunday was Easter. I’m clearly a staunch follower of religious holidays.

So, I’m taking the first two shows, reworking them a bit, and presenting them again in Aspen, at the Theatre Aspen Tent, a very nice local venue where they do repertory theater.

Here are the promotional things I have for it so far –

The top one is for the newspaper ad, the one directly above is the poster I’ll be hanging around town. See if you can tell which one was done by a professional graphic designer, and which one was slapped together by someone, me, perhaps, with a rudimentary knowledge of Adobe InDesign and little or no design sense.

Take your time.

Dangers of the Outdoors.

I used to think there was no harm in smoking a bit of pot and going for a nice hike.

But I’m having to rethink this…because during my 3-or-so-hour trip up to Cathedral Lake outside of Aspen, there were many scenic photo opportunities. Like this…

And this…

My wife, Christina, took those pictures. I, on the other hand, took a lot of pictures like this next one…

And I mean a lot. A whole lot. I’ll spare you more examples, but let’s just say one more time that there are A LOT. And this is using an auto-focus camera with a macro setting – pretty hard to screw up, you’d think…

There were also far more than was necessary of these:

And plenty of variations on this theme …

 

 

Hey, I really like my hiking hat, so I take pictures of me under it whenever I can…

Then Christina somehow gets her hands on the camera and wastes a bunch of memory on stunning and scenic crap like this -

Whatever.

Punk Rock, somewhat!

 

 

 

Look, I’ve done my time in the pit – back before it was called “moshing.” I had the extreme good fortune to live in Southern California in the mid-to-late 1980s, just as I have the extreme good fortune to not live there any longer. I got to see Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Descendents, Suicidal Tendencies, Circle Jerks, Ramones, Butthole Surfers, etc…all up close and personal. It was very cool.

So imagine my excitement when I heard that Social Distortion was playing in the small club in my home town of Aspen, the “Belly Up,” a somewhat upscale, beautiful little venue which usually hosts far more sedate acts.

And, imagine my further excitement when, after a night in the pit at the Social D (with The Supersuckers opening) show, I woke up to find this bruise on my right side –

Pretty PUNK ROCK, huh?

Yeah, I know…not really. But a guy can dream, right?

Good Morning, Canada – The Video

Well, I was finally able to watch the video of my Canadian TV appearance while at the Montreal Fringe Festival. As you may recall from THIS POST, I had not slept for 24 hours before doing this interview, and I guess I did OK, considering I was totally on auto-pilot and don’t actually remember any of it.

Now you can see for yourself – it’s 5 glorious minutes…

Radio Guest

I was a guest on my friend Corby’s radio show “The Green Room” last night on KDNK. The Green Room usually features musicians talking about their influences and such, and playing songs that have inspired them along the way. Apparently no musicians were available, so he had me on instead. I brought along some stuff that inspired me – Ivor Cutler, Bill Hicks, Butthole Surfers, Zappa, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Wesley Willis and some more obscure sketch comedy bits.

Here’s Corby, from where I sat…

And me, from where Corby sat…though he did lean down a bit to take this up-the-nose shot.

Why is my hand inside of my shirt? Because it’s radio…you can do stuff like that.

Corby put his drink (POM Juice – free at the recent Aspen Ideas Festival) on the console until I moved some papers aside to reveal the affixed plaque -

We decided the best way to deal with this was to place the lid to his drink in a meaningful location…

Here’s Corby, about 5 minutes later, cleaning up his spilled POM Juice …

We can only hope that one of us learned something from this incident…

Wish Me Luck…

So, this is me in 1988, dangerously close to 20 years ago…

I’m only adding in this bit of nostalgia because, after not skating for that previously mentioned almost 20 years, I just got a new toy…

It’s a Santa Cruz reissue, if you care for such details. My plan is to take it to the Aspen skatepark, which is about 5 blocks from my house…

This is the plan. Here I am warming up on my living room floor…

Though in all honesty the chances of me actually pulling off such a trick are very slim. In fact, if I find myself doing such a thing in the air, that means that things have suddenly turned very, very bad for me, and are about half a second away from getting much worse. Still, a guy can dream, right?

I think the graphic on this reissue board pretty much sums it up…

So, yeah…wish me luck.

Vancouver Fringe Venue Assignment…

I got my venue assignment for the Vancouver Fringe Festival via e-mail last night. I’ll be performing at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island. I have no idea exactly what this means, having never been to Vancouver, but I’m going to have to assume it’s good. Just because.

According to the Waterfront Theatre web page, it’s a 240 seat air contitioned theatre. This is just over 3 times the capacity of my Montreal venue, so that’s exciting. Here are some pics from their page:

THE THEATRE – OUTSIDE

WHAT YOU’LL SEE…

WHAT I’LL SEE, ONLY HOPEFULLY WITH PEOPLE IN THE CHAIRS…

THE BATHROOM, OR, “WASHROOM,” AS THEY SEEM TO BE CALLED IN CANADA. I HAVE A GOOD FEELING ABOUT A THEATRE THAT WOULD PUT A PICTURE OF THEIR BATHROOM ON THEIR WEB SITE.

A Little More Montreal Fringe…

Here’s a column I wrote last week about some of my Montreal Fringe Fest shenanigans. I write a weekly column, called “Irrelativity,” and I don’t plan to include it here often, but I just happen to have a few pictures that accompany this one, so…

You can read more Irrelativity here…

—–

I’m back home from The Montreal Fringe Festival, where I was performing my “Jesus In Montana” show. It was an amazing experience – but so what? Aren’t the tragedies far more interesting to read about than the triumphs? Of course.
Well, lucky you…

First of all, you have to imagine the whole Fringe Festival Scene – young theatre artists from all over the world doing every manner of performances. There are burlesque shows, gay Shakespeare interpretations, marionettes, lip-synch rock operas, improv, weird French-Canadian mask dramas, Chinese clown cabarets, interpretive dance and me, standing still behind a microphone, telling a story about being in a religious cult. Yee haw.

Now, I think my show is good, it just isn’t very excerptable. Two minutes of my show doesn’t really do justice to the piece as a whole. This isn’t a big deal, until I get invited to do a two minute set during the nightly Fringe variety show. The show, called The 13th Hour, is live, starts at 1 a.m. each night in the official Fringe after-hours club, and it a total freak show.

Usually they have a few fringe performers each night as guests, do kooky talk show stuff, show a film, and so on. The night I was to appear was the night they were having 10 performers, each with 2 minutes to do their thing.

I decided that my thing would be to read my “I Love Coffee” poem, an ode to my favorite drug. It features lots of anxiety-filled yelling and gratuitous use of the F-bomb, basically demonstrating the effect that coffee has on me. Let’s face it, nothing is more potentially boring than a poetry reading, so when I pull out the coffee poem, it just kills. It’s my encore poem. Perfect.

I was slated to appear exactly halfway through the evening, so I grabbed a beer and a seat up front to enjoy the show. My first indicator of trouble came during the first act. The performer was Ryan Paulson, a fellow religious show performer. His show is called “Pentecostal Wisconsin,” and by all accounts it’s really funny – can’t wait to actually see it at the Vancouver Fringe Fest in September.

RYAN PERFORMS AT THE FRINGE BEER TENT WHILE THE DANCING LADY DOES HER THING.

Ryan was teaching the crowd to speak in tongues, which is what they did in the church where he grew up. Good gimmick, and it was going well, as the crowd of 60 or so was enthusiastically babbling some gibberish which was supposedly being beamed down directly from God.

“Now, we need someone to interpret what God is saying to us. Anybody want to come up and interpret?”

I raised my hand. Canadian beer is very strong.

I instructed the audience to resume the gibbering so I could tune into what God was saying, and for the first time it dawned on me that I needed to say something funny. I opted for the surreal, deadpan route.

I said: “God is saying, ‘Where’s my wallet?’”

I thought the idea of God searching for His wallet, or heck, even HAVING a wallet, was kinda funny, right? And to send this info down in the guise of tongue-speaking was even more….uh…

No, it wasn’t. Absolute silence. Even the people in the back who were ignoring the show and talking among themselves stopped talking. Whew. I sat back down to await my official slot at humiliation, as this was just a warm-up.

THE CROWD GOES MILD

Next up was the strip show, then the sexy French marionette woman, then the transvestite slapstick routine, then the fat, topless, loud guys with the name of their show written on their bellies, then the phallic sausage food fight, then the guy who wasn’t funny to begin with coming back to – yawn – read a poem. Yeah, that was me. I could not have brought the room down any more if I’d handed out Valium and played “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on the autoharp.

HERE’S THE ACT I FOLLOWED – THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF POETRY READING.

Earlier in the evening I’d had visions of how the night would end – they involved me being carried triumphantly from the stage by the transvestites into the eager clutches of the sexy marionette woman. Instead I shouted my little poem with all my heart into a crowd eager to see who was next on the bill. I finished to polite applause, then left the stage to make way for a completely different group of topless fat guys with feather boas eager to introduce their new leg-hump dance craze.

I got another beer and slinked to the back of the room, hoping no one recognized me. Canadian beer is strong, but suddenly not strong enough.