Buy This Book!

A good friend of mine, Bob Powers, who's a hilarious (an hilarious?) author has a new book out this week, The Horrible Temp-to-Perm Debacle, the latest in his Just Make a Choice series in which you get to make the decisions for an indecisive slacker, this time an alcoholic temp framed for murder.

Will you end up in jail? On the run? Working full time for the man? It's all up to you and each choice will lead to eff-in funny consequences.

Bob's last book, You Are a Miserable Excuse For a Hero, was a big hit and his first book, Happy Cruelty Day, based on his Girls Are Pretty blog, is a must have for the coffee table or guest bathroom.

So if you want some good hearty laughs this summer, buy this book!

The excesses of a Rock and Roll Lifestyle--TWO Tambourines!!

Last week I was working on my new CD (coming this fall! new tunes! available on line!) and it came time to lay down the all-important tambourine track. I was pretty sure I had a tambourine somewhere but in the many cleanups and rearrangements of stuff in my (recording) studio apartment I just lost track of it.

I simply had no luck finding an existing tambourine in my apartment, and the track had to be recorded--you can't not have tambourine in a pop song--so I went out and got the spiffy new round maple tambourine seen above on the left.

As you can probably guess, as soon as I got home with the new tambourine I had one last idea of where a previous tambourine might be stashed--with some P.A. equipment I hadn't thought about since an unpleasant, non-tambourine-related gig down at Princeton. Sure enough, within minutes of returning home with a new tambourine I found the old one. Now I had two.

Of course, I could return the new one but that would be sensible, practical, pragmatic even. So not rock and roll. I should have twelve tambourines! I should have a lead and rhythm tambourine! I should have alto, tenor, and barritone tambourines in an entire tambourine section!

And besides, I like the sound of the new, old-style tambourine better. It's got a tighter jingle with a less ringy finish. It's Motown by way of the Carpenters which makes it pretty perfect for a goofball like me. Listen for it on the new CD! (out in early September, stay tuned!)

Hey, Todd Palin...

don't you think Letterman's joke about one of your daughters getting knocked up was probably about Bristol, one of your daughters who was actually knocked up and is now an unwed, teenage mother?

And to go from a joke that talks about being knocked up to using the word 'rape' is a little extreme, don't you think? You do realize that conception can happen during consensual sex too, don't you?

In short, take it easy, grandpa.

If they don't know then who knows?

Watching the tube tonight I saw a commercial for the anti-depression drug Prestiq. Now we all know that those side-effect warnings on prescription drug commercials can get pretty ridiculous, but this commerical gets ridiculous long before they even get to the side effects.

About 27 seconds in, right after they say that it's been proven effective in treating depression, the voice-over slips in this little gem:

Prestiq is thought to work by affecting the levels of two chemicals in the brain...

Thought to work? Are you seriously trying to sell me a drug and you don't even know how it works?

I don't care how you think it works, if you don't know how it works maybe I should hold off on putting it in my body until you do.

Hell, I think bourbon works by activating the Debonair receptors of my brain thus making me look and act like Don Draper, but if I were trying to sell bourbon I think I would keep that theory to myself.

If you want to sell something and you don't know exactly what it does or why, just hire the Sham-Wow guy.

I'm on Keith and the Girl live Friday night!

Hey Everyone,

I'm going to be a guest on the very popular Keith and the Girl podcast tomorrow night! You can listen live anywhere in the world, or download the episode to listen at a less-in-the-middle-of-the-night hour.

You can also watch the video feed live and interact with the show via their message boards, IM, twitter, and even the magical telephone!

It's Friday night at midnight New York City time,
9 pm Friday on the West Coast of the U.S.
4am Saturday GMT,
5am British Summer Time,
and 2pm Saturday afternoon on the east coast of Australia (I think).

Check it out, it's a fun show!

Keith and the Girl

Sometimes it's better not to headline...

With headlining goes the glory of the show. You're name is on the marquee and you're the one people are there to see. On the flipside of that is that if the show isn't a success the blames falls on you, whether it's deserved or not.

I pondered this tonight while waiting for my dish to arrive at the restaurant here in Durham, NH before my show tonight at UNH, where I'm opening for Adam Ferrara. I did a google search on my name and the the school's name to see if they had done any promo and this article from The New Hampshire, the UNH student newspaper, came up.

Here's a gem of a sentence buried about 7 paragraphs in:

However, most students had never heard of him [Adam Ferrara], and said they don't plan on attending Saturday night's festivities.

Nice. I'm glad the writer didn't ask the student about me.

"What do you think of the Pachelbel comic guy who's opening the show?" "The Pachelbel dude? F. that guy."

Besides the great buzz this article is sure to generate, it's 80-some degrees and sunny today so I don't know how many people are going to be in the mood for a comedy show. All across campus and in town people are out and about, and a general giddiness is in the air thanks to the early preview of summer weather.

But I'm still psyched to be doing the show. It's a beautiful day to be in New England, I'm opening for a big name, and after my set I can sit back and enjoy the show because I get the night off from headlining. Cool.

My Dalliance With the Theater

As I slowly recover from the hectic few weeks of the one-act festival my play was in (and made it to the finals of!), I want to make sure I take the time to express my immense gratitude for the great job and hard work put in by my cast. From left to right: Noel Dinneen, Nikki Van Cassele, Matt Klan(e), Jennifer Spragg, and there's me on the right. We did 7 performances in 17 days, with 48 hours notice for our first Round 2 performance, and 14 hours notice for the finals, which involved two shows this past Sunday, the first of which started at 11 am.

Yeah, I didn't know there was an 11 am on Sunday either.

It was a great experience putting this show up and I had a blast working with such a talented cast. And since the play is about a bunch of mid-level corporate types who've all just gotten fired, I was glad we could stage it in a timely manner. The audience response was wonderful (except for the last show where they just looked confused, perhaps it was too much business jargon for a Sunday afternoon crowd) and the feedback we received was really positive.

It was interesting though seeing some of the differences between the standup world and the theater world. The biggest I noticed was dealing with time. In the standup world you stick to your time or you're not considered a professional. When there's a showcase or festival, time is strictly regulated: a red light in the back of the room flips on when you have one minute left in your set, and it starts to blink when your time is up. If you go over your time by two or more minutes, they cut the mic and the lights. In other words, you get your ass off stage on time.

Now I understand there's got to be a little more leeway in the theater world--a cast can't spontaneously edit their piece the way a standup can--so a few minutes grace is to be expected. But man, oh man, there were some pieces that were consistently over a half hour long in a festival where the time limit was 20 minutes.

Perhaps it's just my years in the standup world that have turned this into a pet peeve of mine, and I won't get too worked up about it because the slight inconvenience in no way takes away from the great experience I had with those wonderful people in the photo above.

So Thank You cast of Blowing Bubbles! And a hearty Thank You to everyone that was able to make it out to see the show! You helped make it the success that it was.