Today is my day to post over at AndIAmNotLying.com and it has movin’ pictures from a great Storytelling show I did a while back. Check it out.
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So I was outside just now and my downstairs neighbor is watching MASH reruns. It made me want to post this, a thing I call “Good Ol’ Boy Zilla and Son Of Good Ol’ Boy Zilla.” It all makes sense after the jump. But hearing MASH on a big day when lots of big things happen, well, a more superstitious man…  MASH action figures, for all your moral horrors of war make believe. The centerpiece of my hometown is the town square, which is actually a circle. In the center of the circle is a two-story brick building with a bell tower stretching out of the peaked roof. This is the courthouse. On one side of the walkway leading up to the courthouse entrance is one of those black moveable type boards behind a pane of glass. This informs you that you are in Fredericktown, that so and so is the mayor, some other so and so is the sheriff, and yet a third so and so is the presiding judge. Any critical assessment as to the three so and so’s level of competence is left off the board to make room for public announcements, by which I mean when the carnival will be arriving in town. Which is the same date every year. On the other side of the walkway is a community bulletin board on which the only important information is that “Lori is a slut” which the town has known since 1987 thanks to whoever wrote it on the board in very permanent Magic Marker. Behind the bulletin board, just out from the corner of the building, set in front of a backdrop of sumac trees and red cedars, is the statue of my father. Nine feet tall and cast in bronze, Billy Joe Lawrence stands looking straight down Main Street from straight down the sites of a long barreled revolver. He is wearing a cowboy hat, pushed back to reveal a mischievous grin and gleefully squinting eyes. The hand not holding the gun is clutching a beer bottle. My father is portrayed wearing a V-neck T-shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, one of which is resting on a crate labeled TNT. At his side, frozen in a never ending howl of excitement, is a blue tick hound. The Groundskeeper at the courthouse went to school with my father and he keeps the statue absolutely spotless with special attention paid to the placard set in the granite base. The placard reads: “Billy Joe Lawrence, the Greatest Good Ol’ Boy This Town Has Ever Known. Who tragically passed before his son could ever know how amazing he was. No urinating.” Every year, in the spring, a virgin goat is ritually sacrificed.  Hopefully no one is looking to make this a trilogy. So, immediately after I finished listening to the This American Life story about how Peter Segal’s screenplay about the Cuban revolution became Dirty Dancing 2; Havana Nights, I got a message saying that a script I wrote six years ago has finally received financing. Don’t start composing the email asking me for money, the production company bought me out years ago, so I have not received financing. Still, work of mine going on to the next step. Speaking of which, tomorrow I make my Moth Podcast debut. They will be playing the story with which I won my second GrandSLAM, so be sure and check that out. Then come see Cyndi and I as we launch our new show, The Standard Issues at Pacific Standard. We have a fantastic line up this month with Jim O’Grady, Jeff Simmermon, Daisy Rosario, Miguel De Leon, and Joanne Solomon. That is on Tuesday night at 8:00, $5 at the door.
Then on Thursday I will be doing Jenna Brister’s The Third Wheel at The Belleville, corner of 5th and 4th in Park Slope. This show is free and it is at 7:30 and I will be joined by Peter Aguero and Selena Coppock. Last but not least, I created a new page on the blog with sample chapters from the book and you can check those out here. Before we discuss anything else, a reminder: Moth Podcast, me on it, July 26th.
And yes, my Dr. Phil Strip Tease at Told went great. Thanks for asking. Tonight I will be appearing at a show at Comix. It is my first time on the show, which is called Service Not Included. It is hosted by Justin Gray and it is about working in the service industry and dealing with the public. When I received the email asking to book me, it was emphatic that this was not a “waiter rant” show. Which is good, that would get old pretty quick. But doing a show about work, that is a lot of material. I really wanted to hit a couple of stories about construction or working in a warehouse, because in those jobs… Some of those people, there are very concrete reasons they don’t have jobs where they deal with the public. When I was around 21, I had taken a job with a five man, non-union construction crew building a four wing nursing home in the middle of one of the worst winters in St. Louis history. This means that I go to the site every morning at 6a.m. in four layers of clothing, not a bit of skin exposed, in two feet of snow, and spend most the day chipping ice off the concrete foundation they had poured back in the summer. I had this job through a friend. A bad friend. I knew I was in trouble the first day. I was riding in the truck with Greg, the owner operator, and he says, “Hey, Man! You like Rush?” And I’m like, the band from Canada? And he’s like, “No, Limbaugh.” And he cranks the radio. “Bill Clinton is an atheist and a rapist and we all know it.”  Why don't you come up to my place and we will put on that new Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album? And Greg’s like, “Yep! That’s right! The band is pretty good too.” The rest of the crew is made up of the former members of a Sammy Hagar cover band who have give up on their Red Rocker dreams. They apparently had a good run at some point playing every Redneck bar in three states but they are all getting older now. And they are all enormous. I am the smallest guy on the crew. Which leads to the second confirmation that I am in trouble. They start bringing in the wooden frames for the roof and they need a light guy to go up and guide them into place. The second smallest guy on the crew, the lead singer, freezes up on the ladder and they look at me and they say, “Donny can’t do it. He’s got Acrophobia.” I love a ten dollar word coming out of a Redneck. They get the most out of every syllable. I am smiling at this when I notice that they are all staring at me and I think, “Oh, shit.” So I spend the next couple of days fifteen feet off the ground on an icy I-beam while they swing giant wooden triangles at me. It’s like a game of American gladiator played with a crane. In short order, this job starts to wear me out. Not just because of the hours and the work and the weather, all of which is horrible, most days it is ten hours, hard labor, in blowing ice and snow. But beyond that, the rednecks are wearing me down as well. I mean they pretty quick get past black jokes and gay jokes and then start working through the rape jokes and then I am just happy to be up in the roof frames alone and armed with a nail gun. And they call me Gibby, because they think that I look like the lead singer of the Stone Temple Pilots, but they have confused his name with that of the lead singer of The Butthole Surfers. In between rape jokes they tell me stories of the hey day of the band and the groupies, “Yeah, Gibby, I just threw that bitch down in the parking lot and fucked her right into the gravel.” So, by December, about two months in, I am just hating life. I am dreading work every day. My girlfriend will drive me to the site and I am just morose the whole way. And they are picking up on my change in attitude and they don’t need it, especially because the four wing nursing home being built by six guys has gone over budget and over time. And some of the crew is getting restless. And for good reason. In a pre work meeting one day, the guitar player, John, tells Greg that he will need to start looking for a job with health insurance because, “Man, I’ll just be sittin’ on the couch sometimes and then, suddenly, BAM! Blood starts comin’ outta every orifice.” At which point I move a little further away from John.  Eventually, they came and took John away in a barrel. So the last thing they need is me checking out. I can see the disappointment growing in Greg every day that I am like, “Yeah. Whatever.” And the other guys have stopped talking to me and tensions are running high. And then, about two days before New Years, I am getting a ladder off of a truck and this journeyman carpenter walks up and asks for the foreman. I point him towards Greg hoping that this guy is going to take my job. January second, I arrive at the site and there he is. I tell my girlfriend to wait a minute. I get out and I get fired and I get back into the car smiling. As we pull away, the DJ on the radio says that today the temperature may get as high as seventy-five degrees. We went to the zoo. I was going to go into that tonight, or the warehouse job for the prison cantinas, where I was also happy to get fired. But there seems to be an emphasis on dealing with the public at Justin’s show, so, I will be telling about the single most offensive job I ever had. Which was at a well established, mainstream independent bookstore in a very wealthy and fashionable section of Washington DC. This job made my soul dirty. So, come check out my shame, but again, I must be clear that this is a story about the most OFFENSIVE job I ever had. Show starts at seven o”clock. Otherwise, check me out next tuesday at our new show, The Standard Issues, or I will also be at Jenna Brister’s Third Wheel at the Belleville on Thursday. The fine people at the Madagascar Institute have every intention of giving me a weapon that shoots flames wherever I point it. You should be aware that, given the current circumstances, wherever I point it is still going to be Brooklyn.  George Carlin Growing up in Missouri, my house had a lot of knives and guns in it. My step-father kept two fully stocked gun cabinets, one in the basement and the other in my parent’s bedroom closet. Mainly rifles and shotguns, just hunting weapons, but I was aware of at least two handguns in the house. One was a small revolver and the other was a semi-automatic. The revolver was light and felt flimsy, kind of cheap, when you held it. The barrel was narrow and the metal was thin and black. It really lacked the drama you look for in a pistol. The semi-automatic had a little more theater to it, but that had to do with the pearl handle more than size or perceived stopping power. One of the networks had done a made for TV movie starring Kenny Rogers, based on his song “The Gambler.” It was standard western fare and I don’t really recall the plot. I would assume it involved gambling.  My stepfather would be so proud that someone is walking the trail he blazed. In the movie there is a confrontation and Kenny pulls out a pearl handled derringer. One of the seven thugs attacking him points out that there are only two bullets in a derringer and there are a bunch of them, to which Rogers replies, “Which two of you want them?” Ever since then, anything with a pearl handle had at least some cinematic cache so far as I was concerned. But, by the time I was seventeen, I had developed a passing interest in the knives. There were all manner of knives in the house. Hunting knives, Bowie knives, boning knives, scaling knives, pocket knives, buck knives, and Swiss Army knock offs. Real Swiss army knives are expensive. I almost always received one of the knock offs for a birthday or Christmas from some relative who was not going to think too hard about gifts. This wasn’t unusual in Missouri. Weapons are handed out to redneck children like hannukah gelt to the kids of the first Orthodox Synagogue of Bushwick. That along with the knives that were in my step-father’s collection, those handed down from people who had aged out of their hunting and fishing days, and the random ones that just seemed to pop-up because people forgot them or traded them or just as a sort of meteorological effect, a kind of lethal condensation that has yet to be explained by science, all of it meant that in our house it was wise to watch where you sat. Whatever interest I had in the knives had nothing to do with their practical purpose. It was an extension of my elaborate fantasy life, which a steady diet of comic books and pop culture had made as sprawling as the Dallas suburbs. My mind made associations that would have made my step-father cry out in utter defeat. The scaling knife reminded me of the claws on the X-Men character Wolverine. The boning knife was thin and curved like the ones the elves carried in the Tolkein books. There was one, out in the pile of blades in the garage, that reminded me of a Ninja’s short sword. I had no idea what its real use might have been and I didn’t much care. There was also a fascination with throwing the knives, as there was a comic character called Longshot and throwing knives while wearing a cool black outfit was pretty much the entire basis of his superpowers. He also sported a mullet which had its own bad effect on me, but that is a different story.  I am absolutely certain this was in our garage, behind a broken snow blower and under a can of rusty nails, next to a Steve Miller eight track. I actually got pretty good at throwing the knives. There is a whole rhythm to it that you eventually figure out. In fact, I got a bit better than I thought. One day I was outside in the front lawn, I was maybe fifteen at this point, and my toy of choice was a butterfly knife. I’m whipping it around like a pudgy ninja one swordfight away from a very short career as an assassin, when I spy my mother’s garden hose lying in the sideyard, across the driveway. I only threw the knife at the garden hose because I was so sure that I would never be able to hit it. I hit it. The knife went right through the hose about three feet down from the nozzle. Now, I had no intention of actually hitting the hose and, since it was an accident, I had every intention of informing my mother about the damage I had done. Then, with the attention span of someone going through puberty, I forgot all about it and wandered off to the woods. I came back several hours later to find my mother standing in the front lawn with the hose in her hand, furious and soaked. I never saw the butterfly knife again.  Nope. I'm a DIY guy. Now someone is going to give me a flamethrower. Actually, they are going to teach me how to build a flamethrower. Y’know, give a man a fish, blah, blah blah. Artstar: Shop Manager Leif Krinkle has decided it is a good idea to give homemade propane cannons to the kind of twitchy eyed geeks that would show up to learn to make a propane cannon and then loose them upon the streets of Brooklyn. And within walking distance of a strip of bars. This, apparently, is the goal and stated purpose of Flamethrower Theory and Practice. My favorite part of the event listing is – Age Suitability: None Specified. It actually is a rather abstract question to tackle. So, if something goes horribly wrong, folks, (and by horribly wrong I, of course, mean me being injured, anything else that might go wrong would just be funny) remember that I was pretty once and I had great hair. At least in the period between the mullet and the day I burned it all off.  First, I don't know this guy. Second, the photo will make sense when you get further into the post. I received a facebook message a little bit ago that really took me off guard. This is what it was - “Thank you, again, for telling your Grand Slam story about an ex not forgiving a “mistake.” Ever since listening to your perspective, I have gradually shifted how I approach and present myself to, well, the world. Transformative. Much obliged, Brad. Mwa!” I read that – on a day when I was moping around and rolling in my own insecurities – and I read it again and a third time before I got it. I had helped somebody. I am not going to lie, I did not mean to do it, but I feel really good that I did. I was just telling a story. I wasn’t even trying to win that GrandSLAM. I had won the previous one and it seemed that a back to back win was out of reach. BUT, I did win and the story this person is talking about will be on the Moth podcast on the 26th of this month. This is the first of many posts that will be promoting that before it goes up, you can bet your ass. In the meantime, there are a bunch of shows coming up. Monday the 19th is going to be a great big day of having my peanut butter in a bunch of people’s chocolate. First of all, Cyndi and I will be doing the interstitials at Seth Lind’s Told at Under Saint Marks Theater. Not as ourselves, but as our Burlesque alter egos Johnny Angel and Cherry Pitz, at Told which is a storytelling show, where we would usually be ourselves. That is at seven o’clock. Immediately after that…
…I am going to sprint (or ride the subway in a static panic) to do Original Cyn Burlesque, not as myself or Johnny Angel but instead as Billy The Id. My chocolate bar is many different varieties and there is peanut butter spread to the horizon. Hey, look! Pretty girls who have a show!  Original Cyn Producer Mary Cyn with featured performer Apathy Angel. Photo by Burke Hefner That’s at Lucky 13, 13th street and 5th ave. in Park Slope. Show starts at ten and both these shows are free. The after party at this one WILL go till four in the morning. The following day, I will be stripping at Hotsy Totsy Burlesque and I fully intend to let that statement just sit there.
July 20th Tuesday 9:30pm, $8.00 @ The Delancey Lounge 168 Delancey, — just two blocks from the F/J train stop. 9:30, $8. Hosts: Rosie 151 and Cherry Pitz. Featuring: Lefty Lucy, Legs Malone, Boo Bess, Billy The Id & Miss Mary Cyn Join Cherry Pitz, Joe the Shark and special guest Rosie 151 at The Home For Wayward Girls and Fallen Women for yet another night of mayhem and flying underpants. Then on Thursday the 22nd I will be appearing at Service Not Included.
 That is Justin Gray, he is the host, and he is a handsome man who likes beer. Hey, here is some info that I have obviously copied and pasted from the facebook event listing: “Service Not Included” features writers and comedians sharing hilarious tales of insane employment experiences. Performers re-live some of the worst (or best) moments while working for a living in what has become known as a humorous insight into the human condition. Past storytellers have included a dominatrix, a Times Square waiter, a security guard, and a personal care nurse. With tales so shocking and funny, this show should come with a warning: Dealing with people for a living may be hazardous to your health! July 22 features: Tickets are $10 at the door (cash only) NO minimum. $5 bartender special all night long! There are more shows, but I am going to stop for now. Come to the shows, because you have to be where I am to buy me drinks. That just makes sense.
Levittown Minimum Security Correctional Center, visitor’s area. Afternoon. YOU: Hey. YOUR LAWYER: Great news! YOU: Really? YOUR LAWYER: We just struck a multi-million dollar deal with Universal Studios for a major motion picture based on the story of your life! YOU: Wow! Seriously? YOUR LAWYER: Yes! Destroyed; The Jaqueline Rose Story. YOU: My last name is Rosen. YOU LAWYER: Starring Hilary Swank! YOU (taken aback): Hilary Swank? YOUR LAWYER: Yes! YOU (troubled): Well, I mean… Obviously, things aren’t great, but they aren’t that bad. I mean, they’re not Hilary Swank bad. YOUR LAWYER: Sure they are. You and your retarded brother… YOU: My brother is dyslexic. YOUR LAWYER: …Abandoned by your parents at a young age YOU: My Dad got transferred to Phoenix and we stayed with my grandmother, so we wouldn’t have to switch high schools. YOUR LAWYER: Your only care taker a cruelly demented, senile old woman sliding into madness and poverty. YOU: My grandmother is the senior HR director for Pfizer, she isn’t senile. YOUR LAWYER: The studio has agreed to pay your grandmother three million dollars a year to be senile for the rest of her life. YOU: Wait a minute! You can’t just “be senile.” You either are senile or you’re not. YOUR LAWYER: Have you ever read The Secret? YOU: What? YOUR LAWYER: Never mind… Then you get railroaded by a corrupt system and sent to prison for a crime you didn’t commit. YOU: Ok, hold on. It is true that I didn’t know, when I drove off, that I had hit that parked car. But I think we can all agree that had something to do with the bottle of wine I drank all by myself at my ex-boyfriend’s dinner party, after he introduced the “new lady in his life.” I mean, Jesus, so much for “staying friends.” YOU LAWYER: But does all of that keep you down? No it doesn’t. You go right to the prison library and study until you can become a doctor! YOU: I do? YOUR LAWYER: And you go on to use your new found medical skills to save a fellow inmate’s life! YOU: They gave a mandatory first aid course in the common room and two weeks later I gave Sally Hendricks the Heimlich when she choked on a Vienna sausage. YOUR LAWYER: That’s right! And not just any inmate, but your arch nemesis, who has wanted to shank you from your first day on the cell block. YOU: She called me a bitch because I changed the channel when she was watching America’s Next Top Model. She apologized at dinner. YOU LAWYER: This is going to be huge. Guaranteed Oscars all the way around. Oprah might keep her show on the air just to interview you with the cast! YOU (getting overwhelmed): Ok! Wait a minute! Just give me a moment to think about this. (you stand up and begin to pace) Wow… Hilary Swank? Hilary… (you stop pacing) Are my teeth really that big? YOUR LAWYER: Don’t worry about that. YOU: Really? YOUR LAWYER: We’ll get you caps. YOU: Now, Just wait right… YOUR LAWYER (opening his briefcase and pulling out contracts): So, the offer is twenty-five million up front, with five percent of ticket sales and three percent of DVD. YOU: … YOUR LAWYER (extends pen) YOU (taking pen): Tell Ms. Swank that it is an honor to have an actress of her caliber telling my story. YOUR LAWYER: Oh that’s another thing, Hilary’s people have asked that you not attempt to communicate with her in any way or contact her in any form. And we need you to fall in love with, and marry, a guard. YOU: Which guard? YOUR LAWYER (gesturing towards an overweight, extremely nearsighted gentleman in a poorly fitting uniform, closely examining something he has just picked off his face.) That one. YOU: … Ok.
 I was going to read the website where I found this pic and find out why Al Gore was included, then I decided it was more fun not knowing. May I present to you The Private Journals Of Ben Stone Jr. My father said, “He who believeth in me believeth in the lord our God.” He also said, “Judge not lest ye be judged” and “He who haveth so much as a mustard seed of faith may move mountains.” He would say these things to the coterie of sycophants and followers who trailed behind him like dust behind Pigpen in the old Peanuts comic strips. An unwashed sandal wearing lot given to far away smiles and aimless swaying. Excruciatingly slow metronomes. So many slow motion dashboard hula girls in formless Earth-tone sacks. They would sit and wait patiently for the next drop of wisdom to fall from my father’s lips. Wait to gather up his words and clutch them to their breast as though they were scrambling after the scatterings of a broken string of pearls. They cherished everything my father said. Even when he said that his enemies would boil in a soup of their own blood and bile. Or the time he proclaimed that the powers of heaven would strike the children of every employee of the I.R.S. with deformity and retardation if they continued to investigate him. Oh, I’m sorry, misquote. He said persecute. Not investigate.  I'M OPEN! I have shows coming up and I will tell you all about them. BUT, before we get there, I want to talk about how you tell a story, or in this case, how you don’t, or just knowing that you are in the process of telling a story. I do not follow sports. I’ve never been able to feel whatever excitement or tension other people get out of it. Lack that gene, I suppose. I have tried, especially with baseball, but I just simply cannot be made to care. All of this to say that I was not invested, at all, in whether Lebron James stayed in Cleveland or didn’t or dropped everything to join the cast of The Real L Word.
The opposing through lines were easy: Staying in Cleveland = Hometown hero puts loyalty first. OR. Leave Cleveland for a better team = Hometown hero turns his back to pursue bigger fortunes. In neither one of those scenarios do you have to become the villain. Until you hold a multi-million dollar prime time special to announce you are ditching the hometown to head off to the sun and strip clubs and Championship prospects of South Beach. I’m not saying he should have stayed. I’m saying, if you are going to play the hometown hero you do an hour long special, and you shoot it in Cleveland. If you are moving on, you issue a press release and give a sit-down interview two weeks later, most of which you spend talking about how much Cleveland rocks and how sorry you are to go. Like I said, sports narratives are almost mindless in their simplicity and, still, really popular. Anyone, certainly any manager or agent, should be able to pull it off. But, James’s crew couldn’t. Which is just so odd. And that is the part that has had me paying any attention at all. So, I guess the thing was successful, in that they got someone who doesn’t care about pro sports of any kind thinking about their client. The problem is that, what I now think, is that he might be illiterate.
Yes folks, Horsetrade once again brings our inappropriate antics to Under St. Mark’s theater. If you have been there, then I assume you are already in the relevant support group, if you haven’t I cannot adequately prepare you for this. Peter is borrowing my cape. The line up of guest singers tonight, besides me, is Adam Wade, Sara G, and Sharon Mama Spell. Joe Yoga is opening up and we will have Go-Go by Dangrrr Doll and Veronica Vroom. That is at nine and remember you can catch Adam Wade at 7.  This is Veronica Vroom, she will be at the show tonight. This picture of Veronica, along with several other amazing shots from Cherry Pop Burlesque are being featured over on our sister site And I Am Not Lying.com. Click to go there. Man, these posts are getting long. All right, future postings will concern shorter ranting and the upcoming Hotsy Totsy show on the 20th, Service Not Included on the 22nd, and The Standard Issues on the 27th. Assuming I survive tonight. And we will have a long talk about my upcoming appearance on the Moth Podcast. My first contribution to And I Am Not Lying is up and it involves my brilliant skills as a blackberry photographer.
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