8/16 Storytelling at Perch-
8/17 Hotsy Totsy @ The Dalancy. -
8/19 Burlesque at The Beach @ Coney Island -
8/24 The Standard Issues @ Pacific Standard.
I haven’t seen Angie in years and when I last saw her, she was at her going away party with her boyfriend, Ted. This was at the close of a two year association. I had met the couple right after the break up with Julia. I had moved to Brooklyn and I immediately began to lust after Angie. In a quiet way. We had a lot of mutual friends and Ted was a very nice guy, bit of a lug, but a nice guy. He had that kind of densely packed roundness that only slightly balding guys who wear baseball jerseys can pull off. He was quiet, unassuming, harmless.
This was in high contrast to Angie who was this little spitfire of a girl. She had been a dancer when she was younger and had that kind of wiry limbed thinness that girls who were dancers when they were younger have. Those whiplash arms and that skinny little torso that you know you could just wrap around you and wear for days. Great big smile, really engaging, painfully alert, and always laughing. She had these long quick fingers that you felt sure would wander everywhere if you gave them the opportunity and so you spend all of your time looking for the opportunity. Or at least you do if you don’t have a bunch of friends in common with her long time boyfriend.
If you do, you adopt quiet resignation as you attend their going away party the day before they, the happy couple, move to Florida. You file it under “never gonna happen.” They become a friend. A hot friend, but a friend. So it goes.
But a year and half later she is back, without Ted, for a short visit to New York. Great. So we sit at the bar with a bunch of other mutual friends and catch up. Eventually, as happens, people’s attention drifts and consolidates and everyone is having smaller conversations. I am having my smaller conversation with Angie. We do the “state of the life in progress talk” and I go first.
Now at this point in time, my life had progressed its way down a deep dark hole. This was just after I had broken up with a girl who had been a nightmare of a human being. Around the same time I had lost one job that I liked and had taken another that I despised just to make ends meet. And as the new job didn’t pay as much, I was also facing having to move into a place with lower rent and had begun a very painful search into neighborhoods renowned for their fine collections of spent shell casings and broken glass because that was what seemed to be in the budget for the foreseeable future. So, because I have gone first and I am in friend mode with Angie, because she has after all moved to Florida with Ted, I tell her the truth. This is how it’s going. I keep it light, I keep it jokey, I skip the almost complete nervous breakdown I had the previous week, but still it is what it is and I say as much.
Then it’s her turn. Details go by, bartending, getting her social worker’s license, lives near the beach, Florida’s beautiful. No mention of Ted comes up, so I ask.
She had broken the fuck up with fucking Ted! No fucking shit! Dumped his ass and was on the fucking loose!
I’m sorry, that must have been painful, you guys were together for such a long time.
Well, it was a long time coming and she thinks he’ll be ok. Eventually.
And so we talk, to each other, to the rest of the group, to anyone, and as we talk and the evening wears on, this wonderful thing begins to happen. Angie’s hand keeps wandering over to my knee or my arm or she’ll take my hand in hers. She keeps touching me. And I am being charming and funny and she’s laughing and I’m thinking “Great!” It would not be a surprise to me at all if Angie knew I had the hots for her. Politeness and discretion aside, I do tend to wear things on my sleeve, probably gave myself away at some point. But now it seems that not only is she aware, but amenable to the idea.
What’s more, this couldn’t be a better situation. I know I need to get back in the saddle after the dumping, I know it would be good for me, that it would be nothing short of therapeutic, but I absolutely have not been able to muster up the desire. Especially, not to deal with a total stranger who I don’t know what they will want or what I will want. Then here’s Angie, fresh out of her relationship with Ted and going back to Florida. We already have a comfort level established, we know each other, we know our stories. There couldn’t be a better situation. Really. Perfect.
Well, eventually, she stands up. She has driven and she needs to get home before she gets too drunk and too tired to drive. I am not worried about this as I know that we all have plans with her again in a couple of days and I am in no big hurry. So we all stand up to say our goodbyes. After a lot of hand shaking and hugs to the gathered crowd, she turns her attention to me. She leans in, gets her body right up against me, squeezes me very tight, and says into my ear –
“Don’t worry, things will get better soon.”
I lean back and look into her eyes. I now realize that I have spent the entire evening mistaking sympathy, or actually, pity for attraction.
Then she leaves.
Me? I stay at the bar and wear a very fake smile just as long as dignity, what little I have left, demands. Then I say my own goodbyes, go home, and sit in my room in the dark.
Someone very famous and quotable, whose name I have forgotten, said, “All art aspires to the condition of music.” I hate that that seems to be true. Especially because there were a number of times in my upbringing when I was offered music lessons of one sort or another.
The first time was when I was nine or ten and my Mom walked in to find me hammering around on her hand me down organ. She came around the corner and cocked her head at me. “Well, Brad, would you like lessons so you could learn how to really play that?” It is sad that I was unable to just grab that opportunity. I was a pretty weary kid. Given what school and home was like, I had an impression of the world as hostile and any new environment was seen as a new front with new potential enemies. My Mom was being encouraging of an interest I was taking and, instead of seeing that as an opening, I looked at her like she was nuts, an expression that said, “not without a shiv.” There is no Tea Party militia in the foothills of the Rockies, waiting for Obama to come to personally escort them to the marxist re-education camps, that can hold a candle to the sort of paranoia I was cultivating in my pre-teen years.
Normally, I am content with the kind of writer and performer I am. I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on skills I would have learned, if I had known I wanted to learn them, when I had the chance to learn them. Then, I hear something like God Help The Girl and my imagination just reels. This is a side project from Stuart Murdoch of Belle And Sebastian and it entertains me to no end. I am posting a video below. And this is the kind of thing… Oh, if I had learned to play that damn organ. Well, lets say I would have hoped I would have done something like this but with more visual style. God bless Murdoch, but the fact that the singers are not dressed in matching outfits, and he isn’t sitting behind a vintage Wurlitzer dressed like someone put Burt Bacharach and Mick Jagger in blender, with the rest of 1972, and then poured the contents out onto a piano stool, that is just a missed opportunity on a scale with not taking music lessons when they are offered. I mean for God’s sake, man, how many times in your life can you rock blue tinted sunglasses and feel justified?
The only other time is when you wake up to find out you are Steve McQueen.
But the band didn’t go that way, they dressed like normal people. And I didn’t learn to play the organ, I ended up performing in burlesque shows. So, I think we can all see how that happens.
Still, for all of that, if you really want to do music of some kind, you will find a way, it will resurface. And so when I was sixteen I taught myself to play the harmonica. Alone in my room. And now I play with BTK at least once a month and, well, it ain’t a Wurlitzer, but its something.
So it is time for the second ever Standard Issues show, for which we have a ridiculous line up and a great theme, which is…
JERKS!
Cyndi chose this theme. She’d had a bad day. But it put me in mind of this story.
I have an aunt that made a hobby of marrying well. And by well, I mean they had money, not personality or intelligence or anything in common with my aunt. Well, I am sure they liked their money as much as she did, so at least they had that.
Ophira Eisenberg, on the bill and not a jerk.
Anyway, the aunt in question, as I understand it, had always been a hot commodity in a small rural community where true beauty comes around once a generation, at best, and that attribute might be what gets them out of the back breaking grind of shit jobs that makes most of their peers look twenty years older than they are. It also might be apocryphal (Greek for bullshit) since in these small towns where you are always short of people to play all the parts in the show, you assign people a role. So “The Pretty One” suddenly becomes Helen of Troy, instead of the cutest girl in her graduating class. And people legitimately see them that way and make asses of themselves accordingly.
At any rate, my Mom had to grow up with this. Or more to the point my aunt grew up with it and Mom grew up without it. While my aunt was the queen of a parade that never seemed to run out of gas, Mom fell into the role of caretaker, the woman in any redneck family that (barely) keeps everyone upright, somewhat fed, and with as many teeth as possible still in their heads. And this was how they rolled into adulthood. My aunt married a (or another) real estate baron who went on to weigh four hundred pounds and Mom became a nurse who made regular rounds to all the aging hillbillies who refuse to die.
Jeff Simmermon, also on the bill and not a jerk
My people are ridiculously strong and resilient, to the point where the only two things that can kill us are our own stupidity and the unrelenting march of time.
Anyway, the last time I visited, Mom ended up talking about the phenomenon of my aunt and her “legendary beauty.” And she fell upon this story about checking in on a particular older set of second cousins who could no longer get out of their house much. My aunt was visiting from Kansas, where she had moved with the real estate baron and his fat, and was driving around with Mom to all the relatives she had to keep track of. Now, at this point, my mother had been the thin line that kept her cousins from becoming one of those horror stories, the ones where the old shut ins are eaten by their cats after they keel over from eating spam gone bad, and had been for about three years. And we lived about two hours away, so this was no mean feat. And mostly, what these people did was complain about what was not in the care packages Mom dropped off, if they acknowledged the kindness at all.
Wade. Not a jerk. On the bill.
So, Mom pulls up out front, grabs the box of food she has brought and starts heading up the walk, while my aunt lags behind to touch up her face. The old woman comes out of the house and greets Mom with a leathery squint and a blunt, unsmiling “Carol.” My Mom hands her the box and at that moment, the cousin looks behind Mom and sees my aunt heading up the walk and suddenly brightens, the leather flattens out into a broad grin and she exclaims, “Oh! And she brought the pretty one!” Suddenly, the old man was in the doorway, smiling as well. He couldn’t be bothered to get out of his seat for the woman who was keeping them alive, but for “the pretty one” he would find his feet.
Mom had grown up in this shadow and she thought, after they had grown up, that she had gotten past it, that it didn’t bother her. But as she found herself suddenly yanking the box out of the shocked old woman’s hands and telling her, “You and that jerk you call a husband can fend for yourselves or starve, for all I care, you old witch!” and heading back to her car, well, she had to guess that it was possible she hadn’t quite gotten over it. And you should make no mistake, Mom wasn’t being over sensitive, the old woman knew what she was doing. For some old hillbillies that kind of pointless spite, that jabbing a boney finger into your pre-existing bruises, is a pastime and compulsion they just can’t resist. Or as Mom says, “They’re just plain old mean and they got nothing else to do but get better at it.” And mostly, people let them get away with it. But that day, Mom had had enough.
Ben Lillie. On the bill, not a jerk, apparently dreamy.
In the end, Mom didn’t let them starve. But they got a little skinnier over the next few weeks.
Brad Lawrence, your host and, y'know, yeah, occasionally.
Join us at Pacific Standard, this tuesday at 8. The show is free, the entertainment is the best you will get, and they have a rockin’ beer selection. Look forward to seeing you there.
So, It is fall of last year and I’m outside my local coffee shop, smoking a cigarette, when the schizophrenic guy comes walking up. It was more of a shuffle really. He was a red headed guy who had let upkeep slide for long enough that his naturally curly hair had formed into kind of clumpy ad-hoc dread locks. As had his beard. He was wearing a dirty army surplus jacket and cords that had seen better days, days of washing machines and being folded at the end of the night, rather than slept in.
Now, a few minutes before the arrival of our psychologically imbalanced friend, a woman had come up, tied her German Shepard to the light post on the corner directly in front of the coffee shop, and gone inside. I was standing next to the light post. Having my coffee and my smoke and watching people on the sidewalk. It was a nice September day, a Saturday morning, and Brooklyn had a pretty relaxed atmosphere to it. People were gathering in groups and chatting on the sidewalk, or walking their kids or pets or whatever else might require walking, all with a fairly leisurely air.
This all shifted slightly with the arrival of Schizophrenic Dude. I think, by now, we all know why there are so many crazy people wandering around on the streets and, yes, hopefully Ronald Reagan is getting the pitchfork enema for it right now. That said, the proliferation of the unattended chemically imbalanced has served to create an interesting social dynamic, especially in large cities where many of these folks seek shelter. Almost any public environment might undergo a sideways shift in atmosphere or tension level with the arrival of someone who is talking loudly to a host of people, none of whom are actually on the crowded subway train with them. All in one station stop. Between 23rd and Union Square, the secretary, just off from work, might sit with her novel closed in her lap and people watch or read the runner ads. A young professional might exchange furtive glances with his female counterpart across the aisle or, if he’s really feeling bold, strike up a conversation. Groups who got on the train together laughing and chatting will keep going without missing a beat, the act of keeping up the three points of contact balancing act on the moving train, not affecting the flow of conversation at all.
Then the train slides up to the stop, the bell dings, the doors open, the conductor announces all the relevant transfer points, and on steps a guy wearing three coats, two hats, and is engaged in a shouting match with an invisible person who is, apparently, trying to feed him rats.
And for some reason the guy in all the coats has drawn a large letter B on his forehead in, what appears to be, “Mocha Mystique” lipstick.
The secretary opens her novel. The young professional open his Wall Street Journal and his opposite opens her Times (they never would have gotten along, anyway). The conversations lower to a whisper, until whoever was speaking when the doors opened can finish their sentence and, once that is done, the conversations stop entirely. Everyone looks down, either at the floor or something they are pretending to read. Ipods get turned up and the nodding along with the music gets more pronounced as the listener tries to communicate greater absorption in the private world that headphones create. No one makes eye contact with anyone.
Well, the young professionals might still attempt a couple of glances, the libido is hard to defeat.
But, for the most part, the crazy guy now has the floor and everyone is going to do their damndest to act like they haven’t noticed. Even though the bare fact of the guy has changed everything about their behavior.
That may sound like a criticism. Like, “Oh, how terrible that these cold and callous New Yorkers ignore the suffering around them! What bastards!” But, it’s not. I do it too and I know why. Someone is acting in an outsized manner in a public place. But it is only a public place for those observing. The crazy person is responding to an environment and situation that we, the rest of the populace, are not participating in and the rules of this person’s reality make distinctions like public or private entirely irrelevant. They are off the reservation. In this case, the reservation being the general mass conception of a shared perception, in the most basic sense, of their common environment. Those three adjectives, mass, shared, common, all gone for our friends in the many coats.
There is going to be two posts today. First, the shows. Then, below this, I have a piece I call “Corkscrew” that I am very nervous about putting up. It is about the darkest parts of yourself and how they can be expressed when you really start digging that hole deep. It goes faster when you have help. I am a stronger person today and the worst possibility on the table didn’t happen, but it is still a moment in my personal history that makes me feel cold and sick at the center. So now that I have said that about it, you can read it or not.
But right now, we are going to get to the shows.
First up I will be doing Storytelling at Perch where the theme is Breaking And Entering. I will tell you about the day I found out I lost my edge. The other tellers are: Chris Booth, Joanna Bradley, Johanna Clearfield, Selena Coppock, and Abbi Crutchfield. That is at 8, it is free, I am told the beer is cheap, and Perch is at 365 5th ave. in Park Slope. Nisse Greenberg is the host.
My fellow storytellers.
Then there are two Hotsy Totsy shows this week. The first is at the Delancy on Tuesday and this is our Dr. Who show. I will be debuting an amazing suit.
And then on Thursday will be Hotsy Totsy’s appointment with Burlesque At The Beach down at Coney Island. For this one I will be wearing a very tight suit. And I will be evil. That is the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, 9 o’clock, $15.
H says to me, “Why don’t you just hit me?” This brings me to a dead stop. We have been fighting. It’s a volatile relationship. Mainly, because we are twenty years old. I for one am in my Angry Young Man phase. I have an opinion about everything, almost all of them malformed by my youth and zeal and almost all of them fortified with my absolute certainty that they are correct. I have no idea what we were fighting about, but I was much more verbally adept than H and once I got going on some self-righteous rant, I was a steam roller for anyone to debate. Most didn’t even try. H, faced with yet another diatribe that equated whatever personal problem we were having with whatever larger political wrong I was obsessing over at the moment, fell silent for a long stretch before popping out with this.
“Why don’t you just hit me?”
I just stare at her, mouth open.
She isn’t being sarcastic. This isn’t an absurd statement meant to bring me back to reality, which is my first thought. She says it as if it were a solution to the conflict. Like, if I just took a swing at her, took it out on her physically, that it would be the catharsis we both needed. Then it would be over.
“I probably deserve it, anyway.”
An avalanche of confusion, rage, and pity crashes down on me.
“What in the world makes you think I would ever hit you?” I completely subtract the fact that I may be the only person who has complete confidence that my bottomless well of wrath would only ever express itself as tirade. But I press on. “What makes you think I even have the right to hit you?”
She looks away, then down. “BR used to hit me, sometimes. Sometimes, I had it coming.”
Oh right. BR. If I were secure enough I would have listened more closely concerning H’s past boyfriends. I would have been willing to hear the details. But I am twenty years old. I have years before I am that secure. I do know that BR only scratches the surface of how screwed up H’s relationship history is. She grew up in a seriously sheltered religious community and was not nearly prepared for what kind of bastards roamed the secular world. When she left home on an adventure with her best friend, who had grown up in the same place, every asshole in the southwest had seen them coming. The friend ended up stripping in gangster hangouts. H ended up dating a crop from which the abusive BR might have been the best.
So, once again, it is my day to post over at And I am Not Lying. This post has video. I know how y’all like the movin’ picture shows. I do too. So click on image, go to magic land, then come back and read the story I am posting below.
So, back in July, I went to my friend Kenny’s wedding and they just recently returned home from their honeymoon. Upon arriving home, Kenny promptly changed his facebook status to “married” and his facebook friends showered him in congratulations. So, that is it, ceremony, honeymoon, fb update. That marriage is underway. Hell, its old news.
But it put me in mind of the following piece I wrote some time ago about the last wedding that both of us were in attendance for. When I wrote it, I sent it to Kenny. Kenny’s girlfriend, now wife, read it over his shoulder. Then, after coming to a certain section of the story, she demanded that Kenny describe her vagina to her. Right then. Kenny was not happy with me. So, enjoy the story, it continues after the jump, and don’t let anyone read it who you don’t want to have to describe their genitals to.
Kenny and I are at the strip club out of moral obligation. And a lack of any other ideas.
It is two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and we are almost the only two customers in the club. We are probably the only customers in the club that have ever known contact with a woman that we didn’t have to pay for. And we are definitely the only customers in the club wearing tuxedos.
The strip club, called Roxy’s, is covered in red velvet. It is as if Red Velvet were a kind of invasive fungi that started off in one damp corner, perhaps behind the main stage or under one of the cocktail tables and, left unchecked, had consumed the place. Sort of Kudzu’s less tasteful cousin. Red velvet just eats light and, in a place with no windows, even the twirling spotlights can’t penetrate the stuff. So Kenny and I sit in the dark in the middle of a spring afternoon. Not completely sure why. We just felt like something had been left undone.
Kingsley Walker wants to have a tape burning. Kingsley is my youth minister and he likes things with fire in them. For instance, end times prophecy. Fire, raining from the sky to scorch the plague ridden earth and end the suffering of the damned who have already been burned once by a seven headed dragon which rose out of the sea. Which was on fire. He will discuss all of this with the same beatific, God is great, super enthusiastic grin he wears when he tells you that if you have sex outside of marriage you will be ruined forever and certainly go to hell. And this is the way that he announces the tape burning.
It amounts to an open invitation to come to the church parking lot on the following Sunday afternoon and burn all of your secular, otherwise known as devil, music.
Or what I refer to as Nuremberg Lite, the St. Charles, Missouri edition.
Now most of the kids in the youth group don’t make this connection. History class is not taken seriously amongst my peers because world history is a worldly thing and they are Christly people and the only history they need to know is in the bible which stops almost two millennia short of covering the holocaust. Which considering how much time the bible spends on Jewish affairs is quite an oversight, when you think about it. So my peers respond to this not with horror, but with a vigorous debate about whether or not U2 could be considered a Christian band.
I try to catch the eye of my friend Rebecca to get her reaction, but I can’t.
I just want to point out that end times Christian loonies share a certain aesthetic...
...with the metal heads they think are bring devil worship to a strip mall near them. Just saying.
Now there is a couple of things, besides my fascination with world history that I have been keeping back from the other kids in the youth group. First of all, I have been having sex with Sally Martin. So, I know that the sermons Kingsley gives us about how sex is not the glamorous wonderful thing you see in the movies, but instead a sweaty, difficult affair designed for procreation – I know that this is bullshit and he is a liar. He is either a liar or he is doing it wrong, and since I am too inexperienced to know that it can be done wrong, I assume he is a liar. He is likely doing it wrong.
Anyway, this has been pushing me to the edges of the youth group and making me question a faith that I have always had trouble feeling very deeply anyway. One of the other things I hide from the youth group is that I read, a lot. And not the sanctioned stuff, but sci-fi, fantasy, comics, novels, history. And I know that one of the first things that happens in any book when the evil empire takes over, is censorship and burning of books and music and people who write books and music. From Sci-fi to fantasy to world history, this pops up again and again.
But, I have one thing keeping me here. And that is my friend Rebecca. Who I love. We have been close almost from the day I started coming to youth group. She was always too old for me, in that way that 16 is too old for 13 and 18 is too old for 15, so all we have ever been is friends but we are close, and from Rebecca I have learned what it is to really share that with someone. To give that much of yourself to someone. So, I have to see where she is on this, she could be a touchstone of sanity, and I go to her after youth group and I ask her what she thinks. She says she thinks she will burn Duran Duran’s Rio.
The next Sunday, my mother wakes me and I say I’m not going to church anymore. She says she is disappointed but that she can’t make me go. I say “No, no you can’t.” What I don’t say is that I won’t be part of the evil empire for her, or Kingsley, or Jesus, or even for my closest friend.
Anyway, that story has been on my mind lately. There is more to it, a whole chapter in the book. But, that story really embarrasses me in a way that is hard to explain. I think I find the whole notion of burning materials so stupendously ignorant that, having ever been near people who would take such a thing seriously, just makes me feel like I have my pants down at the prom.
Lets move on from my history in the Hitler Youth of suburban America to upcoming shows. This weeks upcoming shows are on the same day and in the same place. How convenient for you. And me. Unfortunately, neither of them involve me stripping or having eighteen costume changes in under ten minutes. For that you will have to wait until the following week. First up: I am very honored to be doing the opening for Adam Wade From New Hampshire. Adam, perhaps the city’s most popular storyteller has been doing this monthly show since the beginning of the year and he always offers up this fifteen minutes at the front for another performer to show their stuff off for his audience. It is a great slot and I am really happy to be doing it. Then after Adam, I will join the rest of the BTK Band for our monthly show. This one is special, not only do we have our usual run of storytellers and go-go dancers, but this one also features magician Nelson Lugo, who has never done this kind of thing before and I know is working on something very special. Both of these shows are on Monday at Under Saint Marks Theater. Adaw Wade From New Hampshire is at seven and BTK is at nine-thirty. Hope to see you all there.
Still, I think we can all agree that Duran Duran will be going to hell for the Nagel fiasco that graced Rio.
I wasn’t going to do this but I just can’t resist. Here you go and you’re welcome -
Miss Mary Cyn
This is the home base of the producer of Original Cyn, as well as several one woman shows, a book, a calendar,and a lot of all around hotness.
If you do, you adopt quiet resignation as you attend their going away party the day before they, the happy couple, move to Florida. You file it under “never gonna happen.” They become a friend. A hot friend, but a friend. So it goes.
Then it’s her turn. Details go by, bartending, getting her social worker’s license, lives near the beach, Florida’s beautiful. No mention of Ted comes up, so I ask.
Well, eventually, she stands up. She has driven and she needs to get home before she gets too drunk and too tired to drive. I am not worried about this as I know that we all have plans with her again in a couple of days and I am in no big hurry. So we all stand up to say our goodbyes. After a lot of hand shaking and hugs to the gathered crowd, she turns her attention to me. She leans in, gets her body right up against me, squeezes me very tight, and says into my ear –
JERKS!
Then the train slides up to the stop, the bell dings, the doors open, the conductor announces all the relevant transfer points, and on steps a guy wearing three coats, two hats, and is engaged in a shouting match with an invisible person who is, apparently, trying to feed him rats.
