Somebody sparked a blunt about halfway through the movie and smoked the whole fricking thing, Cape Fear-style.

Me and my buddy got there before the previews and had to beg for crappy seats together in the back row, up against the wall. So pretty much the entire theater sat there under this dense, low-hanging weed haze that just kept growing and growing through the whole thing.

Pot goes with comic book movies like peanut butter goes with chocolate. Or like pot goes with peanut butter and chocolate, really. But still, this is really something that should be attended to at home or in a park or something. It’s not like smelling weed at a rock concert, where it’s kind of expected.

It didn’t really bother me personally, but really – just the sheer audacity!

Tiny – and egregious – social injustices that don’t actually bother me personally make me completely nuts, just on principle alone. I’m kind of a Larry David that way, which may not be an admirable character trait. But at this point, it simply is, and it’s not going away. Just like Dr.Banner and the Hulk, I’m just trying to manage it.

We’re all part of this one fabric, a larger collective organism that succeeds or fails based on the grace and discretion of its components. And it makes me NUTS when people ignore that and just go off and do any old fucked-up thing they want to, regardless of what it does to the people around them. Somebody in there could have been trying to get clean, needed to pass a drug test, or gone to a movie specifically to avoid being around people that were getting wasted. So who is THAT guy to just blow smoke over the whole social quilt in there?

The haze grew and grew, all the way through the credits. Most people stayed in the theater anyway to see one of the stinger scenes Marvel buries in the credits to set up the next movie. The Avengers has two – the second one is right at the end when the lights come up.

Right after the first stinger scene, some guy jumped up and walked backwards down the stairs in the aisle to the main landing, yelling “hey man, hey man, you wanna go, huh, HUH? HEY MAN HEY MAN YOU WANNA GO YOU WANNA GO YOU WANNA GO” and repeated himself at least a hundred times. He feels the same way about the social fabric, I guess.

Then the dude that was smoking the blunt jumped up and answered back “AND WHAT NIGGA AND WHAT AND WHAT NIGGA”, also about a hundred times.

Really, it’s not so much the actual words they said as the way that they said them.

The guy with the blunt finally jumped out of his seat and ran down the steps to get into it.

He’s one of those guys that wears the waist of his pants down around his thighs with his drawers all hanging out in the back. I’ve always thought that look was mostly tough-guy posturing that might be a hindrance in an actual fighting situation. And it sure as hell was, because as he ran down the steps to meet his challenger, he stumbled on his pants and fell forward, chin out …

… and the guy that cared about the social fabric met that chin with a flawless uppercut.

They tangeld for a while, until the cops came. The blunt guy hiked his pants up and ran out the fire door. The cops settled everything down, all while the credits rolled. Then the second stinger scene came and somebody went “SSHHH, SHUT UP YOU GUYS!”

And seriously, everyone left in the theatre including the cop paused, turned and watched the movie for a minute while the final scene rolled, and then went about their business as the lights came up.

I felt like I was in New York in the late eighties. And man, what a satisfying in-theatre experience.

All this is to say that it’s time once again to leave a pair of smoking rubber tracks on stage at Union Hall with the And I Am Not Lying LIVE show, cock-rocking the NPR crowd with the best comedy, storytelling and burlesque in NYC.

If that tiny bit of promo copy that I half-assed during a conference call was enough to make you want to get tickets already, you can do that here: And I Am Not Lying LIVE at Union Hall on May 1.

Here’s a poster, more on the performers after the jump:

Most storytelling shows around here have a theme. This one is the same, but the theme is the same every month: KICK ASS. We don’t pick guests that aren’t awesome, but I’m particularly thrilled about this month’s guests.

Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz did our show back in December and just wrecked the place. Every time I’ve seen them perform I’ve had no idea what I’m seeing, except that what I’m seeing is hilarious and twisted and impossible to imitate. Both times I’ve seen them I’ve just ended up screaming.

Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz will be rejoining us with a burlesque act, and Mat’s going to tell a story as well.

This is a video of Mat and Julie from our December show. It’s a sweet little medley of cabaret classics, but also totally unsafe for work and the best, strangest thing you’ll see all week:

Hari Kondabolu went on the first comedy tour of India by Indian-American comedians in the “Make Chai, Not War” tour a few months ago. I’ve been a fan since I saw him at Eugene Mirman’s “Pretty Good Friends.”

And of course, we’ll have storytelling by me (Jeff Simmermon), Brad Lawrence, and Cyndi Freeman – and Cyndi and Brad will do a burlesque act, too.

Hope we see you there – this is NOT one to miss. Once again, that’s

Comedy by Hari Kondabolu
Storytelling by Mat Fraser, Jeff Simmermon, Brad Lawrence, and Cyndi Freeman
Burlesque by Julie Atlas Muz, Mat Fraser, Brad Lawrence and Cyndi Freeman

Tickets right here: And I Am Not Lying LIVE at Union Hall on May 1.

If you’re reading this as a long-time follower of this blog, none of this material is going to be new to you. I’m re-flogging some older stuff, so maybe this is a good time to push away from the computer and go enjoy a nice spring day outside.

I want to shamelessly take full advantage of the mention to show off what the And I Am Not Lying show is all about here. Because frankly, not only am I proud of the work that we do and thrilled to see the storytelling world getting a little credit … I want to put asses in seats on the first Tuesday of every month at Union Hall.

Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman and I put on a monthly show featuring storytelling, comedy, burlesque and sideshow — and I want to share some of the stories that we’ve done there. We’ve only had a residency there since February, so we’re still building up some steam. But all of us do a TON of other shows around town, too.

Consider this a primer, dive deeper if you want. Today is functionally a Friday anyway, so go ahead and watch all of these at work.

Al Sharpton vs. Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band

These are two stories by Brad Lawrence:

Gift From A Chimp In Saint Louis

Sometimes Cyndi ties her burlesque acts to her stories, and the end result is bigger than either piece seperately. So here’s a story by Cyndi Freeman, with a pretty direct tie into the burlesque act immediately following:

Here’s the aforementioned burlesque act from our show, featuring Cyndi Freeman, Brad Lawrence and Apathy Angel:

We have comedy guests, storytellers, and sideshow performers, too – including a bullwhip/lasso expert and a sword swallower.

You can follow us here, on Twitter @andiamnotlying or on our Facebook page. And I hope we see you soon.

A year later, his mom took me and him and a date to see the Ramones at the Boathouse in Norfolk, VA and nothing was ever the same again. My glasses got knocked off and ground back into sand during the first 5 minutes of the show, and I took a boot to the face by the second set. The next day, I was half-deaf and limping around the house, clutching the walls to feel my way to my bedroom and all I wanted to do was get up on a stage and be Joey Ramone.

A week after that I quit the rec league soccer team by throwing my shirt in the coach’s face. During a game.

Something didn’t add up, though. Me and Frank were scoring acid from drag queens at the Rocky Horror Picture Show and had a direct line to all the best music this new burning world had to offer. With all this newfound punk rock swagger and the confidence of finally being down with the coolest guys in school, we figured girls would finally start paying attention.

As it turns out, it took a little while. We had no idea why.

Frank Benson has hit his stride by now, and I guess I’m okay, too.

Anyone who tells a teenager that “these are the best years of your life” is only telling half of the truth. In my experience, we got to taste the potential that the world had — but actually feeling it fall into place day by day and year by year is even better. Frank and I hang out now. We both live in Brooklyn, but we’re both busting ass on our own art careers.

We don’t see each other as often as people who live three miles away from each other might. But every time we do hang out, one of is getting the other one really excited about some cool new stuff. We’re still kicking each others’ doors wide open.

They said we were going to be in a big basement theater with ampitheater seating. Then we get there, and the floor is a solid concrete slab, two-thirds of which tilts toward a flat part at a 40 degree angle. There are no seats except for a pile of folding chairs in the corner.

People are filing in, not enough people to fill the room or even have a decent crowd – just enough to make it so that we can’t cancel.

I’m running around the room setting up folding chairs on the slanted part and Cyndi’s trying to make change for people that are paying at the door but her makeup’s not even all the way on. Then people actually sit in the chairs and start sliding down the concrete ramp, sparks shooting from the chairs’ metal legs until they hit the stage part of the concrete with a jerk and fall forwards.

Still, the show’s got to go on so we get started. But while I’m telling my story, right when I’m getting to the hard part, some guy in a baseball hat with two kids walks right up to me and says “excuse me, how do I get to Bryant Park?”

I’m stunned. I tell him and he leaves, and then some woman says “does this thing go uptown on weekends” and I realize that we are not, in fact, in a basement theater. We’re on a subway platform.

Then I wake up and it’s 4:30 in the morning and I stare at the sparkly things floating in my eyeball fluid until 7, when I get up and go to work.

So yeah, we’re having another And I Am Not Lying Live show tomorrow night at Union Hall in Brooklyn. Show’s at 8, ten bucks, tickets are here.

I’m really excited to have my friend Andy Ross on the show, reading and performing some of his short comedic pieces. This is a video of a story he told at Union Hall one time, about the time he sang both parts of “I’ve Had The Time Of My Life” at a talent show. And the amazing thing is, he gets the whole crowd to sing along with him. It’s both hilarious and oddly uplifting.

Hope we see you there.

We specifically didn’t mention it online for a while. It’s nice to think that something can be real without the Internet validating it — and without having to turn it into a story for instant mass consumption.

But still, I wanted to share this with you guys. It’s actually really hard to write about. Every time I try to write down what it means the words look so small and dumb, and there’s so much wonderful stuff that gets left out. That’s because there’s so much wonderful stuff here, in this experience, and in this particular woman, that I don’t think I could write it all down if I tried every day for the rest of my life.

The ring is one that my dad bought for my mom in Hong Kong back in the early ’70s, more or less. It’s jade. Maggie speaks fluent Mandarin, and jade means a lot more to her than some dumb diamond that she’s been trained to want by decades of subliminal pressure.

My lady thinks for her DAMN self. Also, her name in Mandarin is pronounced (sort of) “mei-chi” which means “beautiful jade.”

I surprised her on her birthday at the wine bar where we had our first date. We had our first drinks together there, then over to this awesome Japanese restaurant in Williamsburg for dinner. Every booth in the restaurant is its own sort of private room, with a bamboo curtain that the waitstaff pulls up when they deliver each course. I was going to drop this thing over dessert.

And I couldn’t take it.

We’re having wine and cheese, and seated right next to this pair of girls who are having that same “woe is me” dating conversation you always hear that type of girl having in New York. It’s delivered in a nasal uptalky sing-song, and they always say “No, we’re just like, hanging out, I don’t want it to like, be all serious or something. But like, he hasn’t texted me in like six hours after I sent him this one, so like, what do you think that means?”

Maggie’s snickering and cheerfully chirping, happy at the surprise and loving the wine and generally sweeping the room with her massive smile. That’s her default setting: a smile like a beanbag cannon shooting wads of sunshine.

She’s always smiling at me that way, at least.

The girls next to us are just crapping on in that tired cliched vocal pattern, all uptalks and feigned detachment, and my Adam’s apple is thrashing around like there’s an Anthrax show in my esophagus and I am trying so, so hard not to just drink all my wine in one gulp. I’ve got this rhythm going where I smile, nod, sip wine, taste one cheese, then sip wine, then another cheese in an extremely regulated fashion so it goes

smile
sip
taste
sip
smile
sip
taste
sip

and I’m doing pretty good, not spilling the beans or anything, and she says “Are you okay? You’re awful quiet and you’re just tearing through that cheese.”

To which I replied “oh, FUCK THIS, do you want your birthday present? OK, shut your eyes and hold out your hands.”

It just kind of flew out that way.

So I get up and squeeze my enormous frame between the tables and get down on one knee, drop the ring in her hand and say “Oh God, will you please marry me?” when she opens her eyes.

She squeals and opens the ring up and then looks up and says “Yes, yes, of course, yes! I was planning on spending the rest of my life with you whether or not we ever did this part!”

So then we kiss and I sit back down, and the waitress brings over two glasses of champagne, on the house, and she’s only just a little bit less excited than Maggie is.

And when she moves out of the way, we can see that the two girls at the table next to us have the tightest little polite smiles I’ve ever seen. Imagine a cat’s rectum forcing a grin and you’ll about have it.

There’s a sort of person that sees relationships as competitive sport, like when you land one you’ve broken the tape and it’s just victory laps for the rest of your life, I suppose. These are people who get mad at other people’s happiness and then dangle their happiness in front of other people like it’s an objective truth rather than one of an infinite number of ways of being.

So yeah, it’s pretty fun to think that one of the coolest moment in our shared life together also made a few jerks pretty mad.

There’s so much more to say, but I can’t think of an original way to say it. So I’ll say this and then bow out of the public sphere on this topic for awhile:

Maggie’s a morning person and I am decidedly not. I’m out testing stories at open mics or going to shows, trying to get my stuff in front of pretty much whoever will sit still long enough to listen to me. I’m trying to get back into winning Moth story slams, too, which is kind of an arduous process. I’m usually home by 12, in bed by 12:30 or 1. And there’s always a soft, warm little hourglass-shaped lump under the covers when I get in. I always smooth her hair away from her face and give her a kiss, and she smiles in her sleep. And the other night, after I came in from a Moth Slam, she says to me from deep beneath a dark sleepy ocean, in a small sleep-drunk voice,

“Did you win?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s okay,” she replies. “Did you kill?”

Last night we went to a milonga, otherwise known as a dance session for her tango classmates. I don’t dance, myself, but I was thrilled to just sit there and watch. She danced so effortlessly around the floor with these older guys, her feet stepping and kicking so perfectly. And every time they turned to where she could see me, she just beamed and beamed. Her teacher is a tiny Turkish man, very dignified, but just a pit bull when he wants to be. He said to her, in her ear as they were dancing,

“Your fiancee, he is watching your feet and your face with a great intensity.”

I was. I was thinking to myself as I watched her heels kick the hem of her dress, making it swirl in patterns around her knees,

“My God, holy crap. I don’t know how exactly it happened, but this gorgeous, curious, brilliant woman wants to spend her life with me as much as I want to be with her. We’re neck and neck on this thing, so different from each other and so happy. This can happen every day or every week if we want. Every minute together is such a gift, and we just get to unwrap them for as long as we want.”

Then the song ended. Maggie’s official partner (not her teacher) is a total flake and didn’t bother to show up, and it wasn’t the kind of thing where I could just get out there and learn on the spot. She came up to me and said “That guy flaked, and I didn’t want to dance with him anyhow. You look hungry and I’m tired. Let’s get in a cab and go get into bed.”

And we did, and we will, for as long as we want and at our own pace. And I couldn’t be happier about it.

The act of telling personal stories about one’s own life takes a certain amount of a certain type of nerve — mostly the “who the hell do you think you are” variety. Seriously: why should anyone give a whoop about my feelings about my feelings?

That feeling gets even weirder when I’m using the Internet as a megaphone to get people to my shows. “Who the fuck do you think you are telling everyone to come see whoever the hell it is you think you are” is pretty much the refrain that runs through my head every time I bathe my face in the cool glow of one rectangle or another.

But screw all that, we’ve been busting our asses to pull together a HELL of a week of shows this week in Brooklyn and Austin, TX for SXSW and I want to pull ‘em all together in one place, then crop-dust the whole Internet with ‘em all damn week.

First: We’re cock-rocking the NPR crowd with And I Am Not Lying – Live, NYC’s only comedy storytelling burlesque sideshow on Tuesday, March 6th at Union Hall in Brooklyn. You’ll see stories by me, Brad Lawrence, and Cyndi Freeman as well as magic by Albert Cadabra, burlesque by Cherry Pitz and Little Brooklyn and comedy by Wil Sylvince.

We strongly recommend advance tickets (only $10), which you can get here: And I Am Not Lying at Union Hall, Brooklyn

More info/flyer here, cool trailer here and embedded below:

Second: On Saturday, March 10th, we’ll be offering an entire day’s worth of activities in Palm Park from 11AM – 6PM The Hilton Garden Inn, 18th Floor, Colorado and Red River rooms as a part of SXSW Interactive. We’ll be having a panel discussion entitled “From Basement Burlesque To The Boardroom: What Makes a Good Story,” giving a storytelling crash course/workshop, offering comedy improv lessons, running an open mic for any storytellers, comics, or other raw and rare talents that want to do ten minutes onstage and finally — a two-hour version of the And I Am Not Lying live experience from 4-6 PM featuring the best underground storytelling and comedy that we can find – and some special surprise guests.
UPDATE – 3.9.2012

The tent at Palm Park is flooded out – there’s a whole ecosystem in there underneath the folding chairs. We are moving ALL of the And I Am Not Lying events scheduled for March 10th at SXSW to the Hilton Garden Inn in Downtown Austin – just a few blocks from Palm Park and the convention center. The hotel is at 500 North IH-35/Frontage Road, Austin, TX. Here’s a map.

Our stuff is now going to be on the 18th floor of the Hilton Garden Inn in Downtown Austin in the Colorado and Red River rooms. The content and times will stay exactly the same.

You can get more details, including an hour-by-hour breakdown and performer/presenter credentials here: Schedule of Events for And I Am Not Lying Tent at SXSW Interactive.

We also made a sweet Web graphic that you can pass around on your phone or Twitter or whatever, found here.

For up-to-the-moment news, changes, surprise guest info, you can follow us on Twitter at @andiamnotlying

Third: We’re doing a show at The New Movement Theater in Austin, Texas at 10:30 PM – also on Saturday, March 10th. We’ll have stories, burlesque, comedy and we’ll be just tired, punchy and drunk enough to shoot a pillar of pure fire straight into the sky. Performers include me (Jeff Simmermon), Andy Ross, Seth Lind, Brad Lawrence and Cyndi Freeman and some others that we are trying to nail down now.

Here are the official details, with address, etc: And I Am Not Lying at The New Movement Theater.

You don’t need a SXSW badge for this one, just a few bucks. Probably just ten bucks.

Fourth: I’m MC-ing and hosting the Slip+Lovitt SXSW Day Party on Thursday, March 15th from 11 AM to 6PM at Club 1808 (1808 E. 12th St. at Chicon.) The show features a TON of DC and VA post-punk/screamy hardcoreish math-rock bands like Regents and Beasts of No Nation, but especially includes a reunion of Virginia’s own Sleepytime Trio. Essentially, there are nine bands playing and I’ll be telling a story in between each one. It promises to be a sweaty marathon.

More on that here: Slip+Lovitt SXSW Day Party

If you want, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, all that shit. Hope we see you this week — come on up and say hi.

But look, man: if you hated sports a little and frat-culture a lot in the late ’80s and early ’90s, what else were you going to do? Punk and hardcore had a low barrier to entry then – just get yourself a guitar, a garage and couple other guys and add a few metric apeloads of sweat and willpower. You could turn a pizza parlor, VFW hall or urine-soaked living room into a mothership full of people that were just ROCKING THE FUCK OUT with you at the helm.

My musical efforts at that time were stranger and less accessible.

I met almost all of my best, tightest, life-long friends at these shows. We made bands, made tapes, played records, took road trips to the Black Cat in DC and Twister’s in Richmond together, and ate a WHOLE lot of hash browns at truckstops in the middle of the night together. I went to a lot of weddings and I’ll go to a lot of funerals because of the people I met back then. We shepherded each other along the messy, complicated path into adult life, and I plan to return the favors on the way out.

Some of my best friends in college – the kindest, strangest, funniest guys in the world – formed the Sleepytime Trio. And when they played in our tiny living room in Harrisonburg, VA, the energy was Thor banging his hammer on the ground. Lightning bolts connected everybody and people dove off the mantle and jumped out the windows … before opening them.

Everytime they played, something got broken, someone got hurt and everyone in the room took a malt-liquor shower together and we smiled about it real hard, too. Because we all knew that nothing this awesome was happening for hundreds of miles around this tiny little mountain town and we all made it together.

Here’s the Sleepytime Trio playing at ABC No Rio back in the late ’90s. This looks and sounds a LOT like my living room did when I was in college.

So I’m really, really honored and exceptionally stoked to be MC-ing the Slip/Lovitt Party at SXSW on March 15th — featuring a rare and raw Sleepytime Trio reunion. There are 8 bands, and I’ll be telling stories between all of them. You don’t need a badge or anything, just earplugs. And maybe some extra deodorant.

See, that love/hate thing – it’s not really hate. It’s the natural flipside of a nurturing relationship. You will always resent the thing that makes you just enough to get out on your own. It’s scary out there, and if you didn’t push yourself away, you’d still live in your mom’s attic.

For me, this thing’s like coming home for Christmas. We’re all grown up, and we’re all going to rock this thing as hard as we know how.

For the rest of you, the show ought to be really fun, especially if you like hanging out with dudes in cargo shorts who still buy 7″ records. Hope you can make it.

Our friends Ben Lillie and Erin Barker run a spectacular science-themed storytelling show. podcast and online magazine called The Story Collider. A few weeks ago, they ran a version of Cyndi’s transformation into brassy burlesque performer after a breast cancer scare on their site.

The thing is, not only can you hear the story from the podcast, you can also see a great comic inspired by Cyndi’s story, drawn by Tammy Stellanova.

Here’s the audio of Cyndi’s story: The Story Collider: Side Effects

You can see the full version of the comic here, with a few samples below: Cyndi Freeman & Tammy Stellanova’s “Side Effects”

I would be remiss in my role as a relentless show pimp if I didn’t mention that Cyndi’s performing at And I Am Not Lying at Union Hall next Tuesday, March 6th and at SXSW on Saturday, March 10th in Palm Park from 11AM- 6PM.

Check out the sample comic pages below … one here, one after the jump.