SXSW Daytime Street Scene | Credit: Brittany Ryan

I’m pretty stoked to tell you this:

And I Am Not Lying is not only putting on a show but a whole tent of action and entertaining education at South by Southwest Interactive this year.

It’s coming together really, really fast and last-minute — not unlike most things at SXSW. Here’s what we do know:

We’re going to have a tent on Saturday, March 10th, from 11 AM to 6PM in Palm Park, right next to the convention center.

We’ll be offering an improv comedy workshop taught by musical improv comedy legend Eliza Skinner, of Baby Wants Candy, Diamond Lion and “Amy at the Club” fame.

We’ll also be offering a storytelling workshop taught by Cyndi Freeman and me (Jeff Simmermon). Cyndi’s an experienced storyteller here in NYC, and an instructor with The Moth’s MothSHOP outreach program, though she is not representing the Moth at this thing. As for me, I just do this a whole, whole lot — and teach story structure and writing in my day job at Time Warner Cable, too.

There’s also going to be a panel discussion about storytelling, from the burlesque backroom to the corporate boardroom with stage and radio in between. Panelists will include me, Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman as well as Seth Lind of TOLD! (one of the city’s best story shows), comedy improv troupe Thank You, Robot, and This American Life. Thaler Pekar, communications coach/organizational narrative expert will also join us on the panel.

We haven’t quite determined the precise timing and order of the workshops and panels. But I know this much – we’re taking a taco break from 2-4 while the Interactive keynotes happen.

And then, from 4-6 PM, we’re putting on a version of the And I Am Not Lying LIVE show featuring storytelling, comedy and sideshow from some of our spectacularly talented friends.

Just guess who three of the storytellers are. I dare you.If you guessed Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman, and Jeff Simmermon, then good for you.

Here’s the really cool thing: we’re next to a tent that gives out free beer. As I understand it right now, this is what SXSW calls a “networking tent”, whereby badgeholders get a couple of free drinks. That’s always where the most magic happens for me at SXSW anyway.

So look: at some point, all the Powerpoints and pointy-headed talks about memes are gonna get old. When they do, we’re outside in the shade and ready to entertain you. Come over, grab a couple cold ones and hang out with us. The whole tent is a polished-up and prettified presentation based around trash-talking with a purpose in the first place — and we’ve worked hard to get good at it.

As a matter of fact, it’s pretty much what we live for. Come hang out with us and you can tell your boss that you went to a few work-appropriate panels if you want.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you may recall that I used to play typewriter in a band with some piano-playing chickens.

I’m here to tell you that chickens, like monkeys, go from cute to despicable in about half an hour. They’re vile, magnificently brainless creatures that defecate the way that cats shed – casually, constantly, and in occasionally impressive clumps.

It comes as no surprise to me that Werner Herzog feels the same way. Here’s a little clip on Vimeo (shared by my former human bandmate Tim Gordon)

Werner Herzog on Chickens from Tom Streithorst on Vimeo.

We’ve just added bullwhip and lasso artist Chris McDaniel to the show at Union Hall on February 7th. This guy’s an incredible treat – I saw him whip pasta noodles out of his own mouth at Sharkbite Sideshow a few weeks back and I couldn’t get enough.

Here’s a video of Chris doing part of his act:

AS always, the show is the first Tuesday of each month at Union Hall in Brooklyn, 8PM.

Tickets are ten bucks, available here.

Visit the larger announcement for more information – hope you can make it.

I first met Michael Che at Hannibal Buress’s free Sunday show at The Knitting Factory. I saw him perform 3 or 4 times, and man – he killed it every time. He did the And I Am Not Lying Live show back in December, and my friends called me the next day to tell me that they’d been quoting some of his lines to each other on the long drive back to Virginia the next day.

He was kind enough to let me share this video of his set:

The guy’s good, huh? You can catch him on Twitter at @chethinks, and on Tumblr here.

We’ve been real sometimes-y about these And I Am Not Lying live shows over the past year – a show here and a show there, spattered around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan and DC and Philadelphia in a series of one-offs that are always exciting, but hardly consistent. Considering that the show’s based on a blog that is updated really infrequently, that kinda made sense.

Thanks to a lot of awesome help from Creaghead and Co., that’s about to change.

Starting February 7th, we’ll be cock-rocking the NPR crowd with the And I Am Not Lying live show at Union Hall on the first Tuesday of every month. Doors are at 8, show’s at 8:30 and tickets ain’t but ten tiny dollars for the finest comedy, storytelling, burlesque sideshow you’re going to get anywhere.

Be honest with yourself: stuff like this is part of the reason you moved here. It’s worth a headache at work on Wednesday.

You can buy tickets here if you’re into that already.

We pulled together this cool trailer about it, too. It may be NSFW, depending on your job:

I wanted to start this show for a very, very good reason. I’m doing this thing so that I don’t go completely numb, and I’m trying to bring as many people back to life as I can right along with us.

I spend a lot of time hunched over a glowing rectangle starting and mediating petty squabbles about nothing, breathing shallowly through my mouth and reading tweets about television. I’ve been doing it for years. When I’m not getting paid to do it I sit around my apartment in my underpants and do it for free, apparently.

Everyone does.

Sometimes I think we’re all using computers to row this numbing boat towards a black wall of depressing distraction. I want to do my part to get as many people into one room and feeling something great together for a little while. And maybe if we get together often enough and pool our collective energies into something funny and weird, we can live a little outside of our bottomless pockets filled with lotus petals.

The entire purpose of life is to get as excited as possible. I’m so, so excited to have a reason to hose the town down with excitement once a month. So it’s like a Mobius strip of recursive excitement for me.

Sometimes storytelling shows can get a little sweater-vesty, comedy shows can be too bitter and detached, and burlesque too much, all in a go. This way we can cross-pollinate the best of the best and no matter what, if you’re not into what you’re seeing you can see something else really soon.

I want this thing to be a rock show without instruments, to just cram an entire aircraft carrier’s worth of fun into the basement of Union Hall. So far, we’ve been doing pretty okay on that front, I think.

D.Billy and I collaborated on this cool poster (I think it’s cool, anyway) to announce the residency:

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Creaghead and Company is pretty much Caroline Creaghead. And Caroline Creaghead is pretty much awesome. She helps to book and produce the And I Am Not Lying Live show, in addition to a bunch of others. One of the other shows in Caroline’s stable is “Heart Of Darkness” with Greg Barris. According to Flavorpill, Heart of Darkness (with the live band the Forgiveness) is a

psychedelic stand‐up show … a visceral experience from the downtown comedy underground. Accomplished thinkers, authors, poets, and artists join Barris and his band to become one seamless, improvised comedy freak show.”

I caught the sold-out show at Union Hall last Saturday. What I could see of it was really, really awesome, when I could see around a pillar. Everything sounded great, though.

Reggie Watts dropped in at the last minute and did a hilarious set, improvising all kinds of hilarious music and completely surreal standup that made perfect sense and told right-on truths as long as you didn’t listen too closely. If you did, you’d realize he was riffing on the kind of played-out onstage cliches you hear from most hip-hop and rock ‘n roll stage banter.

Here’s a pretty sweet clip. In it, Reggie Watts covers Maroon 5′s “Moves Like Jagger,” freestyles and improvises, and raps like the lead singer of a Cookie Monster death metal band:

Reggie Watts – Touching Songs Improv – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

In this clip, Reggie, Greg Barris and the Forgiveness improve a long jam about slack friends, vampires, teen smoking and more:

Reggie Watts & The Forgiveness – Improv Jam – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

Both clips were shot and edited by Alex Gaylon of Karmalize Productions.

My show HOTSY TOTSY BURLESQUE is finally back and I could not be happier. I have been running around doing all sorts of things this year, like my solo show and loads of story telling. But what I missed most was dancing naked on stage (or at least semi-nude, there are laws about such things). I also missed the world that Hotsy Totsy is part of. If you could imagine the Muppet show, but instead of puppets you have funny hot naked girls, you are almost there…Hotsy Totsy takes place at “The Home For Wayward Girls and Fallen Women”

It’s an all-girls hotel that has gone through many owners. It was originally incorporated by a religious order called “The Righteous Order Of Frustrated Spinsters With Too Many Cats” and envisioned as a reformatory residence for girls gone bad.

See, the spinsters believed that if you took a girl away from her nefarious environment and surrounded her with cats, she would no longer crave illicit temptation as there would be so many warm friendly pussies to snuggle up with.

I will hosting this week’s show & the cast is:  Jenny C’est Quoi, Gal Friday, Calamity Chang, Go Go Harder and more!

Hotsy Totsy is is part of the Burlesque Blitz: A week of burlesque at the Horse Trade Theater Company in NYC. We will be performing at The Kraine Theater, 85 East 4th Ave (Between 2nd & 3rd Ave) NYC – Dec. 28th – 8pm – for tickets and info go to - http://horsetrade.info

And we have a new sponsor: Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum, who will be supplying awesome swag and drink specials!

Man. I can’t believe it’s showtime again already. But me, Brad Lawrence and Cyndi Freeman are bringing our live show back to Union Hall in Brooklyn on December 10th at 8PM. And it don’t cost but ten bucks, people.

People keep asking me, “so, what’s this show about? What’s your hook?” And man, I have no idea. I used to think it was a live version of this blog. But now this blog is turning to a blog version of the live show. All I can say is that it reflects a huge lesson I learned sometime in college:

Never let your IQ get in the way of a good time.

Basically, we’re cock-rocking the NPR crowd with burlesque, storytelling, comedy and sideshow acts. Sound fun? It better. If that’s not high-quality Saturday night entertainment for you, I don’t want to know what is.

I’d strongly recommend getting advance tickets, which you can do right here: And I Am Not Lying Live at Union Hall on 12/10/2011 — $10

If you’re really into the Facebook thing, you can click here to see the invite and RSVP. That doesn’t actually help anything, but it massages my starving ego.

Here’s a poster, lineup published for Google SEO trickery after the jump:

The show features …

Storytelling from

Jeff Simmermon (storyteller featured on The Moth Podcast and This American Life)
Cyndi Freeman (Wonder Woman: A How-To Guide for Little Jewish Girls)
Brad Lawrence (The Moth GrandSLAM champ)

Comedy by
Michael Che

Burlesque by

Fem Appeal,
RunAround Sue & Cyndi Freeman

and a VERY special appearance by
Mat Fraser & Julie Atlas Muz

Hope you can make it out.

Man, am I beat. In case you hadn’t noticed, we had two shows outside New York City last week. I’ve been consumed with them for months, and we’ve all been super excited. And that excitement pretty much paid off, too.

The bus ride down to Washington from New York was pretty uneventful. The cab ride to Eric and Sarah’s (our hosts for the evening) was another story. That was when I found out that we’d sold out the Black Cat.

It’s really, really difficult to articulate what that felt like. Everything got brighter, sharper. Sounds had more clarity, and all the hairs in my nostrils stuck out straight. I think my metabolism tripled. We all had a belt of bourbon before going down to the club, and I think I can speak for all of us when I say that it burned up before it got all the way through the esophagus.

I’d been getting a cold, and my body did this incredibly strange thing. First, it fast-forwarded through the generative stage of the cold, stuff running out of my head like a child had salted a slug’s nest in my brain.

Then when we got to the club and literally had to walk through a small crowd of total strangers to see this sign on the door, everything just stopped completely:

The cold dried up. My body paused it completely, put the whole thing on layaway.
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So it’s the night before our And I Am Not Lying – Live show in Philadelphia, and I’m antsy. We’re bringing this storytelling, comedy and burlesque gig to L’etage tomorrow night and I’m really hoping that folks turn out.

Here’s a little flyer:

Here are the details:

• Show’s at L’etage, (6th St and Bainbridge St.)
• Doors at 7:30, show starts at 8PM prompt.
• It’s $12 at the door.

You’ll see:

• Storytelling from me (Jeff Simmermon), Brad Lawrence and Cyndi Freeman – and Philadelphia storytelling wizard ******
• Comedy by Doogie Horner
• Burlesque by Runaround Sue and Cyndi Freeman.

Brad, Cyndi, ****** and I all met as regulars at story slams with The Moth in New York. Brad and ****** have won their share of Grand Slams, and Brad, ****** and I have all appeared on the Moth’s podcast. I was on This American Life a while back, and was featured on The Moth’s Radio Hour recently, too. Cyndi’s an accomplished storyteller fresh off her show “Wonder Woman: A How-To Guide for Little Jewish Girls.”

And just last week, we added Philadelphia comedian Doogie Horner to the bill, too.

I’m pretty stoked to meet him – the guy is really funny! In addition to performing on America’s Got Talent (I know), he’s a graphic designer by day — and actually designed the cover to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”

Philadelphia Magazine called him the “Most Hilarious Guy in Philly,” and they may be right:

Hope you can make it.