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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Doctor

Originally uploaded by Jeff.Simmermon

You know, there’s an awful lot of cancer going around. I’m not sure that it’s not catching.

Or, you know how people used to smoke cigarettes with asbestos filters and X-ray their feet at the shoe store to see if they had a good fit? I think we’re doing something like that right now, something our grandkids are going to find so shocking and appalling when we tell them about it. They’re going to say “well of COURSE you all had cancer.”

Maybe it’s plastics.

A friend of mine got diagnosed with breast cancer last week. And before that, other friends and other friends. The words that follow are for anyone that’s been diagnosed with cancer and is really, really freaking out about it. That should cover pretty much anyone that’s been diagnosed with cancer, period.

I’ve just found myself emailing versions of what follows out to a number of people recently, and I thought maybe I’d put it out here so strangers could read this and share it.

Here it goes:

_______________
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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.

I love jukeboxes – pack ‘em right and everyone in the bar’s a pretty good DJ, all night long.

The jukebox at Washington DC’s Black Cat is out of order. Or, it’s out of order as a jukebox – it works just fine as a multi-disc CD player, stuck on shuffle. Someone took the protective covering out from under the glass on the front, and you can see right into its guts. It’s pretty beautiful, I think.

I took this photo with TrueHDR via a wide-angle lens stuck to the front of my iPhone 4, then ran it through the Photoshop app and some other stuff to get this image:

I’ve been taking a letterpress class at Cooper Union, and Jeff recently tweeted something that I thought deserved memorializing in type and ink.
So last night, I grabbed a few fonts of wood type and locked up the form on one of the Vandercook SP-15 presses:

I hand-inked the type with brayers rather than inking the press rollers, so I could print two colors simultaneously and easily change colors later. After some trial and error with ink amounts and pressure, I pulled the first decent test print:

And a while later, I had a small edition of posters in four different color schemes:

It was a really fun exercise. For those of you unfamiliar with the process of letterpress printing, check out the sweet little video below. And if you’re near Brooklyn, be sure to check out The Arm for letterpress classes, or to book press time if you already have letterpress experience and just want to make some things.

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.

I may be bugging out a little bit. I may be bugging out a lot, I don’t know. I’ve got absolutely no sort of benchmark for this tingle arcing from my brain to my gut along my skeleton. Maybe if your skull could have a couple fillings in it and then chew on a ball of tinfoil the size of your brain you’d feel this way all the time — it might feel like that.

All I know is that we’re bringing the And I Am Not Lying experience out to Philadelphia and Washington, DC next week and I’m both thrilled and terrified. What I’m terrified of, exactly, I have no idea. Maybe that nobody will come, or that EVERYBODY will come and my brain will restart onstage. It’s happened before.

But honestly, I don’t think it’s going to happen again. I’m so excited to be doing a mini-tour (or at least two out-of-town gigs) that it’s going to go fine as long as I only have two drinks ahead of time. Three drinks and my accent comes out so hard that grits fly out of my mouth while I immolate in a blinding white flame of AWESOME.

The show in Philadelphia is at L’etage on Sunday, November the 6th. Doors are at 7:30, show’s at 8. It’s $12 at the door.

Here’s a pretty cool trailer for the Philadelphia show:

I wrote about the DC show earlier this week. Follow the link in the previous sentence for more info, but essentially it’s:

At the Black Cat on Wednesday, November 2nd. Doors at 8, show at 9. Tickets are $12, available here.

If you’re new here, the show is this: storytelling by Brad Lawrence, Jeff Simmermon, Cyndi Freeman and in Philadelphia, the tiny legend that is ******. We’ll also have a few burlesque acts by Cyndi Freeman and Runaround Sue — and a comedy set by Philadelphia’s own Doogie Horner.
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There’s a lot of talk about stopping childhood bullying online and on TV these days. Good, I say. I got bullied pretty badly when I was a kid, and I’m glad to hear that people want to put a stop to that kind of a thing. But on the other hand, you can’t stop rampant assholery. It’s a big brown glacier that just creeps across humanity, and it’s going to come out and express itself in some other weird way.

At least you’re allowed to punch a bully right in the face.

When my family lived in the DC suburbs in the early ’80s, it was pretty bad. I got beat up a lot and I was pretty scared to leave my house. My family was tremendously loving, and I had a dog that was my best friend in the world. But once I left the yard it was like a movie about Vietnam directed by Todd Solondz.

Nobody ever talks about this, though: a lot of times, the kids that are getting bullied get pretty mean, too. Being and underdog and a good guy are not the same thing.

I told this story at the And I Am Not Lying live show at Union Hall back on October 5th. It goes long, but I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. I tried to compress it to a tight 5 minutes for a Moth Grand Slam last week and it was a stunning failure. I got more nervous than I’ve ever been in my life, skipped parts and just blacked out completely on my feet. It wasn’t booze-related, just flop-terror. I came to a few seconds later, literally standing in front of several hundred people who were looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to say something intelligible into a microphone.

A lot of people have that experience as a nightmare.

I hope you guys enjoy my telling of this story more than I did teliing it the other night, anyway.

I’m also obliged to mention that I’m coming to DC on November 2nd and Philadelphia on November 6th with Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman, and Runaround Sue. You can get tickets for the DC show here: And I Am Not Lying: A Night of Storytelling, Comedy, & Burlesque.

I’d be lying if I said I knew Runaround Sue very well. I’d also be lying if I said I wasn’t a huge fan. She’s a burlesque performer here in New York and all over the place, including Richmond, VA and a lot of other states and countries. She’s a mystery lady, a sweet enigma that sometimes lives with Cyndi and Brad and sometimes coalesces in the back of used bookstores in Manhattan.

That’s where I keep running into her.

When she performed at our show at Union Hall in Brooklyn, she brought a terrifying heat. She grunted and yelped and when she beat the floor with her breakaway dress and the kind of bra that can NEVER come off fast enough, she did it with an intensity that you just kinda recognize after a while. It’s one part Cramps and one part playground and one hundred percent the spirit of ROCK.

She’s going to be performing with us in Philadelphia and Washington, DC in the very beginning of November. Which is, sweet JESUS, next week!

To learn more about the DC show, go here.
To buy tickets to the DC show, visit this link: And I Am Not Lying: A Night of Storytelling, Comedy, and Burlesque

And to get a taste of what kind of an act Runaround Sue has, watch the video below. Tassels and their contents do fly freely here, so it may not be safe for work:

Wasn’t that just wonderful? My family’s minister reads this blog. He’s pretty great that way, to be honest, and I’m glad to consider him a friend. I’m also glad that maybe Sue and I made him sweat a little much.