We’re putting on a Very Special Valentine’s Day version of the And I Am Not Lying variety show at UCB East at midnight (11:59 PM on 2/14) on Valentine’s day, featuring the all-female mariachi band Flor De Toloache, an aerial Lucha Libre burlesque act, and standup by NPR’s Ask Me Another host Ophira Eisenberg.

Poster designed by D.Billy and Jeff Simmermon

The show is at UCB East, 153 East 3rd St. @ Ave. A, Friday, February 14th at midnight (11:59 PM) – $5.
Here’s a link for tickets/reservations: http://east.ucbtheatre.com/performances/view/30973

And a 40-second teaser trailer:

This month’s show features:

Hosting/Storytelling by Jeff Simmermon (This American Life, The Moth podcast)

Aerial Luchador Burlesque by Lucy Licious and Airlingus

Live Mariachi Music by Flor De Toloache (with burlesque accompaniment)

Storytelling by Peter Aguero (The Moth, Daddy Issues)

Stand-up by Ophira Eisenberg (host of NPR’s Ask Me Another) and Abigoliah Schamaun — who will also chew and swallow an entire light bulb during her set.

Man, the month slipped past FAST. We’ve got two big shows in New York this May, and I’m here to tell you about them:
Order cheap generic Cialis online from https://www.caladrius.com/order-cialis-cheap-20/ in USA.

First, we’ve got the monthly installment of our residency at Under Saint Marks Theater on Wednesday, May 1st, 9PM. The theater is at 94 Saint Marks’ Place, between 1st Avenue and Avenue A.

Featuring:

Storytelling by: Cyndi Freeman (The Moth, NY Fringe Award Winner), Brad Lawrence (The Moth, BTK), Jeff Simmermon (This American Life, The Moth)

Standup comedy by: Guilia Rozzi (Stripped Stories)

Sideshow by: Abigoliah Schamaun (Abigoliah’s Bizarre Bizaar)

Burlesque by: Brief Sweat, Cherry Pitz

You can get tickets here.

Then on May 9th, 11PM, we’re bringing the show to UCB East in a one-hour bouillon-cube of thrills, featuring

Storytelling by: Shannon Cason, Jeff Simmermon

Comedy by: Paul Oddo

Burlesque by: Nastie Canasta

… More special guests to be announced.

UCB East is located at 153 East 3rd Street at Avenue A. Tickets are only five tiny dollars, and you can click here for reservations.

I can’t believe we’ve been at this for two whole years. On the one hand, it feels like we just started yesterday, but on the other, it feels like it’s been forever.

This Thursday, April 11th, we’re celebrating our SECOND ANNIVERSARY at UCB East, at 11PM!

If you want tickets or reservations, click here.

Here’s a flyer, lineup after the jump:

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I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be able to share this video of this story. I told it at The Moth’s “Love Hurts” show on February 13th of this year.

I’ve been working it over and over for a few years – it’s a significant revision of a piece about the depression that comes after cancer surgery, and also all of the stupid shit that people say to you when they hear you’ve had cancer. Just a hint: Yoga can’t actually cure cancer, but getting high and watching ‘Pootie Tang’ will help you to feel better.

I put a lot of jokes into it that I’ve written over the last year, and it feels right. This is also the first time I’ve been able to adequately communicate in public just how much my fiance means to me without using any cliches, and why I can’t imagine living life without her.

Think what you want of Lance Armstrong – the doping scandals, the lying, the bullying, whatever. I didn’t follow cycling or that story that closely, so I’m shielded by a thick cushion of ignorance on that one. But the thing that helped me the most through this whole process of having testicular cancer was being able to talk about it openly, on stage and in the street.

People get a little weird about it now, but they used to get a LOT more weird about it, and it was something that wasn’t discussed at all. We used to say that people were testicular cancer victims, and now they’re cancer survivors. It’s a major cultural shift, and it’s come through the hard work of the LiveStrong foundation.

It’s OK to feel however you want to feel about the man, but let’s please recognize that the foundation has done – and continues to do – really, really important work. I benefited from it directly and indirectly, and a lot of other people have, too.

It’s time all over again for another installment of And I Am Not Lying at Under Saint Marks’ Theater – this month, we’re featuring a VERY special burlesque tribute to John Turturro’s Jesus Quintana from “The Big Lebowski!”

Here’s a fun flyer, info and ticket links below the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

**UPDATE**

Ed Gavagan’s story from tonight’s show is being taped by ‘This American Life.’ We really want to get a good crowd out for him, so if you were on the fence about this one, PLEASE consider coming out to support him! We’ve also created a discount code to sweeten the deal. For $6 tickets, enter discount code “BIGFOOT” there (click the blue “6″ on the calendar that appears, then enter the code.)
**/END UPDATE**

This week is a blur already. I am moving backwards in time, simultaneously experiencing Sunday night forwards and in my own memory from a week in the future. That’s what you do when you’re moving ahead fast – remember things while you live them.

I’m prepping for our shows at SXSW and won’t be at our monthly gig at UNDER Saint Marks’ Theater this week, but it would be horribly irresponsible of me not to tell you about it – it’s going to be awesome.

Naturally, the show is on Wednesday, March 6th, 9PM at UNDER Saint Marks’ Theater, 94 St. Marks’ Place, NYC. If you’re a faithful fan and want tickets right this second, click here (then click the blue “6″ on the calendar that appears.)

This show features:

Storytelling by

Brad Lawrence
Cyndi Freeman
John Flynn
Ed Gavagan

AND

Burlesque by

Nastie Canasta
Cherry Pitz

I just checked my calendar and realized that I’m doing a blur of shows next week, lined up like a long row of shots. The process is likely to be equal amounts of fun and exhausting, enough to leave me whimpering on the floor – just like a long row of shots. But if you’ve been reading this thing wondering when you can see me perform, consider yourself told.

There’s some really exciting stuff in here – an appearance with Michael Showalter, the monthly installment of And I Am Not Lying, and I’m the only white dude in a tribute to Richard Pryor at BAM. Check out these listings, and if you come to any of these, come up and say ‘hi’ afterwards!

Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 8:00 PM (doors at 7:30) – I’ll be appearing on Kerri Doherty’s “Geeking Out,” with headliner Michael Showalter
at Union Hall, Brooklyn, NY. I’ll be joined by my friend Juliet Hope Wayne and Carolyn Castiglia
Get tickets here

Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 9:30 PM (doors at 9) – will be the monthly installment of And I Am Not Lying with Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman, burlesque by Magdalena Fox, comedy from Sasheer Zamata and sideshow by Abigoliah Schamaun.

The show will be at UNDER Saint Marks’ Theater, 94 Saint Marks’ Place (between 1st and A). Click here for tickets (then click the blue 6 in ‘February), and check out the fun poster below:

Thursday, February 7, 2013 at 9:00 PM – I’ll be telling a story in Caroline Creaghead‘s ‘Get It Out There’, a monthly comedy series at BAM, sponsored by IFC. This month’s show is a tribute to Richard Pryor.

Let me just bear down on this a little here: I am the only white dude in a Richard Pryor tribute show at BAM. This is a colossal honor, and a little intimidating as I’ll be sharing the stage with Jeffrey Joseph, Jermaine Fowler, and Hari Kondabolu – all incredibly gifted, hardworking and funny comics. Jeff and Hari both appeared at ‘And I Am Not Lying’ when we were at Union Hall, too.

The show is free, in the BAMCafe – doors at 8PM.

Friday, February 8th, 2013 at 8:00 PM – I’ll be telling a story in “Sharkbite Sideshow,” a bimonthly sideshow featuring some of the finest storytellers, burlesque performers, sideshow artists and pole dancers in New York City. The show will also feature performances from Cherry Brown, Ember Flame, Kryssy Kocktail, Lucille Ti Amore, Moxie Sazerac and fire dancing from Sasha the Fire Gypsy.

Get tickets for Sharkbite Sideshow here.

Sunday, February 10th at 5:00 PM - I’ll be telling two stories in Miz Stefani’s House, Live. This streams live, over the Web – so click this link at 5PM on Sunday if you happen to be ignoring the Super Bowl.

I went out biking and took a bunch of photos in Manhattan a few days after Hurricane Sandy hit. New Yorkers are pretty burnt by all the ongoing coverage, in addition to being shocked and devastated at all the wreckage and destruction. But it’s hard to tell if the rest of the country – or world – is seeing the same things we are.

I haven’t been to Staten Island or the Rockaways yet to help, so I can only document what I saw and felt. When I go there to help out, I’m not going to be waving a damn DSLR around, either.

It’s almost impossible to describe how eerie and dystopian Lower Manhattan felt in the days before the power came back on. This is a shot of Canal Street, between Broadway and Lafayette that I took on my phone:

Shortly afterwards, a guy slowly coasted right down the yellow lines on his skateboard. The sound echoed off the shutters.

For those of you that don’t know this block, it’s one of the most constantly crowded streets in Chinatown. Any trucks, buses or cars entering or exiting the LIncoln Tunnel trundles down this block. I once sat in traffic for 90 minutes on this street, traveling one block every 10 minutes or so.

There are usually street vendors slinging hot dogs and chestnuts, African guys trying to sell you knockoff handbags, people selling plastic crap off of tables, guys trying to get you to trade in cash for gold, and then it’s just wall-to-wall tourists coming down to buy all the knockoffs and I (heart) NY shirts by the pound. One time I saw a guy waving a bubble gun around, shooting a stream of bubbles into traffic and shouting “IT’S BUBBLE TIME, DAMMIT!”

The only vehicles on the street the day I was riding around were ambulances, cop cars, and National Guard trucks. A few people scurried from one building to another, and others huddled in long lines to get bottled water dispensed by men in camouflage off of an armored truck.

It felt like a sci-fi disaster movie. Like “Escape From New York,” or “I Am Legend.”

I rode north on Fifth Avenue, past the Flatiron, and suddenly, everything changed. There was an invisible line at 30th Street, and once I crossed it, suddenly New Yorkers were walking around in the streets eating ice cream, talking about “it’s just so hard to date in this city” into their working cell phones. Like somebody had switched the channel in my brain from “I Am Legend” to “Sex and the City” with a less attractive cast.

And even though I had power and heat in my apartment in Brooklyn, and everything in my life is fine – just passing through the eerie disaster area for an hour and entering that bubble made me HATE those people up there, so much.

I ended up in Chinatown at dark. The power was coming on in the Village, but Chinatown was still black. I’ve never seen the city so black and dead, just a soup of darkness. Here are a few shots I took in Chinatown that night. The orange sky is reflected light from the rest of the city – and in several of these, I’m standing on a dark, narrow street and aiming towards an area with electricity:

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Hey, folks – I screwed up an earlier version of this post and flyer, and posted the wrong time. The show is definitely at 9 PM on Wednesday, October 3rd.

And I Am Not Lying had a monthly run at Union Hall in Brooklyn starting at the beginning of the year, and it was going pretty well. We put on a stadium-sized show down there in the basement, and the audience got a LOT of show for their ten bucks.

One of the things we pride ourselves on is putting on a show full of surprises, so you never quite know what’s going to happen — or what just happened. I want people to walk out of there thinking “holy crap, I don’t even know what I just saw, but I can’t wait to see it again.”

Maybe like a David Sedaris reading crossed with a KISS concert. In that spirit, we booked a grand finale from dear friends and burlesque legends Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz for our May show. And they brought some seriously strange heat from another dimension with an act that was wild, rude, daring, dirty and sweet all at once.

Maybe like a John Waters movie screened at a Flaming Lips concert.

But the act was really, really intense, really, really wild, and there was maybe a lot more frontal nudity in it than Union Hall’s owners would prefer. I can’t imagine that it tickled anybody’s prurient interest – strangers were hugging each other and screaming with laughter, jumping up and just running around the room and yelling in general. I’ve never seen a crowd do that before in my life. I felt like Mat and Julie took us all to a gutter on a higher plane of existence.

But rules are rules, and we got asked to leave. A lot of bars have to protect their liquor licenses, and that’s just the way the world works. I’m not going to lie to you: it hurt, really bad. It stung all summer. We took the time off, did a bunch of shows out of town, and geared up for …

… A triumphant comeback, at a new venue, where the only rule is: ABSOLUTELY NO GLITTER.

We’re BEYOND stoked to announce our triumphant return to NYC in our new monthly residency at Under Saint Marks’ Theater! We’ll be bringing the best storytelling, comedy, burlesque and sideshow on the first Wednesday of every month at 9PM!

And, at the request of Under Saint Marks’ theater, we’re going to be kicking off our residency with a special visit from Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz, performing the act that got us BANNED IN PARK SLOPE!

For tickets, go here: http://www.tinyurl.com/notlying-10-1

To find the theater, click here: http://goo.gl/maps/d7IXg

This month we’re starting off in fine style with:

Comedy by:
Jermaine Fowler
Burlesque by:
Fem Appeal
Cherry Pitz
Storytelling by:
Peter Aguero
Brad Lawrence
Cyndi Freeman

Unfortunately, I can’t make this show — but I’ll be back in November, and I hope you guys are, too. Let me know how it goes – it should be pretty bananas.

All of a sudden, I’ve got the opportunity to host/open for Michael Che at Caroline’s on Broadway tonight, at the 10PM show. I kind of can’t believe it. I’ve been wandering around for months thinking “please, can I just catch a break,” and all of sudden here it is in my lap. That place is beyond legendary.

Michael Che’s one of my favorite comedians who will actually engage with me in person and online. One time we were drunk at the bocce courts at Union Hall and he started telling everyone that I was a professional bocce player, sponsored by Monster Energy Drinks. He got people to bet on us and then we lost HORRIBLY.

He’s a recurring cast member of “Bunk!” on IFC, and was one of Time Out NY’s three “Comics to Watch” this year.

Here’s a set that he did at our show at Union Hall last winter:

I’ll be there, telling stories and jokes in between professional comedians that people actually pay to see. It should be magnificent.

You can get tickets to the show here: Michael Che at Caroline’s on Broadway

Entering the code “COB10″ will get you $10 tickets.