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.

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:

The show features:

Swallowing by Coney Island’s Kryssy Kocktail

Standup comedy by Sasheer Zamata

Burlesque tribute to Samuel L Jackson by Fem Appeal

Burlesque tribute to Vincent Price by Cherry Pitz

Storytelling/hosting by Jeff Simmermon & Brad Lawrence.

Hope to see you out there!

What if these were all the same guy, Googling each question in sequential order?

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.

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

You can get your tickets here, just click on the blue “3″ on the calendar.

The show features:

Storytelling by

Jeff Simmermon (This American Life, Moth podcast)
Cyndi Freeman (MothSHOP instructor, Wonder Woman: A How-To Guide for Little Jewish Girls)
Brad Lawrence (Moth podcast)
Elna Baker (This American Life, Radiolab, Studio 360)

Burlesque by

Corvette LeFace (Hotsy Totsy Burlesque)
Cherry Pitz (Hotsy Totsy Burlesque)

Comedy by

Dave Martin (UCB’s Nights of Our Lives)

Hope to see you folks there. As I understand it, we got a shout from Ira Glass on this week’s “This American Life.” Not that I’m not dropping names – just hoping these words pick up a few interested Googlers. The battle to put asses in seats is a constant siege.

Five of my friends have had babies in the last two weeks. The birth of a baby is supposed to be a happy thing, but it can also be a funeral for a friendship.

It’s great that everyone I know is immediately, rapturously in love with their child, and I wouldn’t wish anything else for them. I see the joy and happiness that my sister and her husband feel now that my nephew is here, and I genuinely want everyone I care about to feel that, too. But it’s not like I stopped needing someone to hang out with, talk to, commiserate with about the crushing grind that is art and performance in NYC, get super baked on pot cookies and watch sci-fi flicks together.

I’m not suggesting that the emotional needs of a 36 year old man should never come ahead of a baby’s, either. If any of my friends kept hanging out like everything was exactly the same, that would be even worse. I’d hate to find out that a close friend was so into our friendship that he was willing to become a deadbeat dad just to keep our train on the tracks.

I think a lot more kids are accidents than people let on. After a certain age, people just go to a different doctor when they find out they’re pregnant than they did in their twenties. I think so, anyway. But after my run-in with testicular cancer a few years back, I’m not going to be surprising anybody.

So while I grieve for my lost – or suddenly, drastically changed – friendships, I’m also jealous. Not like, snatch-a-baby jealous, but with the option of sudden, natural conception behind me, it makes me a lot more conscious of my choices. And I don’t feel like my life is in a place where I could drop everything and support a new life.

I’m really, obsessively focused on writing and performing now. It takes up almost every waking hour, and it pretty much has to until further notice. It’s crushing and exhausting, but sometimes it works out.

For example, I was honored to be the only white guy in a tribute to Richard Pryor at BAM last month. I grew up listening to Richard Pryor records in my room, mimicking his cadence and timing and trying to learn how he could conjure so many characters in a story. Not imitating them, but just becoming them. I’m a storyteller, Pryor was too. And I’ve got a story about a guy who pretty much is the living embodiment of his “Mudbone” character. It was a perfect lock, and such a thrill to be there.

The room was packed, standing room only, maybe 300 people or so. I went on second, after a guy who just crushed it. He’s brash and sharp, grew up incredibly poor in Washington, D.C., and the crowd loved him. Then I went on, and things changed.

They weren’t trying to hear anything from a huge white dude that looks like most people’s boss, dressed in a cowboy shirt. Especially not if the story was a complex story about a friendship with a schizophrenic black man. A large Caribbean woman sat right in front of me, frowning a hole in my skull with arms crossed in front of her like two giant pythons guarding a gateway to laughter on the far, opposite side of an echoing room. I saw dates look at one another and mutually decide to wrap it up early and claim they had an early meeting the next day.

Some people laughed here and there, but I knew in 30 seconds that it was going to be a fight. Comics can go to backup material, but when you’re telling a story and it’s going bad, you’ve got to land that burning airline no matter what happens.

Phones were coming out and lighting up all over the place, and I could hear the audience start to chatter. I swear I heard someone say, “it’s cool, we can talk over this guy.” I zeroed in on a friend’s face and just started talking to her, just to get through it.

And then, also in the front row, I saw this:

A haggard, middle-aged woman pulled a sharpie out of her pocket, and drew a mustache onto her face with a very practiced motion. Then she reached into her coat and took her shirt off completely, unfurling her boobs like faded, trusty flags she’d flown a million times before.

It’s not like things were going well before, but I really didn’t need that. At all.

I wrapped it up the best I could, jumped off the stage. Maggie (my fiance) was in the back, and she said “you ended that one fast and weird, what happened?” I pointed to the stage. The woman jumped up there, mustache on and shirt off, screaming a bunch of bullshit that nobody heard while waving a FlipCam around. I don’t think we would have understood the context much better if we’d been able to understand what she was saying.

I want a time machine, just so I can go back to my 14 year-old self and say “I know that this is going to be tough to imagine, but the day will come that you’re doing the thing you love the most in front of a HUGE audience, and a woman is going to tear her top off … and you’ll feel no appreciation at all, no joy, just a blinding, white rage.”

Eventually, security escorted her out, and the next comic made some solid gold off of it. I was able to tell myself that when nobody met my eyes in the restroom later, at the bar after the show, or when they congratulated the other comics, it was because this woman’s stunt had just wiped my performance from their memory completely. Certainly not that they had hated it and didn’t know what to say, so they didn’t say anything.

It probably didn’t go as badly as it felt to me at the time. Bombing is pretty personal, and people I trust wouldn’t have lied to me about it to spare my feelings. Unless they would. That’s the thing about this: you never really know for sure.

Colin Quinn was the surprise celebrity drop-in at the show, and he got there late. I got to talk to him for a few minutes backstage, in an empty room, just him and me, talking about Flannery O’Connor like we were old friends. He was so gracious and kind, at a time when he really didn’t have to be. He just wanted to talk to the new guy a little bit, and I really, really needed that right then.

He missed the mustache lady. When I told him about her, he said “Really? She did the same fucking thing to me at UCB last week!”

So who needs a bundle of unconditional love when you’ve got all this to live for?

This is a pretty common experience, one way or another. Every performer goes through this, constantly, and it’s part of the deal. I’m trying to do something new, merging storytelling with comedy in a way that works. And it’s hard as hell. Nothing worth doing isn’t. Plenty of other people are working as hard as I am, or harder, but this is the hardest that I’ve ever worked at anything.

I can see other people that I know starting to lift off, getting their first appearances on Conan, on Letterman, etc. These aren’t people that I know well, but folks whose work I admire that I know from around.

I know them well enough to be happy for them if they were to become parents, but not so well that I’ll feel guilty for bitterly missing their company.

It feels like E.T. must have felt toward the end of the movie, when he was “phoning home.” I’m really starting to wonder

“Is there a ship out there? Can it hear me? Have I constructed a communications device, or am I just stumbling around in a field by myself with a Speak-And-Spell duct-taped to an umbrella?”

There are bright lights on the horizon, and from this great distance, they look like ships landing and picking up the people that are supposed to be on them. It may be a trick of the light, or the wrong ship entirely. But it’s hard to tell from this far away.

This isn’t something that only happens to me, either. I mean, yeah, poor me and all, but poor everyone else that does this too. You don’t get good when everything goes well. That’s how assholes are born: money and prestige in the absence of struggle. As usual, Joan Rivers nails it perfectly:

I’m not talking about quitting here. Not because I don’t think about it, but because I honestly don’t know how. I love art, but art doesn’t love me back. It can’t. It’s not a person, it doesn’t have feelings. It’s just a shimmering stream I want to swim in for as long as I can.

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

If you’re a badgeholder and want to add this to your schedule, click here.

To buy tickets to the show open to the public on March 11th, click here.

Here’s a cool poster, more info after the jump:

The show features:
Bullwhip & lasso artistry by Chris McDaniel (David Letterman, Buffalo Bill Wild West Show)

Storytelling by:

Jeff Simmermon (This American Life, The Moth)
Cyndi Freeman (The Moth)
Brad Lawrence (The Moth)

Comedy by Paul Oddo (winner, Boston Comedy Festival 2012)

Burlesque by:

Cherry Pitz (Hotsy Totsy Burlesque, Epic Win)
Ruby Joule (Best Debut, Most Classic @ Burlesque Hall of Fame 2012)

Plus surprise guests TBA

Again, Click here if you’re a badgeholder and want to add this to your schedule, and click here to buy tickets to the show open to the public on March 11th.

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.

Ophira Eisenberg is known pretty widely as the host of NPR’s ‘Ask Me Another,’ but she is also an excellent standup comic and storyteller. And she happens to be a friend as well as someone whose work I look up to and love. She regularly hosts Moth slams here in New York, and we met through that and a million other smaller storytelling shows that we’ve done together.

I’ve been trying to merge standup with my storytelling over the last few months, and Ophira is one of the people who made me think it was worth doing. I found out very soon, the very, very hard way, that it’s actually hard as hell and Ophira just makes it look easy.

She did an excellent standup set at my show (And I Am Not Lying, named for this blog, now at Under Saint Marks’ Theater) at Union Hall last February, and I’m really excited to be able to share this recording from the sound board.

If you only know Ophira from the radio, this is very different than what you might hear on NPR. For starters, there’s a lot of swearing in it. If that’s something that bothers you, you may want to avoid this.

If copious swearing and a few grownup jokes are something that bothers you and you listen anyway, please admit that you get a prissy little thrill from being offended and just keep any complaints to yourself.