Union Hall 4816

Originally uploaded by Shameel Arafin

Those of us that have blogging access and an itch to get up on a stage here at And I Am Not Lying (Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman, and me, Jeff Simmermon) are putting on another live show with some pretty exciting talented friends at Union Hall on Sunday, August 28th. The doors are at 7:30 PM, show starts at 8.

You’ll see storytelling from Brad and I, both folks who have been in a few Moth Grand SLAMS – Brad even won a few. I had a story on This American Life two years ago, and I don’t mind flogging that fading moment of glory a little longer. Cyndi’s a fantastic and accomplished storyteller and burlesque performer, and she’s coming off of a run of her one-woman show “Wonder Woman: A How To Guide for Little Jewish Girls.”

I’m exceptionally thrilled to announce that we’ll have a burlesque performance from Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas. I can honestly say that I’ve never, ever seen anything on a stage like the duet they’ll be doing, an interpretation in dance and song that perfectly sums up my love/hate relationship with the South.

This is an entirely different (and completely NSFW) duet that they’ve performed before. It’s kind of a stylistic marriage between this and this.

We’ll also have a visit from Adam, The First Real Man — an accomplished sword swallower and performer of various feats of strength, along with a comedian who’s yet to be determined.

At one point, this thing was meant to be a live version of this blog. But really, let’s be honest about things here — posting’s been a little slack for the past few months, and we might all be okay with that.

As David pointed out to me the other day, it’s not really a live version of the blog. It’s just a good show.

Basically, I find that I spend a LOT of my time hunched in front of a glowing rectangle, breathing shallowly through my mouth. Lately, I’ve been performing more, working on a book project too. After all day in front of a computer, I just want to FEEL something and experience a connection with other human beings that reminds me that I’m alive.

When I do post here, that’s usually what’s driving that — FEELING something. And we’re putting on a show that’s designed to pack the maximum amount of sensation and excitement into the shortest time possible. We’ve all got a short time here, and I’m trying to keep as many people from going completely numb for as long as possible.

Hope you can join us.

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I spotted this flyer walking up 5th Ave in Brooklyn today. I don’t think someone so much lost this cat as cast it out of their home with a series of prayers and incantations.

Hotsy Totsy Burlesque is back after a 4 month break! I love this show. It is an ongoing burlesque soap opera with returning characters and plot lines. We’ve been doing it for 4 years.

The basics are that Cherry Pitz and the girls live at The Home For Wayward Girls and Fallen Women, an all girls’ hotel that is always in need of cash so every month they run a show to raise funds. Of course, there are things that always seem to go wrong or weird behind the scenes. Think Muppet Show but instead of puppets you have naked girls…..(Which the Muppet Show kinda wanted to do.)

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Someone pulls up slowly to the crowd on the elevated highway, just to the edge where all the people and abandoned cars make it impossible to drive further. The driver wrenches the wheel to the side at the last second, lurching to a sudden stop and surprising a shriek and a laugh out of the woman in the passenger seat.

They slide out of the windows like the Dukes of Hazzard. The woman strips to a Wonder Woman bikini and puts on some silver boots. The driver throws his shirt into the open window and says “well, I won’t be needing this down there.” “Babe, I don’t think you’ll ever need that again,” the woman says, helping him to tie on a giant furry cape as he plops a Thor helmet over his head.

I have no idea why I’m staring at this couple in particular — thousands of people have done this over and over all afternoon, ditching their cars in place on the highway and jumping out to walk down the interstate towards the glowing orb in the park below. They’ve come with roller skates and hula hoops, picnic baskets and massive cone joints that you have to hold with two hands. “It’s a horn of plenty, brother, and the more you share it, the more you get from it,” says the guy that hands it down to me from tall mirrored stilts. You’d think it would be tough marching down the road, slick as it is in spots with smeared fruit dropped from the vines bursting from the median and snaking their way down the guardrails.

The first couple of pilgrims had to stop their cars in the middle of the highway because the undergrowth got too thick to drive anymore. I’ve heard that the giant white orb sticking out of the National Mall up ahead is the source of all these sticky fruit-bearing vines that are caressing the highway system all around Washington with tendrils that plop giant mango-shaped things that taste like honeysuckle and persimmon and breadfruit all rolled into one all over the roads. In some places they burst up through the pavement and then split, creating shady canopies along the road.

We walk faster, laughing and passing a fruit around, the juice dribbling from our chins. Someone bats a beach ball towards me and I smack it on up ahead into the crowd. A couple guys with guitars and bongos are covering the Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers”. People are in bathing suits and furry chaps, riding unicycles and laughing but we’re all moving forward together as the crowd thickens and the sun drops down near the horizon, a giant red orb hovering over the bluish white one on the mall.

The other side of the road is deserted, blank except for one guy who has fashioned his blue dress shirt into a sort of head wrap. He motions for someone to help him over the concrete divider. Once he makes it over, he pulls his Blackberry out of the holster on his hip and whips it over the divider and down the empty road, skipping it like a stone on the empty pavement. When it explodes into shiny shards the guy that helped him over the divider whoops and gives him a high five.
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Two visitors leave the office along with me tonight. They’d had a meeting that went pretty well, apparently, well enough to break the silent force field that most people turn on in large New York elevators.

I’m also wearing shorts and carrying a bike helmet, so maybe they think I’m a bike messenger.

“Well that went well,” the man says, his voice lingering on the “well”, with a pause meant to cue his female partner. “Oh I KNOW,” she says, her hands fluttering, “you were just awesome in there! Especially how you stood up and gestured and threw all those comps to the side and everything — you’re such a ROCK STAR!!”

Whenever someone says “Rock Star” in an office setting, Keith Moon’s spirit buys a pair of pleated khakis at TJ Maxx.

My soul groans a deep and lowing tone, the sound of a majestic redwood that’s about to just give up completely. When I worked as a business banking researcher, my manager would refer to (other) members of our little team as “Excel Rock Stars,” or “research Rock Stars.” She would also leave photocopied prayers for strength and forgiveness on the office copier. Later in our relationship, when she was letting me go, she told me while shaking her head that I “just didn’t have a passion for banking research.”

“I think she’s buttering me up a little, don’t you,” he says, “trying to get some free drinks out of me before the train leaves for Connecticut.” She giggles a little more, and looks at me, saying “no, he was a Rock Star in there, he really had it together! It was incredible!”

“What do you think, man, is she putting it on a little here or what,” he says, totally milking her for more elevator-appropriate adoration.

What I think is:

Nothing says “you will spend the rest of your life in a beige and climate controlled purgatory” like being called “Rock Star” for showing up on time with a succinct PowerPoint presentation.

But I don’t say that. What I say is, “well, you have to be careful when you hear that phrase at work. It usually means something’s coming. I always brace for it whenever I hear that term.”

“Oh, stop,” she says, looking at her partner and laughing still. He’s looking at her, but asking me, “what is it, then?”

“In my experience in office settings, ‘Rock Star’ is the steam wafting off of a pile of corporate bullshit,” I say, before I can stop myself.

But look, people. We’ve got to think about our language a little here, go a little deeper into the subtext. Real Rock Stars show up at least an hour late and blow the hearts and minds of thousands of screaming people. They writhe and sweat, they put their hearts on the line night after night and leave the stage in a hail of cheers and underpants and then shower women way better looking than themselves with champagne at dawn. It’s the reward for years and years of having heart and eating beans, of nurturing the flames in their souls long after it’s time to compromise, shave and get a day job.

Every time someone calls me a ‘Rock Star’ it reminds me how far I am from that. And man, it just burns.

I would have mentioned this earlier, but I’ve been crippled with a bog monster infestation – a whole bunch of them set up shop in my sinus cavities and have been using my lungs as a fricking waterslide. I coughed so hard the other night that I think I gave myself a small hernia.

That’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about here, though.

What I’m here to talk about is that we had us a show a few weeks back, and it went really well! I had a ton of fun, despite some really frustrating technical difficulties in the beginning.

The Kraine Theater is this dank, crumbling space in the East Village, the sort of place that feels like it’s haunted by a bunch of old men in long raincoats. It made a certain kind of sonic sense to hear someone kick over a beer bottle during the show, and when an old lady showed up in a sun hat with a Mike-Tyson face tattoo drawn on with eye liner, I wasn’t even surprised. OF COURSE we had one of those. It was that kind of show.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I still wanted to kick the wrinkles out of that old bat when she started heckling the comedian. I like weirdos in the audience and all, but I really prefer when they stay quiet.

Still, I had a ton of fun, and I’m pretty sure the crowd did, too.

I talked to the theater director about the show today, and I think we are going to start doing this quarterly.

One thing I know, though: we’re bringing this show up to Albany, NY in mid-August. We’ll be performing in Saint Joe’s Church, what appears to be this amazing crumbling cathedral in downtown Albany. I’d love to make a little tour out of it, maybe play in Boston, Providence, BUffalo, what have you. If any of you book shows in bars, clubs or theaters in that area and want some storytellers and burlesque people to come up, do please let me know.

And if you happened to be in the audience on Sunday, thank you so, so much for coming. It was a jam, for real.

Look, I know I’m flogging this live show on Sunday pretty hard. But I’m really, really excited about it, and I think you guys should be, too.

Our good friend and fellow storyteller Tracy Rowland just made us a magnificent trailer for Sunday’s show, and I’d be remiss in my mission to promote awesomeness on the Internet if I didn’t share it here. There is some mild language, almost- nudity. Which is maybe a selling point:

The music is by Richmond, VA sweatrock legends RPG, permission given by Matt Conner. Show info after the jump:
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This week on the Standard Issues podcast we have an discussion I recorded this past week with Jeff Simmermon and Cyndi Freeman about the upcoming And I Am Not Lying live show. We also cover stalker-esque behavior, the history of the blog, being douchified by the media powers that be.

You can receive our wisdom via the magic of iTunes.

The always-excellent ScoutingNY blog has an excellent post tracking down all of the exterior locations in Ghostbusters. I was pretty amazed to see that the firehouse that was the Ghostbusters’ home base is still functional, and just a few blocks from my gym — right there on the corner of North Moore and Varick Street.

Naturally, I went over there and took a few pics:

It’s still fully functional. I wonder how long it takes for the magic to wear off for the firefighters that get assigned there.

It’s easy to forget that life is a gift. And it’s easy to overlook the essential humanity of so many people out there on the Internet. It’s easy to get mad at people’s gripes and whines and forget that the Web can be a tool to expand your empathy and connect with people outside your regular routine.

But this video yanked me out of my regular routine and deep into the wild currents of the human experience. I don’t know whether to cheer or weep, to hug somebody or go be alone. My eyes swelled and leaked a little, and I could actually feel my heart expand in my chest.

It’s by a disabled woman who carefully, methodically explains why it’s so upsetting to be called “retarded.”

These are her words:

I made this video after seeing a number of things: Other disabled people rushing to prove that they were not some thing called “retarded,” being referred to here as a “mong” and other such words myself (on and off YouTube) as well as seeing lots of pointless ridicule directed at people with developmental disabilities, and being asked questions about what it’s like to be considered “retarded” in casual contacts with people, or to “look retarded”, whatever that means. I explore these questions, and the prejudice and dehumanization that surrounds cognitive disability of all sorts, in my video.

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