Sometimes, all you can ask for is a life without casualty. To that end, I did not kill tonight. Nobody got slayed, and I didn’t really bomb.

I guess lives were spared. Quiet lives. The kind of lives that just want to grab a bite and sit quietly in a cafe with a laptop and a beer or coffee and not listen to the sadness that is open mike living.

I can’t remember the last time I went to a comedy open mike. It’s a peculiar kind of ritual. I think the hallmark and shared atmosphere of a real show up get up “show” (show in quotes, because ain’t no one watching or being particularly entertained) is an oblivious bustle of people just not giving a shit about you. It was a familiar sensation.

The best part of the night was cheese fries and a Pabst Blue Ribbon and congratulating myself for deferring lying on the couch for a couple of hours. The second best was realizing that the place up there in the big city of San Francisco was about 15-20 minutes to my door on one of the more pleasant stretches of highway. I glided home through a fog bank and out to our little house with Patti Smith reminding me of comedy shows past.

The last best part was my comedy set. And by last best I mean worst. Ah well. I was going to videotape for posterity but messed up my little camera and the battery was dead. Just as well.

I think almost everyone who has tried stand up has faced a room where no one reacts to almost anything anyone says into the microphone. And, I think almost everyone fantasizes that their words will be the ones that turn the room around and listening will happen. As though, one jest and in mid-puff the espresso machine will halt, a collective breathe will sigh, heads will turn and after a micro-nano-second of silence, laughter or applause.

It’s a fantasy.

Once, at one of the agonizingly silent open mikes in Cambridge, actually the one I had the most fun at, because it really let me not care and talk to the room, I did see a veteran grab the attention of the five people who were not comics and just looking for Chinese food and fruity drinks. No one gasped, but everyone did listen for a sweet couple of comic minutes. It was a life changing experience, because the vet (and seriously he was a vet: movie and TV credits, celebrity friends, stories from NYC, LA and his hometown) showed it can be done.

Most of my fantasies have the allure of being possible. Damn fucking unlikely, in my case, though. Tonight was no exception to that law of probability.

Instead tonight I had a shallower victory. When I first got up, I stated my goal was only to get the guy reading the newspaper directly in front of the mike and/or the guy typing on his laptop right behind him to look up. The laptop guy smiled, looked up and may even have softly chuckled at one point. Not a triumph, but I probably won’t whip out a razor blade tonight and rethink my life choices.

On a positive note, soul-drenching open mikes in SF are different than in Boston just because the venues kind of have no corollaries.

The absolute worst open mike in Boston was in a basement bar adjacent to a shitty Chinese restaurant below a hooker-popular hotel near Fenway Park. The regulars at the bar were the height (or depth) of sad and forgotten men who probably walked there having lost licenses to multiple DUIs decades ago. The bartender regularly heckled. The host, unable to see the distinction between cribbing from a joke book and writing original material, was reputed to be a Chelsea pimp and/or dealer and/or more or less connected to the syndicated businesses your mom warned you about.

The only show I almost cried after was at that venue; I definitely drove home alone blasting the radio and struggling for composure. You can make a fair number of Boston comics cringe or groan by mentioning the words “Chops Lounge.”

This venue tonight is a well-established cafe for not at all near ready for paying gig shows for both music and comedy. It’s a cafe with a variety of coffee and tea drinks, beer and wine and salads and sandwiches and shit like a hummus plate. It’s fame is that it is also a fully functioning coin-op laundromat. You can grab a bite or hang out with your fellow scruffy variously hirsute San Franciscans and have a PBR whilst getting your tighty whities whiter than white. And, on top of that, you can simultaneously ignore a comedian.

With so much going on in one place, I don’t really mind that no one paid attention to me. It was kind of cozy to realize that the host was able to fold two loads in the course of the night. I’m glad it wasn’t a total waste for him.

Technorati Tags: California, Brainwash, comedy, San_Francisco