In prep for actually getting off my comedic ass and hosting a show in a couple of weeks (That’s right, folks, Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday, Jan. 29, come on down), I figured I’d check out the room. It’s a pub (in the most sterile sense of the word) on the first floor of a center meant for students of a graduate persuasion. It was better than I had hoped, really.
Anyway, it reminded me of the cheapest reason I like the stand up. Or I like standing up, I guess. It’s the quasi-legit excuse to talk with strangers. So, I said “hi” to a couple of comedian folks I know. Not truly stranger chat, but that nice warm fuzzy non-commital “friend” with air quotes acquaintanceship fun. I imagine a lot of people go to church for that same sort of social intercourse. But, those relative strangers or graduated to a bit less than friend, which is pretty much everyone and anyone associated with the show and the bar putting on the show, are not the strangers I mean.
You see, if I might be so bold to throw in a meaningless phrase like “you see,” I am a bit of a flirt. Not a girlie-girl flirt. I fear I have never twirled my hair in the company of men, for example. More of the social discourse, Noel Coward/Truman Capote, look at me and love me kind of story-telling flirt.
In the back of the room, just observing the show and then leaving, I got my positive reinforcement. Two young men, the kind of men who at almost midnight on a Tuesday night, somewhere in American on a college campus, are very slowly and carefully articulating their words to cleverly discuss a tongue made awkward by the cheap, campus-subsidized beer. They wanted to know who I was voting for in the upcoming election. I amused myself by replying with salty language and obnoxious discourse unbecoming to my age and gender (but, of course, being my usual speech).
Surprisingly, the buddy of the one in the USMC sweatshirt with the super-short, possibly some kind of mandatory haircut let on the jarhead boy uses “liberal” as an insult. Really, a potential future marine standing on the campus of a major player in the military industrial complex fancies himself conservative? The dickens you say.
They asked if I was a student and wouldn’t believe my vehement insistence that I hadn’t been one in many, many years, in fact so many I could have been their mom. Ah, the kindness of moonlight.
When I said I was coming back, the taller, more earnest one (the non-jarhead coifed) is hoping I will come back having read some Ken Wilber. No doubt for a long philosophical discussion into the wee hours or some kind of hopeful bullshit.
I said goodnight and walked away and remembered why comedy cracks me the fuck up.
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