The Pocket Weather

I checked the weather in Boston and regretted my coming trip home.  I wasn't even sure if Boston would even have its annual marathon since a late-spring Nor'Easter was due on Patriots Day.  But I'd make the best of it.  I was going to see the people I love.

 

I had made up a class on Sunday.  It was for my Level 2 and rescheduled at a special time.  As a result there were only about half-a-dozen of us.  As a result class was much more intimate.  Our first exercise was to go up in pairs of two and simply improvise for ten minutes without a suggestion.

 

As usual, I went up first, and this time worked with someone whom I never worked with before.  I felt really comfortable.  Improv is supposed to be, at its best, as flowing and comfortable as a conversation.  That's not as much of a simile as it sounds.  It should actually be a conversation, and just as natural.  I liked the freedom of no suggestion and a ten-minute scene.

 

I felt almost as good about the other scenes I performed that day.  I felt good that I got in an extra class, the next night would be my final class in Level 2 and Tuesday would be my final day at the job at UCLA hospital.

 

I wasn't alone in my positive felling about my progress, as on the final class, I got a positive evaluation, specifically citing my level of progress from the first to last weeks.

 

But this was an unusual class in other ways.  We got our improv in, but our evaluations were one-on-one, so to pass some time we were told to tell each other scar stories.  Mine was the last one.  I heard tales of drunken stupor, idiocy, machismo, and accidents.  I had something in store for them though...

 

"I have the coolest scar story ever!  So my uncle and I were massive Star Trek fans--"

 

"Why am I not surprised!" I heard from the most self-consciously cool person in class.  I was glad to tell my tale as the antithesis of car stunts and fratboy antics.

 

"So the Fourth of July, 1994," I continued, "we talked about a model we had recently collaborated on.  It wasn't of the Starship Enterprise, but what's called a kitbash, rearranging the parts for the model to create something new.

 

"The next morning, still excited about my new class of starship, I grabbed a knife and started whittling my plastic vehicle.

 

"Now, normally I'm quite the wimp, especially back then, I'd cry at the drop of a particularly sad hat.  But for some reason, when I cut myself, I didn't.  I simply ran to the bathroom sink across the hall and ran my fingers under water, playing with the flap of skin.

 

"I think that day I was more concerned with getting to my oil painting class that day.  It was a Tuesday after all.  Fortunately, I made it to the doctor's, where I got some stitches, and to my oil painting class like the coolest person ever."  Laughter.  I told a relatively tight story compared to the others.  I guess that's something stand-up teaches pretty well: how to hit the beats of a story and work towards a punchline.

 

After class we all went to the bar, Big Wang's, for a drink and some quesadillas.  Because of my story, I found out that one of my classmates was a guest star, and regular extra, on Star Trek Enterprise.  We talked about that and I found out I'd be seeing many of the same faces in the Level 3 that I chose, Wednesday nights.

 

Of course Wednesday would be when I would fly back, so if I were to go to my first class, I'd have to make it up the next Saturday, at three, the same day as an eleven o'clock internship meeting.

 

My last day at the job at clinical labs correcting errors was relatively light.  In fact, I left early, even after taking on a couple of other pieces of busy work.  During that final task, I was called in to complete one more thing.

 

It was a surprise going away party.  I had been there since February 1st, so it had been long enough to develop some kind of working relationship with the folks there.  I wasn't always fond of them, but thought it was nice of them to do something like this for me.  There I found out how different I was from them.

 

They asked me about my comedy stuff and I talked about some recent adventures and about my fellow Boston comic that had appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien recently.  "Oh, I hate Conan!"  I didn't know anyone felt that strongly against Conan.  "Oh well," I thought.  I was off.

 

I finished my packing and headed to the bus stop to wait for the last 111 to LAX.  It would leave Crenshaw and Florence at 9:44, so I figured waiting for a 210 or 710 to that intersection an hour earlier would be good enough.  It wasn't.

 

The 210 finally arrived at 9:18 and I asked how long it would take to get to my connecting bus, "About a half-hour," the bus driver replied.  I didn't know what to do, I thought perhaps I would have to call a cab from Crenshaw and Florence.  "Naw, you don't need to do that, just go a few stops further, you can connect to the Green Line then."

 

So that's what I did.  I got to the airport at around 10:30 for my 12:55 flight to Atlanta.  I wasn't flying straight home, I'd be connecting in Georgia for my flight home to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, CT.

 

I brought along headphones for the flight but they didn't seem to fit in the holes I tried to put them in.  No matter, the movie was "Ms. Potter."  It didn't look good because the score for the trailer was done like it is for a lot of children and family films, it seemed to bludgeon one over the head with the emotions they were supposed to feel.

 

In Atlanta I spent most of my time drinking Pepsi, watching MSNBC, and voting for Gerald Ford.  I'm kidding, obviously.  But I was rather pleased with myself over the joke for some reason, so I called MB, since I didn't know anyone else that would be up at this time.

 

When I got to Connecticut, I got a little surprse at baggage claim.  I looked for my bag, but tilted my head up and saw a familiar face.  I let her recognize me.  She squinted her eyes and then I spoke, "Hey Mrs. Burke!  How's it going?"  She was my anthropology teacher in high school and adviser to East Longmeadow High School's Key Club.  "What was your last name again?"

 

We chatted for a minute and she remembered me and even asked about my brother, who is now a grad student at UCONN, then I grabbed my bags and said "Goodbye."  One thing I forgot to do was give her my business card, like I did when I saw my seventh grade English teacher at the Museum of Science almost exactly two years earlier.

 

I met my dad, we had lunch, and went home.  It was still overcast.

 

The next day was beautiful.  My mom and I went to Athol to visit the cemetery to visit my grandma and uncle and used it as an excuse to give me some practice driving.  We visited another relative to whom my mom joked, "Eric brought the weather with him."

 

Friday, MB came over, though the directions to the house were a bit confusing, so I finally met her at a Lowe's parking lot and had her follow me back.  It was a good thing I got some driving in the previous day.

 

We had a bit of lunch before going out to Springfield's Quadrangle, home to the Dr. Seuss monument, Springfield Science Museum, a couple of art museums, and the main branch of the library.

 

Unfortunately, we got there a little late, so all we had time for was the science museum.  It was definitely smaller than the MOS in Boston, but it was where I used to go for field trips in elementary school.  Not much had changed.  MB remarked how similar the Springfield library was to the main branch of the Boston library's old building, and that that building was probably a template for the Springfield one.

 

After that I had an errand to do, I needed to get a gift for my mom's birthday.  So the two of us went to the Holyoke Mall.  But there's a funny thing about the highways in Western Mass., if you don't change lanes, they force you off into different highways.  Neither of us were used to driving there, though I grew up riding throughout that maze.  I knew where to go, but the timing was more critical than I realized.

 

We still managed to get our errands done and I could show MB the building where my parents' restaurant used to be, my old high school, and East Longmeadow's rotary, an intersection so notorious that it appeared in Ripley's Believe it or Not!  "We're not driving through that and getting lost again!" she seemed to say.

 

Fair enough.

 

I planned my trip to include a visit to any relatives I didn't see on Thursday's trip to Athol, so we went to my aunt's house in Sterling.

 

There, MB and I took my two little cousins to "the bridge."  My aunt lives on a small lake and on the other side is a bridge made of remnants of the Big Dig.  I remembered there was a reason not to go, but I forgot what it was, we we went.

 

The deal was we would walk through the woods on the way to the bridge and on the road the way back.  But when we finally got to the bridge, the younger of the two sisters climbed the bridge.  Oh yeah, that's what it was.  I quickly grabbed her and joked, "Maybe you should read Hamlet, there's a scene that I think would speak to you."  I wrangled my nine-year-old Ophelia, who was not suicidal, just rough-and-tumble, away long enough to convince her we were done at the bridge.

 

That was surprisingly the easy part.  Now we had to enforce her end of the bargain made at the beginning of the trip.  A half-hour later, we managed to walk the fraction-of-a-mile back in time to leave for my own tour of Lowell and Lawrence.

 

The next day, MB drove me back into Boston for a day of wandering around, inspecting the changes of the past eight months.

 

It was Earth Day and Boston usually had a festival sponsored by a local radio station.  Appropriately enough, it was called Earth Fest and it was a concert at the Hatch Shell.  But I didn't even see anyone setting up.

 

I walked along the Charles though, snapping pictures along the way.  I came to the Mass. Ave. bridge, where I intended to turn left.  But there was a movie filming there.  I had heard about it on the news the previous night.  It was a pretty cool sight, but the bridge was blocked off.  I had to wait a few blocks before I could cross the street.

 

I did eventually get onto Newbury Street and discovered the Virgin Megastore was no longer there, and that you no longer need to ask for the key to use the bathroom at Trident Booksellers and Cafe.  I popped my head into Newbury Comics before heading to the BPL to see if I could use the Internet.

 

On the way to the library, I noticed it was the annual Greek celebration that day, so I took some pictures of some floats before discovering the library would be closed for another hour, so I decided to check out the new Emerson building, the one that made national news for killing a guy during construction.

 

At the bookstore I bought an alumni hat and a book.  I gave MB a bookbag for her birthday and she gave me Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat by Edward McPherson.  It would be my first Buster Keaton biography, but she said she couldn't decide between that and Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli.  So, I saw it on one of the new Emerson Barnes & Noble bookstore endcaps and picked it up.

 

Then I went across the street to see "Hot Fuzz."

 

I had already seen "Shaun of the Dead" and was impressed with that cast and crew's treatment of zombie films.  It was a parody that played its comedy straight.  So I was looking forward to this followup.

 

The trailers before the film included another one starring Simon Pegg.  At first i thought there was some kind of error, either I had entered the wrong theatre or they were showing a trailer for the film that would be coming up in fifteen minutes.  Nope, just go see "Run, Fatboy, Run" later this year.

 

I saw another trailer for "Death at a Funeral" a British family dramedy directed by Frank Oz, a Judd Apatow film called "Knocked Up," that I saw a poster for in line, and a trailer for the sequel to "28 Days Later," called "28 Weeks Later" in which the zombie horror spreads to America.

 

The reviews I read for "Hot Fuzz" suggested this wasn't as good as "Shaun of the Dead," but I argue that it's better.  The previous film was a fun straight parody, with some commentary on class warfare and slackerdom, but little else.

 

"Hot Fuzz" is a film that seems to skew more toward social satire than parody, though it does take on many an action film cliche.  This film is also just as gory as Shaun of the Dead, a fact which probably shouldn't have surprised me that much, but there it is.  Go see this film.

 

From there, I went to Harvard Square.  That night, I was to perform on a show at the Comedy Studio, probably.  I had written a sketch to perform with Erin Judge and offered to work the door in exchange for a stand-up set.  I would be sharing the stage with Mike Bent's Emerson sketch class graduation.

 

Earlier in the week I got an email from Erin that the show would not be the sketch graduation show, but the stand-up one.  That meant fourteen students would perform five-minute sets eating 70 minutes of show, assuming they knew enough to stick to their time.  There would be a host and four guest comics, including myself.  It would be cutting it close, so I felt a little guilty, as if I was imposing a bit.

 

I saw my firends meeting for their monthly sketch show for the next week, which now had much more of a rotating cast.

 

I decided that I would only get out what jokes I could and get off stage leaving any time left for the newcomers.  I think it was actually a pretty good set.  You can judge for yourself by clicking here.  In it, I talk mostly about my time in LA, the sketch I wrote was primarily a compilation of jokes I had written since moving, so I just transferred them back to my stand-up.  I think they work better as dialogue, but in stand-up they're okay as well.

 

The first several new comics went over their time.  In fact the first one brought up sheets of "a letter" and got the light after finishing the first of three pages!  And so it was for most of the night.  The line between sketch, characters, and stand-up was very blurry.  Although, I sort of started it a bit, as you'll see in the video, I brought a shirt from UCLA, read from it, and attempted to distribute souvenirs to the audience.

 

The next day MB and I went up to Maine to see the shore-side businesses that were open in the off-season repairing from the storm, while I remained blissfully ignorant of the weather.  It was still beautiful out.

 

Tuesday was my last night in Massachusetts, so I went home to get ready for my flight back to LA.

 

When I got to the airport on Wednesday I was originally to fly to Cincinnati and switch to a flight to LAX.  But there I discovered that the flight to Cincinnati would be late.  So, I was transferred to a flight straight to LAX.  This one would get in at 7;19, after my first Level 3 class was to start.

 

So, I had a few hours to kill.  Unlike LAX, Bradley has free wi-fi, so I spent some time online and listened to some music on my computer.  It would be the last comfortable computer usage on my laptop for a while.

 

Even though the flight was not my original one, and made up of other people who had to be transferred to it, it was suprisingly light of passengers.  I had a row to myself and they were showing a double feature, an episode of The Office and Smallville.

 

The two films shown were "The Holiday" and "Ms. Potter" once again.  I decided I didn't care too much about "The Holiday" although I though Jack Black was pretty good at playing it more subtle this time, so I read my Buster Keaton book and listened to the 90s station.

 

The book was actually very good.  I was a bit hesitant because the back cover noted how he "rivaled even Charlie Chaplin as the master of silent comedy."  This suggested to me that this was an introductory book to recuit converts, not one for those already familiar with some of his work.

 

But the book isn't as facile as all that and lies somewhere between biography and a study of his work, primarily of the films from the 20s after he inherited the Comique company from Fatty Arbuckle, though I was surprised just how much McPherson did spend on Keaton's childhood.

 

There's another contrivance that I wasn't sure about but can't really criticize without another example of my hypocrisy.  Occasionally he'd give a synopsis of one of the films written in italicized second person, presumably writing to Buster Keaton's character in the film.  But I've written entire issues of this blog in the third person and second person, sometimes in the guise of a character of my own.

 

I chose to give "Ms. Potter" another go, and I actually liked it better than I thought I would.  Being an Anglophile, I was charmed by the very early 20th century London language and turns of phrase.  I liked the Beatrix Potter character and, though the film was guilty of the score problems I had mentioned earlier, primarily during Ewan MacGregor's tenure on-screen, I liked his character too.  When he left, the film took a slightly more complex turn, due in no small part to the score.

 

I saw downtown LA from my window just as the episode of Smallville started.

 

I got back to my apartment and found everything as it had been and got some sleep.

 

The next day I noticed a problem.  My laptop's monitor was very dim, so I called tech support and they said I was still under warranty so I was free to send it to them for a free repair, I'd only have to pay for shipping.

 

I managed to get the rest of my errands done and score a new job...at UCLA's hospital.  This was in a different building and I would be a file clerk, so I wouldn't have a computer.  I'd have to find other ways to get Internet access.

 

I got another shift in at IO West and went to the internship meeting the next day, but decided against making up my first class since the first class was mostly about introducing oneself to classmates and teacher.  I'll do that on Wednesday.

 

Next week the adventure continues...

 

Thank you, I'm Eric Cheung.  I'm on MySpace and Live Journal.

 

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