The Inferiority Complex

As I clicked "Send" on my blog last week, I realized I was missing the MTV Movie Awards.  A few days earlier, one of my classmates announced that he made a spoof video that was nominated for one of those awards and asked us to vote for it.

 

In that same class we had a guest who had to make up several classes in Level 3 after failing to do so last session.  During the break, I walked outside where he was chatting with some other students on the stoop.  They asked him if he was the guy from the TV show "Heroes."  Not someone who watches the show, and hearing a jocular tone in their voices, I thought they were making an ironic joke about him being Asian.  So, I cracked that not all of us are that guy on the show.

 

Later on I was told that he played a different character on the show.  Even though I felt better about my performance that night, I was in a more paranoid mood than usual, so I thought back to my days in middle school when someone would commit to a lie and tell me in an uncompromisingly believable way that lie.  I didn't believe them then, and I didn't believe now.  I was wrong.

 

On Tuesday, I responded to an email from a different classmate that a friend of his was looking for teammates to play with.

 

So, I went to Second City for the first time.  It had recently moved from the building that was basically in the parking lot of the stand-up club The Improv.  I never entered that Second City either.

 

This was an interesting building.  It looked church-like with its gothic arches, but had a public high school, or rec department feel to it, with its off-white walls and red trim, like they were the school colors of East Longmeadow High School.

 

I got there early, but once everyone was there we started to play.  I didn't feel like I was exactly the best there, but not quite the worst either.  I realized my classmate had been doing this for ten years, so he sort of acted as our coach.  He was two years older than me.

 

Afterwords, I joked around with my new acquaintances as we headed towards IO West, a couple of blocks away.  We watched one of the festival shows at the Andy Dick Theater: Jotorious, a talk show featuring the troupe members of Quartet including Stephanie Weir and Craig Cackowski.

 

Thursday, on my lunch break, I read the Walsh Brother's interview on an LA website called thecoming.com.  The comedy duo from Charlestown, MA had finally made it to LA after a cross-country journey that lasted two-and-a-half months.  Dave wrote me back saying they were performing on The Tomorrow Show at the Steve Allen Theater.

 

I went to IO specifically to check out some more of the festival and this time I caught a show called, "Ask a Ninja," in which a guy dressed as a ninja is projected onto a big screen as audience members ask him questions.  It was similar to the "Comedy Jesus" show I saw last fall starring a swell host of the Friday night open mic at IO West, Troy Conrad.  I thought Troy Conrad's show was better, because not only was it funnier, but you could tell he kind of believed what he was saying.  But apparently "Ask a Ninja" is something of a phenomenon on the Internet.

 

After that was a team that regularly plays on Saturday nights: Redshirt Freshman.

 

For some reason the paycheck I was supposed to receive didn't arrive all week, so I wrote to them.  They said the check got forwarded back to them for some reason, so I asked for that check and the one they would have mailed Friday there for me to pick up.  I decided to chance picking them up and depositing them in the bank across the street before heading to my internship.

 

It was pretty tight though.  I had the vague idea that since the temp agency building was in Beverly Hills, I'd probably take the bus that goes along Santa Monica.  I even managed to get the 304 (In LA the 300 series buses are similar to the Rapids in that they make fewer stops).  The only problem was that at every stop there were probably about twenty people who got off and about twenty more who got on.  It really slowed things down.  An older woman holding onto the rail had a sudoku book, and I was working on one myself.  "Oh, you too?" she observed.  I acknowledged.

 

I was worried about being late since we were told punctuality was especially important during the festival.  I made it to Santa Monica and Vine at 6:52, so I had eight minutes to run further than I'm usually dropped off.

 

I hadn't eaten, so I ran into a convenience store and grabbed the first thing I saw, a sleeve of Chips Ahoy!.  I ran and finished half the sleeve taking off my office shirt revealing my IO staff shirt.  I trotted to the bathroom to wash up a bit.

 

Earlier in the week I had received a call during my lunch break asking for assistance on the technical issues involved in their show.  What I didn't realize at the time was just how much equipment they were bringing on stage.  In addition to a projection screen, there were five chairs, a table with a table cloth, a keyboard, an easel--all to be unloaded before the very next show!

 

Their show was scheduled for 8:30, the show after it was scheduled for 9:30, and this show wanted fifty-two minutes.  "We'll make it work," a representative hesitated.  I've participated on both sides of the stage in enough comedy shows to know that was an exercise in optimistic futility.  I knew that most stage shows start late to let the audience settle in, so I explained that they'd probably only have forty-five minutes.  I offered to help strike the stage to speed things up.

 

Though I was manic, sweaty, and a bit worried as usual, the house manager assigned to the Andy Dick Theater for that night's festival (usually I'm the only intern), told me the next show only wanted forty or so minutes, so I could call the lights then and play some catch up.  He handed me a bottle of water.

 

The last shows were two half-hour Harolds, the first of which started at 11:30.  My last bus home leaves Sunset and Vine at 12:30, so I decided to mingle for a while, I wasn't getting home that way.  I had some great conversations about the industry and bought a hot dog from a vendor right outside IO.  It was a pretty good hot dog.  I'd never seen a vendor there before, and rarely have I seen them in LA at all, so it reminded me of Boston, just like the next night would.

 

Eventually, I decided to walk home.  At 2:26 I started down Vine from Sunset.  I turned left at Melrose.  At 2:39 I arrived at Paramount Pictures and saw Bronson, a street parallel to mine.  I started walking down it.  After three blocks I came to another main road.  In LA streets often break and restart, so I noticed my street was actually closer than the street I was walking on.  It was 2:49.  I walked briskly down, block-by-block, until I finally got back to my apartment.  It was 3:29.

 

The next night I went to IO West again to see some shows.  I walked in to see Charna Halpern receive the Del Close Award.  It was presented by a tearful David Koechner, and he and a number of other improvisers, including my teacher, performed an Armando, in which Charna Halpern gave a few monologues, inspiring the improv montages that followed.  I wanted to kill time before the show I wanted to catch before catching "The Tomorrow Show," improv with castmembers of "The Office."

 

At one point I talked to the person in the box office, someone with whom I used to work on Tuesday nights, and mentioned I was going to see the Walsh Brothers at the Steve Allen Theatre.  She mentioned that her friend Maria Bamford was performing there that weekend, but was unsure if it was that night.  She asked me to say "Hi" for her.

 

I saw a team in the Andy Dick Theater called K.O.A.L.A.  It featured Gareth Reynolds, an improviser from Emerson who was one of the strongest sketch and improv performers I saw while there, or ever for that matter.

 

Unfortunately, the show I wanted to see was completely sold out, so they weren't letting students in.  So, I offered to help bring some food in for the after party, but wasn't much help as there wasn't anything to bring, so I chatted about sudokus and decided to head to the Steve Allen Theatre at a relatively leisurely pace.

 

When I got there, I chatted with Dave and Chris Walsh, and Craig Anton, one of the hosts of the show.  "We should do the show out here," Chris joked.

 

Todd Glass, one of the performers came by and saw us all chatting, "We should do the show out here," clearly we had a running gag on our hands.  He introduced himself to me, "I'm Todd."

 

"Yeah, I saw you at UCB," I responded, "and television," muttered, meekly in my mind.

 

One of the tough things about "The Tomorrow Show" is that it's on so late.  It starts at midnight and the last few times I've watched it I dosed off a bit.  This was no exception.  There was an act that was basically a tag team of four stand-ups including Dan Mintz, one of the first people I saw perform stand-up live and one of the people who saw me do stand-up for the first time way back in 2001.  He told me, "You have potential," and something else.  I think it was advice or something.

 

But I was awake to see Todd Glass and the Walsh Brothers.  The Walshes did one of the sketches they didn't do as often in which Dave creepily whispered into a microphone for Chris, on stage next to a ladder with a confused, frightened, yet compliant expression, to take off his shirt and climb the ladder.

 

After the show, I stuck around and chatted with Brendan Small, the Walshes, and a couple of others, while we talked about stand-up, rock and roll, and the spoils of "Metalocalypse."

 

It was 3:30.  The Walshes handed me a bottle of water, I got a ride home from my new neighbors, and slept in again.  It reminded me of Boston.

 

But I woke up at ten the next morning, with that feeling that I couldn't go back to sleep, yet was still incredibly tired.  Too tired for this blog unfortunately.  I almost considered calling out of work, because I was unwell, but I made it in and discovered a new hire did stand-up for fourteen years, was Del Close's neighbor, knows a bunch of the same improv people as me, and went to a wedding populated by Star Trek people, due to one of the people being related to Walter Koenig.

 

This week looks to be a return to relative normalcy.

 

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