The Perpetual Freshman

 

On Friday, August 31st, I went to my internship and there was another substitute host, this time Brian O'Connell.  He would also be performing during the eight o'clock hour in a two-person form, the name of which I don't know off-hand, but it wasn't something I saw before.

 

He and his partner would establish that a character would exist in a given location on the stage and then whenever one of them wanted to say something from that character's point of view, they'd run to that spot and take on the mannerisms and speech patterns established for that character.  As the half-hour moved along the pace quickened and the quick-witted lines flew.  Even into the last five minutes a seventh character was introduced to this madcap bowling alley.

 

In the second hour I saw my last ever "My First Time with Cacky."  The guest was someone who was moving into a position at UCB.  The show usually opens by establishing that there's no predetermined format, but usually it involves them staying in the same characters, sometimes the same location, for the half-hour.  This time they changed characters and location about four or five times.  The first scene involved two people who the audience would eventually discover were elderly and had Alzheimer's.  Of course this was sort of the cartoon version of Alzheimer's so it was basically two people with no short-term memory.  This opened the scene up for some great ways to let the performers immediately abandon what they were doing in to move on to something else, but in a good way.  I was crying laughing so hard I had to remind myself that I had to be composed to pull the lights for the show.  Unfortunately, that was a relatively easy task since each scene was slightly less funny.  In improv you can't organize things like you can in stand-up or sketch.

 

For the ten o'clock hour, only one of the teams showed up.  There weren't even any audience members.  So, to kill time and wait, one of the improvisers got on stage and did their impression of stand-up.  At "Ladies and Germs" I snarkily replied, "That's not stand-up."  Naturally this meant I had to demonstrate some stand-up.  So, for the first time since coming home to the Comedy Studio in April, I got on stage to tell jokes I had written.  It was like a two-minute set, but it was enough for the improviser to ask if I realized I was channeling Woody Allen.  I realized I told my more psychology-related jokes and for some reason even used some of his mannerisms like that innocent little swift nodding thing he used to do when he was assuring an audience that he was telling the truth.

 

At the bar I saw the improviser again and pulled a book from my bag: The Unruly Life of Woody Allen: A Biography.  It was a book that, in addition to focusing roughly half the book on his scandals from the early 90s, seemed biased against him, in part because he refused to cooperate with its publication, as opposed to the biography by Eric Lax, criticized for its softball treatment of its subject.  So, I've taken it with a bit of salt, but displayed it to confirm to him one of my influences.  I haven't finished it so I won't be including a review in this issue.

 

The next day I went to class where we studied first beats.  In a Harold there are three beats where the same three scenes get revisited.  This class focused on establishing those first scenes.  I was thoroughly impressed with my classmates for their intelligent choices.  I even felt pretty good about the work I was doing.  I went to lunch with a few of them after at a place called Sharky's (not a rat pack pool hall, this was a Mexican fast food joint).  It was three and I'd need to be back at seven because I was interning for the second night in a row, so I decided to hang out in Hollywood all day.

 

After lunch, I ran into Troy Conrad, friend who ran the Friday night open mic at IO West.  He also performs as Jesus, and others, in a show called "Comedy Jesus."  It's a show that thoughtfully questions religion and hopes the same of its audience.  Troy was carrying luggage and walking in the opposite direction as me.  Having nothing to do, I offered to help him to his car and we caught up.  In exchange drove me a couple of blocks in the direction I was going.  There was a toy store I like to browse in sometimes.  People go there for theatre or Halloween supplies, some go for model kits.

 

When I walked in I saw some homemade proton packs to be sold to an aspiring ghostbuster.  They were firmly attached to the wall, too tough even for a sales associate to reach, so I took a look at some of the model kits for a while.

 

When I got to the IO West, I chatted with a fellow intern about some particularly nerdy subjects when the conversation somehow drifted to Alan Alda.  There are some things I know about and I don't know why.  I don't try to hide my esoteric bits of trivia from anyone, so to others sometimes I seem like an expert.  I just happen to have seen a bunch of Alan Alda films from the 70s and 80s, so I know a little bit about his persona, how he's seen in the world.  My impression is that he's someone who not only thinks a lot about women's issues, but someone willing to expose his own possibly hypocrisies on the subject in the films he's written and directed--and he hosts "Scientific American" on PBS.  Somehow, I came off to eavesdroppers as a fan of "M*A*S*H."  I've seen a few episodes here and there, but I don't know too much about the show.

 

Anyway, the night around back, in the Andy Dick Theater, included Mr. Dick giving a quick tour of his theatre to some friends and a show from Mud Hen, some teams that didn't show.  For the nine o'clock hour, there was a team who had checked in at about 8:20 but went to get some food.  The other team that hour showed up about fifteen minutes to nine and we waited for the first team to get back from eating.  Not only did they come at 9:05, they had special music cues for me to learn, and a short-form game that gets performed at IO West on Saturday nights sometimes called "The Dream" in which both teams in the hour perform a surreal summary one of the audience member's days.

 

Because there was no show on the main-stage scheduled for eleven, the show scheduled for the Andy Dick Theater was moved there, along with their lighting intern.  So, I relieved Sean Cowhig and lit the show, which happened to have a nice neat little ending, so I didn't even need to think much about where to pull the lights.

 

After the show, I saw some of my classmates with whom I went to lunch.  One asked, "Were you carrying some guy's luggage at like four?"

 

The next couple of days were extremely hot so I had to get out of the house.  On Labor Day I went to Santa Monica with the intention of possibly going for a swim at the beach.  Instead, when I got off the bus I decided it was nice enough weather that I'd just hang around the Third Street Promenade.  I browsed at Old Navy and ate at the pizza place I went to a couple of months ago and went into a Border's.  On the way home I did some much needed hardware and grocery shopping.  In all, it was a pretty productive weekend.

 

For the next week, I started getting into the groove of things at my new job.  Eventually I stopped listening to FNX and started looking for an LA radio station to look for.  I settled on KDLD Indie 103.1 FM.  It plays similar enough music to FNX, but it has rock stars as its jocks.  In the mornings Joe Escalante from The Vandals hosts, with an hour on Fridays for his show-biz legal advice call-in show.  And in the afternoon Steve Jones from The Sex Pistols hosts Jonesy's Jukebox, a show where he basically does whatever he wants, within the rules of terrestrial radio.  It sounds almost like if the British roadie character from Wayne's World 2 had his own show.  I like LA sometimes.

 

Friday my co-workers asked me if I wanted to go to Sizzler for lunch with them.  I figured I'd be social and try it out.  A few minutes later it occurred to me that my co-workers were exclusively female.  What was I, Alan Alda? 

 

Sizzler is a restaurant in which you order at the register and then sit down, but it's sort of a steakhouse.  It wasn't bad.  I ran out of the house without making any lunch anyway, so it was nice to splurge for a good, filling lunch for once.

 

At the internship, the shows were alright, but the clear standouts were A Damn Joy, so called because one of the members is named Adam and the other is named Joy, and the reunion of Jeff Hawkins and Brian O'Connell's old team, Happy Time Rainbow Bunny Squad.

 

The next day in class, I felt like I started out well, and the scenes got progressively less good.  Immediately after class I had an audition at IO West for a stage show that would be improvised but where the stuff that happens to the characters affects them from week to week, like a TV show.  It would be a riff on high school dramas, the actors would even be presumably at least five to ten years older than their characters.  I stood in line and flipped through a copy of The Odyssey, as translated by Robert Fagles, a book that MB gave me.  Someone in line asked me if I was reading The Odyssey, but I hadn't really started it in earnest yet.

 

There were several rough archetypes for which to audition, so I chose the lovable nerd.  I was asked to deliver a monologue about what happened when...  My topic was when someone cheated on me.  So, I decided not to do something relationship based, that stuff was irrelevant to this guy I thought, so I made it about my best friend cheating on my test on The Odyssey.

 

I was then to do a scene with a guy who'd already been cast.  For the sake of the audition he was playing a stoner character and we were in a cafeteria.  I stayed focused on him and was affected by what he said, so I feel like I gave a performance that was sufficiently potent.  They asked me what my schedule was, so I took that as a good sign.

 

Like the previous Saturday, this was another one spent entirely in Hollywood.  Only this one was completely busy.  Straight from that audition, I went to the barber shop I went to last time, the rock 'n roll one.  I walked in and felt a little self-conscious for not having tattoos and dyed hair, I felt almost like I wasn't cool enough to be in there, but when I got into the chair I had a different barber than last time.  It was more comfortable and we chatted about music and stuff.  Not only that, but it was a dry haircut, so it was much cheaper than last time.  I tipped the same, which was a much higher percentage.  I usually don't go very often because they cut it too short, but I think he cut it about the right length. 

 

Straight from the haircut, I took the bus back to Hollywood Blvd.  I decided to eat at a pizza place I've been to a few times, one near the new location of Second City, one that MB and I went to her first trip out here.

 

I went back to IO West and interned again.  This time the conversation at the bar was with the improviser who impersonated a stand-up.  We were riffing on movies, sort of joshing the bartender, who was pretending not to know what movies were.  As I told him about persistence of vision, I remembered how the conversation started.  Two movies have prominent posters out right now with the same basic tagline, "Love Blows"--Good Luck Chuck and The Heartbreak Kid, neither of which looks particularly appealing.

 

My day was so busy that I still had one more errand to do.

 

Sunday I went into Hollywood, almost on a whim, to complete this errand.  Due to the spontaneous nature of the errand, I neglected to remember that the LA Triathlon was that day.  So, I had to take the subway.  Getting off at Hollywood and Highland I walked a block or two before seeing Dan Levy, an old friend who was the person who first told me to get into stand-up.  He was accompanied by another comic I knew from Boston, Jay Montepare, though I only knew that his face was familiar.  They were videotaping a hidden-camera show for television and asked me if I wanted to be in it but then realized that the surprise was spoiled, they'd need real people.

 

My errand was to go to Samuel French, a show-biz bookstore, to pick up an updated directory for agents and managers.  I got there too late, so I turned around and went back.  On the way, I noticed how my feet hurt.  I looked down at my sneakers and remembered they were about three years old.  I picked up a new pair near where I saw Dan and Jay and tossed out my old ones that were coming apart by the seams.

 

After work yesterday I went back to Samuel French soon before it closed and picked up what I needed and went home to pack.  I was up early enough to put on CNN, the network of choice for travelers.  It was on when bells representing both planes that hit the World Trade Center chimed.

 

Today, after work, I'm going to LAX to fly home.  I'll only be there for five days, so unfortunately I probably won't even make it to Boston while I'm there, but I'm there to visit my folks.  When I got to work today I put on Rock 102 Springfield's Classic Rock.  Its studio is in East Longmeadow, the town where I grew up, and where my parents live.  It's just down the street from where my dad works in fact.

 

I'm glad I'm coming home at this time.  It's been a while.  I'll see you when I get back.

 

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

Upcoming Gigs:

 

September 30-Andy Dick Theater.  6:30 PM.  Level 4 Harold show.  FREE.

 

October 7-Andy Dick Theater.  9 PM.  Level 4 Harold show.  FREE.

 

October 14-Andy Dick Theater.  6:30 PM.  Level 4 Harold show.  FREE.