Posts categorized “Fools Play”

Every year Fools Play Improv declares war on Olympia’s Lakefair due to them trying to compete with our Saturday night entertainment. This is a just and righteous war. This year we sent out two powerful weapons: ANGRY BEEF and MIKE THE BLUE FOOL’S HAIR!

Let’s see how we did:

As you can see, Lakefair was completely destroyed. They won’t dare show their face again next year!

Look! Look! Lookit what I made!

It’s a plush Ghost from Fools Play Island! I was inspired by the plush ANGRY BEEF that I made a couple of weeks ago, so I decided to make another Fools Play Island character in plush. Ghost is much easier to make, but NO LESS AWEXOME!

I’ve been on vacation for the past week! But I’m back now. It was a really busy vacation. Let’s see:

• FRIDAY
Carrie went shopping with a birthday girl, and we met up with another birthday girl (and a bunch of other Bead Babes & Boys) at Chalet Bowl. I did very poorly! The Chalet Bowl people were acting strangely, like they didn’t really want anybody to actually be in there, just to bowl and get out! I guess they had some big event later on? Randomly ran into @danaismyname there, but she (and her family) were also rushed out of there by the staff.

So instead of hanging out and spending our money there, after bowling we went over to the North End Tavern and spent money there by having beer and playing darts. I did very well!

• SATURDAY
We went to Northwest Trek! With two Mels, a Jen, and a Lila. I took photos with my phone, which I instantly tweeted!

The best part of the whole trip was the last hour when Lila decided she was both an explorer and our Teacher, and that we were her “group.” She would tell us what the signs said, and give us specific instructions. My favorite were, “Okay, now everybody has to stand on the other side of this tree. Okay, now hold hands in a circle. Now walk backwards this way…”

She got really into her teacher/explorer character, but started getting tired towards the end of it and got a little too much into character. At one point when Jen called her Lila she shouted, “I’m not Lila!”

Carrie turned to one of the Mels and said in a low, creepy voice, “Lila isn’t here anymore.”

• FOOLS PLAY
That evening I went down and performed our new Fools Play Easter format: Fools Play Egg Hunt. I ate 19 marshmallow peeps during the annual Peep Show. This year it was a Kung-Fu Peep Show:

A Young Man and his Mother work hard in their small farm in ancient rural China. They work hard but they get to reap all the rewards. One day the Mother sends the Young Man into town to “buy a bucket,” but while he is away the farm is attacked by a group of six Bandits lead by the Bandit Leader, who kill the Mother and take the food, burning the farm. When the Young Man comes upon this scene he vows revenge against those vandals.

Meanwhile in a tavern in town, a Drunkard drunkenly decapitates the bartender. Just then the Young Man enters, scaring the Drunkard’s Coward friend into hiding under the table. The Young Man asks for help in defeating the Bandits. The Drunkard is so disgusted by the Cowards cowardice that he kicks the Coward out from under the table. The Coward goes flying across the bar and right up to the Young Man, who mistakes the Coward’s being thrown across the room with real Kung-Fu prowess and begs the Coward to train him. The Coward is too cowardly to refuse.

And so the Coward, in the span of two hours, “trains” the Young Man to be a Kung-Fu master, even though Coward knows absolutely no Kung-Fu. Emboldened by his training, the Young Man goes off and finds the Bandits and challenges them. They promptly and humiliatingly kick the Young Man’s sorry ass, and don’t even have the courtesy to kill him.

The Young Man goes sulking back to the bar to confront the Coward, who hides again under his table. After a wacky conversation, some wacky action, and some vomit, the Drunkard “trains” the Young Man by getting him piss-drunk. The Drunkard then promptly dies of psoriasis of the liver. The Young Man is despondent until the Drunkard’s ghost shows up to encourage him. The Drunkard’s ghost then promptly dies of ghost psoriasis. The ghost of the ghost appears and tells the Young Man he should just get going because this is likely going to go on for some time.

The Young Man rushes back to the Bandits, challenges them, gets pissed drunk and promptly beheads one of them. He then vomits on another one, who dies from being “allergic to vomit.” The remaining three Bandits pounce on him simultaneously, but the Young Man manages to leap high up into the air and dispatch the three of them all at once. Now all that are left are the Young Man and the Bandit Leader, who have a classic showdown wherein they face off and then run past each other. A couple of seconds later the Bandit Leader falls down dead. The Young Man walks off, saying something presumably inspirational (my mouth was so full of peeps at this point that I was incomprehensible).

Also during this episode of Fools Play, and very excitingly for me, a new addition to the cast was revealed:

That’s right! It’s ANGRY BEEF! We summoned him to fight off the Improv Spawn. But is this solution worse than the problem? We’ll find out in the weeks ahead!

I’m so very proud of this plush ANGRY BEEF, which I designed sewed all by myself. The bone actually runs all the way through a hole down the middle of the body, and if you pulled you could yank it right out! It might be nigh-impossible to put it back in if you did it, though. I would love to mass-produce and sell these, but this one took for-freakin’-ever to make, so unless I come up with a better system I’m not going to be able to make very many, and they’d have to be really expensive to make them worth it. We’ll see.

• SUNDAY
Sunday was Easter, in case you forgot. In the early afternoon we took Suki over to Carrie’s folks’ house, where we hung out and played cards for a while. Then we headed over to my folks’ house for din-dins. After that we drove up to the Skylark Café in West Seattle to see Julia Massey and the Five-Finger Discount (including @rabbiddogg) play a set. It was fun! We really like that venue a lot.

• MONDAY
We cleaned the house hard-core in the morning, and then in the afternoon we drove all the way up to the Semiahmoo Resort just a stone’s throw away from Canada (you can see Canada out the windows). I like taking long drives with Carrie ’cause she always packs really good snacks. But the weather was weird during the drive, including a bout of hail and a section of the freeway that had snow all up ons it.

We hung out in the bar up at Semiahmoo once we got there and I had frou-frou girly drinks. One of the reasons we went to Semiahmoo is because they had a “Ginger Snap Martini” that Carrie knew I would love. It basically has Goldschläger, Jägermeister, and Bailey’s Irish Cream all mixed together, and there might be some ginger vodka in it, too. Not entirely sure. It was good, though.

We took a dip in the hot tub and then headed back to the bar for din-dins, and I had another frou-frou girly drink that had a sugared rim. I’m such a girl.

• Tuesday
Tuesday we had Crab Benedict for breakfast in bed, then headed back down south, stopping in my old stomping grounds of Old Fairhaven on the way. It’s changed quite a bit; it’s a lot nicer and has a lot more stuff in it than when I went to Western ten years ago. I liked it. For lunch we ate home-made chicken salad in the car before completing the return trip.

• Wednesday
In my brain this is the only day of my vacation that I didn’t actually do anything except sit around and relax. This is of course ridiculous because I went to work in the morning, meaning my vacation ended. However, I got off at 1:00 in the afternoon, so it was almost like having an entire day to relax, so it still counts in my brain.

And as of… NOW I’m back and all done with vacation. I have much of work to get done.

So on Friday Carrie & I got our taxes done. We stumbled haphazardly onto a completely awesome accountant who not only cost only $87, but for the first time since we got Married we’re going to get a refund. Suh-weet! Anyway, apologies to all of my clients for not getting much work done last week, but tax prep took a lot of time.

Then over the course of the rest of the weekend I made the most awexomest thing EVAR. I can’t show it to you until it debuts at Fools Play this weekend. But after that you’ll never hear the end of its awexomeness.

SPEAKING of Fools Play, this up-coming weekend is our new Easter format, Fools Play Egg Hunt. And what happens every Easter show? That’s right—my annual Peep Show.

You KNOW you don’t wanna miss that.

The last night (Sunday) we went out for Masa happy hour to celebrate a birfday (not either of ours). Masa has good happy hour stuffs, although if you’re gonna get nachos I recommend getting the regular (huge) nachos.

Fools Play has just released the latest episode of their hilarious animated newsletter, Issue #25! In this newsletter, Ghost and Tiki must fight the awesome might of the Internet.

Click Here to Watch the Latest Episode!

If you didn’t know that Fools Play has a newsletter, you’re in for a treat; this isn’t any regular newsletter. NOPE! It’s an animated adventure starring the characters from Fools Play Island!

Fools Play has been putting out an animated newsletter since 2005, so be sure to check out the Newsletter Back Issues to enjoy all of the varied hilarity!

This post spans two Fridays and one Saturday. Let’s begin.

Friday, 23 January 2009

This was kind of my Christmas present from Carrie. She had the day off, so in the afternoon after I got off work and we had lunch and all that, we drove up to downtown Seattle and spent an hour or so wandering around the fancy shops near Pacific Place and Westlake Center. Carrie didn’t end up getting anything. I know! Not a durned thing. But I ended up getting a Super Mario Bros. 3 T-shirt at Hot Topic, and some musical birthday cards at Daiso. We heart Daiso.

After that we had dinner reservations at The Dahlia Lounge. It’s a nice place, with dark mood lighting. Every meal includes an amuse-bouche, whatever the cook happens to whip up. For us it was tiny li’l open-faced pastrami sandwiches. They were very tasty, and had lots of complex flavors that opened in sequence. For our meals I got potato/leek ravioli in a smoked onion & sage butter sauce, topped with frisée, which was in turn topped with crème fraîche. Carrie got the crab cakes with cracked green olives and a romesco sauce. Both dishes were excellent, and we switched plates when we were each half-finished. For dessert we got freshly-made doughnut holes that were brought out to the table, then placed in a brown paper bag full of cinnamon and sugar and shaken up right in front of us. Our server then cut the top half off the bag so we wouldn’t have to reach down through all that sugar to get to the holes. They came with a jam and a vanilla mascarpone dipping sauces. I also had a really good cocktail made with blueberry vodka and something else, with a float of sparkling wine. Carrie had a margarita on the rocks. It was good and fancy stuff.

After dinner we walked over to The Moore to see a Jonathan Coulton concert.

The opening act was a comedy/musical duo called Paul and Storm. They were very likable geeks, and I thought they did a good job of being funny. My favorite bits were the commercial jingles and the conditional impressions. By that I mean they did impressions of musicians who influenced them growing up, but then they added arbitrary conditions, like “Bob Dylan… in a well” or “James Taylor… on fire.” You could tell that they were honestly awed by the size and intensity of the crowd. It sure seemed like it was the largest audience they’d ever played in front of, and they were very excited. They completely underestimated the Seattle audience, though. Watch as they try to get through a very simple song:

Then it was time for Jonathan Coulton to perform. He did a bunch of songs solo and a bunch of songs with Paul & Storm as backup, as well as Molly, who is famous on teh intarwebs as SweetAfton23. I took all the videos I could find on YouTube of this show and made a handy playlist for you to enjoy. So enjoy:

Molly got to do a solo number, and she did a cover of Britney Spears’s “Toxic” on the ukulele, which I, as a fellow ukulele-player, appreciated a whole bunches.

At the show we ran into Jack, aka “John Hippogriff” from Under the Mailbox Theater. Hadn’t seen him in years, and he looks exactly the same. He came and saw Fools Play the very next day, so it was cool to hang out with him.

Friday, 30 January 2009

This was the day of the triple-birthday party for (using their internet names) HeartFeltRobots, TeezyWeezy, and Jeff the Fish. They were all born in the span of the same week, so they decided to make it easy on all of us and have their birthday parties at the same time and place.

Now, I couldn’t go to their party without bringing them presents, could I? COULD I? I… think… NOT. So I made HeartFeltRobots and TeezyWeezy necklaces. TeezyWeezy likes ghosts, so I made her a Ghostie pendant:

I dangled a teardrop black bead from the bottom of the pendant and strung it on black cording.

For HeartFeltRobots I made a double-sided pendant so she could wear it with any outfit.  On one side: TAKO!

And on the other side: IKA!

Tako being, of course, the Japanese word for “octopus,” and ika being the Japanese word for “squid.”  Anyhoo, I strung this double-sided pendant on black cord as well, but couldn’t find a bead I liked amongst Carrie’s copious collection.  So I went down to The Bead Factory to get one and, man, that place was hoppin’!  Being a nice guy, I let everyone checkout before I made my $2.10 purchase.  I found a small lampwork bead with dots all over it that looked kinda like a sliced-up tentacle with suckers on it.  Poifect!

For Jeff the Fish I made a plush narwhal.  I don’t have any pictures of it because I’m an IDIOT and forgot to take any.  I’m bugging Jeff the Fish to take a photo and upload it to his site or something.  When he does that I’ll add it to this post as kind of a retcon.

Saturday, 31 January 2009

This was TeezyWeezy’s ACTUAL, REAL-LIFE birthday, and at Fools Play we always do a special format whenever a Fool’s birthday lands on a performance date: “Fools Play Birthday Party!”

This format includes a part where the other Fools give the birthday person some funny presents that somehow lead to a funny bit or are introduced by a funny bit or something like that.  I’d already given TeezyWeezy that awesome pendant on Friday, so I decided to do something simple.  It, of course, didn’t end up being simple.

There were two parts to my present.  First, since I know she gets lonely way out there in Wenatchee, and I know she likes ghosts, I made her a ghost finger puppet to keep her company.  But wouldn’t it be better if you couldn’t not only see the ghost, but also TALK WITH the ghost?  So I recorded myself saying a whole bunch of random things in a ghostly voice, with enough space in between so that one could have a “conversation” with the ghostly voice.  I then chopped up each phrase into its own MP3 file, which I burned onto an audio CD so that she could put it on shuffle and it’d be like having a new conversation EVERY TIME!  There ended up being over seven minutes total of ghostly phrases.  Here are a couple of examples:

1. taishas-ghost-08
2. taishas-ghost-18
3. taishas-ghost-28

leiapico came to Fools Play, which was awexome.  I hadn’t seen her in months because now she’s a big-wig science teacher and is too important to hang out with lowly improvisers like me.  *sniff*

Anyway, that’s my story of three birthdays and a concert.  I enjoyed it much more than Four Weddings and a Funeral, mainly because I didn’t have to sit through an Andie MacDowell performance.  Yech.