Thursday evening I headed up to Seattle to watch some Three Ninjas perform. He was at a pizza place called Piecora’s on Capitol Hill. He was performing as one of the headliners of “The Pickle,” which is some sort of fancy open mic night that happens every month. It took place in the back room of the back room of Piecora’s (seriously, you have to just keep going back).
They had some major, major technical difficulties and ended up starting almost an entire hour late. ‘Twas kinda crazy. The show opened (when it finally opened) with one of Jason & Geoff’s co-workers or something. He did a short set of singer/songwriter/solo guitar stuff.
Then there was a dance crew, who called themselves the Young Avengers. They were a group of kids/teens who had self-organized so they’d have something to do other than get into trouble, which is very admirable. They weren’t exactly the most polished and tightly choreographed of dance crews, but they had great enthusiasm. They called their dance style “Jerkin.’” I hadn’t heard of it before but apparently it’s a west coast thing. This was one of the first Jerk performances in Washington State, so that was kinda cool. Here’s a video of the kids practicing:
Then it was time for Three Ninjas and his friend Miss Geoff to perform. I recorded the show with Mathias’s camera. Weirdly, the show only took place like five blocks from Sandy & Mathias’s apartment, but neither of them came. Anyway, as you can see, the Young Avengers also became a part of the show!
I had to leave right after I stopped recording so I could go pick up Lawrence from work and drive us back home. I’d wanted to see more of the show, but they just started so danged late that I was 15 minutes late picking up Lawrence as it was.
When I got near to Lawrence’s house I got a phone call from my own wife saying that I should just stay there when I dropped him off ’cause she and some other Bead Babes were gonna meet us there and have wine and order pizzas. So that’s what happened, and it was great fun.
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!
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.
Last Friday evening the wife and I headed on up north to go to the Skylark Café & Club because our good friend Three Ninjas was playing there. Also there were @rabbiddogg, @tangentbot, @HeartFeltRobots, and @angierox. You can see most of us in this photo that Three Ninjas took from the stage during his set!
Three Ninjas dee-jayed about 42 very entertaining minutes, then had enough time to perform “The Ecstacy of Mallard” at the end.
I also finally picked up a copy of the Three Ninjas album, Welcome to Boy Zone. It’s been out for a while, and I feel bad for taking so long to get my own copy!
The 2nd band was The Order of the Crimson Wizard. They were a fascinating classical/metal/fantasy blend. Carrie & I enjoyed them tremendously, but I’d spent all my moneys on the Three Ninjas CD, so we couldn’t pick up a copy of their CD.
They said they were from Bellingham, so I emailed Ryan (of The Wastelanders and Chuckanut Drive) to see if he knew of them. He said that they used to practice next door to them, and “it always sounded like someone was just playing Castlevania out of a PA main.” He also described them as “Hobbit Rock,” which I thought was funny.
The third act was French Miami, a weirdly psychedelic rock trio from San Francisco. They got really into their music while they were playing it. They had a cool setup: the guitarist and bassist both had keyboards that they’d play as well, sometimes even at the same time as they were playing their guitars. Interesting stuff.
But anyway, Three Ninjas recorded his entire set, both audio and video. The audio is available for you to download AND ENJOY. Here is the audio recording of the performance.
Yesterday (Monday) Carrie & I went out and hung out with some Bead people at a local bar because it was a birfday party for one of them. That isn’t very unusual, but what was unusual was the fact that we didn’t head out until after 10:00 PM. It felt very strange… often we’re getting ready for bed at that time. ‘Cause we’re OLD, see.
Anyhoo, we picked @SphinxAkashaa up from his bus where it let him out on Commerce and met everybody down at the New Frontier Lounge, which we didn’t even know existed out there. They had a DJ who was spinning/mixing entirely reggae vinyl. It was interesting. The place is actually pretty cool, and it was nice to hang out with a bunch of Bead Babes & Boys.
We didn’t get back home until about Midnight:15, which is again very unusual for us. ‘Cause we’re OLD, see.
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:
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.
I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t somehow write a blog entry on this rather unusual bout of snow that we’ve gotten here in the Pacific Northwest over the past week. Therefore this blog entry is what you might call “obligatory.”
Yes: it snowed here much, much more than it usually snows, and it has stayed much, much longer than it usually stays. And therefore much of the Pacific Northwest has gone into a panic the likes of which must seem hilarious to the upper Midwest and Northeast parts of the country, where long-lasting snow is a common happening.
The fact is that Seattleites, Tacomans, and to a lesser extent Olympians have possibly the worst weather memory in the entire country. You see, it rains well over 100 days out of the year here, so you’d think we’d all be accustomed to driving whenever it rained, right? Well, just imagine that there are more than five consecutive days without rain. For some reason it seems like the entire population suddenly forgets how to drive in the rain when it starts pouring again! I’ve lived here my whole life and this phenomenon never ceases to amaze me.
So you can imagine what it must be like if it happens to snow, which it does very infrequently. Maybe two or three times a year, tops, and it generally sticks around less than two days if indeed it does last at all. Here’s an example of the hilarity: one day last week many Tacoma schools were canceled because it was snowing… even though it was much too warm to stick to the ground. Yes, Tacoma schools were canceled because there was snow in the air. There wasn’t even any ice on the roads!
So you can imagine how the whole area basically shut down when a couple of days later the snow really did begin to accumulate on the ground.
Carrie & I have a tradition of night-walking through the snow on the first evening that it accumulates. So late that evening after Carrie got home from work we decided to take Suki with us. We also live within easy walking distance of Alice and Rufus, two Boston Terrier friends of Suki’s (and their owners, who are friends of our). We thought it’d be fun to all go for a walk, which it was. But it was also rather embarrassing, because Suki got so extremely excited by the snow and the presence of the Bostons that she kept on spontaneously barking for joy. Loudly. At 11:00 at night outside people’s houses.
Another evening a bunch of us who live close by all trudged to the nearby Engine House 9 (“E-9″ as it’s called around here) for a nommy din-dins.
On Saturday Laura came over and she, Carrie, and I all went down to the Parkway Tavern to meet with Steph, Jamie, and law-school Katie for lunch, ’cause we were excited she was back in town. Well, right before we arrived a group of about 20 overly-well-dressed professionals had spontaneously shown up demanding food and drink. And only two people were working that afternoon: one bartender and one cook. So we had to wait quite a while for our foodstuffs, but it was okay because there was good company and copious amounts of pear cider. That night Fools Play was canceled due to a rather large burst of afternoon/evening snow (the owner of Mud Bay Coffee couldn’t find anyone who was willing to keep the place open late enough for us). Instead we all played Animal Crossing and we baked cookies and stayed in. Laura even ended up crashing on our couch.
Carrie had to work all day Sunday. Laura & I walked down to Starbucks and had breakfast sammitches for breakfast. The snow was like crème brûlée: a thin, hard crust over a lot of soft stuff. It was crazy to walk through it. But for lunch we walked again, this time to Wild Orchid to meet with Carrie, Christine, & Lawrence. Here’s a tip: if you eat at Wild Orchid, try the Rama Noodles. Very tasty.
We were so inspired by Wild Orchid that we decided to make our own Thai chicken soup for dinner, so Laura, Lawrence & I stopped by the Neighborhood Market on the way back to the house and bought coconut milk and an onion while everyone else went back to work. Lawrence continued on to his house, and Laura decided to drive back to hers before it got dark. Carrie made the soup when she got off of work, and Christine, Lawrence, and the Bostons all came over and ate it (well, the Bostons didn’t eat it) while watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the animated version, not that live-action crap).
Let me just say: onion, chicken, garlic, curry paste, coconut milk, chicken stock, cilantro, basil, salt & pepper (in that order) FTW.
By Monday morning the snow had pretty much stopped falling, but it was still very much there. I managed to get my car out of it and got to work with little incident.
I think my car is under there somewhere
And that’s about it. There are still about six to nine inches of snow around here. According to weather people the snow is supposed to stick around for the rest of the week, so there might be some form of white Christmas (which would be an absolute shock to the people of the Pacific Northwest; I only recall one white Christmas here in my entire 31 years of existence). I would also just like to say that it is very nice to live within easy walking distance of so many good restaurants and bars.
I hope you have a safe and festive holiday season. Until next time… adiós.
