KingLou Drops Science 2.0

Last night Gunshow performed the 3rd and final show in the current run of our sketch show, Color it Clean. It was, by all accounts, a complete success. If I recall the first show had 32 paying customers, the second show had 36 or so. Last nights show was by far the best attended show that Gunshow has ever had. We had 57 paying customers in a theater that seats 40 comfortably. We crammed them in everywhere and I think we may have had some people standing in the aisle. It was a totally awesome vibe. We’d had some time off so we were a little off here and there but not so that the audience was on to us. As a special treat my wife and many of her co-workers and friends made it out to this final show. I even had some friends from out of town who’d come to see Cristo’s “The Gates” come down to the show with some their friends. We actually went and saw the Gates with them earlier in the day. What did I think of the Gates? I though"… “Eh… this is a lot of gates.“ It was quite an installation. I’ll give you that. At a certain point you have to wonder why it wasn’t up longer and then after another point you just stop noticing them. Tomorrow we’re expecting a lot of snow. Those guys who have to take down the Gates are hating life. Back to talk about the show. As a super special treat cast member Ryan Sturt’s parents were at the show as well! This was awesome because how often does a mom get to see her son mime getting his dick stuck in a hole in the wall that leads up to an eventual gay sex act. I don’t think too many. I could be totally in the dark about that particular side of mother-son relationships but I hope I am right. After the show we all went to Swift, which by this point has become the shows pet bar in a major way. Kudos to Matt Stinton for getting the joint to reserve tables for us because we brought a ton of people. At the restaurant people were glowing with reviews for the show. The hands down favorite of the night was Piñata about which I heard several first hand account from both men and women of crying from laughter. Talk about wind in the sails. I was on cloud 9! On top of that we actually made enough money to pay each member of the group some cash money! I mean, talk about something that NEVER happens. Not that in the big picture it puts a dent the endless money pit of rehearsals and classes but it felt good to have had enough draw to actually pack a theater 3 nights and make a buck in the process. Other rave reviews went to Bloodbank and Dusty. Overall the show was pretty damn tight and it showed. I really hope we don’t give up on this material. It’s got legs! We can definitely put it up somewhere else and be successful with it again. Several people after the show expressed disappointment that they couldn’t tell their friends to come see the show. We did the smart thing at the end of the show and announced that we’d be doing some improv next month so some people expressed a definite interest in seeing us be funny on our feet. After the bar we tried to ruin a cab drivers night with a nice couple we met through our friends Regan and Anders. They live in Clinton Hill and we live in Brooklyn Heights so why not condense the Brooklyn misery to one cab rather than two. We ended up taking the F train since everyone and their mother was out looking for a cab at 12:30. We stumbled home at 1am and relieved my brother who had been watching Ace so Jodi could finally see a show. Today we paid for our weeks of fun by doing 4 washing machines worth of laundry. Actually it was more because we used 3 regular ones and the dreaded TRIPLE LOADER! We did manage to go out for our Sunday breakfast at the Greek place on Cadman. There is a waitress there who is gaga for Ace. She ignores her tables when he comes in. It’s adorable and kind of creepy. She’s a little too attentive…. At least our coffee never goes un-filled. Now I just watched the Oscars. Chris Rock was pretty funny in the beginning. Good material. He did fall into his annoying to me routine of repeating his premise after every joke. “Get a real star” JOKE “Get a real star” JOKE, ad infinitium. But he was pretty funny anyway. Of course by the halfway mark it gets a little old that every joke is “This actress is white. I’d like to see Pearl Baily play her part” Or insert any black reference there. Not a surprise but it does get old. HUGE SCHOOL EVENT TOMORROW! MUST GO TO BED... OR PLAY HALO... HRMM

Just got back from a whirlwind trip to Puerto Rico for the wedding of my cousin, Margarita. It was a regular family reunion. All my cousins were there, except for Jose who had to stay back on the mainland for a trackmeet. The result of that trackmeet was that his college beat some powerhouse by 1 point and Jose was resposible for that point. So I guess it's okay that he didn't come afterall. But besides him everyone was there. Even my cousin Amanda with her 6 week old baby, Elias, who will soon be living in Ghana again. Everyone was staying in the Caribe Hilton, The Grand Dame of the Caribbean! Everyone except for my brother and his girlfriend who decided to find their own lodgings in a more secluded hotel. So they missed out on the fun of constantly running into each other and general family shenanigans. Especially the casual pina colada enjoying! One kind of weird thing was that the wedding and rehearsal were formal. I've had it up to here (imagine me holding my hand either at my neck or above my head. Whichever is more dramatic for you) with renting tuxedos for wedding and so on so I bought myself a tuxedo on ebay. My brother had found a good guy with a large selection so I went to the same guy and got a pretty decent tux for $90. $50 worth of alterations and I was set. My brother actually got a little shafted on his tux because it was smaller than he thought it should be but I reckon thats the dangers of buying clothes on ebay. As it was the shoes that came with my tux didn't fit and the shirt was a little tight in the neck. I lived. The wedding was pretty standard fair. All spanish. Big chapel. One funny thing was that there was a big statue of Jesus high above the wedding and it appeared to be hanging out a little and suspended with ropes. The story of that turned out to be that the chapel was actually under some heavy rennovations and the day of the rehearsal they had shown up and found a lot of scaffolding behind where they were going to be getting married. They said "That isn't going to be there on Saturday, right?" and the chapel people said "Oh yes! The chapel is undergoing renovations. That needs to be there to hold up Jesus!" A lot of bickering and bride fit-pitching later and low and behold the jesus, suspended by yellow rope was scaffoldless. Another weird thing was that after the actual wedding part of the wedding instead of the traditional kiss the bride and walk out there was a huge pause as all the guests of the wedding were made to stand around and watch the wedding pictures be taken in the church. BORING! I have never seen that before. There was no announcement that it was going to happen. Everyone was waiting for the wedding march and standing up and suddenly the photographer started moving lights around and then sure enough everyone sat down. I spent that time chasing Ace around and he worked out his extra energy. Eventually the wedding march played and we all got out of there. By the way if you have a fair skinned baby with blue eyes and want to hear non-stop compliments then go to Puerto Rico. The women there go ape-shit for blue-eyed babies. Seriously. The reception and dinner was just killer. This is where the real money was blown. There was a live band, flown up from Miami that totally rocked. Salsa, Merengue and everything else. They did 3 full, individual sets. Inbetween there was a crazy DJ who was mixing the decades very well. He had a tendency to only let a song get to the first chorus and then mixing it with another song. Repeat. It was a bit much but he still kept the party going. Then at the end of the night there was a Jibaro (country folk) band accompanied by dancing puertorican island spirits (vejigantes). The old timey band was the best part of the whole night and a great way for me to remember it ending. I understand that it went on for a few more hours but I left with the Jibaros (pronounced he-ba-ro) band. Inbetween all that music there was an open bar and some really decent food. I had 5 rum and cokes and managed to not get drunk. Mainly because the reception was spread over FIVE HOURS! I could have been condensed a little, for example: Aftere the cocktail hour there was a 90 minutes zone where no food was available. It took like 45 minutes from the main food being done to the cake being cut and another 20 minutes w/o announcement for the cake to be served. Suddenly there was cake on some plates. The cake: Decent! The day after the wedding Jodi and I got to have a romantic dinner in Old San Juan at the Cafe Amadeus. I recommend it highly. Even the live music, an old guy playing guitar, was really nice. They did try and get us to sit right next to the REALLY loud speakers but we managed to get a nicer quiet table. My mom made this dinner possible by watching Ace while we were out. She paid for her kindness by somehow losing he wallet. Sigh. Well now it's stupid late and I need to be at work tomorrow. BOOO!!! Final Words: Puerto Rico!! HOOOO!!!!

About a month ago my Halo 2 clan, TheCompanyNYC, organized a match up with another improv related Halo 2 clan in Chicago. The goal was to play some kick ass competition and claim the best improv Halo city. We met online for practice sessions every monday for a month and send tons of emails discussing strategy and theory. Today was the day. I brought my xBox, 2 video projectors and some speakers over to EpicZeroX's apartment on atlantic and we set up for a fun afternoon. Epic and Karthal (aka Kevin Mullaney) sat in one room while I was in another. We had the projectors shooting HUGE screens on the wall. I think we easily had 8 foot projections of the game on the wall. I have say that at first I was a little nauseated by it but I quickly acclimated. Let me cut to the chase. WE CRUSHED THEM. I will say right off the bat that 2 people flaked on them. We ended up giving them one of our better players for a some of the games. It didn't matter. We played a smattering of games types. Capture the flag, Plant the Bomb (aka assault) and Team Slayer. We shut them out in each game type. They never scored a flag capture or bomb plant and I think we won Slayer by more than 30 kills in a game to 100. It was a ton of fun. To toot my own horn, I really did well. In the first 2 game types I had high kills and medals which was a nice feather in the cap. I even planted a bomb! The Chicago guys were cool in their losing. No shit talking and whinning. Afterwards we all met up for a celebratory meal at Leeche Nut. The victorious team at the table was Ptolemy Slocum, Doug Moe, Tery Jinn, Kevin Mullaney, Dave Eason and Me. We shared some chow and some bits of the comedy variety. Now I am home, I reassembled my internet access and reinstalled my xBox. EVen played a quick game of Team Slayer to make sure that the internet was all hunky dory. Now I am going to start getting my act together for tonights sketch comedy show. It's the 2nd of 3 and I think it's going to be a full house. FINGERS CROSSED! Break a leg, me!

Hot diggity dawg! After almost 11 months of talking and writing and rehearsing Gunshow perfromed our labor of love sketch show, "Color it Clean," this Saturday. As we did the final rehearsal right before the show all my anxiety about itdrained away. I realized that we all knew our lines and that the tech was finally tight. We had close to 40 people in the audience who were in the mood to laugh and we delivered. It was geat to get the sketches up live. Over all I think we were pleased with the way the sketches went. As always some of the sketches were a little flat but they all had their moments. I had a couple of mental goofs but they didn't affect the show. I think we'll discuss switching some things around in the order but the show is solid. All in all a great night. I did manage to go out and have 4 Chimay's which is more than would usually have. As a result I was totally beat on Sunday. Classic. In other events I am really enjoying the TiVo I bought from Finn. It's pretty great. Records lots of great TV while I am asleep of playing video games. For example: last night after I finished playing Halo I was able to watch the episode of HBO's Pornucopia that I had missed. Video games to porn enjoyment.