32

Headed back to Chicago for the ol' birthday weekend and got second row seats to see my 32nd Dave Matthews Band show (ironic?), but also lucked into seats to the JTS Brown reunion show - literally, at the last minute - at the 5th Annual Chicago Improv Festival thanks to one of the generous cast members, and my friend, Jen Bills.

JTS Brown was a legendary long-form improv troupe formed at IO (formally Improv Olympic) who's alumni have gone on to many successful things: SNL, Mad TV, 30 Rock, The Colbert Report, & the two guys in those Sonic commercials to name a few. The form they created is still being taught today, and it was actually the first long form show I ever saw. I still have vivid memories of that and all the subsequent shows I attended and can even still quote lines back.

I met up with Corey who promptly informed me that the Lakeshore Theater's air conditioning broke so the theater had turned into a sweatbox. Despite the setback, the opening act, Children Of A Lesser God, took the stage. This female foursome (featuring Kate Duffy, who is the director of Corey & Mo's show, The Union) attacked the stage with body-mics so they could be heard over the multiple blowing fans that were attempting to alleviate some of the heat, and while that appeared a bit cumbersome, the ladies soon found their form and had a solid show. The distracting ambiance of the fans did have a bit of a hampering effect on the performance, but it was still a great show.

An announcement was then made after a 10 minute intermission that JTS was turning the fans off and going with no mics, which was met with thunderous applause. The cast hit the stage and it looked like they hadn't missed a beat despite being apart for 10 years. Everything from the Sesame Street song "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12" to third graders performing A Christmas Carol to the song from the Car-X commercial made an appearance. It was very apparent that the cast was having a ton of fun while sweating up a storm. We went to the after-party at IO and I got a chance to briefly pay homage to all the cast members, and also got to catch up with Jen and her husband, Bumper.

There's a great review of the show over at The Bastion.

The weekend wrapped up with a tumultuous drive through the suburbs that had us finally end up at the Drury Lane Theater in Oakbrook to see my bud Casey in The Buddy Holly Story. He's been riding a wave of theatrical success of late and I'm really proud of him. The show ended with a very Mama Mia'esque number that had the whole crowd clapping and dancing - and I was afraid one of the many elderly people in the audience was going to have a heart attack.

We stopped at a great sandwich place called Portillo's on the way out of town, and it was a great gracenote to the weekend (also Corey's got me addicted to The Wreck at Potbelly's now too).

We debuted a new game form called Improv Dodgeball for CSzQC 18th Birthday Show as a late show, and it was very successful. I think we're going to have a dodgeball match at least once a month from here on out. If you're looking for something new and have already been to a bunch of CSz shows, it's definitely worth checking out.

I'd be remissed not to mention the flooding that's hitting Iowa right now, as there are friends in the Q.C., Iowa City, and Des Moines that have all been affected by it. It looks like we're having some more moderate weather coming up this week, which will help alleviate the situation some, but the weeks that follow are forecasted to have even more storms. I assisted sandbagging back when the horrible flood of 93 hit and am most likely going to do the same in the next week, as every little bit can help at this point.

Celtics won and The Incredible Hulk was awesome. Nuff said.

"You have given me 100 kisses."

The quote above is from The Professor in what was probably one of my favorite sketches from this past Thursday's The Kids In The Hall: As Live As We'll Ever Be reunion show. I was able to attend the show with my friends Corey and Gabe and we all had a great time reminiscing before the show about our favorite past KITH sketches and characters, and speculated on which of them would make appearances at the show. Happily, all of the show was entirely new material with some familar characters popping up here and there in all new situations. It was an awesome show and the cast looked like they were enjoying themselves even more than we were. Corey is a longtime fan of the troupe and he was grinning from ear-to-ear following the show.

Oh, but then the weekend took a drastic turn...

On Friday night, we were to do a CSz gig with Corey & Mo (who had just finished another show earlier in the night) for an after-prom at the Aragon Ballroom. If you've never been there before, it's beautiful on the inside (as you can see from the photos), but an incredible pain acoustically to try to perform in. We were informed that The Rolling Stones among others had played the venue at one point, but whatever luster that may've had was completely worn off by the time we had our mic check. We couldn't even hear ourselves, let alone each other, as the sound traveled from the 1' high speakers up into the domed ceilings and then...just.....disappeared. Seriously. It was incredibly frustrating as we could see the writing on the wall that this show was going to be an effort in futility trying to keep the kids attention.

We retired to the green room and it just felt like waiting on death row as each of us were playing out in our heads just how awkward this performance was going to be. At the same time, we bonded as a quartet knowing that we were marching into a dire situation, so that was cool.

We did all that we could to fight through it, but the kids simply could not hear us past the first two rows and we had lost 80% of them by the third game. It was brutal. At least Corey and I found a way to entertain ourselves by taking random photos of the place, and then photos of each other taking random photos of the place.

That left kind of a sour note to the night, but Sunday was fun as I hung out with Casey and got to hear about his new show, Buddy, which I'll hopefully be seeing this weekend. We made some final touches to Reality Check and are excited to get it entered into some more competitions.

And congratulations to Senator Barack Obama for securing the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.