"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.