Dropping the N Word

So I did the reading at 8x8 at the Hungry Brain on Monday and it went pretty well. In my story I read, one of the characters gets accused of calling another character a "nigger." I was nervous about reading this one, and thought about swapping it out with a newer short story among some of my recent ones but this one seemed funny and since 8x8 is a mostly booked with stand up comics, I thought I should go with funny to keep the night giggly. My other recent stories are darker, twisted, not that this one isn't but it has the most laugh out loud absurd touches. So I read it, and one of the stand up comics, Will Miles, is African American, so I got even more nervous but I didn't bring other copies of my stories so I had to stick to it. And as I said, it actually went well. Someone said he got a laugh out the n word part.  


As you can see I have a lot of inexplicable white man guilt. 


I once did a play in college, about African American fraternities. It was how I met Donny Rodriguez and became good friends with him and eventually got involved with Wood Sugars. I started off playing a small part, and my character had a line that involved the n word. And I couldn't say it convincingly. I remember taking up half an hour of rehearsal because I sounded like a clunky dork trying to say it. And the cooler, smoother, natural I tried to say it, the more it just sounded dorky. Eventually the lead actor quit and I asked to take on the role. The director thought about it for a week and wound up throwing me the role because he probably didn't have any other options, the show dates were getting closer. He must not have marketed the casting announcements to the right demographic as evidenced by my getting to play the lead role in a play about African American fraternities. And we didn't use black face. 


I had a good time Monday at the Hungry Brain, enjoyed all the other acts, and wound up drinking 6 beers. I think maybe I have some liver fat clogging up the detox process because I woke up feeling like shit on Tuesday. For lunch the next day I went and got myself a shit load of breakfast food. See the thing is, and why I don't go out to bars too often, is drinking gets money flying out of my wallet. Such as in ordering drink after drink. And the next day almost dropping $15 including tip on weekday brunch to inject protein and grease into my queasy digestion. I'm giving myself a 3 beer maximum for a while. I hate losing steam the next day and getting crabby. An ineffective crab is not me at my best. 

Displays of Passive Aggression

We've been developing a new approach in the Wood Sugars Comedy group as to create an efficient and active process for writing, shooting, editing, and releasing a ton more short films in 2012.  We'll be meeting late into tonight to hash out some new ideas, riffing, and getting ball the rolling on these. 

Here is a recent one we've released based on one of our live sketches we did throughout our summer "Freak Show" format. We added a new character element to it. Please go nuts watching The Passive Aggressive Panic Attack. 

The passive aggressive concept led me down a memory lane to the time I lived in a storefront, The Manor, in Rogers Park. We had a continuous issue with people and dog's both peeing on my door. I'd be in there rehearsing with my theatre company and we'd hear someone walk up and unzip and piss would trickle down from under the door. Quickly I'd throw something, a roll of gorilla tape, or whatever was near at the door to scare them off and we'd give chase to the door, throw it open and they'd be out of sight. I hope I gave them a panic attack. 


One morning while my brother was visiting we left out the front to go get some breakfast. Thick dog shit clung to the front corner of the door on the outside. It took a lot of elbow grease to get it clean. And some gagging. I posted the following note to try to put an end to the pissing/shitting epidemic.  My brother took this picture of me. He was quite proud of me taking a stand.

Not the best photo, all I got though, the sign reads something along the lines of:

Due to assholes and their dogs pissing and shitting on my door, SURVEILLANCE has been installed and police are on call and ready. And for those who still feel the urge to unzip and aim, scissors will also be ready.

It's a touch more on the aggressive/aggressive side than passive aggressive. I got a call from my landlord a few days later asking me to please take it down. 

Bringing Home Small Pumpkins

Went apple picking today in Indiana but didn't find too many apples in the orchard, all picked over and some scattered on the ground, got to stump on a few and at least enjoy the pseudo outdoors and the sunshine. I ate 3 pumpkin donuts too many in a short amount of time and had a sugar crash. The Hen House Prowlers were playing bluegrass for the family folk, I know these guys, I know them as Sexfist, their other name from some Chicago shows. They were nice enough to let us record some live tracks awhile back for our Wood Sugars Inside the Barrel podcast.

We bought a tiny pumpkin for our cat Gus. I get a kick out of cutesy things like that.

Wicked tired today from a late night of chicken wings and sour beer, then hoppy beer with a good friend last night.

Was wicked tired last Sunday too, I failed to mention here about our Wood Sugars 4 shows in 24 hours last weekend. We of course had our Jokesmith Juggernauts on Fri Sept. 30th which was a good turn out but the comedy didn't seem to hit. It's okay, it happens. I hope the people were at least entertained and enjoyed their Friday night out. Saturday, Oct 1st we performed at the Ravenswood Art Walk at two different times, different places. At 11:45am we performed for 15min at their Main Stage. We had to substitute out the cuss words and ultimately performed for the beer booth guys, the sound guys, and a mom with two toddlers bopping around. I rehearsed my bits all the way there without the usual cussing. I was intensely nervous I'd let some f bombs slip like usual, but I was proud in the end to be a controlled performer. Then at 2pm we were under the impression we'd be performing in a theatre space but it was actually a wood shop. Wood Sugars in a wood shop, very fitting I do believe. It was actually the most fun I've had performing in a long time. We got about 5 or 6 random viewers, and were supposed to fill an hour. We're used to 15 min time slots, so we threw in some old sketches and did some improv to stretch it out. We popped some genuine chuckles out of our crowd.

Then we were asked to perform at a friend's house party, which we agreed to tentatively but an e-mail blast went out from the hostess that we'd be performing and we didn't want to be the dicks who backed out, even though Donny was hurting from what he thought was a cracked rib after a bike accident. It was actually pretty rad performing along with some other comedy folk in an apartment. It was cozy, almost salon style. I heard about a ghostly encounter from earlier that day in that very apartment. I dig hearing such things. Some people shotgunned their beers. I cheered them on and just drank my beer really fast, not chugging, not sipping. I got drunk and stayed out late. I don't do that enough anymore, but was reminded why it's not a usual thing for me when my wee hour AM bus route through Wrigleyville delayed me from catching the Belmont bus, within only a few seconds. And it was a 30 min wait for the next one. So I just walked, which I usually don't mind but I've been doing that a lot lately and my feet were tired. I thought about the novel I've been revising.  About to dive into another pass at it, and I'm feeling a slight nervousness. The piece I feel is getting close to being something swell, yet I feel like a blacksmith about to work on a bunch of small metals. A slight cabin fever type thing echoes around in me like the sensation of trying to put thread through the eye of a needle. Sometimes I get a kick out of digging into such tight focus on a task, yet sometimes I just want to work sloppily and spill my guts all over the place and not have to reshape it all into neat little piles.

I'm a slob with OCD.

Dub Step Father

If you're familiar with dubstep you may find yourself amused, and even cracking a giggle or two. Yet another adapted stage sketch by us Wood Sugars to video. We've been having a ball with Eliaz's new camera.

Jokesmith Juggernauts

This show is Friday. Chicago Comedy at it's finest. Free show. Brilliance. I will be performing in it. And co-producing. 

More info at WoodSugars.com

The Week in Review

This has been one of those weeks that bull dozes time. Been a busy week with the day job and Wood Sugars shows, with of course some after show boozing that made the early mornings the next day a little rough to get the day flowing. Our MILF show on Wednesday had a great turnout, with a quite a few randoms. Thursday's "One Night Only Show" was a lower turn out but I had a blast. We all drank some red wine before the show. I feel a bit funnier, loser the roll with the give and take of comedy performance with red wine trickling in my blood. After we went to a bar called Simon's with a weird old Swedish feel to it. I liked it. I had a little too many cans of cheap Genessee beer, I hadn't heard of it before but it was on sale and my wallet is thin so I gave it a shot. It tasted nice. But I felt a bit ill the following morning. When I arrived home after intense thunderstorms crackled.

My screenplay of Whiskey Pike unfortunately did not make it to the finalist round of the Nicholls Fellowship I had entered it into. Out of almost 7,000 entries 350 were selected for the final round of judging. I was certainly bummed but I spent some time looking back over the script yesterday and I certainly understand its imperfections. At the time I had submitted it I felt jacked that it was quite incredible but with my latest review of it, a little time and space between my last tear into, I do find there are a lot of fluff moments. I have the piece littered with little transitions, montage between scenes to show travel, whiskey biz development, etc. And on closer inspection these things are really just fat which at the time I thought would build a swell visual sprawl of the old time, wilderness landscape. And when it comes down to it a lot of that stuff is understood. And I'm again reminded that film is really tied together with the most important moments.

So I spent some time reworking it, and in a way I've been wanting to do for some time. I'm definitely interested and determined to shoot this thing out in the woods in the 5 year plan. Whereas I certainly don't think this piece will necessitate millions of dollars, being essentially a period piece, it's going to have some costs. And with film, its like holding up a microscope to the detail, which requires more money to fine tune that set and costuming detail. But being a theatre guy, having spent a majority of my time in Chicago studying theatre and putting on plays, my biggest interest in the production is the element of performance. The characters, the dynamic between the Bowermaster family members and most particularly the rivalry between Shane Bowermaster and George the Brewer, incited the new impulse in me to extract and piece together the scenes which focus on these relationships to develop what can an intense theatre piece that can still translate under a low budget. With theatre such period elements of costuming and set can be more representational and with the right lighting can take you to that place with more punch of ambiance perhaps film even can.

So this is my latest experiment with the Whiskey Pike script, tentatively titled The Whisky Infused Boom of Shane Bowermaster. I know I've gone back and forth quite a bit on whether I want to do this as a play or a film or what not. Sure I'm flip-floppy like a politician here, but it is an ambitious piece, and I want to make sure I put some good thought into how I want to commit to the first production of the piece. My next motion is to begin work-shopping the piece with actors and work towards doing a public staged reading of it in the near future to really hone the project.

This week I've also been getting pulled into watching CNN and CSPAN and MSNBC to follow the whole debt ceiling crisis. It's been like a riveting soap opera. We'll see what the dramatic conclusion is. As of this writing I hear there is McConnell bill that is "close".

HH4Kidz

Another sample sketch. My hair is looking a little shaggy. Should I go here even though I'm a big kid now?

Oh yeah, and don't forget to subscribe to our podcast in iTunes, just search Wood Sugars.

Or stream from http://www.woodsugars.com/listen

Wav Form Dance to a Sketch of Ours

We're in the works to have some of our Wood Sugars Comedy podcast sketches animated, but in the meantime Wood Sugars Eliaz figured out how to create groovy wav forms.

Oh yeah, and don't forget to subscribe to our podcast in iTunes, just search Wood Sugars.

Or stream from http://www.woodsugars.com/listen

ITB S2 E8

We have a new episode up of our comedic variety show podcast, Inside the Barrel. In this episode we interview funny gals Ever Mainard and Rasa Gierstikas of The Shit Show, a kickass stand-up open mic here in Chicago. We also feature the band Lola Balatro! We tackle some slightly economic and educational issues in some of our sketches. But why listen to me yak about it, listen to it! -> ITB S2 E8.

Friends or Benefits

This a short sketch video I'm in over at Wood Sugars. We did a bunch of these as part of the "Friends or Benefits" series. Be sure to browse our channel for more of them. I had a blast. I was originally just helping with sound on this project but had a last minute idea for a character I wanted to try. These type of short short movies takes me back...growing up, what my friends and I did for fun was make movies. Just make them up as we went along. As a grown man, that sort of thing is still a blast.

ITB 6

We put up a new episode of Inside the Barrel last week. We had some fun conversations with Ted Tremper, a comedian, and winner of a Vimeo Award for his webseries "Breakups." We also have a short sketch on there I wrote called "Bikers and Cars" which plays with the seeming rivalry between hipsters who bike about town and the people who drive. Definitely something I see both sides of, and I do applaud anyone who rides their bike, I know I'd like to ride mine more about town, but I've encounter much too many bikers who believe they are above any rules of the road. So this piece was inspired by that. I also wrote and we recorded a sketch called "Furrocious" about a father/son hunting trip, and the son reveals he's a "furry." It felt funny as we recorded it but editing found it didn't work as a comedic piece the way it played out, so I'm back to the writing table with that one.