The Gospel According to Prisco

It all started with a phone call.

I often complain about living in LA.  Because I don’t really live in LA.  I just exist here.  I work in a windowless cave during the beautiful sunny daylight hours that I don’t spend on a crowded smelly bus or in a car in the gridlock on the freeways.  Higginbottom and I rarely go out, and if we do, it’s to the movies. I don’t go to parties, I don’t go out with friends nearly enough.  I’m a social pariah.  I sit in my house playing at Pogo.com and watching Netflix DVDs or Law and Order marathons.  I don’t love LA, because I don’t get to experience LA.  I don’t often get to connect with friends or have a social life.  It’s no way to live.  I mine as well be back in PA, spending my weekdays playing bar trivia and playing Xbox at my brother’s house.

But then I got a phone call.  My buddy Zach leaves me a voicemail on my cell phone at work.  I never answer my phone.  So I check the message.  He says, “Hey, buddy.  Wondering what you got going on tonight.  The Kids in the Hall are playing at the Orpheum Theatre, and I might be able to get us backstage after the show.  Call me and let me know.”

 I run, not walk, but fucking run to where I can make a private call (which is next to impossible.  I’m standing in the middle of a warehouse next to a private airport.  All my phone calls sound like I’m in Kazhikstan taking heavy troop fire.  Ask Manny.)  I get him on the line, he tells me order my tickets through Ticketmaster, and then buzz him to let him know if I can go.  I immediately call Higginbottom.  We were supposed to go to the movies to watch Mister Lonely to review it for Pajiba and I would be her ride home.  I ask her if she wants to go.  She doesn’t know the Kids in the Hall, so she said it really wouldn’t be worth it to go.  I ask her if she’s okay with me going by myself.  She tells me she can get a ride, and go ahead.  I love her seventeen thousand times. 

 I feverishly get on Ticketmaster and order up a ticket.  Able to get one right in front of my friends and his three friends.  Score!  Paying the service fee?  Not score. 

 We meet up at Tom Bergin’s for beers and to meet another friend of ours who was unable to go to the show.  It was awesome.  A W&L theatre reunion of sorts, and we shoot the shit and eat potato skins.  I drink Guinness and it’s all good times.  I haven’t seen many of these guys in several months, and in some cases years.  We say goodbye to our buddy Truax, and I promise him that we’ll get together again.  Which we will.  In three months.  I need to fucking call people more often. 

It’s four of us on our way to the show.  The guys all start talking business, which is cool for me.  TW is an actor, he was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and had a two episode stint on Heroes (he was the dude from the Mexican prison that Syler killed with his mindgrapes.)  He was also in the Bud Light commercial at the Opera where the guys sneak bottles in and they explode.  Which was, ironically enough, shot at the Orpheum.  My buddy Zach does voiceover direction.  If you’ve played Call of Duty 4, he’s the Scottish commander McCallan (?) in the sniper missions.   You’ve probably all damned his eyes a hundred times already.  And their buddy Dave is a writer on the Chelsea Lately show on E!  He does work at Improv Olympic and Upright Citizens Brigade.  You might have seen him in the Wendy’s commerical where the guy filming the political rally grows Wendy braids and starts demanding fresh not frozen.  Yeah, that’s Dave.  I can’t believe I know semi-famous folks.  And then there’s me.  Fat Nobody.  My ego boost comes from TW telling me that inevitably I will eclipse them all.  If only casting directors, agents, and managers felt the same way as you, my man.

 We get to the show, and Zach goes to will call.  They gather their tickets.  We’re supposed to go down to the lobby after the show and meet up with the tour manager Marnell.  So we go to our seats.  Which are literally the last row up to the left in the balcony.  I was hoping to maybe catch a fly ball.  Or a t-shirt fired out of a cannon.  Two downsides to the seats: a) A lot of the show takes place on a video screen on the back of the stage, so most of the short films and skits had the words cut off or the tops of the heads of actors missing.  b) There was an annoying chubby lass who took every opportunity to scream at the top of her lungs, “I LOVE YOU DAVE!”  Except it would come out like some sort of autistic bark.  Which she volleyed eight or nine times.

 I’ve seen both of the other tours back at the Tower Theatre in Philly.  The first one, “Same Guys New Dresses” which is featured in the T-shirt on my MySpace page, was neat, but it was mostly them doing live versions of the sketches from the show.  “Tour of Duty” was better, in that it was mostly all of their old characters but in new sketches, sometimes combining with each other.  Like Gavin answering to his principal who was Daryll.  It was many years and career shifts before this show, “Live as We’ll Ever Be”, so I was really interested in how the show would turn out.

Holy fucking fuck.  It was the most hysterical live show I’ve ever seen.  Two hours of incredibly tight material.  There wasn’t a bad sketch.  Not one.  They brought back a bunch of the old characters, but in totally new sketches that were hilarious.  Even the Buddy Cole monologue, which was weaker in the other shows, was fucking hot.  He explained why Jesus was gay.  The short film was about Carfuckers.  The encore featured The Head Crushing Guy, going around the audience and crushing people’s heads.  And then finishing off the cast members, while destroying their egos.  Fortunately, no Uwe Boll was mentioned. 

 We cruise down to the lobby and wait as the show empties out.  People are standing around, purchasing T-shirts as the show clears out.  Zach waits patiently for the tour manager to show up.  He says, if he doesn’t we’ll just talk to my friend.  We’re all cool, shooting the shit and discussing The Last Dragon and Big Trouble in Little China.  Dave does a mean Lo Pan.  Zach once directed that actor in voiceover.  He said, he wasn’t playing Lo Pan, he’s actually that fucking crazy. 

 Meanwhile, Dave Foley and Scott Thompson come out and start chatting with fans and posing for pictures.  Both guys, incredibly nice and accomodating. We’re chill about it though, because we figure, we’ll we’re going backstage to the aftershow, we’ll get to meet them, let the common folk mingle.  Mwhahaha.  So Zach’s starting to get flustered, figuring this is going to turn into a total cockblock.  Then he goes, oh, good, there’s Mark. 

Yeah, Zach’s contact was fucking Mark McKinney.  He left that part out. 

 So Zach goes over and waits for the gathering throngs to lavish him with admiration.  Dave Foley actually lays down on the floor with the one girl and they chat quietly, while a crowd gathers and laughs at his antics.  Kevin McDonald starts to come from backstage, but is quickly rushed off by a statuesque blonde bombshell who was either his girlfriend or manager or both.  Bruce stayed downstairs, presumably to celebrate his birthday.

 Zach goes up to Mark and they start talking, and then Mark tells him well, just go over to the guard and tell him that you’re my guests.  And then if that doesn’t work, have him get Marnell.  I smile politely, thinking to myself, “Yeah, this oughta work.” 

 We walk over to the yellowshirted guard and tell him, “Hi.  We’re guests of Mark McKinney.  Mind if we go downstairs?”  He says, “You guys don’t have passes.”  Zach says, “We need to speak to Marnell.”  The guard says, “Dude, I don’t work for the tour, so I don’t know Marnell.  But at the bottom of the stairs, there is another guard who’ll be looking for passes too.  Sorry.”  Zach asks if he could go downstairs to talk to the other guard.  The guard’s cool with it.  Zach takes off. 

 I ask the guard if my good friend Thomas Jefferson could get us through the door.  He says, “You know, people always talk about bribing me, but nobody ever actually takes out their wallets.”  I like this guy. 

 Zach comes back.  He says, No dice.  We’ll just wait until Mark goes down and then go down with him.  So we’re cool.  I mean, dude actually knows Mark McKinney.  So we’re that much closer.  Then a little spritely fellow who resembled Michael Weston from Pathology comes up.  Zach goes over to him and asks if he’s Marnell.  He is.  He gives us four passes.  We’re in.

 The passes are actually stickers, our friend the guard explains.  So we affix them to ourselves.  I slap mine prominently on my protruding belly and declare myself a Star-Bellied Sneetch.  The guard stops us and says, “Sorry, those passes aren’t for THIS night.”  We look at him in horror.  He laughs, “Nah, I’m just fucking with you.”  I love this guy. We descend into the underbelly of the Orpheum.  The irony is not lost on me. 

 I have never been to an aftershow.  It was wall to wall people.  And standing among them are the Kids in the Hall.  As well as other varied celebrities.  Stephen Root, one of the greatest comic character actors in the history of the world.  Who is very svelte and looks much younger in person.  The guy who plays Craig on Malcolm in the Middle.  Dave fucking Chapelle.  I’m awestruck.  My friends all break off at various points to speak with people they know from the improv world and from different projects.  I go to the open bar and obtain a Jack and Coke.  I am lost in Neverland.

 I start talking to Zach and my friends.  We all felt like at some point, they were just going to tell us that we’re in the wrong place and we have to leave.  And then Mark McKinney comes up.  And I am talking to Mark McKinney, and I feel like an ass.  I can’t find words that make sense.  I begin to tell him that “I’ve seen the other two shows, and that by far this one was the soooooo great.”  Because I simultaneously realize that I’m about to tell him that the other two shows sucked compared to this one, and that I really thought this was so much better, and the two thoughts conflict in my brain, and grammar and syntax and social decorum completely leave for parts unknown.  So I stand around gaping.  He mentions that they toured the show at the Montreal Comedy Festival.  I asked him immediately if he saw the nudey magician.  The stripper.  These are the words coming out my mouth and I can’t stop them.  I can hear them happening, but it’s too late.  He looks notably perplexed.  So I try to explain that she does an act where she makes a handkerchief disappear and then makes it reappear, each time taking off a layer of clothing until she’s completely nude, and that the entire bravery of the act is that you don’t believe that she will be completely full frontal naked, but she does, and it’s all choreographed to Henry Mancini and the grand finale was hilariously shocking.  However, this thought gets translated to, “Oh her name is, funny foreign sounding but not all of it, but she, you know pulls the kerchief out of her cooter.”  Complete with fucking acoompanying gestures.  I am retarded.  My brain screams at me and passes out.  Mark smiles politely and Zach starts up the conversation that I airbolted in the cowskull.  I turn to Dave and say, “That just happened.  I am a psychopath.  If any point you want to murder my skull with that beer bottle, have at it.”  He agrees. 

 (In my defense, I wasn’t insane.  Ursula Martinez is her name, she does an act called Hanky Panky.  Check it out.  Get the NSFW version.  It will blow your mind.  And she did perform it recently at the Montreal Comedy Festival.)

 I managed to redeem myself later when Mark was talking about how they were so nasty to each other in the old days, just screaming at one another and telling each other how much their sketches were fucking terrible and hating on one another.  Then he said, “We still do that Dave.  You suck, Foley!”  I laughed and said, “You got most of your revenge with Brain Candy, right?  Who are you?  Just a guy.  Gave him all the asshole parts.”  He chuckled and said, “You noticed, heh?  Hahahaha.” 

 The rest of the night, I chat with my friends, and with some of their friends.  People come to us, because we looked like we were having such clandestine and intriguing and hilarious conversations.  We were mostly shooting the shit.  I chatted up a guy from Jenkintown (apparently everyone from Philadelphia is in LA — GO FLYERS!)  I chatted up a school teacher who went to school in Boston and told her about my brother’s idea for Shut the Fuck Up Penguin.  (For legal purposes I can’t go into it here.  Someday, though!)  My friends kept explaining that I was a chick magnet (I was wearing my T-shirt) because I would inspire random strangers to strike up conversations.  Like how at Tom Bergin’s the only two girls at the bar asked me if I wanted to take the seat next to them.  I explained that it was because they thought I was a young Santa.  Which made things awkward at strip clubs.  And mall benches.  Hi-LAR-ious.  That’s me! 

 I managed to tell Bruce McCullough that I was a big fan of his directing work, and I really enjoyed the show. I forgot to wish him a happy birthday.  Because I didn’t want to be a creepy stalker guy.  Same to Dave Foley and Scott Thompson.  I never actually had long conversations with any of the Kids, afraid I would then break into insane gibberish again, or worse, quote the shows or the movie to them.  I’ve got Brain Candy memorized, and I tend to spout movie quotes at weird occasions.  But I did get to smile and sort of stand around as they chatted.  So I felt like part of the game.

 At one point, Dave decided he was going to go over to Scott Thompson and talk with him.  As he walked away, TW shouted, “Have fun.  Don’t be creepy!”  Which is always good advice. 

 All in all it was an amazing night.  And I felt like I could do it again.  My only saving grace was being able to mention that I was a film critic for Pajiba.  It sort of legitimizes me.  And my friends kept touting me as a writer/actor.  Which feels good.  I really felt LA that night.  And I loved the show.  And some day I’ll go from being little fat nobody to little fat somebody.  Those guys are awesome, and I really want to spend more time with them and the rest of the LA people.  It’s easier to appreciate LA when I’m actually in the city having fun. 

 Now I just need to get together with my fellow Pajibans for beers.