Last week SFN! performed at DePaul University in the Chi and it made us pretty much feel like rockstars. I can't lie, when I got to the venue I was...concerned. It was in the upstairs of the student center amongst the food court and arcade with a fucking loud ass DDR console (more on that shit later). We were to perform on a little shaky stage with some flats set up behind to crate a makeshift backstage area to hold all of us when not on stage and our props and costumes. We accepted the challenge and got ready for the sound check and Ts and Bs. I have to admit I was Bitchy McGroucherson as I had just gotten off of a plane from Arizona and come from O'Hare, not to mention I had unloaded the entire contents of my stomach not two days earlier and was still not quite "right".
All of this ended not to matter as soon as the show started. The crowd was alert and ready to laugh and as soon as we stepped on stage it became immediately obvious that sketch comedy was going to win that night. They loved it. We did a "best of with very few repeats" since we'd been there last year and didn't want to disappoint. It was so nice to be able to do a unedited for content show, so to speak, after the Disney shit we had to do for the corporate show a few days prior. I almost forgot how good it felt to say the word "fuck" on stage. Don't get me wrong, having to do a completely clean show is definitely a challenge and something I'm glad I have practice doing (thank you ComedySportz) but it is nice to just be able to perform a sketch as written and intended.
We closed with an improv set and it was a blast. We played a couple of games I hadn't played since Jesus was a boy and the audience ate it up. I was concerned the DDR was going to outshine us at times but being the consummate professionals we are we just barreled through and made sure to give the DDR-ers some shitty looks while offstage. Awesome.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Corporate Mayhem
This last Tuesday SFN! did a corporate show for Harris Bank, Excelon, and Earnst & Young at the Harris Bank location in downtown Chicago. The interesting thing about this show is we wanted it to be sort of a “best of” but we had to keep the show rated G. That’s right G. Not PG-13 or even PG, but the cleanest of the clean. It was as if we were performing for a Catholic elementary school. We accepted the challenge and came up with a pretty decent list of sketches that were sure to not offend delicate corporate sensibilities.
When we got to the bank we showed our IDs at the front desk, got our visitor’s badges, and preceded to the auditorium green room to unload and warm-up. Tech went fairly smoothly although we realized it was going to be somewhat of a challenge to be heard, by both Mike in the tech booth and the audience as the entire theater was covered in carpet (I think the walls were even carpeted). We came up with a series of physical gestures (mostly involving pointing at Mike in the booth) to signal the end of a scene for the slow fade into the blackout.
The show overall was a hit with the sketch “Ron Mok, CPA” killing, natch. It features our own Ron Mok telling CPA stand-up jokes, in a room full of CPAs it of course brought the house down. Hilarious. There were a couple of jokes that had to be edited for content, one of which sadly, is my favorite joke in the sketch, “If I was a porn star my name would be Double Entry.” We closed the show with an improvised “Day in the Life” and got our host on stage to interview. We then re-played her wedding day complete with open fly sight gags, minister jokes, and psychedelic cocktails at the reception. It pretty much killed.
After the show we schmoozed with a group of Harris bank employees and stuffed our faces with Asian buffet. Turns out suits do know how to have a pretty good time after all.
When we got to the bank we showed our IDs at the front desk, got our visitor’s badges, and preceded to the auditorium green room to unload and warm-up. Tech went fairly smoothly although we realized it was going to be somewhat of a challenge to be heard, by both Mike in the tech booth and the audience as the entire theater was covered in carpet (I think the walls were even carpeted). We came up with a series of physical gestures (mostly involving pointing at Mike in the booth) to signal the end of a scene for the slow fade into the blackout.
The show overall was a hit with the sketch “Ron Mok, CPA” killing, natch. It features our own Ron Mok telling CPA stand-up jokes, in a room full of CPAs it of course brought the house down. Hilarious. There were a couple of jokes that had to be edited for content, one of which sadly, is my favorite joke in the sketch, “If I was a porn star my name would be Double Entry.” We closed the show with an improvised “Day in the Life” and got our host on stage to interview. We then re-played her wedding day complete with open fly sight gags, minister jokes, and psychedelic cocktails at the reception. It pretty much killed.
After the show we schmoozed with a group of Harris bank employees and stuffed our faces with Asian buffet. Turns out suits do know how to have a pretty good time after all.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Ain't No Party Like a Raw Meat Party...
Last Sunday SFN! finally had our cast party for our last review, Buddha Call. We convened on Solga, a Korean restaurant in the north west part of Chicago that has some of the most kick-ass Korean BBQ I’ve ever had. For those of you who’ve never had Korean BBQ let me explain. You sit at a table with a fire pit in the center with a grate on the top. The servers then bring you a heaping plate of raw, marinated beef and some metal tongs. You then pile the bloody, raw, wonderful meat on the grate over the fire in the middle of your table and cook it. Yes, YOU cook it. I don’t know but there’s something primeval and wonderfully satisfying about this style of eating, everyone sitting around a communal fire pit while you turn the animal flesh over and over with a metal “spear” until it’s sort of safe for consumption. I pity the vegetarians (there were two of them).
Another fun part about Korean BBQ is the bits of meat that escape and find themselves either stuck in the holes of the grill or fallen to their death in the fire below. This usually results in smoke. Lots of it. So much so in fact that it ends up partially choking the rest of the diners. This happened a couple of times when Ranjit and Ron failed to attend to their meat like good homo sapiens. The servers also bring out little dishes of things like kimchee, and other indistinguishable delicious food that you just put in your mouth and don’t ask too many questions. It’s the culinary version of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
We ate, laughed, talked, and drank soju, a Korean alcohol that’s a cross between vodka, saki, and rubbing alcohol that comes in several wonderfully fruity flavors. The "regular" kind of soju tastes like rubbing alcohol. Needless to say it’s pretty fucking great and it get’s your shit fucked up real good. Just ask Andy Lee.Towards the end of the evening we presented Mary Scruggs, the head of the writing program at Second City who directed our last review, Buddha Call, with a framed poster of the show with all of our signatures. Since some cast members weren’t there Melissa forged their signatures for them…
...cause that’s how we roll y'all...
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Swarthmore College, PA!
Welcome to Illidelphia!
SFN! was recently invited to play a show at Swarthmore College in beautiful Swarthmore, PA and with the help of Neal’s lady, Bizzy (who actually made this whole thing happen) we were off to attempt to make some Swatties (sp?) laugh. Also since Neal is an alumnus of Swarthmore it’s safe to say we were all pretty jazzed.
We leave from O’Hare in the early afternoon and arrive at the Philly International Airport only to immediately get lost looking for out baggage claim. Embarrassing, as we just came from one of the biggest and busiest airports in the world.
By the time we find our luggage it’s been taken off to the side and stowed with the unclaimed live animals. We collect our luggage and stuff as much as possible into the car Bizzy “borrowed” to help us out. This seems to be a trend in Swarthmore, borrowing cars, and it happens more than once and none of us ask any questions. Since we can’t all fit into the car some of us take a cab which precedes to be the most frightening cab ride of my life. Being experienced with terrible drivers (one of my first boyfriends wrecked three cars – one driven off the side of a mountain in NC – in the year and a half we were together) I kept my head down and didn’t look out the window; which BTW had the child lock on. I mean, thank God. When we get to Swarthmore we’re greeted by rolling green hills, blooming flowers, 70 degree weather, and a kindly old man walking his dog who greets us with a warm, “Welcome to Swarthmore!”. We wonder if we’ve been transported to a spring wonderland of sorts.
The B&B we’re staying in is straight out of Ann of Green Gables and looks like your grandparents house if your grandparents were wealthy and had old person “style”. We collectively cream our pants. There are only 4 beds and 5 of us so someone has to bunk up. I quickly succeed in claiming a single as I have a cold and say I don’t want to snot on anyone. Harrison decides Freddie, affectionately called “The Nube” (as in newbie, or newest member of SFN!) by no one except Harrison, has to shack up with him in the double bed in our room. This is followed by a discussion of sexual positions and acts Harrison will be trying out on Freddie throughout the night and how as “The Nube” he has to take it. I kindly ask them to keep it down as I have a cold and need my sleep.
Bizzy takes us to the caf, we marvel at the “free” food (thanks Asian American student organization who lets us bum off their caf swipe cards), and stuff our faces.
Neal relates a story of a week he spent while in school here that he ate nothing but Coco Puffs to fulfill a childhood dream. Also, Neal is a campus celebrity and is bombarded by several people while there. We load in to the theater, do a sound check, cue to cue, etc. Steve and I think of a sketch while sitting in the theater that involves a man serenading a woman in an auditorium with “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey only to find out in the end that she is deaf. We wonder if Swarthmore would be offended.
The show starts and it turns out Swarthmore is the best audience we’ve ever had. So good in fact we begin to doubt our abilities and wonder if they are all just high on pot. Then we start to wonder if they just love Neal as he is a campus celebrity. We then decide no, that we actually are comedic geniuses. Freddy does the sketch “Sonny” to roaring laughter. We decide although he is funny, he has won the audience over with his amazing teeth. Click here to see what I’m talking about. I do the show outro and mention the web site, blog, MySpace page and then forget to thank Swarthmore and Bizzy for bringing us there. We’ll see if I do anymore outros in the future. We then do an improv set and call down Neal’s friend from Vertigogo, Toby, to play with us. He is hesitant to come down as I’m sure he’s intimidated by our brilliance… or possibly embarrassed to be seen with us. We decide it’s the former. Neal does a scene with Steve and Freddie where he comes out as straight although his best friends think he’s gay. At that moment art imitates life. We play Debate and I confuse “adjective” with “adverb”. It becomes obvious at that moment that I did not go to Swarthmore. Steve guesses the first word immediately and makes us look like we’re cheating. It then takes him a very long time to guess the rest, which assures the audience we’re not cheating. After the show we do sort of a casual meet and greet and just talk to all the people still hanging around who are nothing but nice to us, overall we feel really good about the show; like old bastards around all the youthful college kids, but good.
We then go to a late dinner at a local brewery (yum) and commence with the post-mortem (basically a show run-down, what worked, what didn’t, etc.). Steve tries to convince Harrison that his missed cue in the opening sketch was a well-thought out character choice but has bullshit called on him. When we get back to the B&B there are fresh baked cookies waiting for us in our rooms. WTF? Steve shows us a clip from “30 Rock” on YouTube that he finds particularly funny but it turns out Neal’s impression of Tracey Morgan is funnier than Tracey Morgan himself. A somewhat brief conversation about women’s pubic hair follows the “30 Rock” let-down as Harrison and I discuss the pros and cons of “The Brazilian”, “The Landing Strip”, and “The Tasteful Triangle”. This then dissolves into a conversation about anal sex as we all drift off to sleep.
After a kick-ass breakfast at the B&B (they have a Lazy Susan!) we decide to go into Philly to go to the Mutter Museum.
A short train ride and $12 later we are face to face with conjoined twins, deformed skeletons, and grotesque skin lesions. The Mutter Museum houses models of some of the worlds rarest, grossest, and weirdest human deformities and psychical abnormalities. I highly recommend it. After working up an appetite at the grossest museum on earth we get cheese steaks and then head to the airport. Overall we decide this has been one of the best times on the road we’ve had, awesome weather, a kick-ass audience (thanks for making us feel at home guys), wonderful hosts (thanks again Bizzy), medical oddities, and cheese steaks.
Much love Swarthmore, hope to see you next year!
SFN! was recently invited to play a show at Swarthmore College in beautiful Swarthmore, PA and with the help of Neal’s lady, Bizzy (who actually made this whole thing happen) we were off to attempt to make some Swatties (sp?) laugh. Also since Neal is an alumnus of Swarthmore it’s safe to say we were all pretty jazzed.
We leave from O’Hare in the early afternoon and arrive at the Philly International Airport only to immediately get lost looking for out baggage claim. Embarrassing, as we just came from one of the biggest and busiest airports in the world.
By the time we find our luggage it’s been taken off to the side and stowed with the unclaimed live animals. We collect our luggage and stuff as much as possible into the car Bizzy “borrowed” to help us out. This seems to be a trend in Swarthmore, borrowing cars, and it happens more than once and none of us ask any questions. Since we can’t all fit into the car some of us take a cab which precedes to be the most frightening cab ride of my life. Being experienced with terrible drivers (one of my first boyfriends wrecked three cars – one driven off the side of a mountain in NC – in the year and a half we were together) I kept my head down and didn’t look out the window; which BTW had the child lock on. I mean, thank God. When we get to Swarthmore we’re greeted by rolling green hills, blooming flowers, 70 degree weather, and a kindly old man walking his dog who greets us with a warm, “Welcome to Swarthmore!”. We wonder if we’ve been transported to a spring wonderland of sorts.
The B&B we’re staying in is straight out of Ann of Green Gables and looks like your grandparents house if your grandparents were wealthy and had old person “style”. We collectively cream our pants. There are only 4 beds and 5 of us so someone has to bunk up. I quickly succeed in claiming a single as I have a cold and say I don’t want to snot on anyone. Harrison decides Freddie, affectionately called “The Nube” (as in newbie, or newest member of SFN!) by no one except Harrison, has to shack up with him in the double bed in our room. This is followed by a discussion of sexual positions and acts Harrison will be trying out on Freddie throughout the night and how as “The Nube” he has to take it. I kindly ask them to keep it down as I have a cold and need my sleep.
Bizzy takes us to the caf, we marvel at the “free” food (thanks Asian American student organization who lets us bum off their caf swipe cards), and stuff our faces.
Neal relates a story of a week he spent while in school here that he ate nothing but Coco Puffs to fulfill a childhood dream. Also, Neal is a campus celebrity and is bombarded by several people while there. We load in to the theater, do a sound check, cue to cue, etc. Steve and I think of a sketch while sitting in the theater that involves a man serenading a woman in an auditorium with “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey only to find out in the end that she is deaf. We wonder if Swarthmore would be offended.
The show starts and it turns out Swarthmore is the best audience we’ve ever had. So good in fact we begin to doubt our abilities and wonder if they are all just high on pot. Then we start to wonder if they just love Neal as he is a campus celebrity. We then decide no, that we actually are comedic geniuses. Freddy does the sketch “Sonny” to roaring laughter. We decide although he is funny, he has won the audience over with his amazing teeth. Click here to see what I’m talking about. I do the show outro and mention the web site, blog, MySpace page and then forget to thank Swarthmore and Bizzy for bringing us there. We’ll see if I do anymore outros in the future. We then do an improv set and call down Neal’s friend from Vertigogo, Toby, to play with us. He is hesitant to come down as I’m sure he’s intimidated by our brilliance… or possibly embarrassed to be seen with us. We decide it’s the former. Neal does a scene with Steve and Freddie where he comes out as straight although his best friends think he’s gay. At that moment art imitates life. We play Debate and I confuse “adjective” with “adverb”. It becomes obvious at that moment that I did not go to Swarthmore. Steve guesses the first word immediately and makes us look like we’re cheating. It then takes him a very long time to guess the rest, which assures the audience we’re not cheating. After the show we do sort of a casual meet and greet and just talk to all the people still hanging around who are nothing but nice to us, overall we feel really good about the show; like old bastards around all the youthful college kids, but good.
We then go to a late dinner at a local brewery (yum) and commence with the post-mortem (basically a show run-down, what worked, what didn’t, etc.). Steve tries to convince Harrison that his missed cue in the opening sketch was a well-thought out character choice but has bullshit called on him. When we get back to the B&B there are fresh baked cookies waiting for us in our rooms. WTF? Steve shows us a clip from “30 Rock” on YouTube that he finds particularly funny but it turns out Neal’s impression of Tracey Morgan is funnier than Tracey Morgan himself. A somewhat brief conversation about women’s pubic hair follows the “30 Rock” let-down as Harrison and I discuss the pros and cons of “The Brazilian”, “The Landing Strip”, and “The Tasteful Triangle”. This then dissolves into a conversation about anal sex as we all drift off to sleep.
After a kick-ass breakfast at the B&B (they have a Lazy Susan!) we decide to go into Philly to go to the Mutter Museum.
A short train ride and $12 later we are face to face with conjoined twins, deformed skeletons, and grotesque skin lesions. The Mutter Museum houses models of some of the worlds rarest, grossest, and weirdest human deformities and psychical abnormalities. I highly recommend it. After working up an appetite at the grossest museum on earth we get cheese steaks and then head to the airport. Overall we decide this has been one of the best times on the road we’ve had, awesome weather, a kick-ass audience (thanks for making us feel at home guys), wonderful hosts (thanks again Bizzy), medical oddities, and cheese steaks.Much love Swarthmore, hope to see you next year!
Monday, April 7, 2008
I'm Talkin' About the Road
That's right...The Road. That's what I'm talking about. The dirty, sometimes shitty, usually interesting, always surprising Road. Being on it's pretty great I have to admit. It has it's ups and downs but honestly to me there's no better job in the world than traveling around like a bunch of minstrals making people laugh. Sooo speaking of people, that's where you come in; we've decided after being around for 13 or so years to let you in on the action, the insanity, the pain, the bar hopping in the middle of nowhere, and the all around awesomeness of being in a touring sketch comedy group. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the Indian food that you ate on the way to a show in some backwater town off I-94 that's now causing you an anal holocaust.
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