I went to a party
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Tuesday Spectacular on Radio & on M Bar
There is no Spectacular at the Ramada tonight!
But tune in to KXLU 88.9 Tuesday morning at 10 AM to hear the Spectacular guys on the radio!
Then Tuesday night, Spectacular on Ice! will be hosting Comedy Death-Ray at the M Bar!
I'm serious!
http://www.theprettyokayho-humspectacularonice.com
Friday, February 11, 2005
But tune in to KXLU 88.9 Tuesday morning at 10 AM to hear the Spectacular guys on the radio!
Then Tuesday night, Spectacular on Ice! will be hosting Comedy Death-Ray at the M Bar!
I'm serious!
http://www.theprettyokayho-humspectacularonice.com
Spectacular SUNDAY and THURSDAY
Come see DeMorge Brown, Michael Busch, & David I. Johnson in Channel R - The Ramada Television Network! this Sunday!
And don't forget to see ol' Josh Fadem, Chad Fogland, Danforth France, & Pat Healy this Thursday at the Comedy Central Stage! Make reservations!
Friday, January 28, 2005
And don't forget to see ol' Josh Fadem, Chad Fogland, Danforth France, & Pat Healy this Thursday at the Comedy Central Stage! Make reservations!
Spectacular on Ice! starring a cube
A Classy Spectacular
Spectacular on Ice! One of These Men Will Die!
Gather near to us once more, then split
I'm crooked, first of all. From sleeping on my parent's couch, which proved to be too short, I am crooked in the back this morning. 7 AM is a terrible time to be up on one's vacation, but then again, I expect these kinds of irritations when it's me doing the vacationing. I don't do relaxing well.
As I'm "taking it easy" and "chilling out", my mind is racing and panicking and dying with anxiety and worry that I should be doing something, working on something. And I should. I have missed deadlines for certain projects, but I'm trapped with the family these days and it's holiday mode. I couldn't really work if I wanted to.
Enough esoteric blather. What did I get for X-Mas? DVDs. And a good healthy duration of them, too. Return of the King Special Edition, a season of Star Trek, two Red Dwarfs, and then I've already spent my Blockbuster giftcard picking up Blazing Saddles. I also got a Starbucks giftcard worth an obscene amount of money. Spending it over the next few weeks will be a joy.
X-Mas this year felt like a waiting room. Like everyone was gathering around and chitchatting and then we would go to the real X-Mas, which had to have been somewhere else. But no, after hours of waiting -- it was just plain done. So I went to movies to kill another giftcard on seeing The Life Aquatic. By myself.
This is by no means picking on them (they have been known to read this blog), but Mom & Dad don't have very sophisticated senses of humor. What I mean by this is one of their chief responses to something funny or absurd is a weary "yeah, right". If my dad makes a joke in front of my mom, she'll say it. If something intentionally implausible happens on TV, Dad says it. Maybe no one else notices it or maybe it's not a big deal, but as a comedian it bothers me. Surely every one outside of Los Angeles has heard the ol' improv golden rule? "Yes and..." If you had my mother or father with you in an improv, it would go like this.
YOU: Come on, Daryl! We've got to make this special X-Mas pizza for the boss or we'll get fired and the boss is gonna be here any minute!
DAD: I'm not going to improv with you.
Someone gave my dad one of those Worst-Case Scenario books, where it instructs you how to get out of unbelievable jams like quicksand or how to land a commercial airliner if you had to. As the family sat around watching some holiday faire on TV, Dad, paging through his book, would read out just the headlines of entries in a voice usually reserved for the phrase "give me a break": "How to Stop a Runaway Camel" and "How to Survive a Hostage Situation". Now that I think about it, I should have had him read that part out. I would have escaped out to the movies a lot earlier.
In the France household, these things get talked about and nothing else: the Chargers, the Padres, sports radio, that funny commercial on TV, weather, weather in other parts of the country, batteries, that family inside joke that no one has stopped using since two X-Mases ago, directions, and cruises. The last one being the most egregious. There's is no conversation you could have over at the France house that couldn't instantly and inexplicably turn to a factoid about a cruise ship. There's no debate, no discourse so engrossing that it won't be suddenly derailed into a reminiscence about past cruises some family member has been on. Cruises are talked about as if cruise ships were the heaven-bound vessels captained by God himself. (Based on the number of old people on the one cruise I was cajoled onto, I thought the ship may be making its way across the Styx, and that I had died along with all these old-timers somehow.)
X-Mas Eve I sat in my grandma's back yard and smoked. It was cold and clear. The night sky was not black, but a deep and twinkling blue. In LA, the skies are clay colored and the stars there are on the ground. But on a chilly night over Lake San Marcos the stars hung in space and shined like... well, stars. And for maybe the first time in my life, I could see a good deal of stars low against the horizon, not just in the great canopy of night overhead but along side just over the trees. Stars arranged at different distances off to the side, winking. The planet Earth seemed very small.
As I'm "taking it easy" and "chilling out", my mind is racing and panicking and dying with anxiety and worry that I should be doing something, working on something. And I should. I have missed deadlines for certain projects, but I'm trapped with the family these days and it's holiday mode. I couldn't really work if I wanted to.
Enough esoteric blather. What did I get for X-Mas? DVDs. And a good healthy duration of them, too. Return of the King Special Edition, a season of Star Trek, two Red Dwarfs, and then I've already spent my Blockbuster giftcard picking up Blazing Saddles. I also got a Starbucks giftcard worth an obscene amount of money. Spending it over the next few weeks will be a joy.
X-Mas this year felt like a waiting room. Like everyone was gathering around and chitchatting and then we would go to the real X-Mas, which had to have been somewhere else. But no, after hours of waiting -- it was just plain done. So I went to movies to kill another giftcard on seeing The Life Aquatic. By myself.
This is by no means picking on them (they have been known to read this blog), but Mom & Dad don't have very sophisticated senses of humor. What I mean by this is one of their chief responses to something funny or absurd is a weary "yeah, right". If my dad makes a joke in front of my mom, she'll say it. If something intentionally implausible happens on TV, Dad says it. Maybe no one else notices it or maybe it's not a big deal, but as a comedian it bothers me. Surely every one outside of Los Angeles has heard the ol' improv golden rule? "Yes and..." If you had my mother or father with you in an improv, it would go like this.
YOU: Come on, Daryl! We've got to make this special X-Mas pizza for the boss or we'll get fired and the boss is gonna be here any minute!
DAD: I'm not going to improv with you.
Someone gave my dad one of those Worst-Case Scenario books, where it instructs you how to get out of unbelievable jams like quicksand or how to land a commercial airliner if you had to. As the family sat around watching some holiday faire on TV, Dad, paging through his book, would read out just the headlines of entries in a voice usually reserved for the phrase "give me a break": "How to Stop a Runaway Camel" and "How to Survive a Hostage Situation". Now that I think about it, I should have had him read that part out. I would have escaped out to the movies a lot earlier.
In the France household, these things get talked about and nothing else: the Chargers, the Padres, sports radio, that funny commercial on TV, weather, weather in other parts of the country, batteries, that family inside joke that no one has stopped using since two X-Mases ago, directions, and cruises. The last one being the most egregious. There's is no conversation you could have over at the France house that couldn't instantly and inexplicably turn to a factoid about a cruise ship. There's no debate, no discourse so engrossing that it won't be suddenly derailed into a reminiscence about past cruises some family member has been on. Cruises are talked about as if cruise ships were the heaven-bound vessels captained by God himself. (Based on the number of old people on the one cruise I was cajoled onto, I thought the ship may be making its way across the Styx, and that I had died along with all these old-timers somehow.)
X-Mas Eve I sat in my grandma's back yard and smoked. It was cold and clear. The night sky was not black, but a deep and twinkling blue. In LA, the skies are clay colored and the stars there are on the ground. But on a chilly night over Lake San Marcos the stars hung in space and shined like... well, stars. And for maybe the first time in my life, I could see a good deal of stars low against the horizon, not just in the great canopy of night overhead but along side just over the trees. Stars arranged at different distances off to the side, winking. The planet Earth seemed very small.
