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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
I’ve decided that I might enjoy writing some sketch comedy.
I mean, look — you’ve seen me blog. And you’ve caught my standup act. Surely to god I can be good at something.
So I signed up to take a sketch writing class. Or tried to, but they were full. Or they’ve also seen my blogging, or standupping, and decided I wasn’t for them. Perhaps they’ll suggest that I take a mime class, or go to clown college, or make people laugh via interpretive dance.
(I’ve made people laugh with every other kind of dancing I’ve done. So I suppose it follows, logically. But no, thanks.)
While the ‘sketchy folks’ insist — for now — that they’ll have room in their next class in a couple of months, I thought it might be good to peruse the local sketch scene. Observe the natives. Feel the pulse. That sort of thing. So I decided to take in a show at a local improv ‘n’ sketch outfit to see what was sketchily what.
Of course, for a show I needed my wife. Who shows up alone at any sort of comedy show the first time?
(Loners and sociopaths and people who want to be openly mocked by the performers onstage, that’s who. And I’m only a little bit of one, diametrically opposed to another and a little too old for the third by now.
I’ll let you decide which order I meant those in. There’s no combination that’s that far from the truth, really.)
So I asked the missus if she’d be willing to join me for a comedy show. She looked at me sidelong, quite appropriately wary, given the parade of dive bars and shitholes I dragged her to during my amateur standup days. With some trepidation, she asked:
‘Maybe… What kind of comedy show, exactly?‘
“This was a real established honest-to-god comedy venue, with shows five nights a week and reviews in papers that still exist offline, so you know they were pretty big and well-respected once, even if their kind is dying out like a bunch of pygmy African castrated elephants.”
Again, perfectly reasonable. Through the course of our comedic travels — which is to say, thanks to me — she’s seen shirtless middle-aged guys screaming at the audience, heard songs with lyrics concerning numerous disgusting bodily functions, witnessed several drunken and profanity-laced frustrated rants onstage, and been party to the most embarrassing bouts of stage fright and ‘first-timer-itis’ you can possibly imagine.
(Also, there were other comics besides me in those shows. So they probably did some nasty stuff, too.)
But this time, I figured I was in the clear. I wasn’t asking her to watch me do a seven-minute set at an open mic at a Greyhound station, or suggesting we watch an open mic at the local Burger King or Stop ‘n’ Shop or AA meeting. This was a real established honest-to-god comedy venue, with shows five nights a week and reviews in papers that still exist offline, so you know they were pretty big and well-respected once, even if their kind is dying out like a bunch of pygmy African castrated elephants.
Also, I wasn’t going to be performing, so how bad could it be? This one was in the bag, once I explained what it was. So I did:
‘It’s a little different show — it’s sketch comedy.‘
Easy, no? That’s all I had to say. Not standup, not improv — sketch. See?
Evidently, no. ‘What’s sketch comedy?‘
Hrm. Well, I wasn’t expecting that question, really. I mean, sketch is… ‘sketch‘. I paused, and thought about how best to explain it. Should I point to the popular and long-running popular examples, like Saturday Night live or MadTV? Or talk about the setup of premise and dialogue, of establishing a scene and working through the gag? Should I contrast it with improv? Touch on Second City, or The State? What angle should I take?
While I worked to collect my thoughts, an idea occurred to her and she blurted out:
‘Ooh! Is it like the Carol Burnett Show?‘
Well… yeah, actually, but… wait, did she say Carol Burnett? Of all the examples… the shows on TV… Carol Burnett?
I cocked my head at her. ‘No, but seriously — how OLD are you, anyway?‘
For the record, she’s younger than I am.
(So’s Methuselah, as far as I know. I’m just saying — I’ve got no room to talk about age here.)
But why the Carol Burnett Show — a program that hasn’t even been in reruns for fifteen years on cable — sprung into her head as the most salient example of sketch comedy, I have no idea. I mean, I hear that Milton Berle’s doing some real cutting-edge stuff in drag and the Smothers Brothers — whoo-eee, those guys are fresh.
So we — by which I mean I — had a good laugh over her notion of ‘sketch comedy’, and then went to watch a bunch of people who weren’t actually born yet when the Carol Burnett show was on the air perform their version of the craft. And I — by which I mean we — were highly entertained. Even if Vicki Lawrence, Harvey Korman and Tim Conway were, sadly, conspicuously absent.
(And in one case, rather conspicuously dead. Which would make it more difficult to perform sketch comedy, obviously.
Though not impossible. I’ve seen Jimmy Fallon do it.)
So maybe I’ll be doing some sketch comedy in a few months — or at least going to more shows, now that we know the venue. And maybe I’ll let my wife live down that her closest tie to the genre is just a scant two or three decades out of print.
But don’t count on it. I haven’t had that class yet, but I know the first rule of sketch: never let go of a running gag.
Tug your ear and exit stage left, hon. We’re out of time for this week.
Permalink | 2 CommentsI thought I had all my tough problems in life whittled down to avoiding the ‘Big Five’.
(The Big Five is what I collectively call the handful of deterrents of any real significance to me any more. I figured if I just managed to keep myself from getting fired, divorced, arrested, injured or dead, everything else would pretty much work itself out.)
I was wrong. I forgot about bag lunches.
“Anything I prepare should be two-bagged, at least, to hide its shame from polite society, deep-fried in a desperate attempt to salvage some hint of flavor, and only eaten in the dark. Or preferably, not at all.”
Actually, I nearly completely forgot about bag lunches. It’s been twenty years since I packed myself a homemade lunch. It’s not that I’m ‘too good’ for a brown sack meal. I’m just awful at making food. Anything I prepare should be two-bagged, at least, to hide its shame from polite society, deep-fried in a desperate attempt to salvage some hint of flavor, and only eaten in the dark. Or preferably, not at all.
And why would I do that to myself at lunchtime? Eating lunch in the office isn’t depressing enough without poisoning myself, to boot? Why don’t I just slam my arm in a car door and call it dessert?
So, I don’t do bag lunches. I’ll eat at a food court, or off a food truck, or from the food floor before I subject myself to my own brown-bagged culinary misdeeds. Most of the bag lunches I’ve ever had were made by my mom, back when I was in grade school — right before I graduated to my SpiderMan lunchbox. And that’s how I planned to keep it.
However.
Today I attended an event. It’s not important what sort of event — you fill in whatever you want it to have been. A party, a class, an intervention, a kidnapping, an orgy, court-appointed community service — hell, make it a combination of all of those, if you like. And you can figure out what the hell that would look like. Choose your own adventure, kids. Imagination is fun.
The important thing is that this event lasted most of the morning today, and into the afternoon. And the instructions — or invitation or syllabus or label on the fuzzy handcuffs, whichever you like — plainly said:
‘Bring a bag lunch.‘
Damn. There goes another streak out the window. This is “never licked a flagpole in winter” all over again.
More important, I soon realized, is that it’s been so long, I don’t really know how to pack a bag lunch. Not for an adult, anyway. The last bag lunches I can remember, from way back in the Cenezoic Era, were when I was eight or ten years old. I mean, back then I was eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with my sippy cup milk and blister packs of banana pudding. I had to think hard about how to translate that into something that a mature adult in big-boy pants might eat — especially in front of a group of gathered strangers / fellow students / hookers / concerned friends / desperate felons.
I mean, I had to think really hard.
Really, really hard.
Really.
…
So there I am this morning, making my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pouring milk into my sippy cup and wondering whether anyone even makes banana pudding any more. Or whether I should go without dessert — or pack a beer instead.
I went with just a plain old banana. From what I remembered, I used to drop those damned bag lunches fourteen times before second period. So the banana would basically be pudding, by the time I got around to eating it.
Of course, the cliche third grader Smuckers ‘n’ Jif fare would have been bad enough — if only I’d stopped there. But Mom’s bag lunches always came with a little note stuffed inside. I just thought that was part of the deal. And my wife was already up and out of the house. So I wrote my own note. To myself. In my brown bag lunch.
Only, I didn’t know what to write. Mom’s little notes were always fun to find, with her sweet words of encouragement, like:
‘You can do it, my special little man!‘ or
‘Go get ’em, kiddo!‘ or
‘If you half-ass another Social Studies test, mister, then so help me god don’t even bother coming home.‘
(It’s possible Dad snuck the occasional message in the bag on his way to work. Either that, or Mom’s PMS was way more of a problem than I remember.)
None of that really seemed to fit my situation today, but I still wanted to send lunchtime-me a little pick-me-up, in case I needed a verbal pat on the back. And a lot could happen in those next few morning hours. Quite a lot. Could be a real circus, depending on what wacky trip you people sent me on up there. So I offered myself the most helpful catch-all I could think of:
‘Hope you’ve still got clean underpants!‘
It seemed fitting. And it was the least I could do, after bagging a lunch built for a nine-year-old.
Though I have to admit — the sandwiches were delicious. And as far as I could tell, I did still have clean underpants at lunchtime. That note was pretty helpful, after all.
Maybe I should rethink this whole bag lunch strategy. Next time I have a Saturday seminar / day trip / stakeout / golf outing / hostage situation, I am totally whipping up the PB & Js. Thanks, me-Mom!
Permalink | No CommentsThere’s a certain feeling that washes over the office as the weekend nears. A notion that while there might be another piddling thing or two you could accomplish, the saner thing to do is to wrap things up, call it a week and hit the keyboard fresh on Monday. For me, this feeling starts nagging in my ear around four o’clock.
(On Tuesdays. But that’s not important right now.)
I can fight it, for a while. The precise amount of willpower I can muster depends on a number of factors — the relative level of agony the next bit of work would entail, the weather I’d have to slog through to sneak home, whether there’s free beer on our office floor for a group happy hour.
(Or free beer on the next floor, at someone else’s happy hour. Or in the hospital next door, where I could probably blend in if I lifted a stethoscope or a spare rectal thermometer or something. Or maybe there’s a bottle of Thunderbird in the janitor’s closet.
Hey, it’s called ‘Happy Hour’. Not ‘Proud-of-Myself Hour‘. No judging.)
However diligent or desperate I feel at the beginning of the week, by the end there’s a little devil on my shoulder nudging me to get lost for a couple of days. Seeing as how he’s usually in his pajama slippers and sipping martinis, he makes a compelling case.
“The week has beaten me already like a surly kangaroo with brass toe knuckles. All I want is a beer, a couch, a sandwich and fifty-six hours of peace before going back to being a corporate kicking bag.”
That’s when the bargaining begins, where week-weary me haggles with post-weekend me, who’ll have to pick up the crumbling pieces of whatever mess I abandon on my dash out the door. Sadly for future me, he’s arguing in absentia, which is no way to win a court case. Or to avoid a mountain of half-finished work being dumped in your lap. So I make deals — with myself — where no one gets hurt — except myself, on Monday morning — and no one’s to blame — except myself, on Friday afternoon, but I’m also the judge in this case, so, you know — I’ll allow it.
And so, I wind up having ‘conversations’ like this:
‘Ah, I’ll just post myself a little note to take care of this. That can wait a couple of days.‘
‘Hey, if I stick a **GOT TO HERE** sign in the middle of this spreadsheet, I don’t have to finish looking at it now. I can totally pick up where I left off.‘
‘Everyone who doesn’t want me to shove these reports in a drawer and go home and watch 30 Rock reruns, raise your hand… … no one? … last chance… All right, sayonara!‘
For Friday-me — which is to say, me at this very moment — this is a wonderful little trick. The week has beaten me already like a surly kangaroo with brass toe knuckles. All I want is a beer, a couch, a sandwich and fifty-six hours of peace before going back to being a corporate kicking bag. It makes perfect sense to file my unfinished business away and write impossibly cryptic notes to ‘explain’ to future-self what it is I’m pawning off on me, like:
‘175 – uber complex / – should be T; stat for Gary!!‘
(That’s verbatim off a Post-It from three weeks ago I found today on my desk. I have no freaking clue what the hell that means. I don’t even know a Gary, for crissakes.
If someone said that to me on the street, I’d go long and expect to catch a pass over the middle. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that three-weeks-ago-Friday-me is just screwing with me. But even I’m not that evil.
Or was I?)
This week, I decided to try something different. When I just couldn’t take any more, and found myself — as usual — surrounded by half-finished projects and partial reports and Post-Its that might as well have been written in Swahili, I finally did the right thing. The rational thing. A new thing.
I grabbed it all, folded it up in as neat a wad as possible — and shoved it down the shredder. No muss, no fuss, and no ‘unfinished business’ hanging over my head all weekend. The bliss, she is beautiful. As is the happy weekend confetti I made, and tossed giddily around the office.
Sure sucks for Monday-me, though. Some of that shit was probably important. Hope the guy has the good sense to bring a magnifying glass and Scotch tape to work. Lots of Scotch tape. Sucker.
Permalink | 2 CommentsI tend to work late at the office most weeknights. Partly because there’s an awful lot to get done — that desk isn’t going to crawl into a fetal position and cry under itself all day, after all — but mostly because that’s when most people have gone home. That means nobody calling every ten minutes to harass me, or knocking on the door to serve written warnings, or yanking me out of my chair to escort me summarily out of the building. How am I supposed to get anything done between all the screaming and the fist-shaking and the ‘clean out your desk; you’re finished in this town’-ing?
All those yahoos go home at five o’clock, after a full day of flak and haranguing. So most of my real work winds up getting done after ‘normal’ business hours, when things have quieted down and the flak has settled like a fine silvery dust over the room.
Hanging out late at the office has its perks, sure. I can play music if I want, or take off my shoes.
(Not the pants, though — it tends to spook the maintenance staff. Found that out the hard way one night, and we lost an industrial floor waxer out an eighth-floor window. That was a tough one to explain the next day.
On the bright side, the parking space below the window has never looked cleaner. You try parking on it, and you sliiiiiide right through to the next one. But it shines like a diamond at high noon. Very pretty.)
Of course, there are downsides, too. Most of the negatives have to do with the company’s cost-conscious ways. They’re always looking to save a buck here and there, so the building’s amenities become a bit less, shall we say, amenable, once the overtime clock begins.
“I’m generally moving around — running, writhing, panicking, dry heaving, all the usual work stuff — so the lights stay lit. That’s not the problem.”
I can roll with most of these. I tend to like it a little cold, so when they turn the heat down at five, it doesn’t much bother me. It can be a little hard to type during the winter months, what with the shivering fingers and my breath fogging up the monitor, but I get by.
The bigger issue is the lighting situation. I’ve already mentioned the office’s move to motion-sensor light panels.
(And the sneaky ability to turn them off entirely, to prey on the psyches of unwitting rubes like me who naively expect motion sensors to sense effing motion already.)
Those sensors appear to also be programmed with some sort of power-saving mode, because after about six pm, they snap off with the slightest pause in movement. Lose yourself in thought for a second or freeze when you think someone’s coming down the hall and you might have to put your pants back on, and *bam* — lights out. You’re in the dark.
(I just hope the company’s getting a good interest rate on all the photons they’re saving. Maybe we’ll get our own spotlights some day. Or fancy high-candle-power disco balls for the conference rooms. Or they’re saving them up for a weapons-grade laser, to fry anyone who tries to escape.
Yeah. It’s probably the laser.)
It’s not the office or the hallways where the lights are a problem. I’m generally moving around — running, writhing, panicking, dry heaving, all the usual work stuff — so the lights stay lit. That’s not the problem.
The problem is the bathroom.
See, I’ve found that the motion sensor in the bathroom doesn’t ‘see’ down into the toilet stall at the end of the row. And that’s the one with all the legroom — and the mini fridge and the pool table and the high-candle-power disco ball over the dance floor — so that’s the one I seek out, when it’s available. Those little cramped johns are for suckers and temp workers. I’m looking for the wide open spaces to do my business. Oooooo-klahoma. That’s what I’m talking about.
During the day, this strategy works just fine. But after the lights switch to “midnight mode”, taking a seat on the favored throne becomes somewhat more dicey. I was in there just last week, minding my own bathroom business, when suddenly I found myself engulfed in darkness. No warning. Just the (st)inky blackness of a lonely corporate washroom.
I leaned up as far as I could and waved my hand over my head. Nothing. From my seated position, I couldn’t get tall enough to trigger the motion sensor. And now I had issues. Big issues.
At any moment, someone could walk in. There are a few other late-stayers — plus the already skittish night staff — and any (male) one of them could waltz through the door, see the lights come on, and then notice the shoes resting conspicuously in the last stall. Am I okay? Am I a dead guy? Did somebody abandon their loafers in a mad dash out of the crapper? That person wouldn’t know. So they’d have to ask. And “conversation” is on my personal Top Ten List of things to avoid when sitting on the john.
(No, really, it is. Take a look:
Charlie’s Personal Top Ten List of Things to Avoid When Sitting on the John:
10. Hiccups.
9. Insects.
8. Conversation.
7. Spontaneously breaking into a Billy Joel song.
6. Overflows.
5. Sewer pipe gators.
4. Billy Joel.
3. Toilet paper emergency.
2. Prolapse.
1. Falling in.
See? Told you it was there.)
So I had two options — either sit in the dark, finish up, and feel my way through finding toilet paper, using it and redressing myself without the benefit of sight, or find some way to trigger the motion sensor. I went for the latter. There are some things I’m willing to do ‘by feel’, and some I’m not. This one is a definite not.
I tried throwing my keys in the air, up above the stall. That made an awful lot of noise — and I almost dropped them into the bowl between my legs, since I couldn’t see them coming down — but no lights came on. I figured my wallet was a little larger, so I tried it. Evidently my throw was off, and I heard it land with a soft *thwack* in the floor of the next stall. So much for easily identifying the body if I wind up dying here, I thought. Super.
My only option left was to stand, as gingerly as one can with one’s underpants hugging their ankles, and reach tippy-toed up to wave at the sensor. No dice — not tall enough. So I tippy-toed some more, without luck. In a few short seconds, I found myself hopping on one foot, stretching high to the ceiling and waving like a marooned sailor flagging down a luxury cruise liner. With trou, as mentioned, firmly dropped. Quite a tricky maneuver.
(I’d like to say at this point: ‘Don’t try this at home; I’m a trained professional.‘
Only I’m not. I’m just a doofus with a penny-pinching employer who sometimes has to poop in the dark. If there were an actual professional at pulling off this kind of stunt, I’d sure like to meet that guy.
But I am not going to shake his hand. Lord only knows where that thing has been.)
Eventually, I must have reached a sliver of a fingernail into the ‘sensor zone’, because the lights did, mercifully, return to working order. I took my seat again, hastily wrapped things up and put myself back together and got the hell out of the stall posthaste. It’s been almost a full week, and I haven’t dared go back. I’ve been using the skinny little sucker stalls, where you can barely breathe and you can practically wipe yourself using the roll mounted on the wall beside you. It’s savage in there.
So I’m brainstorming ways to get back to my stretch-out stall, without the potential horrors of bathroom conversation or doing the hopping pantsless-pokey to get the lights back on. After a bit of thought, I’ve come up with a plan.
I’ll take a flag with me into the bathroom after hours. There’s a U.S. flag on a pole in one of the conference rooms; I’ll just borrow it whenever I need to visit the little boy’s room in the evening. If I don’t need it, great. It’ll be there to remind me that people in some other countries don’t get to poop. Or they have their poops spread equally among the populace, or can’t vote for who’ll do their pooping, or something. I’m better at the poops than the politics.
(It’s all about the practice. Forty years in, and I don’t have a political party. But I’ve been a Repooplican for life.
Oh, that’s bad. You can edit that out, right? Before it goes live? Awesome.)
And if the lights go out, then I’ll simply raise Old Glory and wave her high and strong until they come back on. She’ll give proof, through the night, that… um, bombs are bursting, in a manner of speaking.
(Though hopefully not “in air”, or with a “rocket’s red glare”. Can that happen, even? Maybe I need to amend that Top Ten List.)
So, problem solved. The lights are no longer an issue, and I’m stalling in style again, thanks to some help from our grand old flag.
I bet Betsy Ross never saw that coming.
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