Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Long weekend

I took another trip to the Washington, D.C. area this past weekend, and went to see Jim Norton again. I went with a friend who's never seen Jim before, and isn't even very familiar with the Opie and Anthony show, where Jim Norton is a regular and of which I'm a huge fan. Jim's comedy show was at the State Theater in Falls Church, VA, and we certainly got off on the wrong foot.

We arrived at the theater a few minutes late due to mistiming trains on the Metro--the show was scheduled to start at 8 PM, and our cab from the Falls Church Metro station dropped us off at about 8:10. Fortunately, the show hadn't started and people were lined up outside. Unfortunately, that was because the show was badly oversold and the staff was telling people in the back half of the line that they'd have to come back to the just-added second show at 10:30--which of course did NOT make us happy. Eventually, they sang a different tune, and said that if we chose to stay for the originally scheduled show (for which I bought my tickets a week ahead of time), we'd have to take standing room, since we didn't have a table reserved. (Not that Ticketmaster gave me that option--though for $8 of "convenience fees", they should have given us dinner for free.)

Bottom line, we got into the show we wanted, got a good spot right in front of the sound mixer where we could see and hear everything perfectly and could lean on the partition in front of the sound pit if our feet got tired. And what a great show it was. The opener (whose name I've forgotten) was really funny, and Jimmy absolutely killed. I was a bit worried about going to another show so soon--figuring I've probably already seen it all once before. That was a groundless fear, as probably 60% or more was either new or freshly improvised material that wasn't in the show I saw in Baltimore. In fact, if I could have seen the Falls Church show at the Baltimore Improv venue, that would have been just about perfect--I think this show was even better than the (excellent) Baltimore show, in terms of content.

A special "F-you" to the bouncers who let people walk outside to smoke carrying bottles of water purchased inside, then won't let them back in with the same bottles.

3 comments:

  1. Those bouncers were assholes, who needed to slip in a puddle of AIDS

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  2. Chug the water. Nuff said.

    ReplyDelete