This past Thursday was my son’s 16th birthday, and while we celebrated as a family that night, we decided to throw him a surprise party with his friends Saturday at Barton Park here in Oregon. Specifically his mother, my wife, decided to throw the surprise. My job was to stay out of the way; she very organized and determined and when she has a project clamped between her teeth; it’s a lot like that great line from the film Shawshank Redemption “Get busy living, or get busy dying” only you substitute her project for living,  and dying, in this case,  means you aren’t helping enough.

The plan was to have a dozen or so of his friends ‘surprise’ him at a reserved picnic site inside Barton Park and then go for a lazy inner tube float down the Clackamas River and we pick the gang up downstream and shuttle them back for hamburgers and hot dogs and some birthday cake. That was the plan. And we executed the plan, only losing five kids along the way. Acceptable losses, right? Most made it. And that’s good, right? By the end of the day I was thinking about books of survival dramas and movies of loss and punishment, as I punctured party balloons as quickly as I could.

It all started badly because it started late. Noah, my son, was to be driven out to the park by me after his high school football scrimmage. Everyone was supposed to be waiting by 2 o’clock when we were to pull up and they all would jump out from behind  trees and yell ‘surprise!’  -you’ve got to do this sort of thing while their young, or have a working defibrillator. My job was to tell Noah that it was a just a family river outing and his late afternoon and evening would be free to spend with his friends ‘where ever they are, and whatever they’re doing right now because I have no idea.’ This lying business is tough. On our drive out I got a call from my wife that they weren’t ready and that I had to circle in a holding pattern, delaying the birthday boy’s arrival so  decorations and late arrivals would be ready. Noah got curious when we got lost for the fourth time and I wasn’t upset. He asked a lot of questions that I tried my best to answer as if I wasn’t lying; but to me they sounded too incredulous, “I’m getting lost a lot because I was recently kicked in the head by a donkey, eh unicorn, oh I forget. It was a hard kick.”

He was genuinely surprised when everyone jumped out, and I was too. My surprise was their stealth. I knew they were there, I was looking for them,  but I couldn’t spot anyone, except for Waldo and his red-and-white striped scarf. We heard varying amounts of time needed to float from our location in Barton to the Carver Bridge, our planned pull-out point. The times varied from two hours to four, and as we waited for more kids to join, and talked and joked around, it soon became no longer mid-afternoon, but late afternoon, and I began to urge everyone to get stated or drop the folly. Fourteen kids set out in tubes and a raft at 4PM with me telling anyone who would listen, “paddle.”

My wife and I had a couple hours to ourselves as we waited for the phone call to come get them. It was a coolish August afternoon, with a breeze, and the decorative ribbon strung with balloons would hum when the wind really picked up. After two hours we thought Janie might as well get down there and meet them, just to expedite  things. She took off in the car and I soon got a call that there were kids walking back to out picnic site on the side of the road. They had gotten out early because the water and weather was just too cold and they were freezing. I left out belongings unattended and fetched them back, quizzing them about the conditions and news of the others. I soon learned others had dropped out too, and were making their way back.

In all, five of the fourteen kids gave up because of the conditions, and as we waited for the rest of them to show at Carver, the two to four hour float became a full four hours and counting.  I starting thinking about how we were going to explain to those kids’ parents how we ‘lost’ nine kids on a popular river and why we didn’t call the helicopter search and rescue crews sooner. I’d visit them in them in the hospital as they recovered from frostbite (the river was cold) and try and avoid the scowls from their parents as I placed flowers next to the bedpan.

They eventually showed, four hours and fifteen minutes after they left and by the time they, and their rafts, were transported pack to out picnic site we were in total darkness. I had set out the hamburgers and hot dogs in assembly-line fashion to be consumed in a  hurry because we only had 15 minutes left on site before closing time. I looked at the plates and cups all lined up for those who were hungry, to come in from the cold and feed themselves, and it looked just like a meal stop for a search crew, the kind of search crew needed to find kids lost on a river. They all ate and recovered, but that image of the waiting food gave me the shivers.

For a three day road trip into California I spent Thursday, August 19th performing at the Black Oak Casino located in the Sierra foothills in Tuolomne, CA. It’s one of the nicer Indian casinos I’ve worked in the past few months. A great showroom -no cover charge folks! and a producer, Del Van Dyke, who knows comedy and comedians and brings in some good talent; for you to watch for free!

There’s a problem with no cover charge, people can disrespect what’s happening on stage. It’s a truism of stand-up comedy: the more people pay to see a show the better an audience they become. There are lots of reason in play why this is true, people comfortable with themselves (and their pocketbook) are more likely to laugh than those who are worried and insecure, there’s also the the urge not to defeat yourself and your money by investing some hope and eagerness into the success of the performance. This cost-to-appreciative audience ratio drops off at a certain point, “Emo Phillips is funny, but he’s not $375 a ticket funny. This has become no laughing matter!”

So when a show is free you take your chances as a performer. And when there’s no door to walk in or out off to rejoin the casino floor, audience members are more likely to get up and leave to answer a text, or drop a roll of quarters, after a joke they didn’t appreciate rolls quietly around the room. They also can show no respect to the comic himself. Which happened to me. A drunk, attractive girl, who was obviously used to getting whatever she wanted, no matter how rudely she behaved, because she was cute and around men who were also drunk, just ruined the last five minutes of my show. When you finally lose your patience and tell someone to “Shut up!” not once, but three times, literally those words, “Shut up!” and she just thinks she’s being cute by continuing to talk and interrupt and stand up and wiggle her ass; as I relive the event for adding it to this blog I wonder how much jail time I’d gotten t if I started to strangle her -at least she’d have been quiet during the choking.

The next two days were spent in my old stomping grounds of South San Jose. I was at my mother’s house to help her with a list of chores she was no longer able to do herself; jackhammer up some sidewalk and hot-iron brand some of her water buffalo -wait, that’s the wrong list. The actual chores were to fix a leaky faucet and a get a automatic garage door to stop making sounds like it was giving birth each time it opened or closed. Those and a few other ‘honey-do’s’ were completed, I even had time to run around my old high school’s, Leland,  track one afternoon.

Leland High School’s most famous alumni now has to be Pat Tillman. They named their track and stadium after him. A stand-out athlete in high school and college who became famous for quitting the NFL to join the army and serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. He serve in Iraq for the invasion and then came home for ranger training and was redeployed to Afghanistan where he became (in)famous over his death by friendly fire. A famous soldier, who’s anti-war sentiments were circulating, was killed by three head shots while no others in his party were hit. No evidence of enemy fire was ever produced.
After a garage sale where our house’s stuff and few others were pooled to offer a real supermarket of crap that we all no longer wanted, -but hoped others would pay us while we made them carry it away, a hodgepodge of families and backgrounds sat around for a beer and conversation. When the conversation moved to each or our kids, I decided to slip in a joke I had thought of recently and give it an airing and gauge the reaction.

I mentioned I had noticed that in the early teen, even tween,  dating rituals all three of my kids had broken up with whoever they were ‘going’ with before they were dumped. The slightest hint through the gossip grapevine that so-and-so was leaving meant a preemptive strike to save face. Very immature. I mentioned that this was the thinking Bush used in invading Iraq and I got laughs from the liberals present while another manipulated soul responded angrily, “You tell that to the three thousand people that died on those towers!” Even Dick Cheney had to admit, eventually, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

But the man thought he was doing what was best, confronting me over a flip comment about serious consequences. Pat Tillman got shot in the head three times for doing what he thought was right. All I got was an angry retort.

When I jogged around Pat Tillman stadium on a sunny, August afternoon, it was too hot for a man in his fifties to be out running around. Not healthy. I had planned to run my usual three miles but I quit after only one. It was my choice.

This past Wednesday I worked at Kahneeta High Desert Resort and Casino. An Indian -excuse me, Native America, casino about a three hour’s drive from my front door. These casino have become a bit of a growth market for us non-famous entertainers, and famous ones too, for that matter. All these Indian casinos: It’s like they’re taking back the United States a nickel at a time. It’s a perverse guilt, the white man’s allowing gambling on tribal lands. ‘Yeah, we took everything from the people that were already living here, but to show there’s no hard feelings, we’ll give it back -but it we have to make a game out of it.’

I always open with a joke about Indian Casinos when I work at them…
“All these Indian Casinos… Is it corrupting the Native American culture? Changing it? I wanted to find out. I was working one Indian Casino and I went up two native American boys, I think their names were Flying Dice and Always Doubles Down…”

here’s a video of me performing that joke a few years back

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPnXub-iZxY

This was a slightly different trip because I brought my youngest daughter with me.  She said, “If I stay home all I’m going to do is watch TV. Let me come with you.” So I did. So she came with me on my two day tour: Wednesday 8/11 at Kahneeta, and Thursday at Wildhorse Resort and Casino in Pendleton, Oregon; where she sat in our hotel room and watched TV. Totally different than watching it home because… someone else cleans up the room after you leave. And that’s nice.

It turns out there was quite a difference between to the two casino resorts. If I was spending my own money (instead of working and getting paid to be there) I’d go to Kahneeta in a New York minute over going to the Wildhorse. The Wildhorse has a better showroom and stage for their midweek comedy show, but as far as going somewhere to get away and relax, Kahneeta has the upper hand, hands down.

Every time I’ve stayed at Kahneeta I’ve had a room containing a balcony that looked over a vast panorama or an Oergon high desert valley and rocky cliffs and hills. At night, after my show, my daughter went out on the balcony and looked at more stars than I’ve seen in years. The desert night sky was incredibly clear and we played our favorite game of trying to spot satellites; slow and steady moving stars that don’t have the telltale blinking lights of planes. Crickets and cicadas and Sputnik; peaceful fun.

Earlier in the afternoon there was a tribal dance demonstration on the grounds just off our balcony. Rhythmic drums playing on the edge of earshot made me think of the corny musician joke that I had to pretend I made up as my daughter and I first distinguished the sound: “You hear those drums? We’re safe as longs as the drums are playing. If they stop, that’s not good.” “Because that’s when they attack?” “No. Then come a bass solo, and we don’t want to be around for that.”

My seat-mate ended up being a very lithe and tall woman who could have easily been traveling between modeling shoots. She was dressed in causally elegant clothes and carried herself with a grace that invited prolonged looks. Of course, when you’re crammed into a middle seat in coach, graceful movement is a thing of the past, any kind of movement is a thing of the past. She quickly fell asleep and started listing toward me and my aisle seat.

As she inched further and further toward crossing her nodding head into my space I started thinking about one of the lesser story-lines from the Gary Cooper classic film, Sergeant York. Before he joins the army and goes overseas and mows down Germans he has to overcome some personal obstacles, one literal obstacle is an old stump that sits in a field he’s plowing. Every turning of the crop causes him to till around it, rather than plowing straight and easier lines, and when he finally goes through the immense difficulty of removing that obstacle we know he’s got his ducks in a row and is ready to go shoot the Huns -who in this movie are displayed almost as antiseptically as shooting arcade ducks.  You should see that movie and then watch HBO’s Band of Brothers or it’s other WWII mini-series The Pacific, and see how vividly we now portray the gritty carnage of war; it’ll engender a few more pacifists.

But I thought of that stump in Sergeant York’s field because my neighbor’s leaning was become more and more of a problem and if I had just gone to the trouble to stop it early on, my life would be easier. She wasn’t physically touching me, partly because I had leaned away, but I was getting crammed, and if she started drooling I was within the splash zone. You see all these movies where an attractive girl ends up sleeping on a shoulder of a strange man and they end up being lovers, but the reality of a stranger leaning into an already minimal space isn’t so glamourous, no matter how cute she is. I was caught in my own gritty mini-mini series.

I began to wonder how far her encroachment would go. By the time we touched down would we resemble Michelangelo’s Pieta? Me, Mary Magdaline carved in grave sorrow and loss, cradling her reclined body across the folds of my lap. It never got that far, she snorted a couple times and jerked herself back across the line every time. I fell asleep myself. And I know I snore. I know that crossed over the line.

The flight connected on to Baton Rouge where I had a one-night show with the Stand-up Dads. The audience was charming -it’s true what they say about the south, some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. You just have to to the south to meet them. To hot and humid for me. I’d prefer they cross over into my space.

In the mid 1960’s, when I grew up in the suburban outskirts of south San Jose, in a place called the Almaden Valley, there were housing development tracts continually sprouting and attaching themselves to other budding tracts. It was a rapid, sprawling growth that seemed glacier-like in its speed to a nine year-old. One year they had laid gravel through an orchard for our path to the elementary school, the next year the same route was all sidewalk.

During the surveying and parcelling of individual lots the contractors would drive three foot long 1” x 2” stakes into the cleared earth. More would show up to mark routes for water mains, electricity, and sewage. Different colored plastic ribbons would be tied around the stakes near their top to indicate they showed where future volts, used toilet paper, or fences would run. I don’t think the contractors were aware of what great swords these stakes made; they even had to be pulled out with noble effort like the fabled Sword and the Stone. They also came already marked for teams; the yellow ribboned sword guys against the blue. Great battles took place on fields where your house may now lay. These usually happened on weekends, and on Mondays when workers came back to their site they’d find all their stakes tossed in a pile discarded, like some weapons-for-schoolbooks amnesty deal had brokered a peace. Lines would have to be drawn again.

This Friday, July 16th, as the Radiance of the Seas turned around in Vancouver to head back up to Seward, Alaska, I took a long stroll around Stanley Park and beyond, and came across some surveyors who were using reference markers that no child was going to disturb. All along the kilometer of the seaward side of Stanley Park and well into the West End section of the city, several surveying crews were marking pavement with orange spray paint dashes. Men with tripods, siting with distant men holding specially marked poles, were measure and marking everywhere. A huge civic project was underway. Near the Aquatic Centre (a great place to do some swimming laps, by the way) I saw one surveyor reaching into a hole in the sidewalk beneath his tripod and digging at the earth.

I couldn’t not ask, “I thought you guys worked with above ground things you can see. Why are you digging there?” As I asked I saw he was digging into an established opening in the sidewalk, there was an eight-inch cast iron hole-covering set to the side. He explained that he was uncovering a ‘surveyor’s monument’ and I read those same words on the miniature manhole cover laying near his scooping hand. I was informed that a permanent civic surveyor’s monument, encased in enough cement to fill a bath tub, laid buried beneath our feet. There were lots of them, he told me, buried within line-of-sight throughout the city, throughout every city, the U.S. too. They were used to decide property lines and draw maps, serious information for hundreds of years of use.They could also inform if there had been any movement over the decades. “Like continental drift?” I asked. He said, “No, you need curve-of-the earth stuff for that, we just do line-of-sight.” Suddenly the cement sidewalk beneath my feet didn’t seem as steady, and I took my hands or my pockets and adjusted my weight, widening my stance.

The six-mile perimeter walk of Stanley Park has markers ticking off every mile, half-mile, kilometer, and half-kilometer. Table place-setting sized plaques are affixed to the short granite wall that falls away to the narrow beach, or the sea itself, that runs the entire length of the paved path around the park. I think a few markers are missing, but there’s so much peaceful, natural beauty that my eyes could have easily been elsewhere when I walked by.  They are marked for a counter-clockwise trip, the same direction track meets are run. I wonder if south of the equator they run their track meets clockwise.

Two non-measuring plaques, embedding in the seawall, near Siwash Rock are worth stopping at and reading. Siwash Rock is a 50ft plus spire of rock a dozen yards off the mainland of Stanley Park. The second plaque, in a clockwise walk, tells of a fabled, long ago, aboriginal Canadian who was so principled and incorruptible that he was transformed  into the singular spire of rock to watch out to sea and protect the harbor and its inhabitants. The first plaque is a dedication to a teenage boy who dove off the top of the spire during low tide and killed himself, mentioning the date and time and the poor boy’s name. The plaques are maybe eight feet apart in distance, but much further in any other measurement. Permanently odd.

Everyone was taking pictures in Stanley Park, and why not, the park itself is gorgeous, but it also has excellent views of the city’s skyline. I kept encountering a group of Chinese businessmen who would drive to various points in the park and get out for photo opportunities at places I had walked to. I took a group picture of them and learned the Mandarin word for ‘thank you.’ Printed I’m sure it’s a ink-spill of dashes and swooshes, but phonetically ‘shey-shey’ comes pretty close. I got a couple of them in a photo with me. In the background you can see the Radiance of the Seas docked near downtown. Shey-shey for the photo, gentlemen, even though my eyes were closed.

There’s a comedic expression of praise that I think is funny every time I hear it: “We sing songs of him in our village.”  The idea that the exploits of a joke’s subject is so significant it’s retold in multimedia (not just poetry but song) in antiquated and distant societies is hilarious. I might say to my wife, “I’m not going to say tonight’s dinner was good, but they will sing songs of it in my village for years.” I’d think that’d be funny. She might wait, wondering how much sarcasm is involved. Then measure how well I had cleaned my plate of her tofuloaf as a barometer for the compliment’s truthfulness.  Maybe a few, unketchup-covered scraps might last longer than me at the dinner table.

When I lived on my own in San Francisco I had to be diligent about having food scraps laying about in the sink. My apartment building had cockroaches and if I was wasn’t fastidious they would swing by the ‘buffet’ for a late night snack. The first time you come home, turn on the kitchen light and see those little uglies scurry for cover, you think, ‘Disgusting! Who would live like this?’ then you realize it’s you. Doubly disgusting. And if anyone is with you when you discover the infestation, you want to scurry out of view yourself.

Once, when walking along the streets of Puerto Vallarta and I saw a dead cockroach on the sidewalk that was so big I was surprised someone hadn’t thrown a jacket over it. I thought that line was funny enough to use on stage, and tried it twice, but both times it went nowhere. That hasn’t stopped me, when I do sound checks during rehearsal before shows, to use the obscure line when I think, ‘what can I say in this empty theater, that I wouldn’t say in front of an audience, but still might cause the tech guys to laugh?’ It doesn’t get laughs with them either. Yet, I still think it’s funny.

A couple days ago, when flying home from Mazatlan I saw another humongous cockroach. This one was alive. Kelly Montieth and I had done the same run on the Mariner of the Seas; joining 6/30 in Mazatlan and departing a week later in the same port. We were waiting at the airport to board our return flight home and when Kelly stepped away I saw the creature. Actually someone else saw it first and the commotion caused me to look over towards the boarding counter and the assembling security personal who were about to finger through our luggage a third time before we’d be allowed to board.

Kelly and me waiting at the Mazatlan airport

All eyes were down on the marble floor at the feet of a security guard who was positioning himself and his feet like he was getting ready to kick something. In front of him, not scurry in the least, was a cockroach the size of a roll of dimes. He kicked it across the marble floor and, upended,  it made a scrapping sound I could hear fifteen feet away. This was one big bug.

My first thought was, why didn’t he step on it? Then I realized it would have made as much a mess if some kid had dropped an ice cream cone. And it was right where we were going to line up to board. More people began looking, and the guard kicked it again, and it went sliding further, toward a stairwell that had a door to the outside. Was he going to just set it free? Then another kick and he got it past the stairwell and in front of the men’s room door.  He was going to finish it off out of sight. He pushed open the door and the security stepped inside, pushing the cockroach ahead of him like a vice-principle and a bad student. When the door closed behind him I wondered if I was going to hear a comic explosion of crashes and screams, a fight to the death that would take minutes to decide. But it was closed only long enough for something to be stepped on, scooped up with paper towel and dropped in a waste basket. The guard returned, dusting his hands, and sneaking a glance around the floor for any other problem.

That cockroach had riled Mexican security and paid the ultimate price. It was big and seemed tough enough not to be bothered by being kicked around. I will sing songs of it in my village. No surprise Mexico already has one song prepared for me to sing: La Cucaracha.

“I can see the whole world!”

Getting on a domestic flight at 5:30 in the morning has some obvious shortcomings. A summer, domestic flight at that hour has a less apparent drawback. Families. Discounted slightly to fill seats at an off hour, airlines draw mom and dad and their now school-free kids to fly to Phoenix and visit their aunt and uncle. Cranky, sleepy, hopped up on bowls of sugar cereal, kids. Being a dad I have far more patience than most commuters for the pandemonium children bring into a plane. But this flight was particularly …infested. Crying and the monotonous questions kids always ask was all I was hearing.
“Can we open the window?”
“Waaaah!”
“Do I have to wear my seat belt?”
“Aaaahhh”
“Where’s the pilot?”

There was one child behind me and across the aisle who was obviously on his first flight, and he never stopped with the questions. His dad eventually gave up answering because a second question was out of the boy’s mouth before dad could finish his response to the first. I was getting perturbed and thought I might shout a few answer myself over my seat-back.
“No, the plane doesn’t have a horn! Now be quiet for five seconds!”

When the plane revved up to take off down the runway, so did this kid. I felt this short two-hour and fifteen-minute flight was going to be as much as an endurance test a red-eye to Japan. Just a minute into the air, and several thousand feet up with the morning sun washing over all of greater Portland and beyond, the boy said something so exuberant and innocently awed that it made my day, and the next. He said, “I can see the whole world!” Of course he could. We all can, all the time, but so rarely with that much joy.

Food or a haircut? Which is more dangerous?

To join the Mariner of the Seas June 30th, Royal Caribbean had me spend the night in Mazatlan at the Playa Mazatlan, a nice hotel that I can recommend; the room was clean, the air-conditioning worked, and it had a nice pool and a restaurant that was open to the nearby surf.

Not that I ate there. It was pretty enough, but I get a little put-off by the prices hotel charge for their food. Hotels, airports, and movie theaters all charge more than a reasonable price for their food because, why? You can’t go anywhere else, you’re trapped. Indentured service-tude. Well, there were plenty of fun, hole-in-the-wall, places to eat within walking distance of the Plaza Mazatlan.

I like to take chances with mexican food. One of my favorite stops is Ensenada Mexico  with all it’s ad-hoc taco eateries. There are cart vendors, but also long, open tables which are covered from the sun and served by several different kitchens. Various salsas and toppings are set in a row down the center of these tables and you order your beer and tacos from one of the surrounding kitchens and enjoy. Hygienic? Maybe not. Certainly look for warning signs; flies feasting on an open sore in my waitress’s forehead would suggest moving to another table, or time zone. But with some mild caution you can get some really good authentic fish tacos.

In Mazatlan I found a couple places I enjoyed, right within walking distance of the hotel. The real risk I took was in the morning before I joined the ship I decided to get a local haircut. To some, that might seem to put me in more peril than bad food. Bad food has you sick for a couple days, a bad haircut can last weeks.

It worked out well. I got a nice haircut, though I had a little trouble communicating what exactly I wanted done. The gal that cut my hair initially wasn’t sure if I wanted a haircut or mosquito repellent by the way I kept waving my hands around my head. We got it settled and I was able to pass along my fear of looking like a koala bear when my grey temple hair is cut too short and sticks out like the fuzzy Australian eucalyptus eater. Her name was America and I jokingly said my middle name was Mexico. We hit it off after that.

Spent the weekend in Kennewick, Washington. I had Thursday, Friday and Saturday night shows in a converted rock ‘n roll club called Jack Didley’s located in the ‘Historic’ Downtown section of Kennewick. There isn’t much evident history in this part of town, there’s a handful buildings which are slightly older but nothing obvious to set them apart. Maybe the little signs demarcating the neighborhood are referring to the kind of history that ex-lovers talk about when they tell friends, ‘so-and-so and I have a history.’ Or maybe someone lost a set of keys and don’t want anything disturbed until they’re found. But as far as historic in the sense of significant buildings that depict an era…? Those must have been destroyed when Australia invaded us and razed most of the Pacific Northwest. That never happened, did it? Well, downtown Kennewick doesn’t have any history either, so there you go.

A unique road trip for me for a couple reasons. I don’t do night clubs much anymore, and I brought my 15 year-old son, Noah, along for the weekend. A rare overlap of both my wife and myself being away from home brought the necessity of bringing my son. My two daughters have shown the maturity, or at least played the part well enough, to allow my wife and I to leave them alone with the house and that responsibility. My son has not. Leaving my son with the only his sisters to answer to would be like leaving a lit lantern next to some dry hay in a windy barn -or some other colloquialism that infers it’d be a bad idea and would most likely lead to trouble. Maybe not, but why set the lantern down when you can take it with you to Kennewick.

My fifteen year-old son is a good kid, he just acts like not a good kid, sometimes. I don’t know what to expect from a 15 year-old boy when he’s out of school for the summer and most of his friends can drive -he entered the school system a year younger than most of his classmates. My wife and I describe him as a cross between a feral cat, because he only shows up to be fed or sleep, and a Russian politburo chief, because he can be surly and imperious even though we’re all supposed to be comrades at the house.

He was good company over the weekend, despite the fact that we could find nothing to do! There was some sort of car show that all the locals were talking about, but we have an annual car show that shows up fight down the block from our house for a couple days every summer, and we find it to be a yawner -though who can sleep when the owners of a blown 327 Chevy consider mufflers to be a nuisance, and happily crank up their monster noise-makers when another starts his. Can’t be outdone. It’s like barking dogs, all making noise and the reason for even starting long forgotten.

To make up for being bored out of our minds, and dragging him along -he would have much rather stayed home with his friends, I indulged him. If he wanted to run to the store and get a Gatorade, we went. If he wanted suntan oil, though the sun can burn you nicely without any help, we picked some up. By late Saturday afternoon I felt I couldn’t keep up the pace, and when he asked for some Jamba Juice I said, “son, life isn’t all running from one pleasure to another, there’s got to be some deprivation.” He said, “Dad, We’re in Kennewick.” “Good point”, I said. We couldn’t find a Jamba Juice.

So eager to get home and out of super-small hotel room with the faulty roll-away bed we took off right after the show Saturday night for the 3 and 1/2 hour drive back home. To drive at anytime after 10pm I need some assistance. My son talked me into getting those five-hour energy drinks you see at all the convenience stores and truck stops. Those things work. Not only was I able to drive until 2:30 in the morning, I stayed up and watched TV until 3:30 tehn got up at 7:30 and started doing yard work. Even in my sleep the dreams rushed.

Here’s a photo of Noah’s bed when it jack-knifed in the middle of the night and cause us to sleep in the same bed like two of the Three Stooges.

Two blocks from my house two elementary schools abut each other at their playing fields. Each has enough turf to host concurrent soccer games and the attending barnacle-like ring of parents and their folding nylon chairs. The far elementary school also has the community baseball field, complete with a two-story snack and announcer’s booth, bleachers with seating for eighty, and night lights so incongruously high and powerful, for so humble a baseball field, you’d think city planners had watched Field of Dreams and set about enjoying such a thing for themselves.

This June has been rainy. It rains in Oregon and people joke about and shrug it off. I have a joke in my act about the rainy Northwest…

“One time I was in Seattle for four days and it stopped raining for
only twenty-minutes; I was in the shower at the time.”

But this year it’s as if the weather felt it was being taken for granted and made a point of showing it could shower whenever it damn well pleased. My wife shared a comment from the local paper that this was the wettest June since Larry Bird’s Celtics won the NBA tittle. I’m not sure what year that was, decades ago for sure,  but I was more curious about how a sports reporter got transferred into the section weather. It made you wonder what kind of metrics awaited us in future weather reports: “It hasn’t been this hot since David Ortiz went 42 consecutive games without washing his lucky jersey -nor as humid.” Perhaps the sports and weather reporters switched assignments, and the sports page would have a new tone: “The Seattle Mariners have a 70 percent chance of winning tomorrow.”

All this precipitation has cause the little league teams to play make-up doubleheaders whenever the rain gods stop for a breath. On fair evenings, after diner, I can walk the short distance to Empey Field and usually catch the end of the opener, then a full five, or seven inning game (depending on the age bracket of the players). It’s an undiluted joy for me to watch these games stretched across a few rows of the bleachers, using the seat behind me as a backrest and bench in front of me as a foot stop. There’s plenty of room, though the players’ parents are there, they sit behind the backstop and down the foul lines in their folding chairs as if there’s no choice what you sit it if you have a child participating: it’s the basic equipment of any game; game ball, protective gear, and folding chairs for the folks.

A couple autumns ago I drove to the local high school’s athletic field  to pick up my son from his evening football practice. A night fog had set in, and having to park against the far side of the field, I headed across the damp grass toward the diffused glow of the field lights. In the dark and fog there were no other points of navigation, just the grass underfoot and a milky radiance in the distance, the lights themselves indiscernible. I could hear the football practice; cheering and coaching, the play, and some laughter. I thought at that moment that this could be heaven. What else would I want amidst an untethered darkness but to know I traveled toward a loved one waiting inside the light, and waiting with them was play and counseled endeavor.

The little league baseball games near my house aren’t quite as ethereal as that autumn night, but they come close.  Innocent fun with small dramas of no consequence. The most recent game I attended was composed of players in third and forth grade; eight and nine year-old boys, who were small enough to be pulled over backwards by the weight of their bat if they weren’t paying attention as they flailed away in the on deck circle. These boys were small and so was their strike zone -if you applied big league guidelines, but they don’t. To avoid making it a game of walking everyone around the bases the strike zone gets big enough to make you think Lacrosse: if you could reach it, it’s a strike. This recent game had a succession of progressively smaller players come to bat. The first was small but the following was smaller, and the following was smaller still. It looked as if their coach had composed his team as a Russian doll set; each player capable of fitting inside the next.

The innocent fun of these summer evening baseball games may not be heaven, but it’s close enough to set your folding chair.

Not that kind of bombing. The kind of bombing that stand-up comics hate to experience but can survive, I should know, I’ve come through on the other side of bombing a hundred times and I’m always as close to the epicenter as you can get.

This past Friday night, June 11th, I signed up for a short set on a comedy showcase at the Bagdad Theater and Pub, one of the McMenamins chain of pubs, breweries, and hotels. The chain, with locations throughout greater Portland, has taken abandoned poor houses, churches, schools, and other previously used buildings and converted them into funky place to eat, drink, watch a movie, or sleep, sometimes without every leaving your chair. My favorite McMenamins is the one in Edgefield because it has a variety of places to eat and drink on the grounds; one evening my wife and I strolled through a vegetable and produce garden, past the small, chip-shot golf course, and ended up in a tiny, brick toolshed of a bar that had a fire churning in its hearth and allowed for cigars to be consumed along with the ports and wines its cloistered barkeep offered.

I hadn’t been on stage for a couple weeks and felt the need to get up there and loosen up a bit; stand-up comedy is a lot like breathing, if you don’t do it every once in a while, you lose the ability to do it all. So I called and requested a ‘spot’ and had to wait a day for confirmation from the showcase’s producer that I was indeed a pro, that I had enough experience to not cause people to run screaming from the room after just a minute or two on stage -you’ve got to keep the ‘house’ for the stand-ups coming onstage after you. Then it’s up to them to keep customers in their seats and laughing for the next guy, this is the nature of non-industry showcases. (Industry showcases have entertainment movers and shakers in the audience, and everyone goes onstage to be seen by them) “Open mikes” mean the field of talent is wide open and you probably will have people running and screaming; some from the stage, some from the audience.

I was wary of doing a set there because by the Facebook ads I could see all the other comedians on the bill were of a completely different generation. I’ve been doing stand-up for 28 years, that’s a generation. All the others on the bill were new and the attending audience had seen ‘new’ comics for the few years this showcase had been running so the mild panic that had pitched a tent in the back of my mind was, ‘they are going to think I’m out if it and over the hill.’ My material and performance will be as off the target as walking up there in white socks and dark, too short pants thinking that will get them laughing before I open my mouth; Jerry Lewis worked that schtick a generation ahead of me.

The bomb that went off Friday night at the Bagdad Theater was not anyone totally imploding onstage, it was the violent exposing of how sensibilities had changed between my early days of stand-up comedy in San Francisco in the 1980’s and what fledging comics were throwing up in 2010. A generation ago there were three major influences of comics’ style; the absurdism of Steve Martin, the observational slice of live from Bill Cosby and Seinfeld, or the iconoclastic Pryor and Carlin. Ninety five percent of all comedians, and their material, could have been traced to these influences. I was, and still am, a Cosby-Seinfeld slice of live, observational style of stand-up. Clean like them too.

The comics who went on Friday at the Bagdad were influenced by someone I’m not aware of. They all got laughs, but I sat dropped-jawed at the anger and impatience that lay behind their sets. The material was far bluer and meaner than anything I’d recently seen. That’s fine, I don’t want to be a fuddy-duddy about whatever makes a successful career for another performer. But what caused the damage was the lack of consideration; considering what espousing anti-social behavior implies, or considering where an entertainer can go when their single, most consistent audience response lies in shocking the audience, not with a revelation, but impropriety.

I should talk. I had a rough, sloppy set. I tried out a couple new jokes and got on stage. So it wasn’t a complete loss. One of the new jokes was the idea of a church lowering its role model of God to something a little more accessible; instead of the Church of God, the Church of Steve… here’s an audio clip of me that night awkwardly throwing out the joke.
church of steve
There was another new joke I told myself I was going to try but failed to remember to do. A cute little thing my twelve year-old daughter and myself co-wrote, that relates to bombing and Bagdad,
“Their coming out with a children’s version of the movie The Hurt Locker. It’s going to be called The Boo-Boo Box.”

I think the crowd that night would have found it as funny as white socks with short pants.