Been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy, though… rather notably, my birthday was crashed by Joel McHale, the host of E!’s The Soup. More specifically, Joel is an alumnus of Unexpected and was in town briefly, so was invited to play on a Theatresports team. This just happened to be on the same night as my birthday Theatresports performance… so my team was suddenly up against a team of UP’s most experienced ringers.
At least I got a picture of him giving me noogies, the second in my series of celebrity noogies (the other entry being Screech from Saved by the Bell):
Joel is a nice guy and an excellent improviser (his ringer-team justifiably won by about ten points), but I got the impression he is jaded and annoyed by his own celebrity, and that he liked me less after I asked him to pose for that photo. It was interesting sharing a stage with him, although I had to roll my eyes a bit at my birthday being upstaged.
I have to admit, though, that it was useful having him there to get more people to come out to the show, which initially wouldn’t have been a problem except that we have been enduring a minor snowpocalypse these past couple of weeks. We had the rather unusual situation that there was not only a storm, but once the storm was over the snow kept on coming, and just when you thought that had petered out we had another storm, this time with the extremely rare and awesome-sounding thundersnow.
Having grown up in Toronto, it’s easy for me to dismiss the average Seattlite’s unpreparedness to deal with snow. But the truth of the matter is that both Toronto and New York are pretty flat whereas Seattle is practically carved into the side of a mountain, and for the week or so of snow that we normally get out here there isn’t the money budgeted for a proper snow-removal infrastructure (although I’ve heard the argument that the lost retail sales tax from this last week or so alone would have paid for the equipment and labour).
The upshot is that many people were effectively trapped at home (if not actually then psychologically), and so I had a lot of unfortunate cancellations. The discovery that Joel would be there may have persuaded a few of those who otherwise wouldn’t have braved the elements to do so, though, so I’m grateful for that.
Now I’m quite used to driving in snow back in Canada, but I’m also used to having snow tires on for five or six months out of the year, which is something that simply doesn’t make economic sense out here. So I experimented with buying chains for my tires… and I’m thrilled to report that they managed to break within the first day I owned them, catching on the metal in the interior rims of the wheel shaft of my car and damaging the rims rather badly (although it only appears to be cosmetic damage). So much for that experiment.
Between my birthday Theatresports and Christmas Carol I’ve been spending an awful lot of time at UP. We had a holiday party as well, which was plenty of fun, but I’ve determined that White Elephant is just about the most vicious and evil form of gift exchange there is. At least, this is the first that I’ve seen a gift exchange make a small child cry, which is what immediately happened at the first attempt to steal one of the gifts (a model car that the initial selector had already given to her son to play with).
I love being there, but last weekend was a little tetchy for me as I was doing a lot of dangerous driving to get to Christmas Carol in full knowledge that the house would be mostly empty on account of the snow. I feel badly for them, especially since last weekend was closing and we had six performances scheduled. We are having two make-up performances tomorrow and Sunday if anyone wanted to see it and couldn’t make it out.
Due to about equal parts the bad driving conditions and my own humbuggy nature I spent Christmas alone in my condo yesterday, but it was okay. I got to relax some and mentally steel myself for the new year… which I know will be interesting if nothing else.
Dan.
Tags: christmas carol, getting older, holidays, improv, photos, seattle weather