I tried to watch Balls of Fury just now...it was just too silly for my tastes. But there was the great line about the Mooshoo Palace. It's a keeper.
One scene, though, brought back a flood of memories--when the ping pong master headlines at a nightclub, and the audience sits out there in the audience, all stuffing their faces and not paying any attention to the rube on stage.
The Ontario Playhouse is a little comedy club in the adorable upstate New York town of Sackets Harbor, where I lived for the short timeframe when I wasn't deployed with the 10th Mountain Division. Josee is a 5-foot-tall firecracker, just a wonderful woman, a Captain in the Engineer branch, and was my closest friend in New York. We worked together when I was the Intelligence Officer (BN S-2 for you military types) for her Combat Engineer battalion. We're still in touch and she's just one of those people everyone meets through the course of life--a keeper. Josee and I loved to go to this little comedy club, even if the acts were bad--they'd bring you drinks, and it didn't matter that the waitress tended to be snotty and one time refused me service. She thought my Louisiana driver's license was fake. I know it was dark in there and I look young for my age, but I was 34 at the time, and I don't think any reasonable person would seriously think I'm under 21.
Our favorite evening included dinner at Tin Pan Galley, an amazing little restaurant on the same adorable little Main Street, a show at the Playhouse, then more drinks at the Sackets Harbor Brewing Company, where my next-door neighbor was the General Manager and would get off work at about the time we'd leave the club. It was wonderful--I loved upstate New York. It was quaint, every town filled with historic homes and little mom and pop businesses, and then there was the natural beauty of Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks only an hour by Harley to the east. I still miss it, but the winters were utterly brutal--30-below and snow measured in feet.
But there was a true comraderie under all that bitter cold and lake-effect snow. We'd stomp the snow off our boots in the brewpub and belly up to the bar, which used to be a train depot back in the 19th century. I've always loved historic districts, homes, and businesses, and since Sherman didn't burn New York, it's everywhere up there.
Back to the night in question. Anyone who's ever been to a comedy club can attest to the fact that shows tend to be rated R. That's just the way it is. Most of the comics came up there from New York City and offered no exception to this rule. One night, Josee and I were seated, ordered drinks, and waited for the show to start. They filled the seats from front to back, so you had to get there a little early if you wanted a decent seat.
The place was suddenly very crowded. Sackets is a small town outside Watertown, and large crowds are not the norm. Josee and I craned our necks to see what the commotion was all about. It appeared a full nursing home had taken up residence in the back of the club. I'm not kidding. Mind you, the shows don't generally start until about 10pm and last until about 1am--they don't have all the puritanical alcohol laws that Mississippi has, and bars can actually stay open late. Hence our brewpub follow-on plans.
About a hundred elderly men and women were led into the club, complete with walkers and ventillators, nurses and chaperones. Since we were seated against the wall, we could see both the stage and the folks seated behind us. It did seem a bit odd, given the hour and the general rowdiness of this place. We ordered another round and settled in.
The club owner took the stage. Steve was one of these small-town bar owners who clearly enjoys his big-fish-little-pond status, and loved to man the stage for a little pre-show banter. He always said the same thing, some inane little monologue about turning your cellphone onto vibrate and how you could give yourself a little thrill. There was some lame joke about his kid which should be burned in my brain, given the number of times I heard it. It was so lame, I can't even recall it from rote.
The comic was a black guy who started out innocently enough, a couple of jokes about the weather in Sackets Harbor and how it was like the four horses of the apocalypse. Everyone had to comment on it--when you drive in through CANYONS of snow on the interstate, it's a bit striking for the visitor.
The nursing home folks, they laughed a bit. We noted that they were not drinking.
Then he got down to business. He told a dirty joke. The front half of the room laughed, the back half did not. I nudged Josee and pointed to the back of the room, where they all sat stiffly, clearly not amused. We quickly discerned that it was much more fun to watch the room dynamics in conjunction with the comic.
More dirty jokes. The separation between the front and back of the room, which Josee and I straddled, began to feel like the Maginot Line. A DMZ. One guy behind us sat with his arms crossed over his chest, working a toothpick around in his mouth in silent fury behind thick glasses.
And the comic? The more pissed they got, the dirtier the jokes. He crossed over into NC-17 and toyed with the idea of softporn. Finally, the nurses and chaperones reached their smut limit and began shuttling them out. Chairs clattered to the floor as they exited as loudly as they could.
Josee and I watched them leave. I was sorry for them in a way--this was clearly not what they'd signed up for--and I had to wonder what their administration wonks must have been thinking. Turned out, it was a bus tour, a "surprise" tour, where the patrons didn't know where they were going until they arrived. A 10pm show at a comedy club in bucolic Sackets Harbor, NY, likely sounded like a fine idea on paper, clearly planned by someone inexperienced in the general conduct of the stand-up comedy routine. Hell, even if you just watched the comedy shows on HBO or Comedy Central, you'd have to know there was risk involved.
We laughed about it over 1812 Ale at the brewpub later. I wondered if some well-meaning planner lost his/her job over it. The older businessman from Montreal I've posted about before (the predatory one with the sailboat) was lit when we got there and bought us all drinks.
A month later, I'd be in Afghanistan. Then I'd be sent to Iraq for a year after only a couple of months at home. It was hard to leave the Army after that nightmare, but it was even harder to leave northern NY--I had an adorable house and good friends, but no way to make a good living without the Army.
Maybe I'll get back up that way again, or maybe I'll decide I missed Oxford all these years and stay there. If I've learned anything in the last twenty years, it's that my life will always be filled with drastic career and geography shifts, and it's fruitless to surmise where I'll be in five years.
Which is how I like it.
