Tour Diary - Part 25

Show Day!  Great sleep thanks to the bus being parked all night.

A great day off yesterday. We had lunch at the 3rd Street Market Hall, and then gathered a cooler,  some beach stuff and Ubered to Bradford Beach, just 10 minutes up the road on Lake Michigan. Cute little beach! The water was temperate enough to swim in and I had a nice dip. Vic showed up late with our baseball gloves and we had a toss. The endorphins released from a three-man baseball toss seemed palpable.  We then shot a little video for the continuing injured mouth saga.

A nice rest and then dinner at Mader's - a classic German Restaurant. We walked in and nearly bumped into Fox News Anchor, Bret Bair, who's in town to moderate the first Republican Debate, happening tomorrow night.  We did a mini goof of taking way too many pictures with him... but he was very nice about it. We all sat down and debated what level of scum he was... He's not The Worst I guess... one of those Fox guys who tries to shoot straight. But he does work for them, one of the few companies largely responsible for polluting so many minds. So I dunno, I was in too good a mood to really care about Bair one way or another.

You could feel the room swarming with GOP operatives.  Weird. But behind us was an older gay couple, in from Palm Springs celebrating a birthday. A big chocolate cake came out and we all sang Happy Birthday to him. Another couple of men were sitting just behind them and said, "it's OUR birthday too!" They were two identical twins, in their 60s having their own birthday dinner! What!? We sang again.

The food was fantastic: Schnitzel, sauerkraut, spaetzle, red cabbage, sausages... my people's food.

After dinner, we took a little river walk to begin processing the tremendous amount of meat and starch in our digestive systems and headed to the bus to hang.  I screened my favorite talk show appearance of all time: Charles Grodin on Carson: Do You Care About Anything?   I think it's a perfect 12 minutes of dry, intentionally uncomfortable meta-comedy. Both men in total control and demonstrating master-level riffing.  There's not even a camera cut in it. Sure, Johnny lands a couple of cornball one liners, but I love them, as they let the audience in on the fun... the audience gets it... everyone on the bus watched captivated, laughing, and cringing.

Shall we do 3 more shows this week? Yes.

Can't wait for tonight! Turner Hall's gonna be a great room for this show. It'll be packed and we'll knock em down.

Until then...