Saturday, February 28, 2004  

Montreal Quatre

Spent a great day walking around Montreal yesterday. Saw McGill's campus, which was only made lovelier by its proximity to the "danse contact" boutiques that line St. Catherine's. I still have yet to avail myself of the famous Montreal strip clubs. It's just too creepy to go by myself, and all the boys here are jaded to them. Still, I feel like it's going to New Orleans and not hearing jazz or going to Texas and not being dragged behind a truck. I might just take a little dough and go give it a whirl.

Great show last night. Worked the Too Fat to Hang bit back in, and it worked okay. Had a couple of the local guys give me insight, and their thought was that it was the word "fat" that was freaking the crowd out. This place is kind of like Cambridge writ large when it comes to PC-ness. They suggest that if I say he's too heavy to hang, the bit will be just fine. That's just weird. I was considering going to the Comedy Works here afterward, but decided I'm already having a hard time remembering the names of all the new comics I've met already, so instead I stuck around for the open mike they do at the Nest late Fridays.

I've been wondering if the bit about my sister coming out would work here...wasn't sure if it would be received as either homophobic, or too Taco Bell intensive for the references to work. So I grabbed four minutes on the open mike, and had them just bring me up as a comic from Boston, so I could see. That was a good call, because it TANKED. Bad. Could have been the intro ("This guy is from Boston or something, and he's an ordained minister...Tim McIntire!"), but it was like a snuff film. Cronk. No biggie...that's what open mikes are for, and that's why I tried it there instead of during the real show, but it was kind of embarrassing to see all the open mikers deciding that this week's headliner sucks.

The whole "Reverend Tim" thing seems to befuddle the local comedy crew here. People just can't seem to get their heads around it. I even explain that it's a ULC thing, and it's just really a stage name and a hook to make people remember me, but it's resonating wrong. I might bag it for tonight's intros, just to see.

After the bloodbath, went out with my boy Kevin, a local Montreal act that I've met at the Comedy Studio a few times. Hit an Irish pub for a pint of Black and Tan, and then he and his wife and their friend invited me to a loft party thrown by this artist cat they know. Knowing that if I went home, I'd just stay up all night playing Call of Duty, I figured something social would be cool. But when we got there, it turns out that the loft party was playing second banana to the rave the artist cat had rented his space out to. Coming up the stairs, I narrowly avoiding becoming collateral damage from the stream of Ecstacy-laced puke flying out of the face of a kid in a wife beater and what can only be called rave pants. We all felt immediately un-hip and fled the scene quickly. So they dropped me back at the condo, where it was a little scrambled porn and a cozy night of much needed sleep.