Keeping Abreast Of Trouble

Friday January 16th, 2009 - Sault Ste Marie, MI/Lake Villa, IL

I think I might be in trouble but I don’t know who to ask. This is a delicate situation and I hope it will just blow over and drift away but logic and experience tell me it won’t. I had a couple of incidents during last night’s show in Sault Ste. Marie and I fanned the flames.

I’ve been to this gig before more than once and I’ve found everything to be of top notch quality except the actual show. The hotel is really nice and they feed us as much as we are able to hold down without our hearts bursting from overwork and the staff is wonderful.

One of the times I was here before I had a rotten show and didn’t think I’d ever be back. The audience is mainly college kids who are really drunk by the time I get on and that has never been my crowd even when I was that age. I remember wanting the time to just end.

Then for whatever reason the booker asked me back and I had an open date so I took it and it went splendidly well as I remember. This was the tie breaker and it was one for the dark side again. The house was packed full but it was loud and chatty and I could feel my work was cut out for me in the first few minutes when my normal openers layed an egg.

I’ve been around the block a few times and know how to adjust to most situations but it took a lot of work to get these people to even quiet down enough to listen to me. Nobody told them to be quiet and it’s no use fighting that situation because they want to sell beer.

Most bar managers in a casino aren’t trained in comedy or any other live entertainment so it’s not fair to expect them to know what ideal conditions are. In a perfect world there would have been some announcements made at the top of the show and then when some babbling idiot got loud they would have been bounced immediately. Ha. No such luck.

What made tonight’s situation so tricky was there were two full tables in the front with younger people having a birthday party for a woman named ‘Trixie’. She had a friend of hers named Mindy come up and ask the emcee if she could get me to announce that it was Trixie’s birthday and then Trixie would get up and get a birthday shot and do it on stage.

I was fine with that because it’s their show and I could tell I wasn’t going to change any minds anyway. Mindy was determined to do it and at this point in my life I just don’t care anymore. I would be getting paid no matter what so if they wanted to do a shot let it go.

Well Trixie got up on stage and she was quite the looker. She downed the shot in about a tenth of a second and then turned to the audience and lifted her blouse and flashed them. Of course the guys went nuts and I had my head turned for a second as of course is always my luck but I knew this was where the show was going so I knew I had to make it work.

I acted like I was angry that I missed it and demanded that she come up and show them to me before I could continue the show. It fit in perfectly for Mr. Lucky and the audience was now really into it. I ad libbed some big laugh getting lines and it was going very well.

Finally Trixie came up after I offered $20 to see them and she snatched the bill from my hand as fast as anyone I’ve ever seen. Then she lifted up her blouse and pulled my head to her chest and gave me a ten second face wash with her dangling meat pillows. How fun!

The crowd went beyond nuts and I must say I was pretty surprised myself but I know an opportunity for laughs when I get one and I was all over it like mud on a pig. I cranked as many lines as I could and it was really killing but I knew I’d have a hard time following it so I tried to ease out of it and go back to doing my show but they weren’t going to buy it.

I could feel them getting a little more out of control and I slowed down to make time go slower as I knew I didn’t want to have to do more than I needed to on this night. Just then Trixie’s partner Mindy who had a nice pair herself started talking loud from her seat so it begged to try and get her to do it too so that’s what I did. I pulled out my last $20 bill.

She didn’t even wait for me to ask her. She came up on stage and lifted her top and they were right in my face too. I told her she wouldn’t get the money unless the audience could see them too so she let them fly and everyone got a peek. Two for two. Forty bucks gone.

I didn’t mind at all and in fact now I was starting to get into it. I knew this wasn’t art and I had to finish my time and all I was being paid to do was entertain an audience which had been exactly what I was doing. It was all going over like gangbusters until ‘she’ came in.

‘She’ was the female head of security who was not at all pleased at what was starting to go down just steps from her office. Waitresses were apparently getting upset too and they must have called security and then I could see the staff motioning for me to shut it down.

I could sense the tension and I did shut it down because the last thing I need is to get in trouble with the booker or worse yet not get paid from the casino. I don’t know what they can and can’t do in Michigan and I may have been committing a felony and didn’t know it. I steered away from the flashing and went back into comedy and finished off my time.

After the show there was huge mixed reaction. Guys lined up to shake my hand and said it was THE best live entertainment show they’ve ever seen in their lives. There were even women who said I handled that delicate situation better than anyone else they’d ever seen.

All that was flattering but I could see the staff was ignoring me and I sensed that I made someone angry by doing what I did. I don’t know what did it or who it was but I’ve been in trouble in my life enough times to be sensitive to the feeling that someone is upset with me for something I said or did. I’m used to it even though I don’t enjoy it and this was it.

I didn’t want to upset anyone any more so I left after the show and didn’t want to start a fight with anyone on staff who was offended or insulted by what I did. But hey, it was an entire room full of college students from Sault Ste. Marie. Like none of them have seen a woman flash her rack by now? They’ve never seen a Girls Gone Wild video? The sad part is none of this matters. PERCEPTION is what matters so I wonder if anyone else is upset.