Saturday March 19th, 2011 - Bloomington, IL Talk about both sides of the spectrum. Last night was about as fun as a one nighter gets, tonight was exactly the opposite. That doesn’t usually happen on back to back nights, but being Mr. Lucky often has side effects that don’t happen to anyone else. This was brutal. The venue tonight was called the Tree House in Bloomington, IL. There’s been comedy there in some form for decades. I remember working it at least a dozen times over the last twenty years, and have had mixed results. Sometimes it’s been fine, other times pure hell. The actual setup isn’t bad at all. There’s an elevated stage and nice seating area with no poles or bad sight lines in the way, and the sound system has been workable. The lighting is terrible, but that’s better than having bad sound. In theory, this could be a good venue. Unfortunately, they haven’t figured out a way to make it work just yet. This wasn’t the Tree House I remembered, and I could see trouble brewing as soon as I walked in. There was loud rap music playing with disgusting X rated lyrics, and the people were mouthing along with the words which is a bad sign. It felt like a gang hangout, and I didn’t like it. Showtime was 8pm, and by 7:55 there were 12 people there for comedy - all sitting in the back row. Nobody was there to seat them, and I could smell trouble. There were also about 20 people at the bar in the rear of the room, about half of them white trash boozers who were loud and obnoxious. When the show started, they were talking to the comics. Whomever was to host the show didn’t show up, so a potential comedy student went up and tried to fill in after a short debriefing. He was there to maybe do a guest set, but not a hosting job. He was very green and had no clue as to what to do, but that wasn’t his fault. The feature was a very nice young kid out of Chicago named Jay Washington. He tried to do his best, but the hillbilly mafia wouldn’t stop talking and that makes it very difficult especially for a newbie. I give him kudos for hanging in there, and he did his whole time. As for me, I’ve been around way too long to put up with any lip from drunks. I went up and immediately confronted the situation and threw gas on the fire. I told him to shut his toothless pie hole or the show would be over. He wouldn’t, so I got off stage until he got thrown out. It was awkward for several minutes, but eventually all of them staggered out. I’m sure the bartenders and staff were pissed, but I wasn’t going to fight those imbeciles for 45 minutes, especially when they didn’t pay to see the show. I don’t think anyone had expected there to be a confrontation, but it absolutely worked. The 12 people were great. I ended up doing a full show, and those people laughed hard and were a fantastic crowd, or reasonable facsimile of a crowd. I actually had fun performing for them, but afterwards I realized even more I need to stop doing these lowball one nighters. No amount of money is worth having to expose myself to this kind of aggravation. This was a waste of energy.
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