Steev!

This is Izzie making faces in the mirror in the back seat of the car.  Check out her awesome little pony tail.  This kid is a comic genius, I tell you.  Can you see it?  She’s practicing her “Did I do that?” in response to pots and pans crashing to the floor.

When Izzie walks, she uses her left arm to keep her balance, and her right arm to thrust herself across the room.  It’s possibly the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

Titling blog entries is often pretty difficult.  Maybe that’s a sign I shouldn’t be posting an entry, if I don’t have any cohesive thoughts to center it around.  But I just completed week 1 of the 100 pushups program, so I’m compelled to post something.  Hey, whoopy, I just completed the first week of a 6-week program that will supposedly end in me being able to do 100 consecutive pushups.  Tonight I had to do 5 sets… 15, 13, 10, 10, and then as many as I could (20).  As they have most nights this week, my arms feel like complete jelly.  But it feels great to be sitting, resting them on the desk, typing.

Last night was our 4th-to-last Don’t Spit the Water, and now we’re down to our final 3.  Butch Hilarity performed in his last show, which was pretty sad.  Scot Goodhart has been with this show since before it was a show.  And as evidenced by this, this, and this, he’s always been more than willing to participate in my stupid ideas.  He is one of the funniest people that I know, and I really do believe it’s an honor and a good sign when he’s willing to show up and act the fool.  We had a sold-out house last night, and I imagine the last 3 shows will sell out as well, so snag tickets now!

I am excited about hitting our final three shows.  As great as these last couple were, they weren’t much of anything with The Noob out of town.  And last night we were missing Timekeeper Willis as well.  We’ll hit these last three shows with a full cast (minus Tyler, of course), and end this run on a crazy high note.

Whoopy!

Inspired by Fuzzy’s post and by Josh Hamilton’s kazillion homeruns in the derby this evening, I’m going to sign on to this soon-to-be-a-silly-fad One Hundred Pushups workout.  It’s a 6-week program that ends with you being able to do one-hundred consecutive pushups.  It consists of tiered workouts, 3-nights per week.  Tonight I took the preliminary test to see which level I need to start at.  I had to as many consecutive good form pushups as I could before my quivering little arms and stomach glued me to the floor.  I did 17!  That’s about 12 more than I expected.  I was probably coasting off of my sugar high from the two Vanilla Cakesters I had just eaten.

We’re down to our final 4 performances of Don’t Spit the Water at The Playground Theater.  4 isn’t as exciting a number as 5 or 3, but it’s how the show started.  On October 29th, 2004, we began a 4-week run, and that was supposed to be that.  In March of 2005, we mounted an 8-week run, and that was supposed to be that.  And then in July of 2005, we mounted The Playground’s very first “open” run.  Here we are in July of 2008, finally ready to close things down.  We’re either closing things down too soon or too late.  I probably won’t know the answer to that one until I’ve been detached from the show for a while.

Don’t Spit the Water has carried me to some pretty interesting places over the last 4 years.  I’ve been to Three Oaks, Michigan.  I performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York, and then later for a whole week at the NYC Fringe Festival.  I performed in the Chicago Improv Festival and the Chicago Sketch Festival.  I performed in South Carolina at their comedy festival.  I performed on the Comedy Central development stage in Los Angeles.  I sat down with people at the Nickelodeon animation studio.  I sat in a trailer with Syd Vinnedge, producer of The Price is Right, on the CBS lot.  And I sat down with the VP of original programming at the Comedy Central offices.  I went on WGN Morning News a bunch of times, and on the Nude Hippo Show on cable-access 25.  Characters from DSTW spawned Talkin’ Funny, a weekly cable-access show on CAN-TV 21.   I performed stand-up at The Lincoln Lodge, auditioned for the Montreal Comedy Festival, and was taped for Comcast On-Demand.  I’ve franchised the show for a 6-week run at a theater in North Carolina.   I had a baby.  And now I’m days away from signing a contract that will result in the pitching hopefully development and sale of Don’t Spit the Water to networks in Australia, The UK, Canada, and New Zealand.

I’ve taken a lot of mileage from something that was a last minute fill-in for a sketch show I was too lazy to write.

I’m happy that this show came to be.  At the time it started, I was incredibly bored with improvisational comedy.  On nights I performed, I couldn’t even bring myself to sit through any of the other shows that night.  I’d pace around the theater outside, do a show that was sometimes hilarious, sometimes boring, and go home completely unfulfilled.  It’s lucky for me that I lived out in Evanston.  It made each trip to the city a little more meaningful.  Had I still lived blocks from the theaters, I could have gone years more lazily walking to the theater performing inconsistent and meaningless shows.  When I dropped everything for DSTW, it was a bit of an experiment and a statement.  I wanted to see if putting all of my energy into one project instead of spreading it thin among many would ever actually pay off.  As it turns out, for me, the answer was yes.

This also gave me a whole new insight into improv as performance.  I think the long form improv show as a performance piece was a fantastic and amazing idea that is now a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, and in most cases, unwatchable.  Don’t Spit the Water is a game show.  It has a loose structure, and several scripted moments.   Yet it’s chock full of improv.  Without the improv component, it’d be so much less.  So that’s the type of stuff I dig, it turns out.  Shows with structure that contain plenty of opportunities for improvisation.

I’ve used the word “I” a whole bunch in this entry.  That’s not to suggest that I alone was responsible for any of this.  The most important thing about this long run of DSTW was the artistic collaboration that grew from it.  For DSTW, and Impress These Apes, and I’m sure several future Blewt! projects, the real goal was to create a stage and a space for creative and funny people to perform without apology.  Without the countless contributions of so many creative folks, Don’t Spit the Water would have been nothing more than a silly 4-week run.

Anyway, I ramble.  Don’t Spit the Water has 4 more performances before it closes.  If you’re interested in checking one of those out, I recommend you purchase your tickets online right now (www.dontspitthewater.com).  We already have 25 tickets sold for next week’s show, and it’s only Monday.

Also: Fart!

Yesterday I made a box office deposit at the bank with a few weeks worth of Don’t Spit the Water ticket money.  Later in the day the bank called me to inform me that one of the twenties I deposited was counterfiet, and that they’d be deducting it from my deposit.  I got a little nervous, thinking they were going to have me talk to the cops or something, but it turned out to be a courtesy call so I wasn’t freaked out the next time I checked my balance.

Somebody passed a fake twenty for Don’t Spit the Water tickets!  And we likely handed them a real live fiver in change.  So not only did they catch a free show, we paid them $5 to see it.  And if they were one of our contestants, they walked out with a free pickle as well.

I hope they had a good time!

This is the lesson that I’m here to teach the world.  If you have aspirations, simply pipe up.  Ask, and you shall receive.

Fuzzy and Erica posted a new episode of the Silly Funny Goof Gang on Monday.  This one features Ken in one of my favorite bits… the card trick!

The year sure moves pretty quickly.  It seems like only 6 months ago we were ringing in 2008, and now here we are, just days from July.

Things are moving forward, which is nice.  We have an agreement with a production company that still needs to get batted back and forth between attorneys a bit, but hopefully we’ll have something signed in the next couple of weeks.  This basically gives these guys the exclusive right to pitch the show for a short time period, and gives Blewt! a cut of any deal they’re able to make, and a portion of any money the show makes thereafter.  They’re going to focus overseas, England, Australia, New Zealand, and across the border in Canada.

Wouldn’t that be neat, to lead a secret life as a game show producer in New Zealand?

Anyway, I went through a bit of a post-LA hangover, so it’s nice that emails are once again bouncing back and forth.  I got used to a certain pace while out there, and immediately following our trip.  My mind began to crave it, and the last couple of weeks have been depressing without it.

All the while, Isabella grows cuter.

She’s my other addiction. She’s so interactive lately, it’s becoming tough for me to get through a work day without her! During the week I see her in such short spurts. We play in the morning from 6am to 7am. When I get home in the evening, I catch the tail end of her dinner, help out with her bath, watch some Teletubbies, and then handle her pre-bed book and bottle. By that time, though, she’s increasingly fussy. She knows that soon we’ll be leaving her in her room alone, and letting her scream it out for a while before dropping off.

Weekends are great. We play and play. Tomorrow I’ll be on my own with her as Becky will be away at a math conference. Wish Isabella luck. Alone time with her inspires stupidity, sometimes.

I’ve been holding out on new entries until I had something exciting to report, but as it doesn’t look like that’ll be happening any time soon, I figure it’s best to just start posting.  We’ve been stuck in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for contracts to get drawn up with this production company, and until that happens, and they start pitching, there really isn’t much to say.

We have decided to pull the plug on the live show.  We’ll be finishing off just shy of a 4-year run, and performing our last Don’t Spit the Water at The Playground Theater on Saturday, August 9th.  There are 7 performances left!  We’re doing this for positive reasons, not bad ones, as we want to free up time for this upcoming run of Impress These Apes, and to work our butts off toward our big goal of getting the show on television.  Also, the stage show has run its course.  Time for new ideas, news productions, new spaces, and hopefully, new successes.  Though I’m pretty sad to be closing something that’s been a weekly part of my life for almost four years, I do think I will be too busy to notice that it’s gone.

Speaking of closings, tomorrow will be our last Talkin’ Funny for a while!  We’ll cap off our 5th season with special guest Dean Richards, the entertainment reporter for WGN.  You can also expect a nail-biting cliffhanger that will leave you clamoring for season 6 next April.

Izzie has been a real joy.  She’s playing all sorts of games, laughing, smiling, and running all over the place.  It’s becoming evident that she understands a good deal of what we’re saying, at least more than I expected at this age.  We took her over to the Custer Street Art Fair a few times this weekend, since it’s right outside our door.  The only thing that really caught her attention was a booth that had little marionettes dancing around, their strings hooked up to a machine.  They should take the word “art” out of that fair and replace it with “knick-knacky crap.”

I had half a mind to return to the fair with a picket sign and march around a few of the more quacky booths.  There was a booth for a robed psychic lady with her tarot cards.  There was a booth where people in Oriental robes claimed they could massage your mystical “Qi.”  And there was a booth where people took photos of your aura and chakra using specially filtered cameras.  My picket sign would say, “These people are stupid.  Don’t give them any money.  Spend it on knick-knacky crap instead.”

I want to produce a short run of a live show called, “Steve Gadlin goes into the bathroom and prank calls your mom.”  I’d rent out The Playground, and rig a cell phone so that it could output to the sound board.  I’d have the audience write down their moms’ cell phone #’s on slips of paper, and I’d take them into the bathroom.  Then I’d prank call everyone’s mom while they watched live video on the screen.

I’d be in the bathroom so that their moms wouldn’t hear a room full of people laughing.  Also, it spices up the title of the show.

Fuzzy and Erica have been posting weekly episodes of Silly Funny Goof Gang… you can see new episodes every Monday morning!

I saw a very nasty car accident on Saturday.  An SUV screeched off the road right next to me, bounced off a light pole, and then landed with the driver’s side on the street.  The light pole then crashed into the street, blocking traffic on both sides.  I jumped out of my car and called 911 while others climbed on top of the SUV to try and pull people out.  I had to move my car so that emergency vehicles could get close to the accident, and in doing so found myself caught up in traffic going the other way.  I’m not sure how things shook out, but it was terrifying to watch.  From what I did see, it looks like at least one person was well enough to crawl out of the car, so hopefully the others inside were okay, too.

I’ve been getting a lot of spam lately concerning replicas of watches, and I wonder if I inadvertantly caused this spam 3 years ago by purchasing a fake Rolex for $20 in NYC’s China Town.  Perhaps my purchase rounded out their budget enough to purchase a computer, or a book on sending out mass email.  And now I have to ask myself… was it worth it?  Was it worth the experience of haggling the price down from $70 to $20?  Was it worth the thrill of participating in this illicit activity?  Was it worth the cheese-factor of owning a real live China Town bogus Rolex watch with a second hand that doesn’t move, and a dial that won’t even operate?

The answer to that question, and more, to follow.