It’s Friday, yo.

SNL Trivial Pursuit Match Goes Very Wrong

 

Damn you SNL Trivial Pursuit and your obscure 1985 season references.

I’ve had this trivial pursuit “SNL DVD Edition” sitting in my closet unopened for two years. This fact is a testament to the kind of people you may find in DC.  Nerds.  Not the comedy nerds that I HEART and often speak of here in the ole blog but rather straight up serious-job-ties-martinis-politics-only-look-forward-to-Superbowl-commercials-for-laughs-NERDS.  And alas, for a while I was unable to find any playmates that may prove to be worthy enough adversaries for me to take it out of the plastic.  I am equally proud and ashamed to say that is no longer the case.

Being my own greatest fan, I was still confident in my ability to wipe the floor with the chums I slyly seduced into my lair of crazy with promises of cakes, French pressed coffee and a friendly boardgame. After all, their knowledge of SNL maybe respectable but I doubt they used to sneak into the kitchen since they were still in feety pjs after bedtime on Saturday nights and lift a 19″ TV set half  their weight into their rooms in order to catch every minute of SNL and then wake up again at 5 AM just to return that TV set back to the kitchen without anyone the wiser.  I mean Coobs grew up in the third world (those are his words) for chrissakes and my Southern Belle has never been north of Pennsylvania.

I don’t really want to get into it…but I lost to Coobs after he failed SEVERAL times to answer the “FOR THE WIN” question.  I mean no offense Coobs, but you did have some difficulty towards the end.   And how do I feel about it?  I think my feelings can best be expressed by the piece I chose to best represent myself on the board.  See below.

It’s Friday, yo.

Improv Nerds Abuzz for F.I.S.T.

Modeled after my own knuckle tattoos.

Hey, is it just me or does this black box smell like beer breath and B.O.?  Oh, it must be time for F.I.S.T!  This will be the third year WIT hosts the Fighting Improv Smackdown Tournament.  What is it?   So glad you asked.

You know those funny friends you have that are always using their surplus income to take improv classes and see improv shows? You know the ones you introduce to others at parties without making reference to what they do for a living because they’re kind of embarassed by it so instead you say,”This my friend _______.  They do stand-up comedy.” ?  Then your friend gets really annoyed that you still don’t understand what it is they do with their free time but instead of telling you outright they go home and blog about it and joke with their comedy nerd friends about people who just don’t “get it”.  

FIST is teams of three improvisors that perform 10-15 minutes shows Star Search style.  Two teams perform one after the other and then are judged individually at the end.   The winner is decided immediately by judges and that team moves onto the next bracket and so on until there is but one final team of snarky Puma wearing Peter Pans standing and holding onto a pride similarly experienced by adults without stunted maturity when their first born arrives.

The losers?  Well, that’s the great thing about comedy and improvisors; subjectivity and narcissism.   No one ever really feels like they lost because clearly the judges obviously were unable to “get it”.  And winners and losers all head to the pub together for many beers and ego massaging.  It just all seems to work out in the end.

So in closing, being a part of FIST last year changed my whole DC experience.  It was the most fun I’ve had since my friend’s wedding in ‘04…and that involved naked backdives and was pretty hard to top.   I aslo came out of it with incredible friendships and the confidence to keep doing what I love… makin’ the jokes. 

I hope all my L3 kids sign up.  After just one class mommy is already so proud of you.

“Gordon Lightfoot” Is Coming To Town

Honorable Mention: GL's nickname is so given because one of her parent's friends gave Gordon Lightfoot a BJ in the '70s.

I can only imagine what kind of visitors  this blog will get having nicknamed one of my friends “Gordon Lightfoot”.   The three of you inmates reading this will note that I give nicknames to my friends in order to protect their identity…protecting them from what I don’t know.  But I’m not too keen on having my name all over the interwebs and so I try to give a little anonymity to my loved ones.  Also, when I am a member of  the comedy elite I can disavow any affiliation with these small time losers.

Gordon Lightfoot is recently engaged to her first love.  It is the cutest story.  Where shall I begin… Ok, so I met GL at my Rockefeller Center gig.  We shared an office.  She thought I was weird because I spent most of  my time looking up Wizard of Oz paraphanalia and calling Tina Fey’s work phone and hanging up because I found the number through the alumni website before she got crazy famous.  I also printed out Jimmy Fallon photos and pasted them around my computer monitor and generally ignored everyone else.  Miraculously we became friends.  Little did we know September 11th was just around the corner and there’s nothing like insane tragedy to bring two bitchy twenty-somethings together.

CUT TO:  Us eating Mexican food together on 56th St.

CUT TO: Us dancing in her kitchen with our martinis spilling everywhere.

CUT TO:  Us walking around Bloomingdale’s pointing at things we can’t afford

CUT TO: Her giving me a peak of her roommate’s bedroom.  (Turns out her roommate was the boy my best friend and I were obessessed with in high school …. How obsessed?  My best friend and I parked my car two houses down and across the street from his house on nights we didn’t have anything  to do just to see if we could catch a glimpse…)  **Sidenote – Let sleeping dogs lie.  I was unprepared for what I found…it was not only the filthiest room I’d ever seen but it also housed an abundance of awful low end scraped up knees porno mags.  How awful?  Like, these-old-ladies-took-these-photos-for-a-sandwich awful.

CUT TO: GL moves to DC.

3 years later…

CUT TO: Tara moves to DC

CUT TO: Us eating Mexican food at any one of the three Guapos.

CUT TO: GL moves back to Michigan

CUT TO: Tara eating Guapo’s alone.

Ok felons, that brings you up to speed. 

Sure enough, shortly after moving back to her home town more than 10 years after leaving it she runs into her old high school boyfriend and they become friends and fall in love and are now engaged.  Fin.

The cutest story right?  I am dragging them to some comedy shows this weekend and we may or may not have Guapo’s.  Probably not.   We hate that place.