Bring Out Your Dead!

The other day, I was feeling a bit like the dead. The deadly three 'B's - broke, blue and bored –were working their mischief on me, and the phone rang. Was I free to usher Sunday night at the Music Circus? HELL yeah!

This past year I've suffered a dearth of theater. I stopped my subscription to the Davis Music Theater because after my theater buddy Cornetta retired to Georgia, it was a pain in the bum getting friends to attend performances with me. You would think offering someone a free ticket would do the trick, but its amazing what a pain that proved to be and I finally decided to hell with it. Add to that famine, that last year I wasn't asked to usher at the Music Circus, nor did I call the powers that be to push my case for ushering. Happily, Sunday night they were desperate enough to call on me. I was at the ready, and all at once, the three 'B's turned into the three 'E's - eager, enable and effin' excited. Was that four 'E's? Tough tits! That was 2 'T's, or is that too rude?

I totally enjoyed my theater gig. I didn’t usher really, I acted as a ‘greeter’, yelping out my overly cheery ‘Hello!’ to theater goers, then telling them where to go, as in ‘go west to door 14 and the ushers there will show you to your seats’. Oh, and not being an usher I didn’t have to deal with seating late patrons, which can keep an usher out of the theater, missing anywhere from the first 5 minutes to even 15 or 20 minutes into a performance. Nope, I got to plop my rear into a free seat, saving my poor arse from the price of a $50+ theater ticket.

Spamalot is based on the 35+ year old Monty Python and the Holy Grail movie which I’ve seen about a b’jillion times over the years. The play includes many gags from the movie, and damn it, they still make me laugh, everything from the bounced bovine and the killer rabbit to the outrageous Frenchie who farted in the general direction of the silly English kkkkknnnnn-igh-ttts!But there was also tons of new stuff as the play pounced on and worried bits of the movie that I hadn’t realized were screaming out for further silly development. Who could have guessed what was in store for Lancelot the brave when he rescued the singing waif at the swamp castle? And didn’t Lance look positively fetching in his silver lame codpiece? Suffice to say, I laughed until my well shaken intestines released a fart in the general direction of… TMI?

King Arthur, a brave knight & one Cantelevered Cow