I’m hosting at the beautiful Helium Comedy Club for the lovely Sebastian Mansicalco all week, and tonight will also be rushing over to the Hollywood Theatre to check out our competition in the 48 Hour Film Festival! No matter what, I know that the film we made is beautiful and funny, like the baby I would want if I wanted a baby.
On the one hand, I don’t know that anyone looks at this. On the other, I feel Blog Guilt for not posting for weeks and weeks. Tonight’s show is gonna be a ton of fun, Josh Finch, Seth Milstein, and Stephanie Purtle are in town from Eugene to throw some funny around, the lovely Rochelle Love-Cox and the Portland-Famous Ian Karmel is treading the boards with me, along with visiting celebrity C.J. Levine and your soulful host Tristian Spillman. Pizza, beer, jokes! Only $5! Come on out!
Who doesn’t like a green screen, a free afternoon, and the Cure? Nathan Brannon stars as the ghost, filming and song by Tim Kohl. I did everything else, and I mean EVERYTHING. Well, I sang and lip-synched badly, and I made the ghost costume.
Postscript: At Helium last weekend, someone walking by yelled, “I Like the Ghost song!” This is one of many things I love about Portland, and about the internet.
I’m writing this essay on my fifth anniversary as a stand-up performer. Apart from the respect of my peers, and the literally dozens of dollars I have made while performing my craft, I think the best part of being a comedian is the fame.
Oh, reader- I can feel your slight reticence to accept my famousness- but let me assure you, it’s very real.
I started doing stand-up for the same reason most people do, which was to make British performer Eddie Izzard pay attention to me.
While this has not happened yet, it may one day happen. It’s certainly more likely to happen if I do stand-up than if I work in a warehouse or genetically modified poultry farm.
He’s already paid a small amount of attention to my friend Dax, which was he said he was too tired to do an interview after two hours onstage in Vegas. I often repeat Eddie’s advice to newcomers who want to know how to get good onstage, which is simple: get up and do comedy a thousand times. By the thousandth time, you should be pretty good! If you’re not good by then, you should definitely quit.
For the last few years, my fame level has been very dependent on whether or not I am in a vegan restaurant or a gay bar in Portland, or both (and why aren’t there more of those?), but recently, I have found that I am famous in more places than ever. Admittedly, sometimes I am confused with the adorable Kristen Schaal of Flight of The Conchords, which is fake fame. This is still OK with me. I discussed it with her, and she said that while she doesn’t see the resemblance, it does not bother her that people think I’m her.
Last Summer I was at a rock show with my friend Pete, and Pete and I were having an impromptu dance contest, the gist of which was “Who can do the most embarrassing pop-and-lock?” when someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was Virginia Jones. I admitted I was, and she said, “I’m a fan of yours.” Just to be certain, I asked “a fan…of my dancing? And she paused for minute and said, “no.” Nightclub: FAMOUS.
I appear briefly in the comedy documentary “I AM COMIC”, and every time it runs on Showtime people ask if that was me, and that makes me feel famous.
There is a privately owned movie theatre in Portland where not ONLY do I not pay to see films, I am allowed to take my small dog to films, because I’m so famous. I usually don’t, because when we went to see Grizzly Man, he growled at the bears onscreen (Genus CANIS, just like he is). But still and all- he’s allowed to go.
A creepy-famous story happened when I was at an after-party for Bumbershoot performers last September. A young man approached me and said he’d seen me perform at the Club Deluxe show in San Francisco, and he had seen me perform in Seattle that day. I said, “Oh, that’s really cool!” Then, he showed me in his notebook where he had written down that he had seen me both places, and I said, “OK!”
The gem in my crown of famousness probably happened last month, when I was recognized at Costco. The woman manning the checkout line told me, “I thought it was you, and then when you got close, I knew it was you!” And then she called her husband immediately to tell him that comedians buy bulk trail mix, just like regular people. And yes. We do. We like the kind with pineapple in it.
Onward and upward! This month I have done shows in Coos Bay, OR, Winnemucca, NV, and was the only straight person performing at the Pride festival in Portland, (where I was so famous I was offered FREE water and Red Bull) so I really can’t help but become still more famous. Look for me in the funny pages! Reading this is like talking to me, which makes you slightly famous. Believe me, there’s enough of this to go around!
This amazing photograph is by the amazing Roger at Circle23 Photography. (Please note: big chunks of his website are NSFW.)
“Dammit, Virginia” said Virginia, “How many times do I have to tell you to keep your dirty whore shoes off the coffee table? I work hard to keep this place nice, and I could use a little help”
“Well, Virginia”, said Virginia smugly, “It’s my table. I paid for it, and I guess I’ll ruin it if I want to.”
Virginia, meanwhile, sat whimpering in the corner, rocking back and forth and crying to herself. “You guys!” she screamed. “WHAT ABOUT VIRGINIA?”
All eyes turned to the coffee table. There, six inches from Virginia’s foot, Virginia’s body sprawled across the table, one hand clutching a shot glass. Her breath had been clouding the glass surface for the last few minutes, but the shapes of her condensed breath had been shrinking and slivering away until now, when no breath appeared. Her lips slowly began to turn blue.
“Wait- wasn’t Virginia supposed to be watching her?” asked Virginia. “Where is she, anyway?”
Virginia, her finger shaking, pointed through the window, out to the sunny balcony, where Virginia was finishing a glass of Champagne, oblivious to the state of her charge.
“Well,” said Virginia, closing her magazine, “Can I have her bedroom?”
I was recently sent to Sri Lanka for a work project, and my main plan was to visit the elephant sanctuary in Pinnawela.
I was told that there are wild elephants hanging out, many of them were orphaned by poaching and military action. This is true, and they’re fed from bottles and you can ride ’em (I didn’t), and they’ll have their picture taken with you, but the reason they do that stuff is because there are dudes poking them with big, nasty bullhooks.
I swiftly fell out of love with the concept. It’s a mixed bag- it’s tourist money that feeds these guys, and there’s the an old blind elephant being taken care of, and there’s an elephant who lost a foot in a landmine whocouldn’t survive in the wild. On the other hand, they’re just as penned in and abused as elephants in the circus. They also appear to have a breeding program going to generate the babies that tourists, myself included, love. Yes, you do get to pet a baby elephant for tips, which feels good, but dirty. I don’t know how much more for a lap dance, but you’re advised to have a very strong lap.
The first elephant I petted was this old blind man, with giant curvy tusks like a mammoth. He felt like a hairy handbag. After I petted him, an Australian lady took her turn and he bellowed and peed all over her. I said to my friend, Oh, I’m glad that wasn’t me. After he had a nice piss, he got an erection. Against my best judgment, I took, like, a million pictures of it. I’m not proud, but nor could I help myself.
Here we can see the ginger, bearded hipster outside his natural habitat of Billyburg, meeting an elephant while a prick holds a bullhook.
It’s not that the elephants weren’t beautiful, or that the babies weren’t adorable and the dusty navy of blueberries. They were.
For a vegan to drive three hours through the jungle to watch animals be abused is a real letdown.
They don’t have animal rights in Sri Lanka, they barely have human rights. Still and all, I felt like a giant asshole.
I have been spending an educational and largely fun ten days in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Part of the job involves going out and getting drunk at night, which is very helpful for addressing the international traveller’s twin ailments of loneliness and jet lag-induced insomnia.
Last night, an expat Englishman pointed out to me that the name of this website, Badinia, means “I Want You”, in a very decidedly sexual way, in Singhalese. This was very helpful, because it explained why everyone I had given my business card to had laughed delightedly. Incidentally, that means my email address is I want you at I want you dot com. It’s things like this that keep my mother up at night.