Category: women

Tonight, Seattle! From the Stranger!

Chuckletown, USA

Shows That’ll Help You Laugh at the Traveling Freak Show Your Family Becomes at Christmas

by Cienna Madrid

Postscript: Another fun show by the amazing Rick Taylor! He made this lil button for me, which made me feel famous:

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THURSDAY 12/15

HOLIDAY HULLABALOO 2011
“As a gay man and a comedian, I’ve always found it funny that those worlds—comedy and being gay—[couldn’t] intersect more,” explains Hullabaloo producer Rick Taylor. “So [my partner] and I created this show to bring the comedy community over to the drag community and introduce them.” The Holiday Hullabaloo that results is charming: Local comics like Derek Sheen and Barbara Holm (and her ukulele) perform 10-minute sets, holly-decked drag queens strut their stuff, and Taylor recites his annual rendition of “‘Twas the Night Before Gay Christmas” (“‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the gay bar/All the creatures were stirring because that’s how gays are/The condoms were hung by the vending machine with care/In hopes that leather Santa soon would be there/The twinks were dancing and wearing their Keds/While visions of sugar daddies danced in their heads…”). Best yet, the show benefits the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Abbey of St. Joan—those immensely compassionate, beautifully scary nuns who raise money to help homeless and queer youth, among other social service projects. (Another reason to love the Sisters—they draw the line at celibacy. We all have our limits.) Julia’s on Broadway, 8 pm, $20 adv/$25 DOS, 21+.

Smutty Clown Comedy review- from qpdx.com

Need a good first date idea? This is not it. It’s more like the third date when you’re ready to see what your person is made of.

Smutty Clown Comedy at Saratoga Bar isn’t for the faint of heart, nor is it for the politically correct. Seriously. Do not bring that special someone who is canvassing for any sort of human rights. You will be dumped. Immediately.

But if you’re looking for a fun way to spend a Thursday night and you can handle straight cisgender guys yelling “you all are cunts” into the microphone, this may just be the place.

Billed as a monthly X-rated open mic, Smutty Clown is hosted by Sterling Clark and Whitney Streed. Clark is pretty much adorable – on this night she was wearing a floral dress and cardigan, hair in a head scarf with large glasses aka Sally Jessy Raphael. Streed was walking around in a suit, looking like she knew everyone in the place.

[Here are] “Some of the best comedians in town, saying some of the dirtiest things to you,” Streed said.

Virginia Jones, the funniest of the night, poked fun at her name – “It’s totally a black girl name, I get it. Virginia Jones either sings in a church or dies.” With hot pink dye streaking her dark hair and donning a suit with a tee-shirt, Jones, who is white, went on, “I don’t trust black Republicans for the same reason I don’t trust gay Republicans. Why would you want to be with a team that hates you?”

She described rockabilly guys “as gay as you can get while still being a straight dude,” and said her experience on OKCupid has led her to believe that most single men in Portland are bearded, bisexual, polyamorous and do graphic design – freelance.

“I would like to be the expert in c*ck-sucking at my house,” she told the audience on why she ultimately decided to not date bisexual guys.

After a swear-filled rant about handjobs in a Korean spa from a guy with neck tattoos who lived in Vegas, Richie Stratton came on stage to say, “That act was sadder than a Craigslist personal ad.”

In the world of open mics, you’re lucky to see one or two that really light up the stage – that exude confidence and understand how to engage an audience. Stratton is one of these people – “I tried to kill myself,” he said as part of his twisted bit. “I took a whole bottle of pills but they were multivitamin and I woke up fighting crime.”

He added later, “I don’t do cocaine. The last thing I need is to be confident and not shut up.”

Guess maybe you had to be there.

It’s easy to rant about shitty jokes or the people who can’t deliver them – but I will say this – it’s not easy getting up in front of a crowd and performing for a laugh. And though much of the humor at Smutty Clown is refreshingly perverse and dirty, it’s not clean in the sense of smart or conscious – for the most part. But that’s just the night I went – something tells me every month is different – even if the same comedians show up to play.

Go and judge for yourself. Just have thick skin and be ready to deal with long-haired hipsters double-fisting beers and clapping obnoxiously in the middle of jokes. Kudos to Streed and Clark for creating a space for this to exist – the wildly inappropriate humor strangely fits in this wildly inappropriate world.

6th Annual Pacific Northwest Women’s Comedy Festival, Saturday, Nov 12!

Come on down to the Wildish Center in Springfield this Saturday for an evening with Oregon and Seattle’s funniest ladies!  This is my fourth year performing in this show, and it’s always a fantastic time- my hilarious friends Barbara Holm, Marcia Belsky, Jessie McCoy, Jen Seaman, and our fearless leader, Leigh Anne Jasheway, will be killing it all night long!  Make a move- this show *will* sell out!

PASHA PRODUCTIONS PHOTOGRAPHY

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Any comics looking for HEADSHOTS: A very talented local photographer is Pasha Gross, and she shoots bands, strippers, and roller derby gals in town, and is in general a little fun and has a little edge to her.  I just did my shoot yesterday and had a lot of fun, and feel confident that I’ll get a great picture out of it.

Here is her website to check out her existing work: www.pashaproductions.com, you can make an appointment through that site, or you can call her at 503-236-5585.

Ladies’ Rock Camp and the Birth Of Furious Yellow

For many years, I have been playing mediocre rhythm guitar. I used to play with my band, Sadly Deluded, and I would tell jokes and play songs until someone suggested that I could just tell jokes and I wouldn’t have to haul a guitar around. I have always wanted to be a better guitar player, so I decided to force myself to practice guitar more by signing up for ladies’ rock camp. It didn’t actually work that way, and so I showed up with baby-soft fingers to play on for eight hours a day, which then hurt like bejeezus all weekend. My fault.

My former band’s logo, designed by the fantastic Francisco Garcia

Ladies’ Rock Camp is very fast paced- you show up, eat lunch, form a band, take a class for your instrument, and start writing a song.

When asked what kind of band I wanted, I couldn’t think of the term for the music I like so I just said “Mope Rock”. I still can’t think of a better word for the music I like.
Something strange about Rock Camp is the almost unremitting positivity and support of the other campers and staff. I think now that I have been selling myself short as a mediocre guitar player. I’m at least an average guitar player.

It was kind of uncomfortable, since I am used to stand-up, in which friendships are based on tearing each other down in public or private.


I had a moment I think might have been life-changing- we had been rehearsing our song over and over, and for a minute I was just playing it on my own, and I thought, “This doesn’t sound as good as it does with the rest of my band,” and that’s the first time I’ve ever thought anything of the sort.


 We named ourselves Furious Yellow, and our lead bass player made us matching 1″ buttons.
We wrote a song about breaking up, and sketched out our first EP:

Title: I Am Furious Yellow

Songlist:

Confirm or Deny
The Blood Of These Whores Is Killing Me
Doublewide Coffin (a coffin built for two)
Let Go Of The Cremains
My Hands Are Made Of Meat
I Still Have Your Knee Socks From Thanksgiving

Fun Facts About Furious Yellow:

Three members from Cali, one from Idaho, and one Portlander
We’re so heavy, we need two bass players
Our lead bassist has been to Rock Camp four times. She features in an article from the London Guardian on ladies’ rock camp in 2006!

Two blue-eyed, two green-eyed, one brown-eyed lady.

Five band members, and THREE tap dancers! What are the odds?

I was given a rainbow guitar strap, which I thought was appropriate because my Telecaster is at least bi-curious.
After the show at Satyricon, Furious Yellow was very tired and stinky and our fingers hurt, so we drank alcohol until we felt better.


If you like music and are a lady, I really recommend this camp. It is approximately the most fun thing ever.

Fatty Carbuncle- Another Repost From I Could Kill Her

Dear Elaine;

Listen. I know you’re concerned with your weight. How do I know? Because you’re a girl and because you’re alive. Our guy friend wondered to me why most women think they’re fat when they’re perfectly lovely, and I think it might be because when we go to the clothing store, the only items that fit us have a silhouette of a whale on the label.

In general, if the size number is greater than the age at which we lost our virginity, we start getting concerned that we’re hideously fat. I just read the touching book about funnyman Chris Farley, and evidently I weigh the same as Chris Farley at a “good” weight. So we’ve gotta do something.

A lot of people say they just don’t know how to get in shape. I know how. It’s just that it’s hard work. I was watching a show about weight loss, and how it’s just an equation- if you take in fewer calories than you put out, you’ll lose weight. I said, thanks a lot, TV- you think I’m fat *and* bad at math.

The last time I lost a lot of weight, women would ask me all the time how I did it, and as I explained that I was training for the Portland marathon, running 40 miles a week, I could see their eyes glaze over with disinterest, and they would say, oh, well, my friend’s been sleeping in a hydraulic tube, wrapped in Saran Wrap smeared with lard and beeswax, and I was hoping it was something like that.

I’m not working hard anymore. This time I’m working out smarter. This time I’m gonna lose weight in a fast and easy way!
What are my options for nutty-ass, health-endangering fad diets?

I do know a guy who is the last living Atkins dieter. I am not a good candidate for that, because I don’t eat meat, so I am not swayed by the magic of eating bacon smeared with butter. As far as I can tell, all that would be left for me to eat is celery and dust. Also, I read that carbohydrates are not just the fuel for your body, they’re what powers your brain, which is why every Atkins aficionado I have known has had ketosis breath and the attention span of a potato-starved gnat.

I was curious about Alli, the little blue diet pill that makes you shit fat*. There is a helpful booklet that comes with Alli that reads: There are some side effects, which include “oily spotting” and shitting when you hadn’t planned to. Don’t be a baby, Elaine – it’s all the same symptoms as you get from eating at Taco Bell.

The book also says: the excess fat floating on the toilet water may look like oil from a slice of cheese pizza.

See that? Already Alli has helped me! I’ll never eat cheese pizza again! Blarg! And it’s classic Clockwork Orange-style reprogramming: instead of feeling watching violent films and feeling nauseous, you’ll grow to associate eating a doughnut with the very real possibility of crapping a stick of butter on the subway.

* This is not their official motto- yet! I have helpfully emailed it to them and am patiently waiting for a response.

All the skinny bints at work go on about the Master Cleanse diet. A couple of years ago, it gained some popularity because Beyonce went on it so that she would not be mistaken for the fat, talented girl in Dreamgirls.

Apparently, the difference between this and real-life anorexia are the duration and hot lemonade, which has just enough maple syrup in it to keep you alive- and it’s supposed to turn you inside out with the mastery of its cleansing.

It seems that when people are not worried about the size of their ass, they’re concerned with what’s inside of it. A very similar diet is the cabbage soup diet, which is the same thing except you pretend you’re eating soup, and then you fart yourself thin. I guess I’m not clear on the details.

Goth Juice: The Most Powerful Hairspray Known To Man


I don’t know the last time I was just an out-and-out shill for something, but I was pretty excited to pick up a container of GOTH JUICE last weekend, the new hairstyling product from Lush. It’s purple, it’s powerful, and it’s inspired (along with a companion product called King of the Mods) by the fantastic UK comedy, The Mighty Boosh.  Each tub claims to be “Made from the Tears of Robert Smith.”

Confidential to Gabe Dinger and Pete Ellison: Robert Smith is *still* not a member of the Smiths. Oddly, none of them were called Smith, which makes them the opposite of the Ramones, who were all named Ramone.

POSTSCRIPT:

I loved this product and used it when my hair was short, and then one day, I went to Lush to pick some more up and my friend Andrea, who is now the lead singer of the great band Holy Grove, had to break the news that it was discontinued, and comfort me because I was crying in a soap store.  Zen teaches us that loving something means one day you will lose it, and you must always prepare yourself for that loss.