Beta Beta (A show) Tomorrow

A plug, and a mostly unsolicited list of thoughts of living in LA

A Plan For The Future

My essay earlier this week about “the new silliness in LA improv” got a lot of reactions and generated a lot of subscriptions! “A lot” means, like, a hundred. But for me, that’s a lot! That’s more new subscriptions than Paramount+ got this week! Yeah, I burned Paramount+. I’m on strike, you know, so I’m at war with the studios.

I don’t want to exclusively write about improv but I have a sneaking suspicion that a majority of people who signed up want nothing else. Here’s the plan: I will post once a week. The first post of every month will be an improv-focused rant/essay/diatribe. But for the other weeks I’m gonna do whatever the heck I want. Sometimes improv, sometimes a truly undesired essay, like my new understanding of why exactly John Lennon broke up with the Beatles in September 1969 (he was bluffing, trying to get Paul to beg for forgiveness, which misfired and led to them all being annoyed with each other and refusing to apologize, thus leading to John refusing to finish Let It Be, which… well, anyway, more on this later).

For right now, I want to use the new influx of subscribers to … plug something.

Come See Beta Beta

This Saturday (August 5) at 9pm at Public Displays of Altadena, Jim Woods and I are doing our monthly show “Beta Beta.” Come see it! It’s where Jim and I try out new sketches, characters and also do a little improv. PDA is located at 2553 Fair Oaks Ave, Altadena, CA 91001. It’s a quick drive on a Saturday night with — get this — truly plenty of street parking! $10.

Is the show good? Yes! Is it also…. written days or maybe only hours before? Also yes. Did one of our past sketches end with one of our characters quoting Pulp Fiction (“Shit negro, that’s all you had to say”) only to be met with complete silence from a room of our friends? Also yes. Has our audience size ranged from a full house to also… just one person? Has at least one sketch gone so well that we had to end the show early because the laughs made the runtime go way over? Yes! It’s been wild. The show has really been bringing me back to the days of doing sketches with Rob Lathan in the East Village in 2002, when we called our show “The Osgood-Schlatter Show” (a bone disease) only to have someone show up saying “But I do have Osgood-Schlatter, is this show not about that?” and then us having to explain that the title was meant to be silly, to which he said “But it hurts.” We let him in for free and he left early.

“Beta Beta” is loose and fun and experimental. PDA is a really fun space doing lots of exciting comedy. Jim is one of the funniest people on the planet Earth and I know a lot about the band The Gin Blossoms. I highly recommend this dumb show!

That’s It For Now

That’s it for now. Next week, probably on Friday, I will have another post of some nonsense. If you don’t like any of these essays, I kindly point you to your “delete” button or else, more harshly, the “unsubscribe” button! If you’re like me, about twice a year you unsubscribe from everything in a fit of rage only to realize you’ve deleted all of your own medical records and proof of identity. So I get it.

See you soon!