Meow House Theatre

Friday, August 3

The last day of class was today. We spent the whole time preparing for our performance on Sunday. More doing monologues and riffing off the monologues into scenes. I was getting really sleepy by about 3:30. I hadn’t even been staying out really late, but the combination of 6 hours a day of acting class, plus all the walking in the baking humidity, well by Day 5 anyone would be tired. Everyone in the class said they were wiped. At the end of the day, Sharilyn and I went back to my hotel so she could use my laptop (her power cord had died on her own laptop and she was having to pay for using her hotel’s Internet station–something like a dollar for 3 minutes–so I said she should use mine. Even though my wireless connection was not that great–we had to practically do gymnastics with the machine to get it in a position where it could pick up a decent signal. Next time I stay there I’m asking for a lower-floor room. (They had told me my floor was having problems with the wireless.) Or geez, install some more access points!

Sharilyn used the computer for a little while and then went back to her own place. I was so tired that I didn’t even want to get up to get dinner, although I was getting hungry, and kept putting off getting my butt off the bed and by the time I thought I really better go find something, a huge thunderstorm had started and so I was trapped, so to speak. It was pretty late by that time–after 11:00 PM–and while there were plenty of places nearby I didn’t have an umbrella and didn’t want to go out in the lightning anyway. So I watched some terrible movie, whose name thankfully escapes me, and just went to sleep.

Saturday, August 4

My plan for Saturday was to head back over to the Paley Center (aka The Museum of Television & Radio) and catch another panel or two from The Daily Show, and maybe a couple of old episodes, and then go do a little shopping. I wanted to buy some sneakers of some kind. I had only brought heels with me and wanted some sneakers for the performance on Sunday. Just in case; you never know if you’re going to be running in place or leaping across the stage, and while I am very comfortable in heels it would be just my luck to fall flat on my face on stage in front of all those people.

I got to the MTR at noon, right when they opened. A funny thing happened before that: I had been there before and knew exactly where it was, but I guess when I was walking I must have had my head in the clouds and so walked right past it and crossed Fifth Avenue, which means I was now on the East Side of Manhattan instead of the West Side. I could tell within a block that something had changed; it was like being in a different city almost. I tend to spend most of my time in NYC on the West Side or in the Village. It’s kind of a shock to see the East Side.

Anyway, once I saw La Grenouille I knew I had gone too far and turned back. I ended up buying a membership to the MTR. I figure I go to NYC often enough that I’d get full value out of it; plus, day tickets only allow an hour of viewing time (although they often give you more anyway) while a membership gets you 3 hours. So I got it. Also, members get notified of panels ahead of time, before the general public, and the tickets to those are pretty hard to come by so all the advance I can get is good.

I ended up choosing another couple of old Daily Show episodes and a couple of panels (one from 1999 and one from 2005). One of the episodes had a hilarious segment with Stephen dressed as Hitler–mustache, hair combed forward, brown shirt–reporting from Berlin where he couldn’t understand why people (especially old people) were yelling at him and refusing to talk to him as he was trying to do a story. This is one of the “lost episodes” and I had not seen it before. What I mean by “lost” is, most of the Daily Show episodes from 2003 to the present are available through file trading (a chunk of early 2003 is missing for some reason), but episodes from 1999-2002 are fairly scarce. Episodes pre-1999 are practically non-existent. Oh, they’re out there–someone probably is sitting on a gold mine of VCR tapes–but freely available, there are not many. If anyone has anything they’d like to share, please contact me. This particular Hitler episode I’ve never seen a screen cap of, nor heard discussed by anyone, and I don’t have it myself (and I have 99.5% of everything Stephen/Jon-related since about 1994). While at MTR, I was a very bad girl and took a couple of photos of the screen, which is HIGHLY against the rules, and actually one of the employees came over after I had already put the camera away but he must have thought I was fiddling with something (which actually I wasn’t at that moment) and said in a suspicious voice, “You aren’t recording anything, are you???” Man that made me nervous! So because I feel bad that I even took the two pictures, and plus I think a lot of people would misunderstand both Stephen dressed as Hitler and my publicizing of that particular picture, I think it’s best if I leave it off the blog. They might show up somewhere else, if you know what I’m saying. And some of you do.

After leaving MTR, I walked back to the subway and intended to take it down to the West Village but for some reason, when the #1 got to 14th Street, it reversed course all the way back to Penn Station, and by that time it was getting late, so I just got out there and found a shoe store and bought a couple of pairs. Then it was back to my hotel to get ready to go out. I had gotten an email on my BlackBerry from Sharilyn saying that while she was at TKTS buying tickets for a Broadway show, she saw a guy she recognized: Howard Feller, Jon’s former partner from 13 years ago on The Jon Stewart Show. Only Sharilyn would recognize him, of course! She must know (or at least know of) every standup comic who has had the least iota of success in the past 20 years. If they played in Peoria, as the saying goes, she probably saw their act at one time or another. She asked if it was him and they got to talking and he said he was doing a standup set that night. So she and I decided to meet at my hotel, go to dinner, and then get to Howard’s act. We went to a nice Italian place on 8th with a waiter straight out of The Godfather. Very charming, with a marvelous accent, but I expected him to all of a sudden walk quickly in the back as a silence descended over the room, and then someone was gonna get his brains blown out. Thankfully that didn’t happen. Good food, good dinner, as we discussed some crazy Internet people. Yep, there are people on this here Web who are far more nutty than I. You wouldn’t believe it even if I swore I was not making up characters for my next mental-hospital drama. But enough about that.

We got to the venue–a restaurant that had a guy out front hawking the show–and were led into the back room … where we discovered that we were the first audience members, and as it turned out, the ONLY audience members. Which means they cancelled the show. Not before we got there; after. Due to no customers. There were a few people there who clearly worked there, and we asked if Howard was still coming in and they thought he was so we waited a while so that Sharilyn could talk to him and possibly ask a few questions for her JSS site. We were just about to leave when Howard appeared. He looks EXACTLY the same as he did in 1994. Jon looks a lot older but not Howard. I mean, he looks the same then as he does now, not the same now as he did then. There’s a difference there; think about it. Well we had a nice talk with Howard and he was quite taken with Sharilyn. I felt a little like a 1950s chaperone. O, if this had been some other former (or current) TV star, how different things might have gone … but let’s just say that Sharilyn felt it was best to maintain a professional relationship in this particular case. We did have a nice talk with him–he was very pleasant and told us what he’s up to now, still doing a lot of standup, and shared a few funny stories from the JSS–and after a while it was getting pretty late (late for me is midnight, keep in mind) so we said our goodbyes and hit the road.

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