Theatre of Note marathon!!!

Wow, this blogging with a glass of milk is becoming a thing that I do! I love it! So, this is my last night here in LA and what a better way to spend it by going to a theatre marathon right?

Ella and I were originally planning to hit up Edison in downtown LA and then I saw Kirsten Vangsness tweet about the Theatre Of Note (TON) marathon they were having and the Edison plan was never made. It was TON all the way!!!

It started at 3pm, but I could only go by about 6:30pm because I had to check into my flight, get some last minute packing done, etc. We started off with Stacy McQueen hosting the segment and it was hilarious!!! She had a Pomeranian, that she found on the street today and was adopting (she wins all the way through for this) and a crafts basket filled with cards, books on Alfred Hitchcock - An in depth analysis of only 5 pages! Or that is how small the book looked! She also had some things Gweneth Paltrow and some other books!

We started off the act with Vinyl Candy, which is a Modern Rock band. They had pretty good music and I found myself catching the chorus and singing along! It was not a bad way to start the evening! Each act was about 7-9 minutes long, so the band played about three songs. They handed out some free CDs and Ella scored one and gave it to me (I love being the foreign visitor! Whaaat??). After that, it was Bill Brochtrup, who was an essayist and read out his essay. It may sound boring, but it made me laugh, even though it wasn't as out there as the rest of the comedy. Betsy Salkind came on and she was a funny stand-up. It was a nice act and it was clean, which I applaud her for!!!

Then the most memorable act was Hiwa Bourne!!! She blew me away!!! She is a lovely hula dancer! The way she danced!! It was amazing, and it made me feel incredibly awkward, because the only dancing I do is bobbing and shifting from one foot to another. I have actually become quite adept at it! She talked about going to Tahiti and performing there. She loved the culture and they gave each of the American dancers a black pearl necklace, which she wore tonight. She then danced to a Tahitian song which was beautiful. The surprise of the night was when she invited her friends to come and dance and Kirsten Vangsness came out with some other people and they all did a group dance for us!!!! It was so awesome!

The other amazing performance of the act were the fire-eaters!!!! Oh my word! We all had to go outside, where they offered us glasses of wine and we had to witness a wedding!! Well, two of them in any case. This was a whole act of fire-eating and it was fantastic, how they did that! Ella and I got good seats, kneeling right up front!

We then had a fifteen minute break, before the next act which was hosted by the delightful Kirsten Vangsness!! She was super funny and so sweet! She started out by handing out candy, always a win, and then introduced Lemon Road, which is an acoustic rock group. They were awesome and had some really nice songs! After their performance, Kirsten came back. She started hosting and then went to the performance gear, because she was the next act! her act was delightful. It was faction piece called Mess. I related to this piece SO much, it was like she was performing my life out there! She started off by telling us what the piece was about where the first bit was a piece of fiction that she had written and the next was a little bit of reading from her one of her diaries that she keeps.

The fun part about her act is that the description of her piece was done to the tune of Poker Face!!! And she was spot on! I love that she keeps her diaries and read a piece of her fiction because I write fiction and keep diaries!!! I felt all "I do that too!" there. It was a cool feeling! I am cool now!

After her performance, it was the comedy duo Ten West! They were simply outstanding!!! I love them! They started off with walking onto the stage with a coffin and walked off it, into the loo! Then they made "No, no" faces and brought it back. They set it down to sad funeral music playing and then one of them went to the mic at the back, turned around and started "We are all gathered here today to remember the diseased.." and the other member ran to him and whispered something and he started again "the beseeched" and went on, till it even became "split peas" till he finally got it "the deceased" and then the show went on about how no one would say something about the deceased and they collected donations, which ranged from actual money to the candy that Kirsten passed out, to candy wrappers, to jewellery and then to purses, that were not willingly donated!

After that, they made all the single women stand up and handed us their businedd cards, miming "call me" which was hilarious! After that act was the awesome Tom Lenk!!! If you are not a Buffy fan, shame on you! He was insanely funny, and talked about Nerdgasm, a play he did in London and Rock of the Ages, which he did in NYC. He also talked about some of his childhood, being a drama nerd and Shemar Moore's hot abs. Yeah. You read it right!!! Can this night get any better???

After Tom Lenk, Kirsten's hostessing duties came to an end. It was Alex Boling's turn!! He was super funny and some of the cool acts that performed in his act were Amy Stiller, from Meet the Fockers, and was funny. She did stand-up and most of her material was about her being an actor in LA (duh! Cause that's what she is!). I really fell in love with the folk band Ampersand. The singer was fantastic and so talented and the guitarist was really good too! She had such an amazing voice! The next act was Jimmy H, who is a magician. He did some cool tricks like mind reading, like he guessed cards that some members of the audience got and then got us to guess a card that an audience member had, which was awesome!!!

The sour note of the evening was Karl Herlinger, who is a ventriloquist. Oh my God, his act was so not to my taste and something that I would have gladly skipped!!! It was dirty, disgusting and vulgar to the extreme! I do not want to describe what it was on my blog because it is bad enough that it's burned in my brain, it does not need to be in yours! Oh well, I covered my eyes for the most part of it. Let's just say that.

To end on a good note, meeting Kirsten was lovely! She is such a sweet person and so freaking friendly!!! Loved it and she wore the cutest outfits on the show!!! Here is a picture of us!