Comedy Festival Diary, Day #1: Missing Bartenders, Flash Floods, & Vegan Taco Bell

For the next three nights I'm performing in Traverse City, Michigan. (If Michigan doesn't get washed away in a flash flood...)

For the next three nights, I’m performing several shows as a guest of the Traverse City Comedy Festival in Michigan. (If Michigan doesn’t get washed away in a flash flood...) I’ll share my daily diary of the festival’s goings-on with you as they unfold unravel.

~ Jason

Wednesday, 8:15 AM – The Guilt Trip

Location: Manhattan & Queens, NY

Packing a suitcase on the morning of a flight is a rookie mistake, but I am a professional at making my own life difficult. As I cram crinkled shirts into a broken suitcase, Morris watches me with his beady little eyes. I can see the deep, burning resentment in his face. He knows I’m leaving him. What he doesn’t know is that he is about to get the greatest walk of his life from his Uncle Paulie, the undisputed king of New York dog walkers. Still, the guilt is heavy.

I scoot my bag along the sidewalk to the subway, and the MTA, sensing my urgency, immediately collapses. The trains are running on different lines. I make it to the end of the E in Queens only to find that buses no longer exist. I eventually flag down one of those neon green outer-borough taxis. He charges me an arm and a leg (plus tax) to drive me the final 50 meters to LaGuardia.

Wednesday, 1:30 PM – The Eaves-drawing

Location: LaGuardia Airport, NY

The TSA line is a slow-moving river of angry, exhausted humanity. Despite being fully funded by the Department of Homeland Security, the system is backed up to the curb. I shuffle past an airport massage parlour called “Be Relax,” which sounds exactly like a business named by Melania.

All the afternoon flights have banked up. We are delayed. I retreat to the airport bar, pull out my sketchbook, and begin “Eavesdrawing”—listening to people’s inane conversations and sketching them.

• Subject A & B: Two girls heading to a bachelorette party in Chicago.

• Subject C: A guy at the end of the bar, trying desperately to pick them up, completely ignoring the fact that they have name-dropped their boyfriends into the conversation no less than fourteen times.

• Subject D: A woman next to me on her way to visit her grandkids in Arizona. She leans over and asks if I’d like to finish the rest of her Prosecco because they’re calling her flight. I know she’s just trying to be nice and not waste a drink, but absolutely not. It’s Champagne or nothing. (What, does she think I’m an animal?)

Oh yeah..

At this point, I should probably mention that I’ve been invited to perform at the Traverse City Comedy Festival. It’s absolutely crazy to be on lineups with people like Gary Goldman, Roy Wood Jr., Megan Stalter, Sarah Sherman, Joe DeVito, and so a heap of other great comedians from around America.

It’s a truly fantastic festival, and they really take care of you. You can see and hear me talking to the festival director, Anne, on a previous episode of Draw Me Anything from last week; you can catch that here:

Wednesday, 3:45 PM – The Devil Wears Prada

Location: Somewhere over Pennsylvania?

I board the flight dead last. I am jammed into a middle seat between a lanky teenager who hasn’t showered in fifteen weeks and an obese, hirsute man who insists on watching The Devil Wears Prada on his phone without AirPods.

I try to get some work done, but focus is impossible. I spend the flight doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, punctuated by tinny, aggressive blasts of Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt trading sassy jabs at Anne Hathaway from my seatmate’s phone speaker.

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Wednesday, 5:30 PM – Independence Sauce

Location: O’Hare Airport, Chicago

O’Hare is absolute bedlam. Flights are delayed, cancelled, or missing entirely. People are propping themselves up against pillars and garbage cans just to keep from falling over amid the bedlam.

I squeeze into a bar between an old man who looks like he’s been sitting there since the Reagan administration and a woman from Kansas City who tells me she lives in an RV. She is seated next to the only other Australian in the entire airport. His name is Bruce. Because of course it is. And he knows exactly who Ginger Meggs is, because he is over fifty-five years old.

Bruce and I speak for twenty minutes in an impenetrable Australian shorthand while the RV woman stares at us as if we’ve just arrived from Uranus. I order a side of tater tots. Forty seconds later, a trough of potatoes and grease is slammed in front of me, accompanied by a ramekin of “Independence Sauce.” I don’t want to know what makes the sauce independent. I eat three tots just to justify my barstool, knowing full well I will regret it if my connecting flight ever actually takes off.

Wednesday, 8:15 PM – The Lolly-Stick Express

Location: The Tarmac

Michigan is currently experiencing a biblical flash flood, which explains the delays. We finally board the puddle-jumper to Traverse City. Once again, I am the last one on.

I am squeezed into a tin can that feels like the wings were attached with sticky tape, and the fuselage is made of lolly sticks. As we bounce through the turbulence and fog, I genuinely spend five minutes trying to remember if I ever got around to drafting a will.

Wednesday, 10:30 PM – The Irish Exit

Location: Traverse City, Michigan

We “land” with a heavy thud. There is a deeply passive-aggressive sign near baggage claim reminding me to have patience. After a wait that spans the length of an entire Trump administration, my bag finally spits out onto the carousel. I step out into the freezing Michigan air just as my old friend Devin Keast pulls up. Perfect comedic timing.

Devin and I used to run a weekly open mic in New York that eventually morphed into a wildly popular show, and later, a podcast called Move On Up.

I am ravenous. Every kitchen in town is closed except for one place called The Parlor. We sit at the bar. I order a Negroni. Devon orders a red wine. The bartender is a girl on her third night of work, and she looks completely terrified. She has no idea if they serve wine. In fact, she doesn’t seem to know if she’s even in Michigan. She takes our drink order, walks into the back room, and never returns.

We assume she quit, left through the alley, and perhaps set fire to the building next door (a theory we confirmed when we saw the local news the next morning). Another bartender eventually wanders in off the street and replaces her. We talk about the NYC grind, the Bronx gig we did last weekend, and share quotes from Sam Tallent’s brilliant, dark road-comic novel, Running the Light.

Devin tells me Traverse City is proudly the “Cherry Capital.” I immediately picture a billboard on the highway that just says: Welcome to Traverse City: Population 15,000. Fuck Cranberries. A lone musician in the corner starts playing desperately sad, gravelly Damien Rice covers on his guitar. It is our cue to leave.

Or Dance. We can never tell.

Before hitting the hotel, Devin and I had stopped at a local supermarket the size of Manhattan to stock up on essentials: wine and an irresponsible amount of Pedialyte. We also drove past the local comedy club, which features a gargantuan rat mascot out front. Maybe it’s just the New Yorker in me, but I flinched.

Thursday, 12:15 AM – The Vegan Taco Bell

Location: Hotel Indigo, Traverse City, MI

We walk into the hotel lobby to find a befuddled delivery guy wandering aimlessly with a cold bag of Taco Bell. He looks at us. “Are you Sarah?” “No,” we tell him. “We are not Sarah- collectively, nor is either of us individually Sarah.”

Right on cue, the elevator doors slide open. Saturday Night Live‘s Sarah Sherman shuffles out in incredibly loud pants. “I’m… Sarah,” she says sheepishly. “That vegan Taco Bell burrito is for me.”

It turns out the comedian goodie bags provided by the festival contained a THC lemon-lime drink called Buzzn. Sarah, who doesn’t normally smoke weed, didn’t realise how hard it hit. She accidentally got extraordinarily high and needed a burrito to survive the night. We stand in the lobby talking in that weird, disjointed shorthand comedians use.

I am exhausted, mildly dehydrated, and have to be awake in five hours to do morning television with the festival director, Ann. But looking at the lineup this weekend, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Let the festival begin.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.