Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Ambidextrous
Sunday
July 4, 2004
Wow, what a weekend this has been. I type this from my computer on a Sunday mid-morning, having just returned from meeting up with Bubba The Love Sponge to give him some of his racing t-shirts (since he's racing in Orlando tonight). I was supposed to meet him at 9:30, but unfortunately the alarm failed to wake me up at 9:00 (or it did, I woke up and turned it off and then went right back to sleep). Somehow I woke up on my own at 9:29, looked at the clock, cursed, and hauled ass to South Tampa. But all's well that ends well, as he was also running late. Bubba is not someone to keep waiting.
Friday night I went to Side Splitters in Tampa, where Murv Seymour from Channel 10 was the opening act. It was a chance to see Jamie Anderson one last time before he moves up to Maine, trading overnights at WTSP for a teaching job at a specialty school (not to be confused with a "special school") for people interested in mass communications. Also, I got to see Mary Pederson for the first time in more than a year, along with her husband Darin, who I hadn't seen since the going away party for Amy Leone and Ted Daniel back in September 2002. Damn, time flies. Scott Massey and his girlfriend, Carrie Sieber, were there, and along with Jamie's friend Jenny we had a seven person crew in the house to see Murv's set.
Murv, pimped out in a pinstriped suit, was hilarious yet again. He worked in some different material than Scott and I had seen in Sarasota, including some TV news humor, which I thought was especially hilarious. If they make a Last Coming Standing Season 3, the producers of that should give Murv serious consideration -- he could do his entire set without using profanity or "going blue" if needed. Speaking of the phrase "going blue", it's too bad that Ashley Apperson from Channel 10 wasn't there -- I remember a number of times cracking up hard in the control room when something perhaps a bit ribald would come out in conversation during a three-shot going to weather or in a features package or whatever, Ashley would say, "Uh oh, he went blue." My description of it on here does it no justice, but he'd deadpan it and have me laughing every time.
After enjoying Murv's set, we had the chance to see the headliner: Jamie Lissow, who was also very very funny. Between Lissow and Tom Rhodes last month, I've gotten to see some great shows (with them in tandem with Murv). It's worth noting the the warm-up guy at Side Splitters was really funny, too. Being a stand-up comic I would think takes all kinds of guts, and I respect anyone who gives it a try. But for those who do it well... I have very high admiration. Scott managed to get recognition for booing religion, whereas I was one of the few people who got Lissow's joke about the guy to girl ratio in Alaska (where he implied that the seven-to-one male-to-female ratio would lead to alot of gangbangs, but he did it subtly enough where alot of the crowd didn't pick up on it).
The night didn't end there; we hit Chili's (with a two-for-one Amber Bach for me, thanks to Chili's continuous happy hour deal) and then finally it was time to say my goodbyes and head back here. From that point... well as the Ladies Man would say: "I don't want to get into the particulars of this, but umm let’s just say it involved a bottle of courvoisier, a couple of bus station skanks and a pay toilet."
Last night was fun as well. One of the cool things about where I live is that there are plenty of young people who live here as well. A bunch of us ended up playing drinking games, including "Asshole", which is a total college throwback game for me. Oh, and did I mention that two of the ladies playing were two of the top 155 women's tennis players in the world? Vilmarie Castellvi moved into my building last month, and as of this writing she's #155 in the WTA rankings. Her friend Kelly McCain is #125 (and actually she remembered more about the rules of "Asshole" than I did, so we played by her Tampa rules, which had weird things like not being able to play a pair on top of a single card). Now I wouldn't have known about their respective tennis successes except that Andy, Vilmarie's fiance, told me about it (and how both of them have had a meteoric climb up the rankings). He and I had quite a bit to talk about, since he also grew up in Nashville (he was Class of 1997 from Brentwood High School). He knows my cousins Donald and Derek Wolfe, in one of those "small world" type deals (he knows Derek better since they were closer in age).
Speaking of tennis, how about 17-year-old Maria Sharapova winning the Wimbledon women's singles title? Think if you had parlayed that bet with "The Devil Rays will move above .500 this season" in Vegas in mid-May? You'd be doing allll-right in that case, eh?
|
