The Home of Todd Van Allen
So, yeah. I figured “What the hell, I’ll fire it up again” and did the AltDot New Material Night. Main motivation? I hadn’t put the first one to video. So now thanks to a couple of my best pals, I’ve got it in the can. I’ll work on getting it posted soon to the “Videos” section of the website.
The past seven days have been the type where you decide one day to look at your calendar and realize that for some reason you’re busier than Stephen Harper’s budget-making all-nighter. It seemed to go gig after gig after gig without relent and it all finished with a familiar theme at the Alt Dot last night.
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Read MoreNormally I’ll go out of my way to do a spot, pretty much anywhere. Thunder Bay fell in my lap, so how do I refuse? Besides, I’d be on a show with Brian Hope and Andrew Evans. So, at least there’d be Thunder Bay to go and sight-see. I did this on the back of using Air Miles, thinking the flight would be close to free. Once the booking fee through WestJet was added in, I’d be making a total of $8.66. I was able to make money on the trip, but it took me winning some cash at the Thunder Bay casino. With Andrew booking himself on a different flight, Brian and I arrived on Thursday evening to find out that our flight originally booked for 9:15 departure would be delayed for more than an hour. So…off to the bar, then.
No bars made themselves available so we found our way into the Mahogany Grill bar across the street from Terminal 3, settled in for a couple of pints that, when the bill came, weighed in at $10 per pint. Of Keith’s. This would turn out to not only be the most expensive beer of the trip, but also the biggest at-once purchase. This includes an eventual car rental when we soon discovered after half-a-dozen cab rides that there is a mathematical anomaly in Thunder Bay. Any two given points are at least $20 away from each other by taxi. This portion of the blog brought to you by Enterprise Car Rental, folks who don’t giggle when you ask them, “What’s your cheapest car I can get today?”
I’ve seen some really good comedy, and some really crap comedy at the AltDot. I’ve also performed really good comedy and really crap comedy at the Riv. Of the stuff I’ve seen meeting either criterion, I will hazard a guess that the spark that ignited the success/failure was an idea that started with this sentence: “Hey, the AltDot is supposed to be an ‘alternative’ room, right?” Last night’s AltDot show at the Rivoli saw me put on the fruit of my labours anchored in an at-the-same-time cool-yet-stupid ideer. Why not do a show and not be on stage in the process?
Got the idea whilst tweeting on Twitter one day (for the uninitiated, start reading about Twitter HERE. Note also, that the text below my headshot on my website is directly posted from my tweets on Twitter.) when one of the folks I follow and who follows me stated he was going to show up to the New Material night at the Riv. I’d never met this man in the flesh. I didn’t know his name. He just read the stuff I was posting, found me slightly funnier than running your toe into furniture, and decided to come out. Social networking at its best. But then I got thinking, which is usually bad, who are we kidding? Since I met him through Twitter, and I knew that there was a good chance the Rivoli was wired for it, what if I did the entire set through Twitter?