Recent bastardries - it's been quite the time!

It's been a while, and things have been motoring along in the world of the Bastard.

The Feral Chihuahuas went to Ohio to the Shadowbox Sketch Comedy festival. Shadowbox is quite the entity, and if you happen to be near Columbus, you need to check them out! It's like a commune with a theatre - the gang there do everything from writing to performing to cooking. We were treated like royalty, and if you've been to a Feral Chihuahuas show you know that we don't just bring the funny, but we love to entertain and we were the party planners for the late night gazebo sessions at the hotel. I have no idea how we weren't kicked out of the rather nice Marriot Courtyard.

For Day #1 we got a tour of the facility at Shadowbox and worked through our material on the stage. In typical Chihuahuas fashion we were something like 87 minutes longer than we thought we were, so cuts had to be made. I was hoping we'd cut everything I was in but Facescroll so I wouldn't have to change costume at all, but I ended up in two of our pieces so there was one piece of rapid costume changes.

Performance went well - the audience at Shadowbox were there to LAUGH!!! All six of the groups got at least one great reaction, and our set went really well. The only role I had that was meant to get a lot of laughs was as Postings in Facescroll, and it suits me pretty well, I just have to deliver lines in a silly voice, no acting required.

A few of the Shadowbox people came and joined us at the hotel late at night - yay for 3am drinking and philosophising with fellow funny people, particularly the guys from Laughter League, Cell Camp and the Indicators. Here's some samples of these groups...



Laughter League's "You-scan-it" sketch. Although the idea has been kind of done before, the cap is brilliant!



Most of the sketches that I really liked by Cell Camp aren't on their YouTube, but I wish they'd done this one live - "Can I fart in here"?



The Indicators also don't have their funniest stuff online - they were the first group I got to know (because their table was between ours and the buffet).

Far less hungover than I had any right to be, I emerged for Wednesday's festivities. The plan for Wednesday's show was to highlight the "best of the fest", although I wasn't sure about them breaking up sketches into smaller parts to thread through the show, it might have been a better idea to give each group two sketches, one long and one short. For us, they picked "Gangster Rap for the Hearing Impaired" so I had a whole day to watch and hang out. I ended up being picked for one of the few lines in the Garrett Morris sketch, so I suddenly had something to do. In the sketch, a lot of us had to play kids - Joe from Laughter League and I both had beanies, "just in case" (hey Joe, if you're reading, did the picture of us come out?).

Wednesday night's show was a blast - a lot of audience members came to both shows, so at the end I had a few crowd people come up and say they liked Face Scroll (and one person who confused me for someone in Cell Camp - with great apologies to whomever in Cell Camp looks or sounds like me). I got to see almost all of the show from the little back corral area, and Shadowbox's lighting and mic effects really helped a few of the sketches. Drew and Tommy stretched Gangsta Rap out for an eternity!

There was some pretty nice press around the event too. Metromix Columbus pointed out that the Feral Chihuahuas took the risks and got the rewards. Columbus Dispatch gave us much love, with reviews of the shows on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Staggered back to the hotel late at night to see that the Laughter League had commandeered the pool, so joined in. This was followed by more drinking and merriment, and a fairly sombre drive back to Asheville on Thursday.

Shadowbox! Can't thank you enough for amazing organization of a terrific festival. I want to go back!