Turn Out The Lights, The Party's Over

So the Seventh Annual Dirty South Improv Festival has come and gone. Whew! I'm not sure I've ever worked so hard in my life. I produced nine different videos for the Festival, ten if you count the huge revision I had to make for the Festival opener, and two of the videos didn't even get shown! I took Thursday and Friday off of work, and still almost didn't finish my stuff on time.

Everything I was involved with went well. Friday's ComedySportz show was okay. It didn't end well, and I felt forced into calling it a tie, which sucked. Oh, and in trying to install the Mr. Voice software on my laptop, the system crashed and corrupted the disk, and I had to wipe the drive clean and reinstall everything. That ate up a good five hours. (Wade, it wasn't the software's fault; my laptop was already acting wonky.) Got to see Fit SitzKimons on the way out; it was very cool to see him back at a DSI event, even if only as a spectator. Hopefully he'll be able to mend some fences and come back where he belongs, as one of the biggest talents and hardest workers in improv. In the meantime, we're getting together on Tuesday for a birthday celebration (his) and a fun ISIDTA experiment; so I'm looking forward to that.

After ComedySportz, I had a little break before CageMatch, and hung out with Jackson, which was cool. To tell the truth, I was really worried that the Cat's Cradle show would deplete my audience, but we held the start of the program for ten minutes, and ended up with a standing room only crowd of about a hundred odd people. So that rocked. The best part was the huge contingent of Siegel-Prov supporters that showed up in true wrestling fan style carrying posterboard signs supporting Dan and Dave. The videos went over quite well, and really seemed to charge up both the audience and the performers. The Impatient Theatre Company won the Triple Team Terror match, so I got to show my Frank Sinatra video, which the crowd seemed to like. The Siegel-Prov entrance was mindblowing. The crowd was ready to see them, and the video whipped them into a frenzy. Dan and Dave ended up winning, which was nice. I was happy that they finally got the Ten Grams Of Gold that didn't exist when they were champions before.

Afterwards, all the teams were really kind. They seemed excited that I had made each of them a dvd with all the videos on them, and they were very complimentary of the way I ran the show. I ended up hanging out with Chris Biddle of International Stinger the next night, and he told me how much fun he had doing CageMatch. Several people commented on the great interplay that Scott Sullivan and Biff Hobgood have on stage, which was gratifying since I'm never sure what the hell is happening when we're up there. All in all, I think I hit my goals on the DSIF7 CageMatch; I really wanted to show people from around the country how a CageMatch show can be done with style, with all the videos and characters and whatnot, and I think a lot of people will go back home with CageMatch as one of their big memories of the Festival. Thanks to Scott and Tommy for helping put out such a great product, thanks to HARSH, International Stinger, and The Impatient Theatre Company for putting on such great segments, and a special thanks to Siegel-Prov for always being so kind, generous, thankful, and damn funny. Todah rabah.


ComedySportz on Saturday was MUCH better than Friday. The crowd was bigger and had more energy, and it went off without a hitch. Zach was kind enough to bring my niece Amelia on stage for one of the games. My favourite part of ComedySportz was flirting (or trying to flirt, more likely) with the cute redhead sound-and-light tech, Holly. You can sorta see her off to the side in this picture. She was really cool, has mad theater tech skills, is amusingly sarcastic, and is mighty hot as well. I gave her my email addy. HAH! Like anything will become of that...

And then at 9:30 on Saturday, it was time for PT Scarborough Is A Movie. This was actually the show that I hyped up the most. We made 100 PTSIAM buttons to give out to all the performers, along with flyers in all their goodie bags, and I plugged the show during CageMatch. Well, word got around somehow, and the theater was sold out for PT's show, which was sweet. PT and I made a little surprise intro video for the show, featuring PT's favouritest movie of all time, Back To The Future. That went over well, but didn't get the huge pop I thought it would, probably because a lot of people didn't know it was PT. Eh, who cares. I made it for PT's amusement more than anything else, and he seemed to love it. It certainly got him jacked up for the show, because he KILLED. Bigtime great show, and I think he got an even better reaction than the all-star headline act. We did Bullitt, and PT worked wonders with it, making up phone sex chat callbacks, hesitant assassins, and one annoying fan. Definitely one of the top highlights of the Festival.

It was very cool to see Jackson come out for both CageMatch and PTSIAM, and Scotts came to see PT's show as well. Thanks for the support, guys.

Then I teched The Bat, which went well, and got to play my We Are From The Dirty South song at the end, which seemed a good way to usher people off to the party. I actually WENT to the party, which was amazing. Got to hang with the aforementioned Chris Biddle, Corey Brown, Dave Siegel, and EITAN!!!! Came home about 2:30 am, and couldn't get to sleep until 6; I was still wired with adrenaline. After all my responsibilities were over, my immune system crashed, and now I'm sick. Woohoo. Stuffly and sniffly. And tomorrow, back to work.

So a good week's work done, well-received videos and performances, and now, rest. I'm off to Nyquilize myself. I'm really happy with what we did this week. Zach did an awesome job of pulling off the impossible to make this Festival happen. Amazing.

Here's some of the videos I made for the Festival, for your viewing pleasure.
CageMatch preview
CageMatch show open
Siegel-Prov entrance
Impatient Theatre entrance
HARSH entrance (which didn't actually get shown--a YouTube exclusive!)
International Stinger entrance (also didn't get shown)
PTSIAM show open

Enjoy.