CT Day 3 - Off Season Museums, the Outdoors, and Open Mics
Today started and ended with the Blue State Coffee House, and in the middle was a small streak of bad luck.
I started the morning getting a coffee from Blue State in New Haven. Yale just recently classes and the place was buzzing with students. It’s really weird feeling like I should be getting ready for class as well and not needing to. My coffee was good, and served as nice counterpoint to college nostalgia.
After that was the first in a series of museum related disappointments. I wanted to go to the Warren Museum of the Occult, which is supposed to be the home and collection of the ghost hunting couple that inspired The Conjuring movies and the Amityville Horror. Unfortunately though the museum is currently closed due to problems with the zoning committee. Score one for the mundane, and zero for the occult.
From there I went to the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art to see a famous statue of Hera, the greek goddess covered in Watermelons. The watermelons and the statue are actually both sculpted by the same artist and are supposed to represent a statement on the illusions of culture and the fragility of life, in that the beautiful statue appears to be in decay and the sillier watermelons look pristine. I’m sure the artist has more eloquent words for it than I just laid out, but it’s a cool idea and even if it’s all baloney the statue is still pretty impressive.
Museum-Related Disappointment #2: Unfortunately the rest of the museum of contemporary art was currently turning over exhibits so they only had one small one by the artist Kay Rosen using word art. It happened to be pretty cool, with some very clever word play thrown in there, but it just wasn’t a very large exhibit. The ladies at the front desk were nice though, and let me look for free which I don’t know is usually the case. This one is called Did ‘Ya Hear about the Pig Who Walked Into a Door? :
I then went to Stamford, where I had Museum Related Disappointment #3 when I learned that the Walker Library’s History of Human Imagination was actually a guy’s private library and not open to the public. I consoled myself with a carnitas burrito from Ole Mole, my first burrito of the trip and one that really hit a spot I didn’t know was going so unfulfilled. I was also pleased to find a surprisng amount of veggies mixed into the burrito including zucchini which isn’t super common but not unwelcome.
I then had my one and only museum related success of the day as I went to the Stamford Museum and Nature Center. The museum was also sort of between exhibits at the moment, though the one that opens in later September seems really cool. It’s about imagery in sci fi and fantasy and it seems fun. Fortunately the museum is only a small part of what is covered in the admission. It’s a pretty big estate, and there are nature trails, outdoor sculptures, and a barn/petting zoo. I think the intended audience is younger kids (there’s actually a pre-school and a playground on the museum’s campus) but everything was still very much enjoyable.
Less enjoyable was that while hiking, I got stung by either a horsefly or a bee, and it’s still itching me as I write this. They had a first aid kit so I was able to disinfect it, and I’m honestly surprised this hasn’t happened to me sooner. I’m sure my mom would use this to vindicate her distaste with nature, but I still like it.
Museum Related Disappointments #s 4 and 5: The PT Barnum Museum and the renovated Pleasure Beach park in Bridgeport were both closed by the time I got there. Fortunately down the street in nearby Stratford was the 2 Roads Brewery. Flights were $11 which was a little bit pricey to me, but you got five beers and they were all really good. I tried the No Limit Hefeweizen, the Espressway Cold Brew Coffee Stout, the Ok2berfest Marzen, the Worker’s Stomp Barrel-Aged Saison, and the Roadsmary’s Baby Rum-Barrel Aged Pumpkin ale. The two barrel aged ones were probably my favorites. The pumpkin ale had an almost stout-like creaminess with a nice rum finish, and the saison was aged in white wine barrels and basically tasted like a good white wine only heavier. Everything was really good though, and it was a hip spot. I felt like bartenders knew the customers and it was a good, friendly place to hang out. I don’t know much about brewing, but they also seemed to be trying out cool and unorthodox techniques so I’d really recommend checking their selection out if you’re unfamiliar.
It was back to New Haven after that, where I rested and wrote in one of the cafes that was open a bit later called the Book Trader Cafe. It’s a big book store with a cafe inside. I really liked it in there; there’s something oddly comforting about being surrounded by books. They also gave me one of the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever had.
The open mic came next and it was in a bar called Anna Liffey’s. The place was pretty decently filled and seemed like a fun hang out spot. The open mic was actually outside in the back porch area which I thought was kinda cool, and it meant that the comedians who smoked could, giving it a more homey intimate vibe.
I’ll be forthright and say I didn’t do too great at this mic, so that might have retroactively soured me on it, but I think regardless of how I did, this wasn’t my favorite mic. The host, Dan, was totally friendly and nice though, so I don’t think it was anything he was doing.
The audience was mostly other comics with a few outside bar patrons, and they seemed good and receptive for the first half of the mic but then kinda ran out of steam.
That’s partly because a bunch of the comics left to go to another later mic. To be fair that is an advantage for performers of having a mic like this that’s a bit earlier, but it also stinks for the later performers to have to tell jokes to a de-energized crowd. I also just got the vibe of being at a club that I wasn’t a member of. It seemed like comics that were friends with each other got laughs even when the jokes were relatively weak, and the comics from outside the scene (which wasn’t just me) had to work a bit harder to win over the audience.
That isn’t to say the comics that were in the scene were bad. My personal favorite was a guy named Dan Rice, who had kinda darkly absurdist material. And the two guys I singled out at the mic on Monday, Pete Angelo and Andrew Manning were again consistently strong.
In general I also got a bit more of a confrontational vibe to a lot of the jokes. One comic asked two random women in the audience if they “were squirters” and there was a lot of calling out of other comics particularly the one Black comic there. I think it was all generally playful and well-intentioned but it did only strengthen the “I’m not a part of this club” feeling for me. It’s possible that’s all in my head and I’m just being surly though.
My set wasn’t a total bomb, and I was happy that some of the few laughs I got was on new stuff I was trying out. In general I felt like my shorter jokes went better than anything that had more set up to it, because I would lose the audience’s attention. I’m sure that’s probably a combo of me not being strong enough at hooking them, and also a more general disinterest in me talking at length on their part (as evidenced to me by one comic repeatedly calling me Chris later ) that was a little hard to overcome. I also made the mistake of telling some drier almost anti-joke type stuff which I think probably comes across as smarmy if they’re not already into you. That wasn’t my intention but that’s one that was definitely more on me, and it’s important to always assume that there’s more you can do than just blindly blame an unreceptive audience because that’s not gonna help you get better and may just lead to keeping mediocre material. I was surprised though because the bit that fell the flattest here was one that had done pretty well last night, and had been the one I got the best reaction to in Burlington so I don’t really know how to interpret it’s overall effectiveness.
The comics that stayed were pretty supportive and friendly though so I don’t wanna paint the whole New Haven seen negatively especially after one mic. One guy told me he thought “I had potential” which was encouraging.
I ended the night back at Blue State because they know their college crowd and are open until eleven. I got some local Connecticut apple cider to cheer myself up and worked on some more writing. The baristas were really funny trying to come up with jokes on the spot, so it was a kind of sweeter ending to the day. Hopefully tomorrow will feature less bug bites and better receptions.
Favorite joke of the night: Andrew Manning RE People shooting at the hurricane in Florida “The police had to actually tell people not to shoot at the hurricane. Because it is unarmed and that’s their job”
Favorite Random Sightings: The Tint Man; Manny’s: The Place to Get a Haircut; Pound Ridge; Dingee Street; Conn Artists
Regional Observation: Maybe because it’s more square shaped and less mountainous, but I feel like it’s easier to go East-West in CT than in the other states I’ve been to.
Albums Listened To: Boys & Girls by Alabama Shakes (I think it's weird that when a singer-guitarist is equally good at both, if it's a man they tend to focus on the guitar work but if it's a woman they tend to focus on the singing); Briefcase Full of Blues by the Blues Brothers; Broken Organ by the Duppies; Bronx City Rockers by the Clash (just White Man in Hammersmith Palais); The Brooklyn Rocksteady Soundtrack by Various Artists ( from a very cool documentary about the Brooklyn ska/reggae scene)
People’s Favorite Jokes:
How many tough guys does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, tough guys aren’t supposed to be scared of the dark
A streaker runs past a bunch of 80 year old women and exposes himself to them. What do they do? They each have a stroke
I don’t remember the set up, but it has a duck and the punchline is “put it on my bill”
Financial stability and employment in the arts
