Vermont Day 1 - Green Mountains, Greek Mythology, and Great Comedy in Vermont
Vermont's pretty, let's just get that right out of the way. I'd only ever been to Vermont before in the winter, for my college band's annual ski trip. I never went skiing, I just got drunk in a cabin for a week (sorry, Mom), but rest assured I'd never seen the Green aspect of the Green Mountains and it was a treat. This is just what I woke up to:
I started the day by going to a small town called St. Johnsbury. I get the feeling that it's a quiet town anyways, but labor day made it extra quiet. Luckily the Boxcar & Caboose book store and coffee shop was still open. I caffeinated myself and got a little bit of writing done, but the wifi in northern Vermont isn't the best in the world. The place is really great though. Great coffee, great book selection, and lots of interactive stuff for kids. It seems like a good community place too, because while I was there, I heard multiple people come in and ask the woman working the register if she could order books for them, to which she happily complied. They also had coffee ice cubes like the Holy Donut in Portland. Did everyone else already know about these and it just hasn't caught on in Mass yet? Because it is great idea that I had never seen before traveling.
Wide awake, I then went to the Fairbanks Museum, my primary reason for going to St. Johnsbury as recommended by both the Atlas Obscura and a friend of my dad's. It's a really cool museum, another one built out of the curiosity cabinet craze of old rich folks around the turn of the 20th century. The building itself is beautiful, and the scope of the museum is fairly impressive. The whole bottom floor is nature oriented with all kinds of stuffed animals, and a few live exotic insects. The top floor is a mixture of folk objects and art from around the world, as well as more animals, fossils, and minerals. It's really informative, and there's lots of interactive elements for younger patrons. There's even a George Washington made out of bugs:
A big draw to the museum is their planetarium shows. The room is super cozy and relaxing, and the host of the show is fun and informative. The show I took in was about the zodiac signs and the stories that inspired them. I'm a sucker for mythology stories, and it was especially fun hearing the tour guide do some mental gymnastics to clean up some of the stories for the younger kids in the audience. Zeus was really pervy, to be sure.
My favorite thing in the museum was some of the basket art by Native American tribes. I'd seen basket weaving before in other museums, but never any that were super pictoral like these ones. I'm so bad at drawing which is the most straightforward way of representing something pictorally, that anything that requires multiple steps to represent is massively impressive to me.
After the museum, I went to Burlington to hang out for a while before the open mic. I'll be honest it was great to be out of the car for an extended period of time after this weekend. I went to Maglianero Cafe which is supposedly one of the best coffee spots in Burlington. The cafe is spacious while also being comfortable, and there's a bunch of local art on the walls. The staff was really friendly and the coffee was good and strong. I spent a couple of hours in there, just writing and veg-ing out in the recliners.
After sufficient vegetating, I decided to move my body and walk around Burlington. It might give Portland a run for its money as the most hipster-y place I've ever been to. Lots of cyclists and people going to or coming from yoga. Plenty of cool shops and restaurants most of which were unfortunately closed, due to the holiday. One place that happened to be open was a Vintage Photography Emporium that has tons of costumes and settings for people to take old timey photos. The kind of brilliant business strategy they have though is that they stay open super late and really sucker in the drunk crowds, which is awesome. The thing that surprised me though is that two of the settings, the boudoir and the bath tub, had a lot of stock photos of people in pretty skimpy outfits, which they would have had to change into in front of strangers just for a gag. Go them, but it's not what most people would call a normal Monday night.
The open mic was in a restaurant called the Skinny Pancake which specializes in crepes. The food was really good. I'd never had a sandwich in a crepe before but it was fluffy and would have been the best pancake/crepe I'd ever had even without the delicious filling. They also had pretty good coffee, and a solid beer selection.
The comedy started with a showcase first before the open mic. The plus side of this was that it was a really great show, but the down side is that most of the audience left once the showcase was over.
There was a good mix of local comedians and comedians from Boston. The headliner, Jordan Handren Seavy, was from Maine originally, but had been around Cambridge/Boston for the past couple years.
Jordan's headliner set was very good, tackling a variety of topics both personal and political with clever twists and a spot on Bernie Sanders impressions (you can imagine that the Vermont audience loved that last bit). His success though sort of made clear to me something that was a bit off with the rest of the showcase. He's about 10 years older than all the other comics that performed, so his crowd control and delivery was much more polished.
I thought all the performers had great material, but I noticed little micro things (which I absolutely do myself so this is not me coming from any high horse, just being observational) like awkward pauses for remembering jokes or overly wordy set ups that are super easy to do with early material but eventually get refined away with practice. The fact that Jordan had that practice, I think really gave him an edge with the audience, who sometimes missed pretty (in my opinion) well crafted jokes that weren't delivered as strongly as I'm sure they eventually will be.
My personal favorite joke of the night came from a comedian named Dave Anderson: "I did a bunch of mushrooms to find enlightenment, which I'll admit might have been an extreme way of going about a word search"
The open mic was understandably a more mixed bag, but I thought it was really cool that just about all the featured comics stuck around to try out new material. The fact that some of Jordan's jokes from the open mic part didn't land as much, again highlighted how valuable practice can be.
My own set went pretty well, with mayonnaise jokes again going over better than the white supremacist jokes, which did better than at some open mics but not as good as others. I am beginning to suspect that really positive reaction those jokes got at the first open mic might have been a fluke because of their extra topical-ness, so I might start phasing them out to try new material. The one new joke I tried at this open mic was just a silly one-liner but it did pretty well, so I think that might be a good way to close stronger, because you figure people only really remember the first and last thing you say.
Overall the open mic was pretty good, bit more of a confessional comedy vibe as opposed to rants, one liners or political stuff. There was one guy that was kind of out of it (unclear if he was on something, possibly mentally ill, or a combo) who went on much longer than his set was supposed to go. This isn't actually all that uncommon at open mics, but it's a tough situation to handle especially for the hosts, because you want to be sensitive to a guy who's definitely going through something, but you've also gotta get them off the stage. I think the host Carl Sonnefeld handled it with aplomb though.
After the show, I went out for drinks with a couple of the Vermont comedians, and they were great to hang out with. They gave me great suggestions for more comedy stuff as well as generally good sight-seeing tips for around Vermont. I'm really socially awkward around new people, which you'd think this whole experience would be helping, so I really appreciated them just kinda taking me under their wings.
Favorite Random Sightings: A woman walking into a book store and proudly announcing, "I'm a hundred years older and twice as grumpy"; A woman answering the question why'd you move to Vermont with "Well I ruined my entire life"; A bookstore called Secondhand Prose; Every store playing lots of Steely Dan, to honor the late great Walter Becker; A middle aged man helping his mom making an account for something on the internet and completely reverting to an angsty teenager
Regional Observations: Much more free wifi than other states. Maine and New Hampshire were very green, but Vermont is noticeably hillier. The cities I've been to also have much more out-spokenly feminist storefronts, which I think is pretty cool and also surprising that I didn't see in either Portland or Cambridge.
Albums Listened To: Big Inner by Matthew E. White; Big Lizard in My Backyard by the Dead Milkmen; Bitches Brew by Miles Davis
People's Favorite Jokes:
Where does the king keep his armies? In his sleevies
An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman walk into a bar and the bartender says, "is this a joke?"
