KS Day 3 - Pizza, Packed Houses, and Plenty of Art
I started out today by walking through the Riverside neighborhood to a cozy place called R Coffee House which really put the House in coffee house. It was absolutely a house that had been turned into a hip little cafe with a porch and everything. It was like hanging out in a really cool sitting room that also happened to have very tasty coffee. I couldn’t resist getting an Almond Joy which was a blend of coconut, almond, and chocolate flavors which reminded me of my favorite local coffee shop back home and the flavored drinks I used to get before I built up a tolerance for what coffee tastes like on its own.
Fueled up, I went to my first stop of the day, the Wichita Art Museum, where I instantly started cracking up at their sweet but goofy attempt at appealing to a younger crowd:
As silly as that advert was, the museum (delightfully abbreviated as WAM) was really incredible, with an impressively expansive collection of art from around the world gently tucked away in the heart of the prairie. I started with the lower lever where all the special exhibitions were displayed in a neat circular arrangement that made them all sort of flow into one another despite all being pretty varied in terms of style and content. I began with a pretty spectacular collection of Pre-Columbian pottery from Mexico and Costa Rica dating from 1000 B.C. to 1450 A.D. It was really amazing that this stuff survived all that time at all let alone with such rich details still preserved in the designs. The artistry in both the sculpting and painting of these vessels is wild with pottery and furniture taking on the likenesses of various animals, deities, and people in ways that beautifully blur the lines between aesthetics and functionality.
My favorite was this massive smiling jug, because he just seems so lovably cheerful:
The next special exhibition took a big jump through time and geography to focus on 19th century fashion prints from American and French Women’s magazines, accompanied by some particularly ornate examples of the kinds of clothing being advertised. For something that might seem sort of niche, the gallery touches on a number of themes including but not limited to: innovations in the art form of printmaking, class status in what is considered “high fashion” versus common clothing, gender norms in what is expected of women in terms of presentation and behavior, and history recorded in some of the earliest examples of very modern advertising techniques. In terms of comfort and insane expectations for waistlines, I found the clothing itself to be pretty horrifying and definitely indicative of a very limited scope of femininity (though to their credit some of the later French magazines start showing “shocking” examples of clothing that women can actually move in). From a purely artistic viewpoint though, the print’s were insane with intricate attention to detail given to fabrics, grand exquisite backgrounds, and vibrant colors that would certainly be eye-catching to any casual magazine reader even if the actual products are a nightmare.
One advertisement for formal beachware (a truly crazy concept to my modern sensibilities of not wanting to sweat profusely or clean sand out of silk) jumped out at me as a particular egregious example of how much women were expected to uphold a ridiculous standard of regal feminine ideals as opposed to you know being actual humans. And unfortunately there’s no amount of excellent draftsmanship that can make that seem remotely appealing.
The next special exhibition was called Look Don’t Touch and focused on art with particularly tactile elements, accompanied by physical displays to give viewers an idea of what the art might feel like without ruining anything. The first batch of these sensory oriented works a series of collages and multimedia pieces which showed how artists can utilize familiar objects in new contexts to build on and subvert emotional and thematic associations with the collaged elements. My favorites included: Robert Kushner’s Angelique which blends pop-arty lithographic portraits with actual threads of fabric, sequins, and metal to make the glamorous airs of his subject just leap off the canvas; a very silly collage by Nancy Morrow that takes nostalgic images of domesticity like flowers, schoolhouses, and old timey bathing beauties and literally blows them away with a hilariously placed lithograph of a leafblower; a messy mixed media piece by Joan Snyder called Small Symphony for Women that calls to mind a chalkboard of scrawled feminist theory slowly morphing into an abstract painting turning words into emotions; and a community project that takes post notes left by dozens of visitors and rearranges them to form the likeness of a classic Mary Cassatt’s classic painting Mother and Child.
The next series in this collections focused on the materiality of the paint and surface themselves. It’s easy to think that painting’s are truly two-dimensional images and always on canvas, but there is a lot of physicality to paint that is usually masked by traditional representative aesthetics and playing around with the surface medium can bring that out even more. These pieces tended to be more abstract, but they were so uniquely textured that even if you think they look weird you’ve gotta be a little impressed by them. My favorites were: Kent Williams’ globby untitled painting featuring carefully built up hunks and swirls improbably holding their shape on a smooth masonite board; Paul Maxwell’s sort of dreamy untitled piece on stretched canvas with carefully made cuts into the paint using a stencil to create a juxtaposition of smooth distinct colors and rough crackling whiteness; a sketch for a classing installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude an artist duo who became famous for their large scale “wrappings” where they would put strikingly painted cloth over massive landmarks and other unexpected places to test the limits of what was possible with simple painted fabrics (see a massive example here or check out my post from Delaware where I saw a bunch of photos of them wrapping islands); and a wild piece called Eillizaville Poppies II by Paul Dean which uses similar techniques of building up big globs of oil paint but in the service of creating a gorgeously surreal and textured impressionist landscape as opposed to a total abstraction.
And naturally any exhibition about tactile art has to include some sculptures, my favorites of which were all stone and marble because they look so weirdly peaceful and powerful all at once. My favorites were: the slightly creepy yet mythological seeming Girl and Bird by Robert Laurent; a seemingly impossible flowery sculpture by an artist whose name I sadly didn’t record; and Robert Allen’s stoic dreaming figure made of alabaster enigmatically entitled Behind the Garden, Beyond the Wall, Enters the Dream.
While not the prettiest, easily the most impressive sculpture for the sheer fact that it was actually standing was the complex web of intertwining steel and brass pipes that make up Ibram Lassaw’s Space Densities:
The last special exhibition was dedicated to the museum’s collection of glass art featuring a century’s worth of pieces from the innovative art glass manufacturers Stueben Glass Works (1903-2011) with additional pieces by modern artists building on techniques and patterns innovated by Steuben. Everything was just stunning, and it was incredible to see what insanely rich and detailed works the different artists were able to layer onto glass. Pieces ranged from ornate classical Venetian glass to sleek more stylized art deco pieces to more abstract modernist works. I’m a little biased because I’ve always been a sucker for glass art, but these were exceptional.
My favorite pieces were more modernist examples of the immense power in simple clear glass. These included: Kiki Smith’s decorative tattoo vase with swirling wildlife imagery etched into the otherwise pristine vase; an impossibly dynamic rendering of the literature’s most famous whale by Sidney Waugh and Dollard; and a deceptively elegant piece called Arctic Fisherman by James Houston that plays beautifully with light and textures above and below the imagined ice.
From there, I made my way to the second floor for the permanent galleries, but the walk actually continued the museum’s collection of fine glass with a massive lobby installation by Dale Chihuly and an overhanging ceiling installation along a walkway to some terrace windows:
Through the terrace windows you were greeted by a pretty spectacular view out of over the museum grands and the bends of the Little Arkansas River.
The largest permanent gallery was dedicated to American Art which mostly consisted of pieces from the entirety of the 20th century. It is fun to see how much styles change over such a relatively short historical timeframe. Pieces were grouped more by themes than chronologically, so we began with landscapes which started off very romantic, Impressionist, and European in style but gradually got more poppy, modernist, and uniquely American in terms of both style and subjects. Landscape highlights included: a scenic cliff view by John Sloan; a beautiful rendering of a New England autumn by the incredibly named Guy Wiggins; a tender twilight view of sunset over Provincetown by John Noble; and a fantastically surreal Cloudscape over the midwest by Phil Epps that I never would have dreamed might actually be a pretty accurate (albeit heightened) capturing of weather on the plains before this trip.
My favorite landscape though was a 1938 piece by Paul Lantz called Lightning and Thunder Over New Mexico because it’s really powerfully exists in that modernist state between realism and expressionism capturing a sort of primal energy of the forces of nature over the desert. Ever part of the scene from the clouds to the trees, even the mountains, seems to surge with life. It’s really evocative.
While the first suite of paintings captured the land, the next set was focused on the people of America during the first half of the century. These ranged from idealized rural odes to the common man to less glamorous scenes of poor mothers in city tenement buildings. Regardless of setting, the pieces all show a focus on grit and determination that must have been on a lot of American’s minds going through two world wars and a major economic collapse. I like that even with really similar subject matters different paintings add to the mythologizing of “an American character” while others seek to demythologize and just show regular people as they are (though tellingly all the subjects are white).
My favorite piece here was a portrait of a baby named Mike McTeague by George Luks partly because it was an excellent painting but largely because it had perhaps the funniest accompanying text I’ve ever seen next to a piece of art. So you don’t have to strain your eyes, the text in question was this one two punch of insane editorializations “A New York critic remarked, ‘Mike McTeague, in bright orange, is no more than a baby but he shows unmistakable belligerence.’ Luks was equally ornery. He died as the result of a barroom brawl in 1933, and his New York Times obituary declared ‘He painted as he lived”’. I don’t no if I’m more delighted by the incredible description of the baby’s grumpiness or the cattiness of whoever wrote that obituary, but I was full on laughing out loud in the middle of the museum like a nut.
Another highlight was the original of Mary Cassatt’s Mother and Child which is only more impressive when it isn’t made of collaged post-it notes:
The next section focused on animal centric pieces with my favorites skewing strange and modern over pastoral. I particularly liked the oddly menacing Big Turtle by Everett Spruce and some majestically abstract Horses by Hugo Robus.
The plunge into full modernism became more apparent with different artists’ highly geometric renderings of urban landscapes. My favorite cityscapes included: Charles Sheeler’s boxy shadowy but strangely pretty Skyscape; Stuart Davis’ jazzily abstract Bass Rocks #1; and Ralston Crawford’s sparse and lonely Section of a Steel Plant.
Of course nobody captures the angst and isolation of the city like my favorite, Edward Hopper. The WAM had two pieces by him which really blew me away. The first, “Sunlight on Brownstones” takes a very leisurely scen of a wealthy couple lounging on their porch and frames it within the encroachment of urban development onto green fields. The second, Conference at Night, appears to be a friendly office conversation until you notice the blackness of the sky through the window and realize that light illumination the workers can only be coming from another massive skyscraper, thus framing and illuminating their entire interaction in artificially and corporate malaise. He can’t have been very much fun at parties for how dour his work is, but god damn the guy could paint.
Another piece that seemed to capture the spirit of Hopper’s work was Nathan Oliveira’s monumental Stage No. 1 with Waiting Figure (clocking in at 8.5 ft X 10 ft!) which looks almost like a massive Rothko-eque abstraction until you notice the tiny little figure sitting on a couch near the center waiting for his turn on stage. It’s impressive in its scale and it’s sense of loneliness, and when you’re actually standing in front of it it’s hard not to get kind of sucked in.
As the galleries moved towards more contemporary art, things began getting more abstract and surreal which I loved. Highlights for me here were: Fred Wilson’s elgant black glass and wood installation with the mysterious name Act V. Scene II - Exeunt Omnes; George Grosz’s surreal swirling hellscape of deep dive into his own post-war psyche entitled The Pit which is equal parts terrifying and oddly lovely; and David Salle’s Butter Lane which blends different styles and images to create it’s own internal dream logic that combines old photographs, abstract shapes, and of course one giant piece of swiss cheese.
I also really liked seeing how more traditional subjects like portraits and real world scenes would bend and mutate with the more modern artistic impulses of different generations of artists. Highlights for me included: James Strombotne’s pop-art tinged portrait of the author Herman Hesse; Alex Katz’s portrait of a couple at one of his cocktail parties, Frank and Sheyla Lima, that is realistic in such a heightened and unusual way that it seems oddly unnerving and fantastical; Rufino Tamayo’s more explicitly fantastical Toast to the Sun which evokes early indigenous paintings from his native Mexico; Lloyd Glasson’s tender intimate bronze Bed which interweaves real fabric with the bronze to create a neat wrinkle of cognitive dissonance in your brain; Raphael Soyer’s quietly confrontational oil painting of Dancers enjoying a smoke break; and Paul Meltsner’s capturing of a Martha Graham dance class rehearsal which seeks to capture all the modern, angular, and strange beauty she brought to American dance and choreography in a single hauntingly lovely image.
Perhaps my favorite for just how many layers of deceit and trickery were involved was Fred Danziger’s Man Guarding Textiles which looks like a collage but is actually just one acrylic painting that demonstrates the artist’s ridiculous skill in capturing different textures. It is at once a parody pretentious-to-the-point-of-goofy contemporary art, supposedly inspired by a piece of art at the Guggenheim where an artist put a pile of lard on a podium and then hired an armed guard to make sure nobody touched the lard, but also a fun and lovable example of that same kind of artistic conceptual pranksterism. While Danziger was inspired by the silly performance art, he also said he chose to have his cardboard guard protecting textiles because a fabric still life is a really classic and challenging artistic exercise that he wanted to try but felt like no one would care about without all the window dressing. He also just added a beautiful painting of Mt. Kilimanjaro and just sort of tucked it in the corner. He says it’s because textile art makes him think of Africa, but I love that each viewer walking by just has to figure out why all these things are in one painting together. Once the confusion subsides though, it’s hard not to be shocked that everything you see is two-dimensional, on the same canvas, and by the same artist. It’s a goofy but hugely impressive work.
Up next was a small but nice gallery dedicated entirely to Western Art featuring gorgeous drawings, watercolors, and paintings of the wild frontier by greats like C.M. Russell and Frederic Remington.
The next gallery was a special exhibition about Americans who traveled to Paris and became entrenched in the growing Impressionist movement. These were just some classically pretty paintings with highlights for me beings: a lazy scene from Greek mythology by an artist whose name I didn’t catch; a pulsing vibrant portrait of a society lady by Willam Glackens; a lyrical Asian inspired piece by Julian Alden Weir called The Connosieur; a remarkably centered portrait of a young lady sewing in the middle of the French countryside where the only thing that seems to be in focus is her by Theodore Robinson; a delightful array of blobs of color in the form of a beach scene by Maurice Pendergast; and a very Matisse-esque portrait of a reclining Gertrude Stein by Abraham Walkowitz.
As we moved a little further back in time, I came across two of the most fantastically unflattering portraits I have ever seen. They are truly a jowel-lovers dream come true.
And last we had a collection of pre-20th century American art that was much more pastoral and filled with awe for the natural world than more city-oriented modern stuff. The tranquil “simpler time” might be in a lot of ways a fictional creations but it sure is nice to look at.
Naturally though my favorite piece here was the craziest, which was Henry Bryan Hall’s depiction of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve never read the play so while I’m sure it’s a wonderful depiction, without that literary context it really just looks like a tiny naked man antagonizing a sleepy but beloved half-man-half-donkey, which is all I’ve ever really wanted art to be.
The last piece I really loved before heading out was a little wooden whale that used to hang outside a tavern circa 1780(!). This scrappy little guy has come along to survive that long but he’s still got a hint of a smile on his face which I really admire.
After leaving the museum, I decided to take advantage of the beautiful day by taking a quick stroll around the building as opposed to taking the shorter way to the parking. Here I was greeted by Tom Otterness’ impressive sculptural installation called Dreamers Awake which is at once very simplistic and very complex, very playful and kinda creepy. I loved it.
While from a distance you are probably most struck by the monumental god-like figures, one standing proudly the other lying in pieces, when you walk around the figures you are greeted by dozens of tiny little cartoon characters with goofy expressions, little guns, tophats, and cigars as they greedily cart off the remains of the fallen figure. It’s a silly reminder of life moving on after you’re dead no matter how grand you were, cosmic nihilism by way of Looney Tunes. I could have spent hours just walking around the scene and noticing new funny little details. It’s iso cool that such a weird and fascinating work of art is just out there and accessible to the public for free.
The most famous public work of art however in all of Wichita is probably the Keeper of the Plains, a 44 foot tall, powerful tribute to the Native American legacy of the plains designed and brought to life by local contemporary Native Artists. It’s a stunning monument, but one I unfortunately never got to see except from my moving car so I had to turn to the internet to find a picture that captures the grandeur that I passed every time I crossed a major water in the city.
For lunch, I went to a classic college staple and supposedly the home of the best pizza in Wichita, Ziggy’s Pizza. I think a big reason they are beloved is because they have really great pizza and sandwiches, but it might also have something to do with the fact that they have a lunch special where you can get two slices of whatever pizza you’d like and a small salad for just $6.99. I tolerated the salad (I believe it was only my second one in 36 states) because it was part of the bargain, but the pizza really was particularly good with a perfect cheese to sauce ratio and a crust that was soft where you wanted it to be and crunchy where you needed it to be. To wash it all down, I got a light refreshing High Winds Hefeweizen from Aero Plains Brewing, a good little aviation themed craft brewery from the area. It went well with everything and the whole small feast still clocked in at only $12!
After lunch, I went to Wichita State University to visit their Ulrich Museum of Contemporary Art, where I was thrilled to be greeted by a massive outdoor tapestry made of glass, paint, marble and mosaic affixed to a backing of stainless steel by one of my all time favorites, Joan Miro. The piece named Personnages Oiseaux (which translates to Bird People) and it is the only glass mosaic the artist ever made and his largest piece to have taken up residence in the United States making it a real gem of the museum, the college, and the city to have claim to. It’s as strange as anything the artist ever did to be sure, but it’s bright colors and silly creatures makes it oddly welcoming and playful in a way some of his darker works really weren’t.
The Ulrich Museum is also connected to the McKnight Art Center which showcases different student created art and projects. I happened to enter through the McKnight center and was positively blown away by an exhibition they were still setting up called Sacred Space: A Collaborative Exhibition. The exhibition featured doorways built by different artists working together that served as windows into different cultures’ concepts of a “sacred space”. It was a beautiful and touch tribute to how much world cultures are unified, as well a celebration of the different things that makes those cultures unique and special. If that weren’t enough, it was also just hugely impressive artwork even without really lovely themes at its core.
Unfortunately, photography was not allowed in the Ulrich Museum itself, which is a shame because the main special exhibition was pretty darn cool. It was called En Mas: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, and it focused on the how contemporary artists from all over the Caribbean have put their own stamps on Carnival traditions that engage with the past but also feel very relevant to the future. The artwork was very creative and thematically rich, but honestly just getting to see photos and videos from different Carnival celebrations was a joy in and of itself. I got to see a little bit of the fun of Carnival, in New Orleans’ derivation during the week before Mardi Gras but seeing the real thing and the craft and enthusiasm that average people can bring to make the festivities soar was quite special. A lot of the artwork was video and performance based seeing as how trying to capture or comment on Carnival without music and dancing is a little bit silly, but luckily I was able to find some still images that capture a little bit of my favorite pieces. My highlights were: John Beadle’s Inside Out/Outside In in which the Bahamian artist created incredible sculptures out of simple cardboard to be used in a small parade float and in costumes which besides showing off his skills also in their materiality highlight the disposability of identities when engaging in performances; Cauleen Smith’s H-E-L-L-O, a video/performance piece where the artist hired musicians to play the simple “Hello” sequence used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind on bass instruments at different important “buried” historical sites (often associate with slave trade) across New Orleans, with the hope of using music and vibrations to probe the buried histories an engage in that troubled past in a way that welcomes a better present; Charles Campbell’s Actor Boy/Fractal Engagement in which the artist created an impromptu parade through Kingston, Jamaica with the hopes of getting people from various backgrounds to just take a break from their day and enjoy a blend of staged performances and wholly improvised audience participation dances with homemade costumes just to see how different people react to the mischief, art, and fun of Carnival in spaces where they’re not expecting it; and Marlon Griffith’s eerie but astonishing Positions+Power in which the Trinidadian artist created a dazzling but ominous character called the Overseer, an elevated female figure with a dark mask and luminous glowing eyes, and carried her around parade routes at night, calling to mind police surveillance and engaging with the fact that for all the fun of Carnival, there is still a greater scrutiny placed on brown bodies by people in positions of power and that doesn’t go away even during times of celebrations. It’s tragic but a powerful artistic statement.
En Mas was accompanied by a smaller exhibition called at;into;across which featured works from five Caribbean-Canadian artists seeking to explore how the performance traditions from the Caribbean have spread and changed through colonization and emigration in the West. My favorite was a very strangely beautiful series of photographs by Erika DeFreitas entitled A Teleplasmic Study with Doilies in which she knit very decorative doilies (a symbol of “high society”) using traditional Caribbean textile making techniques and staged several photographs with the doilies seemingly entering or exiting in her mouth based on Victorian photos of seances, almost like a weird, hypnotic exoticism of colonialism.
After that I took one more stroll around the upper level of the McKnight Center to see some really surreal and remarkable student works using water colors. I loved the unexpected uses of the medium, and it always warms my heart knowing that every major city I’ve visited has young people continuing to do amazing things. I sincerely wish them the best in all their creative endeavors because the talent is really there.
The upper levels of the Ulrich and McKnight Center were connected by a hallway that was also a greenhouse which was both very cool on a technology/design level while also offering a pleasant burst of color on an aesthetic level.
Lastly by the elevator, there was this piece of artwork that I sadly d not record the name of nor the artist who made it but for whatever reason it’s blend of bold colors and simple architectural geometries really won me over.
The last big highlight of the Ulrich Museum’s permanent collection is not actually in the museum itself but strewn all across the Wichita State University campus. I speak of the museum’s Sculpture collection which features over 70 (!) pieces from world-renowned artists adding whimsy and beauty to the academic settings. Visitors can take a little map which tells you the names and location of all the sculptures, and it’s like a little treasure hunt trying to find all of them. Some of my favorites included: Claes Oldenburg’s Inverted Q; Marlon Korbel’s The Kiss; Salvador Dali’s weird lumpy Condottiere; Dimitri Hadzi’s Centaur and Lapith.
For pure creative goofiness though, there was no topping our friend from the Wichita Art Museum, Tom Otterness’, Makin’ Hay:
After a fine day of art and pizza, I refueled a bit with some excellent coffee from local favorite, Reverie Coffee Roasters, at their newer bakery location Founders Bakery. The coffee was great but when they also had blackberry cream puff pastries the size of my head (slight exaggeration but only slight) it was hard for the delicious baked goods to not steal the show. It was so surprisngly light and fluffy, and blackberry’s a nice flavor because it’s refreshing and tart but not overly sweet. I don’t think I had intended for that to be my dinner, but it was, as previously noted, gigantic so I didn’t have much room after that but I wasn’t too upset about it.
From there, I made way to the venue of tonight’s open mic the Wichita Loony Bin. Bbecause it was a monthly mic at the biggest comedy club in town, I knew it was gonna be a big sign up list so I wanted to get there early to secure a good spot. I found out much to my surprise and delight that before the mic the more seasoned local comics run a comedy workshop for more recent comics in the scene. It’s a sweet gesture that is really a win-win-win for everyone especially for a small scene like that. Older comics get to pass on knowledge and sharpen the skills they already have, new comics get to test out material in front of an attentive audience without the risk of a live crowd, and the venue gets the benefit of better trained amateurs which reduces the risk of a bad show and allows everyone to keep doing what they love. It gave me a great impression of the scene right off the bat, and I really enjoyed just sitting in for the workshop and being a fly on the wall. The main comic running it who would also host the mic, Eli Graves, was a real pro and a thoughtful critic being very honest with young comics without ever coming across as harsh. He also took a stance that I think is actually shared by most comics which was you can be as offensive as you want but if it’s just offensive without being thoughtful or funny enough nobody will like it and you’re better off not doing it. It really is that simple, and it’s not “PC culture ruining comedy” (as some old comics love to go on talk shows and say) its just something that’s always been true that in any art form that requires an audience its best to not wildly offend that audience if you don’t know what you’re doing. My favorite line that came out of the workshop was one young comic asking Eli if a bit he had might accidentally sound racist to which El replied “I’m not sure I understand it, but I feel like if I did it would be racist so don’t say it” That could summarize so many comics’ earliest attempts at joke writing its crazy.
I still had a little bit of time between the workshop and the mic itself so I walked over to a little craft brewery nearby called Third Place Brewing (a wonderfully self-deprecating name). I got the positively delicious smooth and creamy Black Toro Milk Stout, and I was very happy I took the stroll on down.
Because the mic was actually at a comedy club, I was pleasantly surprised when I got back and discovered that there was a huge audience of people looking for something fun to do on a Wednesday night in Wichita. It gave me high hopes for the evening and I was not disappointed. I feel like all the comics also really brought their A games, and even though it was a mic it felt almost like an overstuffed showcase.
While there were so many excellent comics to choose from, my favorite of the night was probably Eric von Reicher whom I’d met just a few days earlier on that show in Boulder. His touring just gave him such a confident command of the stage and his material lived up to the delivery. My favorite line of his was “I was driving back from Colorado and I saw these spaced out billboards. One said, ‘Visit...’, down the road a bit the next one said ‘Wichita...’ the next one said, ‘for...’ and then I didn't see another billboard the whole way”
Other highlights included:
Eli Graves- I'm playing a drinking game called don't throw up. An eye doctor with glasses is only as good as his eye doctor
Avery Perkins- my friend is newly single so he celebrated by sleeping behind a gas station.
Brandon Pritchett- There's a really fucked up stereotype that black People talk to loud at movies. And I'm the living example of that. I laughed when Georgie died in It. This movie takes place in the 80s at the height of stranger danger. There is no stranger stranger than a clown in the gutter.
Corey Smith-I been told I look like Charlie sheen if he fucked Mr. Bean
Ashley Barnes- I hate math too because by the time I get here my whole check is subtracted
Tim Haggert- A friend asked me if I wanted to go to the mall with him which is a weird thing for a grown man to ask another grown man
(a comic whose name I didn’t catch)- What did JFK's assassination teach us. Nothing like a good car ride to clear your head.
Erica profit- People ask me, “what are you?”That's a weird way to talk to a person. It's like saying, “who do you gotta fuck to make you happen?”
Diane Roth- (a little old lady who sang a parody song called "you make me fart like a natural woman" which was very more oddly endearing than funny but I sort of loved it anyway)
Buddy Daniels- I've been carded at every AA meeting I've ever been to
Meagan Welsh- I brought up abortion at Easter dinner. The ham was taking too long, everyone was going a little stir crazy so I figured that'll get people talking. All the anti abortion signs mysteriously look like they were put up by the same person. I found the conservative Banksy
Abby Hilliard- Dating is like internships you only stay there to figure out if you want to be there full time
Norman Day- I have no felonies. I didn't say I didn't do felony shit though
Mike Baldwin- you guys have sat through a lot of comedy and a lot of people just talking. If you google Mike Baldwin I'm the first one but if you go to MikeBaldwin.com that not me. That's another Mike Baldwin and he's a realtor in Maryland who doesn't answer emails from other mike baldwins
It was a great night, and it was a little better for me personally because I had a particularly good set. I don’t know if having a few days off just made me more rested and energetic or if I was just feeding off the energy of the crowd and all the strong comics before me, but I felt like every single joke landed and a lot harder than they sometimes did. I got a lot of positive feedback after the show, and I think it helped me break the ice and start chatting with a lot of the local comics. I hung out for a while just chatting and laughing with all of the Wichita comics (a further return on the promise of supportiveness from the workshop) and I’ve actually kept in touch with a couple of them which I think is a lasting testament to both how nice that scene is and how well comedy can bring people together.
Favorite Random Sightings: Duck’s Flying Discs (it’s so descriptive and yet I really don’t have any clue what they sell); Haute to Tot (a funny name for an unnecessarily fancy baby clothes store)
Regional Observations: My baseless assumption was that Kansas would be mostly yellow hues (probably purely because of the Wizard of Oz and corn) so I was really surprised but pleasantly so by how lush and green it could get around Wichita.
Albums Listened To: Vic with the Forthrights Bootleg by Vic Ruggiero and the Forthrights (a great live album)
People’s Favorite Jokes: nothing today so here’s one from the web-
At the zoo I noticed a slice of toast in one of the enclosures.
I asked the keeper, “How did that toast get into the cage?"
"It was bread in captivity,” she replied.
Songs of the Day: