Lost weekend

The Embarcadero Center across the street from the venue on Battery Street is a semi-enclosed mall where almost nothing is open at night. I remember temping here, answering phones for a business I’ve completely forgotten in the early oughts; it feels eerie to be back in this place, wandering like a ghost through these empty brutalist halls. Feeling like I don’t exist if I don’t see anyone I know, like some alt comedy J. Alfred Prufrock. 

Once I’m allowed into the Punch Line, I settle in to watch the host, a very confident Oakland-based comic named Marcus Williams. Williams is a structural engineer from Atlanta, gay and black and extremely high energy, who occasionally scandalizes audiences with jokes about prison dating before offering winking apologies. I can see where all the punchlines are heading, but it becomes secondary to the force of his personality. 

When he takes the stage,Taggart of StraightioLab, is charming and self-deprecating as he toggles between his notebook and his drink, making a meal of both. I envy the built-in safety net of a parasocial podcast audience giving the partly developed bits space to percolate, but I also wonder if that’s too creatively cushioned.

Co-headliner Civeris comes in strong with political content, a joke about the secret police murder cabal told before the ink is even dry, the inadequacy of our supposed DNC champions, and all sorts of riffs on the dystopian present. Even with the goodwill of a self-selected audience, Civeris seems aware that the Bay Area comedy crowd is not going to follow everything he throws down, but his confidence carries them through any bumps in the set. 

There is no afterparty, so I bust a rideshare over to the Rickshaw Stop on Fell Street and catch Gumby’s Junk, an East Bay prog/jam band well-loved among punks and musicians. The youthful mosh pit throws herky-jerky dance moves to match Eli Streich’s cowbell-laden drumstick strikes. I run into my co-worker who mentored bassist Emmalee Johnson-Kao and guitarist Jas Stade when they were kids in the Bay Area Girls Rock Camp. Johnson-Kao’s dad is in attendance, making the age range of this 21+ show pretty wide. 

After spending six hours in a car and public transit, I’m beat. I catch the penultimate train back to Oakland and crawl into the ADU to process my night and get some sleep.

DAY TWO: FRIDAY JAN. 23

This year, Sketchfest is coinciding with SF Art Week, so my many associations are colliding and no one working at an art space has time to see my 2 p.m. Saturday show. I drive over to the inaugural ATRIUM Art Fair in the Minnesota Street Project in the Dogpatch. I’m looking for a table supposedly run by my friend Anthony Marcelini, but nothing is obvious in the cavernous space. Charlie Smith from Cruise Control gallery in Cambria is set up across the way from Steuart Pittman, who overlaps art and comedy scenes (half of the sketch group/rock band Sad Vicious) and runs the Pacific Saw Works gallery in Oakland. All my worlds are converging into a collective “Have a great show, I’d come if I didn’t have to be here!”

After I’ve made my rounds through the whole space, including seeing Keith Varadi from Genes Dispensary in LA and his partner comedian Maggie Widdoes, I drive over to 215 Fremont St., which Google Maps shows as a Supercuts. In fact, it’s a former bank space hosting Creativity Explored x Open Invitational, an art show bringing together progressive art studios for artists with disabilities. I make a purchase of this amazing dog drawing from the Exceptional Children’s Foundation out of Whittier. 

Next, I head to the Hotel Kabuki on Post Street to pick up my badge from the Sketchfest headquarters. A friend and I head into a poetry event at the Golden Sardine, a tiny wine bar/poetry space on Columbus Avenue celebrating its second anniversary and a reading/zine release for Alley Poems, hosted by Marthine Satris. Somehow, I barely notice that I’m not going into the Mission at all on this trip.

My friend and I surmise that as recently single people (don’t ask) we might get called on stage at Cobb’s Comedy Club for Why Are You Single?, a live game show hosted by Marie Faustin. We didn’t need to worry since, it turns out, volunteers need to sign up much earlier so the game’s producers can make PowerPoint slides about them. New York comedian Kenice Mobley was one of the guests; the two other contestants were not comics, just very brave (or crazy) people willing to expose their love lives onstage.

After the show, I hit the Sports Basement party in the Presidio. The Sketchfest afterparties feel like school dances: DJs, cliqueish groupings that adhere to some understood but unspoken status, and, in a departure from school dances, free alcohol served amid cleats and camping gear. Among the quarter-full hall I spot veteran comics Todd Barry and Eugene Mirman, who’d performed at the sporting goods store earlier that night, a reminder to us all that no matter how many decades you put into the craft, we all find ourselves plying jokes near a display of sports bras once in a while.

DAY THREE: SATURDAY, JAN. 24

I wake up and see on my phone that someone else has been shot by ICE in Minneapolis. I turn on the TV and see footage of Alex Pretti pinned down by federal agents. We only have a shaky camera angle available at that point, but it’s so soon after the murder of Renée Good, that I think about trying to be funny amidst a national disaster. 

I decide to drop by Cushion Works on 18th Street in the Mission to see Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, who radiate hippie positivity in this bleak world, even if it’s only for a few minutes before I have to set up for Talkies at the Lost Church on Columbus Avenue.

It’s a 2 p.m. show, but I think we have around 45 people coming. Our guest performers are Sara Benincasa, Kyle Ayers, Jared Kassebaum, and Iain Langlands, each of whom has some slide show component to their bits. We often joke that our show is like a homework assignment that even we put off till the last minute. My cohosts Land Smith, Aviva Siegel, and Nick Stargu, have backlogged a good amount of bits that work for the format of the show and I feel ready despite my earlier dread while watching the news. My thing lately is putting all my clothes on backwards and having a weird face on the back of my head and playing guitar backwards. I have to remind myself that even with a ski mask covering my face, I can’t get too close to the audience or I risk blindly winging someone in the head with the stock of the guitar. I don’t know why people like it — is it clown comedy or a punk rocker’s midlife crisis? — but it’s the thing people have been asking me to do the most. 

The gimmick of the show is that it’s all gimmicks. Siegel’s Crone bit involves jump scares with a figure jumping out of the audience; Benincasa riffs on all the strange paintings found at the venue; and Kassebaum leads the crowd in a signature singalong about cranberry juice.

After a post-show hang at The Page on Divisadero Street, I drive back to Chinatown with Nick, eat at House of Nanking and then we walk down to Cobb’s to catch Smug Shift. This is a show that Brent Weinbach and Moshe Kasher started 22 years ago in San Francisco. Todd Barry was one of their guests, offering up jokes in his classic hushed, dry, and commanding style. 

I run into Barry later at the afterparty and remind him of a show we did together in North Carolina about six years ago. He does not remember, which is fair: I wasn’t wearing my clothes backward then.

DAY FOUR: SUNDAY, JAN. 25

I meet up with friends at Wat Mongkolratanaram, the Berkeley Thai Temple that hosts a weekly breakfast that I haven’t been to in over a decade. I’ve grown a little tired of driving and BART over to catch Brittany Carney’s headlining show about spirals at Lost Church. Marcus Williams hosts again and he reliably gets the 2 p.m. crowd pumped up. Carney had lost her slides but persevered riffing on the nature of broccoli. She is my new favorite comic from this fest, a true left-field weirdo.

My friend Kristina Wong tells me she is hosting this show at Bay Area Theater Sports (BATS) called Outtake-O-Rama. Missing the first twenty minutes of the show, I quickly grok that the panel is all producers and voice actors from Futurama (Maurice LaMarche, Billy West, John DiMaggio, and Futurama showrunner David X. Cohen) and they’re recreating famous bootleg recordings. It’s like the inverse of lip synching as they do conversations like the infamous Bill O'Reilly and Casey Kasem tantrums.

My last show of Sketchfest is still at BATS for the Groundlings show. 

The Groundlings: Personals creates characters from snippets of dating profiles. Creator/director Brian Palermo has run the show over twenty years with a traveling improv cast, including Sketchfest founder Cole Stratton. Local improv guru Diana Brown and visiting NY musical comedian Sydney Kane are the outliers among the solidly millennial cast. 

The scenarios jump from awkward first dates into runs about soothsaying spirits, kickball bullies, and a happy ending for a reformed gay white supremacist. It’s the first improv I’m seeing at the festival and a reminder that when improv works, nothing can beat the highwire thrill of making scenes out of thin air.

Eventually, I end up back at Golden Sardine in North Beach. My college friend Heidi suggests we go to Bourdain-approved Sam’s Burgers on Broadway. Sitting at the counter, we strike up a conversation with the guy next to us who, as it turns out, is Ramsey Metcalf, guitarist from the ‘80s Dischord band Swiz, in town for a book event at Et Al. gallery in the Mission. 

It’s the fortuitous capper to one of my busiest Bay Area weekends ever, where so many parts of my creative life and communities overlapped.