Friday Night was a night of Solo Performances (not that kind-Gross!) and odd encounters on 2nd Avenue and the #10 bus…yes, all the world IS a stage!
I started out my Friday (yes, I’m aware it’s now TUESDAY, the FOURTH…Life has been hectic the last couple of days; if you want regular hourly posts, then buy a damn ad so we can do this full time for a living! But, I digress…) still recovering from my Thursday and desperate to keep my schedule straight in my addled and elderly head. I had foolishly double booked myself and had a tight, tight schedule to maintain if I was going to make it to everything on time. I’m proud to say, I DID make it to everything, with time to kill actually, and managed to have some interesting adventures along the way…
Stephen Hando, center, in blackjack dealer mode in still from last year’s production of Keefee at Theatre Off Jackson.
I started my evening by flying home from real, (but dull) job at 6pm just in time to cram food down my gullet to fly BACK down the Hill at 7:30pm to make it to the 8pm performance of Keefee’s House of Cards in the beautifully faded Deco rose known as the Jewelbox Theater at The Rendezvous in equally faded but not very Deco-ish Belltown. Stephen Hando’s trailer trash gay character and play was originally performed last year in a production that featured other characters interacting with Keefee, but for this latest incarnation the other characters have been dropped and Mr Hando is performing solo but with the participation of four audience members who come up on stage and play a few rounds of blackjack with Keefee. It’s a cute but dangerous concept. If the audience members sit around like a bunch of cough drops, paralyzed with stage fright or crippled by a serious case of “no personality disorder”, then the show will crawl to a fitful end. But, if the audience members are raging hams that attempt to overshadow and upstage the lead actor, that can be just as problematic. (There’s also the danger they’ll pull up a looney tune who goes all berserker mode on stage.) But, as I discovered Friday night, this element of danger is key to the charms of the show. The plot, what little of it there is, is slight and not highly dramatic. Keefee, a charming but alcoholic middle-aged Floridian of trailer trash descent is a sweet but highly unprofessional blackjack dealer in a very low-rent casino on the fringes of the Las Vegas Strip who finds himself coping with the problems of maintaining a relationship with his relatively new and much younger boyfriend as well as the impending arrival of his oldest friend from Tallahassee who doesn’t much approve of Keefee’s disastrous taste in men. Stephen Hando carefully weaves these plot strands through out the show in between the improvised blackjack sequences with the audience participants by the use of casually tossed off anecdotes and confidences about his life directed toward both the audience and the blackjack “players” and by the use of strategically placed cell phone conversations with the no-account boyfriend and the old friend who’s in transit to Vegas from Florida. Mr Hando’s balancing act between the plot and the game is masterful and exciting and a bit exhausting to watch (it seemed exhausting to the actor as well; Keefee is a highly strung character but it was obvious that keeping all those balls in the air was hard work; Mr Hando was visibly, but not inappropriately, winded after his acting “sprint” at the end of the show.) I have to say I liked “Keefee”, both the character and the play (as well as the talented actor who created and played him), but you leave the show wishing for a plot with a bit more substance to it. The show is only a bit over an hour, and as is, I’m not sure if it COULD have gone much longer with the bare bones plot and the business of using the non-actors on stage. The four on view Friday night, two male/female couples, were fine with the two women being fairly reticent and the two men doing a capable job of playing along with Keefee. The younger of the two men, (and quite cute in a musician/hipster guy sort of way) turned out to actually BE from Tallahassee and he and Keefee shared some common reminiscences of the local gay bar and a popular local drag queen. It was a sweet, genuine moment in the show and one that can be hard to duplicate on paper. Keefee’s House of Cards is an entertaining, SHORT theater piece that I can recommend and I would pay to see more of the character but in a new setting and situation; I think Keefee deserves a longer, deeper, richer plot structure to tell his funny, drunken, kinda bittersweet life story.
I had planned on Keefee lasting until about 10pm so I left the Rendezvous with some time to kill but fortunately there was an art show across the street at City Hostel, (2327 2nd Avenue) being run by the cute kids at S3A, “a group of artists and galleries committed to raising awareness of the alternative art scene in Seattle…” The show was HOT and a great fit for Belltown being close to Roq LaRue and the whole Juxtapoz art vibe scene that is so hot right now. And the show was full of great, fresh art from talented young artists at reasonable prices…I wish I had heard about it sooner, so I could have plugged it on here. And, I was rather proud to see new work by an artist that I had used in a show at the LGBT Center, the young artist known as CASH. CASH wasn’t gay but he submitted his stuff to me and I liked it and snuck it into a show (my motto was, if you’re willing to SHOW your work in a queer space and you’re gay friendly, then you’re worthy to be accepted). I also saw work by the very talented Jonathan Wakuda Fischer, who also had pieces in the Seattle Erotic Art Festival and Augie Pagan who has a big show coming up at the Upper Playground Gallery on the Ave in the U-District starting May 21. Bookmark these websites and keep tabs on what these artists are up to…I know I will.
I hung out for a bit at the S3A show but had to hit the road to make it back UP the Hill to my next show, so I trotted (shuffled) down 2nd Avenue to catch the #10 bus at Pike Street. I was on the block with the Moore Theater on it and walking past that interesting retro residence hotel just a couple doors down from the Moore when I heard someone say, just as I walked past, “Hey, you look like Andy Warhol!”
Huh?
Andy Warhol 
was a skinny, white wigged, albino artist with no facial hair. I’m a not skinny, brown haired, pale but not THAT pale, kinda middle agedish gay dude with a scruffy beard and hipster glasses…Maybe it was the glasses? I dunno. There wasn’t many people on that block at that time, and maybe the guy (older, African American) was talking/referencing someone else, or maybe he has vision problems, or was confusing Andy Warhol with someone else who MIGHT look like me, or maybe he was tripping. I wasn’t offended by his comment, (because it made no logical sense) plus I LIKE Andy Warhol…I’m looking forward to the show at SAM which starts next week…We’ll see if anyone at THAT show makes any Warholian advances towards me…
After that odd moment, I finally made it to Pike Street, and as luck would have it, a #10 pulled up right in front of me. I got on the bus and right behind me were a couple of 17 year old kids, one of whom had a song and dance story about giving his bus pass to a friend, ’cause he hurt his leg on his board and needed to go to the emergency room and he didn’t have any money and he had to get home and…at that point the weary lady bus driver just waved him and the two kids and I both went and took seats at the back of the bus. We then head up Pike and stop at the next stop and more people get on, including a mid-30’s black guy in coveralls looking like he just got off of a construction job who sat down across from the two skate board kids and to my right. We waited a moment, but the bus didn’t start moving and then the bus driver announced, “The guy who got on the bus without paying needs to come up and pay or get off the bus.” Well, the two kids thought at first she meant THEM, but then the bus driver repeated herself, this time adding “the guy who JUST GOT ON THE BUS” and the kids thought they meant the 30ish black guy sitting near us and he started getting huffy because he said he HAD paid. But then we noticed a hubbub towards the front of the bus where a tall, 30ish, white, vaguely-kinda gayish guy had taken it upon himself to confront the ACTUAL deadbeat culprit, a bundled up, out of it hobo type guy. Mr Take Charge Guy got up from his seat, walked over to where the Hobo-Culprit was sitting, hauled the Culprit to his feet and started escorting him to the door, not really roughly but firmly, and saying “Man, if you can’t pay, you gotta get off the bus” and the Culprit didn’t fight back but just mumbled and shuffled along and things seemed fine until Mr Take Charge Guy got the Culprit to the back door, which the driver had opened, and then proceeded to give the guy a shove off the bus! The befuddled Culprit landed on the ground and began moaning, the rest of the bus was just shocked and the black guy next to me got PISSED and started cussing, “What the fuck was that? Why’d he have to shove that guy?!?!?” Well, Mr Take Charge and the bus driver, (who shouldn’t have let this happen) went out to check on Moaning Culprit, who frankly probably wasn’t actually injured as his moans were extremely fake sounding, like a 5 year having a phony tantrum to get attention. Everyone on the bus began yakking away, the skateboard kids thought it was all pretty funny and Outraged Dude was furious and wanted to confront Mr Take Charge for being so aggressive but started telling himself, “Man, I can’t get involved; I’m on parole! But, that shit ain’t right!” Eventually, the bus driver and Mr TC got back on the bus, (because apparently Moaning Culprit was fine, or more likely, they just didn’t want to deal with it), and we started moving up Pike Street. Obviously, everyone was still stunned by what had happened and Outraged Dude continued to bitch about the incident and the injustice of it and began relating a story about a similar scene that had happened to HIM a couple years back when he was in downtown Seattle with his girlfriend. 
The couple was down near the market minding their own business, when a white, tourist lady walked up to him and told him, “You know, you would make a good house n*gg*r!” At that point, our Outraged Dude friend, PUNCHED the nasty old bigot in the face and sent her glasses flying off her head! Realizing that it’s generally not a good thing to punch nasty, old bigot ladies in the face, (especially if you’re a black man punching a white woman), he fled the scene. But the girlfriend stayed behind and told the police what happened, and their response was, “We’re not going to pursue this” and didn’t bother looking for our Outraged Friend. At this point in his story, I was so engrossed, I had to comment to him, “She said WHAT to you?” not believing anyone could be that mean and stupid and we began a conversation that continued the rest of the way up the Hill, with me telling him, “Dude, if I were you and someone said that to me, I would have done the same damn thing!” We introduced ourselves, (sadly, I forgot his name, but Outraged Dude does fit him), shook hands and I got off the bus at 10th and Pine. So far, my intermission between theater visits was turning out to be more dramatic than the actual theater pieces themselves. The last time I had seen so much public drama on the Hill was my last late night visit to the IHOP where every booth seemed to be carrying on their own private Tennessee Williams play…
After digesting both the incident on the #10 bus and a quesadilla from Rancho Brava, I finally made it to the Annex and my 11pm date with Evenings With Carlotta starring Troy Mink and his popular and beloved character Carlotta Sue Philpott, a 70 year old Southern Fried Grandma now making her home in the Pacific Northwest. Mink has featured Carlotta in numerous shows over the years but she is usually surrounded with a supporting cast of zany characters and her “Late Night Wingding” shows took on the format of an improvised talk/variety show with real guests mixing it up with the Hee-Haw comedy characters. Not so with this latest incarnation of Carlotta. Ms Philpott is front, center and solely ensconced on the Annex stage as she invites us in to spend the night as her house guests for an evening of gossip, dance, Rice Kripsy treats, and personal (and sometimes painful) revelations about the early years of her life.
This is not your typical “Carlotta” fare…”Evenings” is funny, (Mr Mink is incapable of NOT being funny) and it can be as sweet as the hilariously prepared, aforementioned riced cereal and marshmallow treats, but this show is also quite capable of giving us the bitter and the painful to temper the sugary sweetness of America’s favorite, easy to prepare afterschool snack. Carlotta’s hour and fifteen monologue threads its way through funny gossip about neighbors and friends in her prayer circle, and coy digs at one of Seattle’s preeminent but kleptomaniacal lady broadcasters but also manages to weave in personal stories about Carlotta’s first big dance, her teenage pregnancy and subsequent shotgun marriage, and a post marital affair that results in tragedy for the young Carlotta. But “Evenings” never stoops to the mawkish; Carlotta is obviously pained by these experiences but she doesn’t seem to dwell on them or revel in their telling. It’s always presented to us that we are her guests, and her friends, and Carlotta is a friendly Southern lady who feels comfortable enough with us to share these reminiscenses of her life, both happy and sad. You leave Evenings With Carlotta with similar thoughts; happy to have spent time with her and sad that the time has to come to an end. My only carp with this show is that it’s not finished. It SHOULD be longer and it needs some shaping and a complete story arc built into the show with a solid structure. Like Keefee, Ms Carlotta Sue Philpott deserves a bigger, better more solid and complete and fulfilling vessel for the story of her life. The enormous talents of Mr Mink are up to that task, and his conviction and honest portrayal of this fully formed female character are a tribute to those talents. You always believe and accept him as this elderly female character. Eavesdropping on three audience members sharing a smoke at intermission, every one of them commented, “She’s exactly like my Mother/Grandmother/Aunt Dotty/Cousin Flo!” And for those of you not lucky enough to have a sweet, gabby, female relative or friend in your lives, I encourage you to visit the Annex and make Carlotta your new best friend…but hands off the Vienna Sausages; Carlotta promised them to ME!
REVIEW: Keefee’s House of Cards by Stephen Hando. Produced by Printer’s Devil Theater at the Jewelbox Theatre at The Rendezvous. Directed by Jennifer Jasper. With Stephen Hando. Friday nights at 8pm, 21plus through May 28. Tickets available here.
REVIEW: Evenings With Carlotta by Troy Mink at the Annex Theatre. Directed by K. Brian Neel. With Troy Mink. Friday/Saturday nights at 11pm. Tickets available here.
REVIEW: The Metro #10 Blues by the Ensemble. Produced by Metro Transit. With Michael Strangeways, The Warhol Dude, The Skateboard Kids, The Clueless Bus Driver, Mr Take Charge Man, The Moaning Culprit and Outraged Dude. Now through eternity. Tickets available here.
About the Author: Michael Strangeways
