August 22, 2004- I’ve been to Buffalo……

After a nice warmup gig on Thursday at the Laguna Beach Brewery, I flew to New York and began my week headlining the Comix Café in Buffalo. I thought it was cool that my picture was on the 2nd page of the Laguna Beach Independent for the show, but Kimmy pointed out that there was a picture of a dead possum on the front page. She wasn't excited that I was in the paper, just amused that I got bumped off the front page by a dead rodent.

I flew to NY a day early so I could do morning radio with "Shredd & Ragen" on "The Edge" in Buffalo, so it was cool they let me stay on the air for about 25 minutes. After that, they rushed me out of the studio to get the Hooter girls and the Buffalo Bills cheerleaders in there. I took a nap then had two really good shows on Friday. Saturday was my unofficial bachelor party and most of my hometown buddies came up to hang out and get me into trouble. After two good shows, my friends took me on two really strange cab rides, a strip joint, and back home. I don’t remember a whole lot but I did leave my dinner at a gas station parking lot somewhere in Tonawanda around 4am. It was a full day. There are no pictures of this event. Thank God.

I had a fallout the following week. The club owner informed me that there weren’t opening for another couple of months so I spent the week at my parents finalizing wedding plans with Kimmy. Then, it was off to Lake Ontario Playhouse which is always fun. I usually work there in the winter, when the town is frozen. It was fun to be there in the summertime when the street is alive with tourists, music and food. The town is literally one street but has two or three of my favorite restaurants. It was a beautiful weekend and it was just my luck that this was "Jazz Fest" weekend. The word "Jazz" might be giving the wrong idea about theis festival. It was very low key, grandpa-napping-type of music. After giving the "jazz" a listen for a few moments, it seems to me that old white people use the term "Jazz" for the music they whistle when they are bored.

There are times that I pretend that I am a wizard. That when I drink beer it gives me magical powers, like the ability to sing, dance and be attractive to woman. This week it was a little easier to imagine being a wizard because I stayed in a room identical to Harry Potter’s. His room was a closet under the stairwell. My room was a closet on top of a playhouse in a room that I could touch each wall at the same time. I got a little spooked so I flipped on the TV and got a few Canadian channels. Luckily, I got to see "Canadian Idol"! It was atrocious and there wasn’t one person who looked like they were supposed to be on TV. It was so bad it was funny.

It helped that we got great crowds all week, including a Saturday show which was the biggest I had ever seen in my five or six trips there. I took a picture of the big crowd so you can sort of see things from my point of view.

Then it was a flight home to LA for about ten hours before I had to jump in the car and head to Tucson, AZ for another week’s work. Kimmy came along and we did fun, touristy things like go to the zoo. One thing I learned is that I’m hated by Tigers. I’ve never been on the receiving end of a dirtier look than the one this Tiger gave me.

We got to see some Jaguars up close and personal as well, those cats look lazy but they can really turn on the jets when they need to. We watched one of the zoo workers feed them fish through the fence and I’ve honestly never seen anything move as fast as those Jaguars when they saw their lunch. The Tues, Wed, and Thurs shows have been light so far. I didn’t feel so bad until I saw the Rhino at the Zoo take a dump and get a bigger applause break from the crowd than I’ve gotten so far this week at my shows

As if we hadn‘t seen enough animals this week: at the hotel this car, which was part of an exterminator company, resembled a mouse. I don’t mean to overanalyze this but it would seem to me that if you were an exterminator, you are driving a VW "beetle", you might design your car to be some time of bug. I’m not really sure that a mouse really represents the whole exterminator thing that well. Damn I’m not funny. I took the fun out of the whole thing. The guy probably has a good sense of humor, decided to make his car into a mouse to put a few smiles on people’s faces and I go ahead and suck the life out of it by criticizing him. Then again, why would you make the mouse yellow?

After all my complaining, the Friday show turned out to be one of the best shows I’ve had my whole career. Luckily, I was recording audio for my upcoming CD. That’s right, it’s honestly almost done. It should be available (fingers crossed) in a few weeks but I don’t want to jinx it. More on that soon, I promise.

Saturday’s show was almost as good as Fridays. It was so good that a singing group called "Illusion" did an impromptu audition for me. They were great, not that I know much about singing, but they said they were moving to L.A. in the coming months so we’ll see who gets famous first. The headliner, Tim O’Rourke, who you might know as the bartender on the Drew Carey show, suggested that we drive back to L.A. on Saturday night after the show. I felt like a cowboy in the old west as I packed up my bags in the jeep and drove off into the desert at midnight. On the road again…..

Thanks for Reading,
Paul C. Morrissey