I’m at at cafe and just wrote a big long thing about the card at the hotel then I accidentally erased it or maybe my time ran out. I’ll get it up tomorrow. Today is bad. I’m locked out of my house. North West Airlines lost my bag. My hair is messy. I want some eggnog. So later……………..
Iam writing this on my brand (last week) Blackberry. My right baby finger gets kinda numb when I use it. Idont know if it has spell check…Last week some one took $460 out of my bank account. Some one Idont know. So basically means that it was scammed from me. Anyway, my bank turned off my debit card ‘cos they figured it was a scam. However, I didn’t know that they did so I landed in LA and cruised on over to a hotel. I tried to check in and couldn’t so I had to call Chaille to bail me out. Thanks dude. Anyway, the next day I had to do some major manuevring to get a new ATM card and had to stay an extra day and take cabs to the bank to sort shit out. So far it has cost a fortune. Thank God for my business manager to help. Last March Mitch and I were checking into a New York hotel and the lady at the front desk put our card
Okay - I have to go finish this on a real computer ‘cos this is a pain in the ass. Later.
I just wrote a whole thing but accidentally erased it. I find it really hard to start all over. So here’s a second hand, rethought version of things.
I’ve been away from computers for a while now. I come to you live from The Hedberg’s home in St. Paul, MN. By the Hedbergs I mean Mitch’s ‘Ma’ and ‘Pops’. His names for his parents, aka Mary and Arne.
So, it’s all things Thanksgiving here. Turkey, nieces, sisters, stuffing, Christmas shopping, nephew…….. Mitchness - everywhere. The memories and Mitchness stem from the visits that we made over the years. I sleep in the guest room that we shared when we didn’t stay at a nearby hotel.
I arrived on Thursday @ 6pm. Arne picked me up at the airport and we headed to Wendy’s house. Wendy, as in “My sisters Wendy has a family photo on top of her VCR…..”.
“Shall I just get a cab when I get there?” I asked Arne the night before. I already knew the answer.
“Hell no. I won’t have it…..”. In the past, Mitch’s Dad has picked us up and dropped us off numerous times. From aiports, train station; all hours of the day and night.
“Taxi’s aren’t the same here in MN”. I’m not sure what that means but I’ll take the ride.
Cab and Taxi is a four letter word in the Hedberg home.
If I added up all the $$ Mitch and I spent on cabs in the other 49 states. Hmm…it’d be….like..a lot. Like tens of thousands-a-lot.
So, I arrive in Minneapolis and it’s freezing and Arne picks me up.
I had flown out of Palm Springs and called them just before we took off just to let them know that it was 80 % there.
“Bring a jacket.”
Arne picks me up, already concerned about the fact that I’m cold. I brought a scarf at least. He knows I’m from Canada, knows I can take it and we head on our way.
We arrive at Wendy’s place. I take a deep breathe - in we go. As I was taking the deep breathe - Arne, realizing what I’m doing - says, “I know what you mean. I feel the same when I’m about to enter a room full of people”.
There’s something that happens to you when your sad. Or depressed. Or you lose your husband or son. You have to brace yourself a bit. Just to kinda take it all on.
Does that make sense?
So, from that moment until now I’ve been in the warm belly of family. Mitch’s family……
It’s very cool and fun. Every now and then I feel like a monster. Here, celebrating with his family - like I shouldn’t be here without him.
His nieces are hilarious. They call me Lynn and know totally know Mitch.
“I can’t believe you and Uncle Mitch are famous!!”. As I try and explain to Maddy (age 10) that I’m not famous, Mariah (age 14) says, “It’s sad that we won’t be able to hear more of his jokes”.
Mariah is my new Myspace friend. On my profile, there are a couple of Mitch Hedberg fan group that I’m a member of. She asks me “Can I join them?”.
I’m like, hell ya. AND you can show off that your his niece.
It wasn’t the easiest thing to get Mitch to attend every family functions. The fact is they take place almost every week end. But for the ones we did come too - I’m glad.
Okay, it’s Sunday and turkey dinner #2 is about to be served. The family is here. I’m starving…….
I’ll catch up very soon.
I just talked to Stanhope. Last week he finished almost two months on the road. He was burnt out. On Thursday he started 30 days of ‘cleansing’. No drinkin’, no smokin’.
I just called him to check out his progress.
“How’s it goin?’
“Well, I’m laying on the couch craving a cig and a cup of coffee”
Coffee? He explains, and I agree - why would you drink coffee of you can’t smoke? So you might as well give up both.
Oh Ya!……it’s the last day to vote for M. in the XM radio ‘Comic or The Year’ contest. It’s a bit late to mention it, I suppose.
It would be cool if he won. I should have hired a room full of fans to vote……….hmm…..nah.
You can vote as many times as you want.
My life has turned into some cheap tragic/comedy. Earlier today I wrote (in 67% Gross below) about my local laundromat called Sudsy Belle. I was bragging about how I leave my laundry there for a long time and no -one screws with it. I basically was letting you in on the fact that I kinda like to act like I run the joint.
My laissez - fair attitude is no more.
After about 3 or 4 hours since I put my stuff in the dryer, I cruise on over to fold it and bring it home. When I enter ye ol’ Sudsy, I notice that it’s a bit busy. Busy being that there are two other people doing there laundry. That’s fine. Now, as I tend to leave my clothes in the dryer for some time - I understand the fact -that when I pick it up it may have been taken out and put in a Sudsy Belle basket so that someone else can use the dryer. Hey, I know the game. I know how it works - gotta play by the laundromat rules.
Okay, today’s clothes were in dryer #2, #6 and # 8 when I left. I put stuff like jeans in dryer #2. Why? Well, since I’m a local - ‘in the know’ as they say - I am aware that #2 is the best dryer in the joint. It gets the hottest and is coveted by us S.B. dryer connoisseurs. Number 6 is average and # 8 is a bit lame-being the fact that it’s smaller and you get less time for your money. Knowing this, I will only use #8 if I have to. Today I did - you win some you lose some.
So even before I get there to fold my stuff, I know that someone will have emptied my stuff from #2 in order to use it. I’m fine with this - like I said when you playing with the big guy (dryer # 2) this sort of thing is to be expected if you don’t hang around to watch it. I like to leave the place when my stuff is drying because a) It looks like I’ve got shit to do. b) I used to stay but it can get boring and very loud as some parents bring their kids and yell at them.
I’ll try and get to the point. So, I get to the S.B. and of course clothes from #2 are in a basket. I cruise on over to them to check if they are dry. They are, but my jeans - which I like to be very dry - has a minute bit of dampness on the waist. I sigh loudly (why, I don’t know - it’s my fault for leaving them for so long) and take them to dyer #6 which, for some strange reason is still drying. I think to myself “Hmmm….that’s weird….I think I only put four quarters in. Should have only lasted an hour….oh well”.
Then I start folding the dry things from #8, which has stopped completely and nobody seems to be jumping at. So…I’m folding away as I notice a man hedging towards me.
I look up and he says, “Would you be offended….mumble….I put a quarter in #6″
I’m confused, “Well..hmm…why would I be offended?”
Nervously he continues, “Yeah….uh…I put a quarter in earlier…so..it would, y’know”
This guy is not S.B. savvy. I can barley figure out what he’s saying. Then it suddenly dawns on me. He had put 25 cents in my dryer because it had stopped, but the clothes were still wet. An then he put a quarter in so it would dry, then he could use it. I’m starting to feel like an asshole - dominating the dryers and leading shy men to fork up their hard earned cash to get things rolling down there.
“Oh my God!!…..I’m sorry, here let me grab my stuff. I couldn’t figure it out. Let me give you back some quarters” I rush to # 8 and take out my very dry things.
Okay then….back to folding. At this point there are three grown men in the place. It’s quite small - kinda cramped. Three grown, ruff-around-the-edges, men.
I’m folding away when all of a sudden one of the men bends down right behind me and picks up one of my socks and checks on his dry. It’s dryer #2 that he opens - meaning he’s the one that took out my stuff earlier. As soon as he opens the door (I’m standing right beside it) he puts his arm in for 1 second and goes “Oh, look what I found!” and holds up a 20 dollar bill.
I jokeingly go “Hey!….that’s mine!” and smile at him.
As soon as those words come out of my mouth, I think ‘hey!….that’s mine!’
I mean the guy found it in one second, AS his stuff was still spinning, then closed the door, left his clothes in there (still spinning) and walked to another part of the S.B.
The reason I was thinking it was mine was the fact that I ALWAYS leave $ in my pockets and happily find it in the dryer.
No way to prove it, I keep folding and give the guy a bit of a side way glance. He’s looking at me. I give him a bit of a suspicious looksie. He smiles at me -in a guilt way, as far as I’m concerned.
Whatever.
Okay - my stuff is folded. Three dryers worth. I had carried my dirty clothees to the S.B. in a white plastic garbage bag, some stuff was in a suitcase that I hadn’t unpacked yet and the rest was in a small plastic laundry basket. I had put the suitcase back in my car before I left earlier and left the others at the place.
I found the garbage bag back near the dryers. I filled it with, like, towels and pillow cases and stuff like that. Then I grabbed the basket. When I had arrived earlier to wash, I just through in all the dirty clothes from the basket. At the bottom of the basket was stuff that didn’t need washing or shoes or something. Or so I thought.
I grab the basket and decide to check if the junk in the bottom can be thrown out before I put the folded clean clothes on top. I bend down, right in the middle of Sudsy Belle - a place I frequent quite often. Have been for years. Many times with Mitch by my side whing “Do we have to fold it?”
I look in the basket and notice a torn, half opened plastic bag. Target bag maybe? No….I think it was a cingular bag.
‘What?……I open it further. Right in front of my laundry peers. I think I even muttered, “Hmmm…more junk, I suppose”. The room was silent. All eyes are on the bag. I lift it up, open it and we take a little look.
I’m totally embarrassed to even say. But it’s a sad end to my S.D days. Inside the bag - a bag I haven’t seen forever - is like…full of…..um…embarrassing…shall we say -
sexy ….like…adult….gifts mainly!!!!!….toys. Honestly, most of said….er…toys were jokey type of things. Unopened.
Unopened.
I hadn’t seen them for ages.
Honestly, it’s like a shitty sitcom. What the f?@# is going on??
In my mind, I’m thinking…’should I just throw them out? Like I don’t know where they came from’……but wait - that means they’ll be able to see them in the garbage when I leave.
I just put them gently back into the basket….put my clothes on top. I march towards the door, stopping to give sweet guy/dryer #6 helper some quarters (he at this point has been joined by his lady and 10 year old son) and forfeit my final sideways, mean glance at Mr. “Look what I found in dryer #2 right after I took your clothes out of it!” - that I had been planning. Head held somewhat high…I leave.
I head home - all the while thinking how nice it would be if I finally just got my very own washer and dryer. Suddenly, as I open the door to my house , a scary thought enters my head - they’ve been in the basket, in the laundromat all ….day……long.
See, as soon as I get all cocky about something, like the Running Springs Sudsy Belle- I get a bit of embarrassment to put me back in my place. Serves me right - God-damn it anyways.
Good night!
You don’t even understand how soft and fluffy my hair is right now. Well, it’s because I finally washed it after leaving it for 10 WHOLE DAYS.
Yup, 10 days. And I realize that is 67% gross + 10% natural + 11% depressing + 12% lazy.
So , with a fluffy new head I decided to go out for breakfast this morning. At the local diner, sitting at the counter, by myself, eating a bacon and egg sandwich, I hear this:
“Are you a Christian?” - coming from the right.
“Well, um….not, like, really. I don’t know. No”
“Oh….I thought I saw you praying before you ate.” As I turn towards the voice I notice a religious fish necklace around the voice’s neck. It’s a man, by they way.
“Um..no…I just had a headache and I was rubbing my head…..maybe…if that’s what you saw. Are you a Christian?”
“Yes”
Then, I don’t even know why I said this, “Well, it’s not like I’m not a Christian, it’s just like…well…I don’t really know…do you live around here?”
So that was that. After a wee conversation with Pat, I was on my way. I finished my breakfast and went and did my laundry at the Sudsy Belle. An over priced Laundromat very close to the coffee shop where I ate.
Now, I like doing laundry. Quite a bit actually. There’s a beginning, middle and end. Whenever I do laundry at Sundsy Belle, I sometimes leave my clothes in the dryer for hours. Maybe all day. I think this unnerved my sister when she visited this summer. But there is nothing to worry about. No-one ever steals anything from my dryer - even though I heard rumours from other Sudsy Bellers that it happens. Honestly, it’s one of the only things that I act all confident about. Doin’ laundry is my thing. Hmm……
I ordered a Total Trainer Pilate’s Gym from Ebay and it arrived on Thursday morning. And I know it sounds like a joke but I seriously can’t get the energy to take it out of the box. I told my friend Bonnie about ordering it and she just told me that she keeps having visions about me getting all caught up in the pulleys and that I should keep a phone close to me if I work out on it.
Okay….I just saw a Mitch Hedberg signature (on a piece of paper) sell for $56 on EBay. 56$. Holy Cow. Just his signature. Of course in my mind, anything of his is priceless - but still that’s kinda crazy.
So, On Tuesday, November 15th at 6pm (eastern) Sirius Radio is having a Mitch Hedberg Tribute. Like I said earlier, Doug and I are going to be on it. I decided a cool thing would be to play a few clips, talk about Mitch and I want to give away something cool to a fan. I have a framed signed poster. I framed it myself!!! I mean, I went and got it framed at the store by myself. It’s pretty - it’s from the Comedy Central Attell/Black/Hedberg tour.
I hope you listen and it goes smoothly. I’m a little bit worried, but Doug tells me 2 hours goes by very fast when you’re on radio. Yikes!!!!! It will be cool to visit NYC and see my pal Bonnie.
Sometimes it’s so hard to just keep it together, you know? I guess I’ll go and try and open Total Trainer Pilatez 3500.
It’s Sunday Night - the electricity in my house was out most of the day. So I sleep and walk and drink coffee and think. For some reason I live most of the time in a small town type of thing. I live in a cabin in the mountains. My husband and I bought it as a retreat from the road. The ‘road’ being where we made our $$ as comedians. He made most of the $$. Now, in the best intentions of all - we bought this cabin as “Our second house first baby!”. It’s small yet the coziest of coziest. The cutest of cutest. The theory of retreat soon became something that we viewed as ‘we’ll get to hang there when we can’. As the weeks on the road turned into months on the road and almost years on the road with quick visits to our cabin to get our mail and make sure it hadn’t burned down . The fact that we liked hotels and later motor homes helped with our infrequent visits to our home. “We’ll get there and fix it and live there next…..week, month, summer”. We did spend many, many days and many, many nights here as a refuge from travelling but never really enough time.
Fire Place:
There were Christmases and sunny days and winter days. Although it’s in CA and quite near LA we get snow. I remember sliding down our street on our suitcases to get to a gig.
Well, it’s next whenever and it’s fixed and I live here with a lesson learnt well about waiting for whenever.
It’s a town with one post office (mail doesn’t come to your house; we get a p.o. box), one liquor store, a pizza joint, one small grocery store, one smaller grocery store, TWO Mexican restaurants (why two? - but a good thing for M.), a coffee shop. There are five - 5- real estate companies. And for some reason there is a tattoo place and too many junk stores and crystal/new age places. I remember us getting pissed about a store sign along the lines of “Second Hand Furniture and Guns”*** in the window. “What the fuck?”. But we loved it here.
The post office itself has caused much grief and activity over the years to the point where we almost got banned. Well that’s in my mind - Hedberg was much more aware of his ‘rights’ .
When you move to a small town, a p.o. box is the only means to get mail. And how it works is this. You go to the post office, prove that you live here (water bill, mortgage etc.) Then you get a box. For free you get a small box. Since we didnt get any bills sent here (we have an accountant), the bulk of our mail would be personal and maybe a check or two or say, a parking ticket, stuff for our vehicle . Stuff like that. It’s not much really, which is good since we were on the road and not able to collect it every day like the ‘other’ mountain dwellers.
Things go swimmingly for a while. Every week or three weeks or 6 weeks we gather our mail. Now, it’s very good that we have a accountant because I quickly notice that neither Mitch our myself really jump at opening anything that looks boring or billish. We like the fun stuff from family and friends. Magazines fit our profile as well; don’t even have to open the damn things.
So, our post office box proves to be our friend for some time. Oh ya, I should mention this. The free box is quite small. It’s big enough to handle all our postal needs but - but, it receives an awful lot of junk mail. Flyer’s, ‘Mountain News’ newspapers, crap and then even more crap. In our minds we think and know this is a waste and we decide to mention that we don’t want it anymore. Simple right?
Well, it just so happens that we are working for quite some time before our next visit to p.o. 1193, Running Springs, CA. In fact its months before we return. Now, both Mitch and myself aren’t the most diligent post office box owners. What you’re supposed to do is contact the post office and tell them that you are on vacation and to hold your mail until you return home. First of all, that’s an awful lot of preparation for us. Didn’t we get into this business so that we didn’t have to ‘plan’ anything. This was around the time we were touring in our old, shitty, motor home. We were never quite sure where we would be. When we would return from our adventures ?- fuck if we knew.
About three months into our absence one of us goes, “Oh shit, the mail!”. A few days later, “The mail! Someones got to call about it”
Neither one of us like confrontation. My thing is that as long as I don’t confront it, it doesn’t really exist. Finally, Mitch , I think calls. Phew for me bad for him. I hear him on the phone and it doesn’t sound good. He gets off and tells me that “they’ve closed our box”. Goddamn it. In my mind, I think Mitch is such a great comedian - he shouldn’t have to deal with this every day crap. Well, he kinda felt the same way about me
which suited me fine because like I said I don’t really deal with such crap very well myself. Thank God for business managers, I like to say.
Cut to, some time later and both of us are in the Running Springs post office pleading our case. I go first, gently explaining that we were working and we’re sorry can we just have our mail back and we’ll never do it again. The woman explains that they have sent our mail back to the sender and blah, blah, blah.
Realize that the post office is tiny - many post office abiding Running Springs are squashed together, chatting their local chat - “Dave how’s the kids?” to “Hey Tracey, going to the bake sale next week?” type of thing. We don’t really fit in.
Mitch goes next, ‘We’ll we don’t even know what was in the box. Besides a I bet more that half of it was full of junk mail. There was probably enough room for our stuff!”
He’s right. The response was, “We don’t call it junk mail. The post office is paid to deliver it.”
“Well WE call it junk mail and so does everybody else. Haven’t you noticed that huge piles of it in the garbage every day?”
Dude’s got a point. The office is silent.
The employee remains calm and continues with the ‘It’s not junk mail ‘ defense.
I step in to back up my man. “So what your saying is, because you are paid to deliver it, it’s okay? By that definition if someone payes me to spray paint a car it’s okay - because I’m being payed to do it!!”
There are no cheers from the crowd. Mitch shifts a little closer to me, we are banning together to take on…..the post office.
“We shouldn’t have to be a part of the waste and in turn lose our box. Put a sign on our saying we don’t want that shit anymore!” Os shit, Mitch just swore. Still no cheers from the crowd. Some of them must have been on our side?
“You no longer have a box, sir”. She remains calm, why wouldn’t she ? - being the controller of all boxes.
During this phase of the fight I’m drumming up more arguments in my head. “If someone paid you to deliver a bomb, would you? Beside it’s a waste. You know it, I know it and they know it”
With that I nod to the people in the room. Me, Mitch, the post office lady focus on their faces. They don’t make a move.
“Cowards” I mutter. At this point Mitch gives in on that round and offers, “Fine, we’ll buy a bigger box so that our mail and your junk mail can fit”
Fine. She then pulls out the paper work for our new, bigger, more luxuries, paid for mail box.
I must say this, I’m the type of person who is really apologetic and kind of a pussy in situations like this. I tend to think everything is my fault. Mitch was more the type that stood up for himself. As soon as I get cocky I quickly buckle with stuff like “Oh thank you, we’re sorry” And that leads to Mitch’s reinforcement of “Lynn, we live here, we’re allowed to receive mail.It’s not our fault that we don’t get mail delivered to our house. Stay with me!”
And, as most couple do, we often played the bad cop good cop by instinct. On the road, if I ever was impatient or crummy Mitch would jump in all cool. If he ever was cranky or frustrated, I would be the voice of reason. It was just natural .
Now - in the post office situation - where we both came out guns blazing, where we believed we were right - I started to back down to which would Mitch refer to me as ‘the traitor’, leaving him hanging as the asshole. I tried to stay focused.
Okay, so the lady is giving us the form to fill out for the new box. I must mention that both Mitch and I HATED to make people wait behind us. He was especially conscious of this. Like if we were getting on a plane and I was putting the bags above me and being all slow, he was like ‘Lynn, there are people behind you!”
Back to the form filling out. Mitch pulls out his wallet to speed up the process, “How much?” While I’m being all sweet and sugary.
Then, in the burns of all burns, she politely days, “Well, we require proof of residence in order to allow you to open a post office box.”
We both respond, talking at the same time, explaining that since they had just closed our box that we had obviously already provided the information. Then there was some swearing and the post master was brought out.
The pettiness of the situation, the crowd breathing down our neck and dealing with the post master lead to more bullshit. Mitch was the type of guy that really believed that people were cool and reasonable. When everything we said was responded to by “We’re sorry, that’s the rules”, it only made him sadder and more frustrated. We left soon after without a new box.
I was scared to ever enter the post office ever again. “Can’t we just move?” was my suggestion.
Not Mitch, he didn’t like to be scared of stuff. We got the new, bigger one soon after . I thought that they wouldn’t recognise us after that. Of course they did and they were nice to us. Maybe a bit nicer to me. It always bugged Mitch, “Why do I have to look like the bad guy?”
I was like, “You look like the bad guy at the post office but your the great guy everywhere else, so there”
I don’t really know why I told this story. I always sit at the computer with no real intention of what I’m going to write. So, take it or leave it, my friend. And have a groovy day.
Later ~ Lynn
hmm…. I just reread it myself. It’s a bit mundane, really. I’ll work on the juicey.
*** On furthur memory digging, I recall the sign actually reading “Gifts and Guns”
Just want to say ‘thanks’ to the emails that people send me. I do get them all. I try to answer them all. (not that there is very many or anything)
However, when I was on the road last week, I was trying to be all cool and check my email on my phone to try and impress people around me. However, this foolish act caused me to lose a few emails. I read them though - but I can’t locate them to respond. So sorry, and I want to say to the guy who sent me the one about the show in Tampa a few years ago - thanks sooo much. Great words to hear - and Ill be in Tampa Nov. 17-20th. If you read this send me another email and I’ll hook you up with some tickets (I’m not trying to date you or anything, don’t be scared - you mentioned your girlfriend - you were sweet is all!).
Okay, my lips are chapped and I gotts to go!
Lynnnnnn
I love hotels. To me, it’s one of the best things about travelling and working around the country. When I met Mitch he had already been on the road for several years. The way it works in comedy is this. When you first start out, you will drive any amount of hours just to get on stage. Maybe you have a guest spot, or it’s an open mic. You will sleep in your car, on a stranger’s floor; anywhere you can to be able to perform. Then, if your lucky or any good, more work comes your way. A club actually hires you to be an MC or the ‘feature’. The MC obviously hosts the show and the feature is the guy or girl who goes in the middle. These spots don’t pay all that much but it’s work. Real payed, comedy work! Most of the time the club or venue has a condo where the MC and feature stays. It’s cool - it’s the romantic life of the young comedian. The condo ranges from okay to a room above the club or bar where you perform. If the club doesn’t have a condo/room - you get to stay at a cheap hotel. Even more exciting.
Then, as the comedian gets better and accumulates more ‘time’ ( the time you can do on stage), you start to headline. The headliner, obviously, is the guy or girl that goes on last. Closes the show. This is not easy. My all accounts it should take years and may bad shows in bad rooms to get here. The headliner may have to stay in the condo or the cheap hotel for a while as well. This is still exciting and fun for the comedians. Dreams are coming true!!!!
Then, if your good and lucky and willing, you get to headline really goods rooms and people come to see you.
I met Mitch around the time where he had just started to headline a few places. He had become a great feature or ‘middler’. He had stayed in his share of condos, cars and Motel 6’s. Still was, in fact. I met him, officially, in Toronto as he was sharing a condo with a comedian that was causing Mitch a lot of trouble. As a matter of fact, said comic was trying hard to derail any connection between Mitch and myself. That’s a whole other story. The cool thing about Mitch was, he was the type of guy that didn’t mind and even liked talking into the night about ‘the first time we met’.
The first place that we lived was The Chelsea Hotel. Mitch had moved in there a couple of months before we met. We lived there together for about 8 months.
So, we met and started working on the road almost immediately. He basically thru’ me to the wolves since I was still in the MC and short set period. I was completely excited about staying in any hotel. We went to his favourite towns and stayed at his favorite hotels. These weren’t five star joints. They were places like The Alan Park Inn in Houston. Or the Westward Ho in Grand Forks. But we loved it. We even stayed in a condo in Austin with Comic Riley Barber the week before we got married.
Mitch was headlining more and more and we shared a love of hotels. When you stay in hotels life is really just vacation, right? No mail. Don’t have to buy toilet paper. Don’t have to talk to your neighbours. Just per unadulterated escapism. We even stayed at hotels on our days off. One of our first fights was over a hotel. I was still languishing in cheap hotel heaven whereas Mitch was inching forward up the hotel ladder. It was in LA and I spotted a hotel for $49 but he had his eye on one that cost over $100. I could barely stomach it. “We could stay at mine for two nights for the same as one at yours!!!”
He won. And the rest is our own history. Mitch’s audiences got bigger, we worked all the time and the hotels got better. We still fancied the quaint motels one finds off the beaten track, but hotels became something that we considered to be experts at. I still have hundreds of hotel keys from hundreds of hotels that we stayed at. And here’s at tip for ya’ll. Always sign up for the Hotel Honour Program. You get points for every stay, you may get a better room with that card. And very important, you can check out late. Not that we ever acknowledged check out time. We weren’t amateurs. We knew how to negotiate with housekeeping on many levels to get what we wanted. Alway tip the housekeeping. I have many tipping stories that concern us not knowing when not to tip.
Okay, I have a million hotel stories but I really want to share a one that concerns The Commodore Hotel in San Francisco. Within, say, a couple of months of being on the rod with Hedberg we went to San Francisco. There, he played The Punchline Comedy Club. When headliner ‘do’ SF they also go to Sacramento to ‘do’ the Punchline Comedy Club there. Mitch had booked me as the MC and I was still hating every second of performing ‘cos I wasn’t used to it yet. Anyway, we arrive in SF. I can barely believe it. In the few months of meeting this man I had already seen and done so much. Thanks, M.
So, in San Francisco, at that time, the headliners got to stay at the Commodore. I can’t remember the street. It was a ‘cool’ hotel. Funky. We were totally excited. When we checked in the room, we were jumping around all excited and shit. Talking about all the good food there was to eat. Then we looked on the wall and saw a painting.
We both looked at it for a second. Then I remember saying something like “Did you get them to put that there?”
He assured me he’d never seen it before.
“But that’s you, right?”
We both thought it looked an awful lot like him. I had seen photos of him taken before I met him. The guy in the painting looked like Mitch did in the photos he’d shown me. In my head I created a story behind the painting. Maybe a few years ago when Mitch had been in San francisco, say featuring for Dave Attell or something, he was out writing jokes on a sunny day and a painter had seen him. I will find a photo to show just how uncanny it is.
I don’t know. But for a couple of years after that, whenever we went to The Punchline in S.F. we would stay at The Commodore. And several times we got that same room. Later, we stayed in other, more fancy places. But I’ll always remember The Commodore. There’s a cool painting in a room on the fourth floor of the Commodore Hotel.
Every hotel has a story for me, I guess.
Today I bought a tea pot. Right after I bought it I was thinking to myself “That was so productive!”. At what point is shopping productive?
Cut to…..2 minutes ago. The best cup of tea I’ve ever had. For real.