A Serious Week

After a little over a week, I'm finally back into webby webby thing, and thought I'd update, just for the hell of it. Besides, the events of late have been many, and worth telling all, er, both of you.

Firstly, my fianc-eh and I moved out of my beloved LBC (dat's Long Beach, yea-ah) and into my childhood city of Garden Grove. It sucks for two reasons: a) now I have to visit Long Beach; and b) Garden Grove is a Pepsi city, and I hate Pepsi. Coke is better, let's move on.

This move does have its upside, though, which is: a house. That's right, a three mf'ing bedroom, attached garage, front and back yard havin' actual OC house. It is a fixer-upper though, that's the catch. Which leads me to the move itself:

Day 1: move 5 truckloads and a carload of boxes of little shit Jessica and I have accumulated over 4 years of one bedroom apt living. Then, gig. Exhaustion set in during the second set, and I fought back (unsuccessfully) several gaping yawns while playing. Nothing says "I'm totally into this music" like, aaaaaawwwwwwwwwmmmmmm.

Day 2: Early church gig, borrow a big fat probably-should've-had-an-A-class-license-to-drive truck from a good friend and great drummer, John, whom I call Lecc (LAYCH). Roll with Pops and Kevin (sidebar) to LBC, grab the furniture, get to LBC, eat Los Cotija's, start scraping ceilings.

Day 3: finish the ceiling scrapey. For those who are confused, if you have ever seen "popcorn" acoustic ceiling, wall to wall to floor to wall to ceiling plastic, some warm water, and a scraper will take that shit right off. Which is what I did Day 3. Day 2 is big ups to Pops for getting me started, and my niz Matt for doing a gang of work with me, even though his incessant cheery whistling almost drove me batty.

Day 4: move furniture into the main part of the house, get furniture delivered, rip up carpet to reveal sweet ass hard wood floors, etc.

Then it gets interesting because it turns musical:

The last couple of weeks I've been helping out the bassist-less CSUFullerton big band. Several rehearsals, couple of performances, normal college big band fare. Thanks to Luther (sidebar) for referring me. Great music, mostly Count Basie, whom I was not super deep into (you know what I mean), but now I want to get ten or so albums. Anyway, played the Brea jazz festival, on-campus concert, and the Count Basie Jazz Festival (officially, One O'Clock Jump) at a hotel by LAX. This was a treat because I'm a big Ellington fan, and one of his great trumpet players was there: Clark Terry. Clark's performance showed his health problems and way up there age, but who cares? it's Clark Terry. Also, one of the great arrangers in jazz history was present, Mr. Frank Foster. We played one of his tunes, pretty shabbily, but I met him in the hall and he was very complimentary about the whole group and the other music we played - Kansas City Suite, if you care. As a sidenote, I wish I had a camera to take a picture of Frank and Clark in the hallway, two really old feelble black guys whispering to each other as they passed each other in their wheelchairs, facing different directions like the lovetoilet from SNL.

And finally, the best for last. Kevin and I have a running belief system which is that there are several comedians that are the least funny people in the world and yet seem to get a lot of work, kinda like the asshole that gets chicks. They are, in no particular order:

Ellen Degeneres
Wanda Sykes
Robert Townsend (except the first half of his appearance on the Rodney Dangerfield Show in the early 90's)
Bernie Mac (except maybe in Ocean's 11, or was that Cedric the Entertainer? or Mr. T? or Denzel Washington? or Morgan Freeman? I'm going to Hell.)
Rosie O'Donnell
also included should be Chris Kattan and Jimmy Fallon, for obvious reasons.

Well, the CSUF Band was invited (with me) to perform on a daytime talk show hosted by none other than Ellen Degeneres. I laughed, and of course said yes.
We did this show earlier today which was something like, get picked up by a charter bus at 11am, drive to Burbank, get in the studio, set up, run the arrangement of New York, New York none of us had played ever before, go to the green room, go back, green room, rehearsal for 20 minutes, green room for an hour, play twice (about a minute of playing), green room, one more time through the tune, green room, pack up, go home.
There were two really funny moments though, which is good for Ellen. One, when a hundred and fifty middle-aged white women were dancing to "OPP" by Naughty By Nature, and when I found out that one of the guests was, yep, Wanda Sykes. It was a black hole of funny.

To summate (I don't know, Kevin) the Hollywood experience: did I see any celebs? yes, on a monitor in the green room mostly, I did see Ellen a few feet away. She seemed nice, but busy, and looked exactly the same as on TV. Did I feel like a star? They gave us sandwiches and a T shirt. Did I get make up? Hell yes, bitches! I was a powdery, unshiny bass player. Was it worth it? I'll let you know tomorrow after I see the show at 3pm on NBC, but yeah probably.

So there's my busy week as quickly as possible. Not the eloquent verbiage I would prefer to provide, but I'm beat. Time for more beer and DirecTV.