Paul and Storm

We’ve been rather remiss in discussing our recent activities here on the website; but hell, we’ve been busy. Come see what we’ve been up to the past couple weeks…

We started things off in Dallas on Wednesday, May 13, with the first of a three-show stint with Beardy McInternet. Easy enough: good crowd, nice venue, and Mai Tais. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary. (Except for the ASL interpretation, which was quite cool)

Then we did the thing that always guarantees strangeness: we went to California. First stop was San Diego on Thursday (technically, Solana Beach; but we’re not very technical), and a show at the Belly Up Tavern. The crowd was drunker than usual for a Coulton crowd, and especially punchy (but in a good way). Luckily, fan Gl3nn recorded the whole show, and posted it to the youtubes. Also, fans Colleenky and Jade showed their true dedication to their Minionhood with custom Minion sashes and buttons.

The next morning, we gathered in a secret underground bunker recording studio to record a Rifftrax for the movie TRON. (See our previous post for details) While it was somewhat unsettling to be recording snarky comments about a movie right in front of three of the guys who perfected the art form, we muddled through and celebrated with a lunch of staggering proportions, and a “standing around in the office lobby” picture (see right).

Working our way north (and further up the weirdness scale) we found ourselves in L.A. and right in the heart of a geek-cred vortex. Several vortices, actually, the first of which occurred when we met up with Adam “@lonelysandwich” Lisagor (“You Look Nice Today” podcast) and Jesse Thorn (host of “The Sound of Young America” and noted hater of shorts) and their significant others for the Friday night concert by Jon Brion at Largo. (He plays there pretty much every Friday) We were not adequately prepared for the degree of awesomeness and talent displayed, and all left the show despondent and filled with feelings of inadequacy; in other words, we had a great time.

Then, on Saturday, Kim Evey (co-producer of “The Guild” and star of “Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show“) hosted a house party with us, Jonathan, Adam, and half the cast of “The Guild”, including Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh and Jeff Lewis, plus new media mega-agent George Ruiz. And what happened at the party? Rock Band, of course, courtesy of Ms. Day.

But wait, there’s more! Did we mention we did a show while in L.A.? And that it was at fabled venue Largo? (The place we talked about two paragraphs back?) And that Wil Wheaton introduced the show in his capacity as the Obama Administration’s Secretary of Geek Affairs (pending Senate confirmation)? And that the talented and adorable @Molly23 Lewis (sweetafton23) sat in with us during Jonathan’s set? And that five minutes into our own set there was a FRICKIN’ EARTHQUAKE that we didn’t even notice because we were rocking so hard?

It doesn’t get any better than that, does it? Well, yes, actually. It does. “Weird Al” Yankovic and his wife came for the show, and they were gracious enough to come and say “hi” afterwards (see pic at beginning of post), even though the risk of being trampled by an entire theater’s worth of adoring fans increased with every minute he stayed on the premises. Add to that an after-show hang that included (in addition to most of the previous night’s revelers) Jordan Morris (“Jordan Jesse Go!” podcast), Austin Tichenor (from the Reduced Shakespeare Company), and our good (and super-twisted-funny) friend Eric Schwartz, and you have a mighty overwhelming evening that pretty much shut down the internets for a few hours.

So we went home for half a week to reboot, then went right back out again, this time to the wilds of Illinois for two shows with our longtime friend comedian Dan St. Paul. Our first stop, on Thursday, May 21, was at the Jukebox Comedy Club in Peoria. While there, we had a nice interview with Adam Harris for the Stand-Up Chronicles podcast.

After a day off on Friday (during which we went to see the diverting but aggressively mediocre Terminator Salvation), we finished up with a show in Galesburg, Il at the lovely (and historic!) Orpheum Theatre. To get us in the proper historic mood, we spent some time during the day visiting the Carl Sandburg Historic Site. Finally, we staggered home (undoubtedly on little cat feet), road-weary but pound-foolish. (Or something; kinda lost the handle on that saying halfway through)

In summary: wow. And thanks.