Show 78: Lake Worth, The Night Heron

Turnout: 22

Monetary Votes of Support: 87.50 (7 in merch, 20 to The Night Heron)

Personal Injury Report: In one of the few parts where Ben is supposed to be responding to what I say, he forgot and just sat there. Fortunately, immediately afterward was the part where I slap him around, so I gave him some extras.

Show Description: Woo! There was a small child in the crowd. Wildcard. This kid has genuine sympathy and also genuine dis-concern, it was refreshing. Banjo and guitar music warmed up the night, which I tried to cry to to warm up for the cry-y parts of the show. It sort of worked, until I thought people saw me and I stopped. The discussion went well and we got to see a bunch of snakes later on at the canew house. I helped fix their onion peel afflicted fridge fan and we got to sleep in a shack in what felt like a jungle.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 77: Miami, The Firefly

Turnout: 22

Monetary Support: 126 (106 door, 20 merch)

Personal Injury Report: Ben lost his shoe and I broke my sweatshirt zipper.

Show Description: The firefly hosted us in this great ceilingless room outside that I, sadly, didn't take a picture of. In place of a picture of the nicely graffitied cement walls with mango tree branches shading the open roof-hole to the windy sky. I offer this humble picture of myself taken as I realilized I'd forgotten.

This show has me thinking about two things: One of them being how the play's grim content can eclipse its more hopeful production values. We need to do a better job of talking about how the theatre company works as an example of non-capitalist relations and about alternatives to capitalist production in general as possible economic solutions to the grimness of the play.

The second thing it has me thinking about is the way mosh pits work, as they happen differently all over the place. Florida has its own style. The "more clit in the pit" saying was spray painted on the wall where we played.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 75: Gainseville FL, CMC

Turnout: 10

Monetary Votes of Support: 24 door, 47 merch, 25 donation

Personal Injury Report: I slapped Ben's head too hard he tells me. It sounded good though.

Show Description: Back in Gainseville at the Civic Media Center for the second time. I really like the wide openness of the CMC, makes you want to jump around in it, play tag or something. Glad to be back.

We had a smaller turnout than last time but had a great discussion afterwards. It kept on going until almost midnight and covered subjects ranging from capitalism's mediation of human relationships to the benefits and possible drawbacks of hook worm.

The next day we came back to host a discussion on the sort of theatre we do and how it can aid in a life that attempts to distribute power non-heirarchicly. Here is our diagram:

Afterwards we went to Niel's house for some greens and grits, good talk and disturbed cat viewing. Sounds like a good time right? We haven't left Gainseville yet!

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, ask us some questions or comment on it. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 74: Knoxville, TN

Turnout: 13

Monetary Support: $55.07

Injury Report: Kate decided to change the "she holds the gun to touch his chest as he stands" part into "she holds the gun to ram his head as he stands" it was a bad idea.

Description: First show of a ten day tour, a Tuesday in Knoxville, where we've never been before. We played the Birdhouse, which is an old house converted into a sort of community center that does a little bit of everything. Mostly artist studio/gallery space, but also home of a small zine library and a food not bombs. We performed with Circle Modern Dance, one of the art groups that work out of the Birdhouse.

I really enjoy performing with modern dance groups. I don't mean to sound like a hippy, but they really warm spaces up with some nice tense energy. Something about dance tightens the audience's focus and also makes me more aware of my body in our performance. I find myself thinking of writhing in the chair as a sort of dance.

Anyway, the dance group was great, the venue was great, discussion after the show was solid, and, while the turnout was a bit low, they were definitely supportive. Our performance felt a little slow and low energy, but the audience definitely stayed with us throughout.

Afterward we went to a house party/pot luck with music acts, including a front lawn folk serenade of affectionate songs about inebriation by a couple who were appropriately inebriated and hardly made it through the set, to great comic effect.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it, or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 55: Louisville, Brycchouse

Turnout: 9 Support: $97 ($50 donation, $26 hat, $21 merch)

Personal Injury Report: Some doors don't have functioning pneumatic slow-closing mechanisms. Kate slams these doors on her thumb.

Description: A good show in the Brycc House, a DIY community center in Louisville. Between trouble with circuit breakers and a small late-coming audience, things were looking rocky at first, but ended up working out marvelously. Once we got started with the show a few more people arrived, and afterwards we segued nicely into discussion. There was a video camera set up, so we might have some clips to share soon.

We get to add another house to our tour of cooperatives, we spent our two nights in Louisville at at a large unnamed (unless i missed the name) townhouse in Old Louisville. We met a bunch of wonderful folks, including trainees and specialists in the whole gamut of DIY and radical healthcare (from street medics to deep woods EMTs to abortion escorts and health-access activists). Also an excitable but lovable dog named Lucifer Jane.

On Thursday we visited a Nazi Eugenics exhibit at the U of L Health and Sciences Library and also watched a documentary about the "evacuation" of Japanese Americans from the west coast after Pearl Harbor. Contrasting the American vs Nazi approach to concentration camps was an insightful and depressing yet pleasant way to spend our accidental Thursday off. Then Friday morning before departing for Urbana, we caught a cheap matinée of the Romanian crime comedy "Police, Adjective" which, unlike American comedies, was actually funny.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 54: Nashville. Little Hamilton

Turnout: 18 Support: $55.14

Personal Injury Report: Freezin cold toes, for us and probably lots of the audience.

Description: Enthusiastic show! We got to play with Word Up! Poetry Collective and Little Chicken Music. The place was cold, and there was a manniquin that scared the shit out of us when we walked in.

Playing with people who seemed to really like what they were doing put me in a great mood and the show went well because of it. That night turned out to be a long one, we stayed up until 3:30 in the morning talking about, of all things, cults after going to check out some free music at the exit/in. All in all a solid night. Hope to get back to Nashville for a longer visit soon.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 52: Iron Rail, New Orleans

NO PICTURE

SECURITY CULTURE!

Turnout: 9 Support: $17

Personal injury report: A mysterious and annoying flesh wound on the middle knuckle of my middle finger on my right hand.

Description: Another disappointing turn-out in New Orleans. Maybe we need to incorporate a marching band into the play. Or at least a banjo.

Kate channeled her frustrations (pre-show quote: "presbyterian housewives who've done NOTHING with their lives are better at community organizing than this") into her performance, resulting in a furious and intense iteration of the play. Some audience members seemed to consider this too emotional, unstable, "weepy" even. It didn't jive with their romantic notion of unflappable anarchist heroes. That's fine, cuz we're not into mythological heroics. We suspect their role is to provide symbols one can project their desires for resistance onto (thus sublimating the desires). We hope to present a flawed character enacting a flawed plan, we encourage examination, and the development of something viably actionable.

We know better than to talk any more shit over the internet than this and most of what we could say would come across as broad generalizations that don't apply to everyone in the audience, or in the city. Suffice to say: much of the conversation on the way to Memphis was about how to respectfully and constructively express these frustrations and criticisms of the anarchist mileau during the discussions.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show Report 50: Sedition Books

Turn out: 14

Monetary Votes of Support: $112 ($82 hat, $30 merch)

Personal Injury Report: Kate pinched me uneccessarily at least 5 times, once when I was supposed to be unconscious and therefore could not yelp.

Show Description: Great show! The evening started with good spoken word about shooting Shakespeare from a poet named Alex (we lost his last name and contact info), followed by strong political songs from The Deconstruction Crew. Then we performed. Then there was an involved and unique discussion.

It's generally hard for me to get really excited about spoken word and poetry, but Alex surprised me with some really great lines, interesting ideas and powerful delivery. I really enjoyed the fact that Alex and the guys in Deconstruction Crew introduced each of their peices in something like the same manner we do. There's something about art that explains itself or prepares the audience that I really like. Many artists object to this insisting that the work should speak for itself, or that their work needs no introduction, or even that they don't understand their own intentions and therefore can't explain their work. I can see the attraction of that kind of approach, but I can't help but feel like it's often a posture adopted to mystify art and fetishize artists. I recognize how introductions can be pedantic, or hierarchical, telling the audience what they're supposed to think, too. I hope we can instead try to explain ourselves, but also remain open to others' interpretations and understandings.

Anyway, we really enjoyed the show and the discussion afterward. The performances felt good, but different. It's always interesting performing after a few days off, some things get missed, but others get discovered, or re-discovered. This was the 50th performance of this play, and we're really happy to see it continuing to develop and grow. We've got a few dozen more shows booked already, and will probably be doing this play through next fall. This kind of extensive touring with performances in very different spaces and different cities highlights theatre's living and growing character.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 49: New Orleans at Zeitgeist

Turnout: 9 or 10

Door: 66

Personal Injury Report: My funny bone turned serious.

Show Description: Nearly the opposite of last time we were at Zeitgeist. This time there was a small audience and bands that were, again, completely on the other side of the spectrum from last time's bill with Evolve, Self Help Tapes and Illusion Fields. Epic, naive beauty and less epic more ignorant rock opened up the Sunday night show.

I felt kind of strange about the whole thing as there seemed to be only 5 people who were there out of actual interest in what we were doing. Alright show nonetheless, and the Zeitgeist is a great place to play. On a different note, Ben and I decided to change a paragraph of the script about half an hour before the start time, so that was a nice memorization challenge.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 48: Tallahassee @ Free Radicals

Turnout: 20

Suggested Don. at Door: 38, Merch: 20, Hat: 24

Personal Injury Report: Just the standard bruises and welts.

Show Description: Oh, before I talk about the show, I should mention that today was the day that we brought a large, huge, owl-bird to death by tire. It swooped down from the trees in the rainstorm that we were making our way through and wacked the windshield of the van in front of us and then flew backwards off the van's roof smack-dab into our path. And we ran it over. Ugh.

The show went well. Two punk bands, one of them Cody's who set up the show, opened for a somewhat damp from the rain audience who seemed to, at the end, like what we did. Good times. There were even some folks who'd heard about the show from people who'd seen it in St. Augustine. Florida seems to be good like that. Cody also gave us some great music for the road. Much appreciated. Just of note, there were cops everywhere. From when we pulled in to when we left. Lurkers.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 47: Gainesville, FL

Turnout: 30

Support: $69 1/2 of door (CMC also got $69) $26 donations, $81 merch. I think this is the most we've made on a single show.

Personal injury report: I figured out that the strange welt on my left wrist I got in St Augustine was a rope burn, because I got another one right next to it at this show. Concrete floor #6 in a row, but Kate's knees are fine, so it doesn't really matter.

Look at that picture. CMC has so many books! The person with the red and black checked shirt is Jimmy, who is awesome, works for the CMC, and lives on a farm. The person wearing the red sweatshirt with the white ties is Eric, who is awesome, he not only has continental philosopher trading cards, but can speak intelligently about them, and about coupons. He is married to Saara. The person sitting next to Eric, who you can't see cuz some dork in a grey suit is standing in the way is Saara, she is awesome and used to live in Milwaukee. She can speak intelligently about television, poetry and many other things. We stayed with Eric and Saara, which was super awesome nice and comfortable. The person on the other side with the grey shirt helped untie me and asked insightful questions about sexual violence (some others asked less insightful questions about sexual violence, but i won't point them out).

A totally wonderful kickass show. Everyone in Florida seems to want us to come back. So we will. Hopefully sooner rather than later, and when we can maybe also swim, and play Fort Worth and Pensacola and the other nice places we didn't play this time.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it, or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear from you because we believe in artistic transparency.

NATURE DAY(S)!

NATURE!!

Nature on Monday in Savannah!

Nature, for only 30 minutes because we'd driven all day and the sun was setting.

This is the area labelled "alligator ponds" on the map.

Nature when the sun sets. This is also when the alligators get ready to eat people. And when we leave.

What else other than nature is there? HISTORY!!!

History on Wednesday in St Augustine!! This is a really old city! The OLDEST still existant European city in the US! That means there is lots of TOURISM here! But we didn't take pictures of that, instead, we took pictures of this fort!

This is a fort there made out of seashells. Look at this history! It's historical!

This is a historical machine for killing your enemies with fires!

These guys wouldn't let us into the history fort without paying. Fuck them. Fuck tourism, history wants to be FREE!

Enough goddamn history. Back to NATURE! Here's nature on Thursday in Gainesville!

Now it's time for real nature! Saara took half a day off work to take us to the nature!

Look at all these vultures! Holy shit. They eat dead things! And there are alligators too! The alligators kill things and eat them, but the dead things that the alligators don't eat, these vultures eat! It is the cycle of nature!

How many alligators did we see this day? Lots! How many are in just this one picture? Six.

Sometimes we got close enough that the nature maybe coulda run after us and ate us, or maybe just ate half of us and left the other half for the vultures. Fortunately, this didn't happen.

There were also TONS of birds. Crazy great blue herons splashing around.

Look, mom! Look how close to the great blue herons we got! Ha ha! They were just hanging out, not flying away like they do in Wisconsin. Also, wood storks (huge!) grackles, sandhill cranes, and (really too far away to see properly) whooping cranes, buffalo, wild horses and a big fat pig.

Here's some cute scaley baby nature!

Good night nature!

(Our next scheduled nature day is Jan 18th or 19th, where we will be discovering nature somewhere between NOLA and Houston, it will be a good time and we might get killed by a snake).

Show 46: St. Augustine

Turnout: 18

Monetary Votes of Support: $24 (door) $2 (donations) $27 (merch)

Personal Injury Report: Bizarre tender lump on my left wrist. No idea how it got there. Other slight bumps and strangeness. Cement floor #5 in a row. Kate's voice hurt a bit afterward, due to shouting the whole show over the bar crowd. Ben's soul hurt after seeing a small sample of what is on television these days.

Show Description (by Ben): We came to St Augustine last winter and had a GREAT time. Went swimming in the ocean, played a huge show with a ton of bands, at a hip cafe/venue, really crazy high energy powerful stuff, and John Kuehne even got himself smitten with a cute girl who we had to leave behind at the end of the night. We were excited to come back, and are actually happy to have had a very different experience this time.

First, it was too cold to swim. We tried, but could stand getting in past our knees.

Second, we spent an afternoon bumming around St Augustine, which is the oldest still surviving European city in the US. Of course this historical fact makes it a huge tourist trap, which means almost everything is ugly, crowded and overpriced. We wandered around the outside of a fort (see pic) marveled at the endless little shops all selling the same overpriced crap, and struggled to find a place where we could sit down and check our email without paying for it (ended up being a parking lot).

Third, Cafe 11 was unable to host us, so Travis set us up at a different venue, St Augustine's best dive bar: Nobby's Sports Tavern. It seems he was pretty disappointed by this alternative (may have discovered an allergy to cigarette smoke) but definitely managed to make the most of the circumstances. He brought a good attentive crowd, some exiting music, and good energies to the show. The bar's regulars also came out, played pool and for the most part loudly ignored what we were doing. This gave us an opportunity to push our ability to perform under any circumstances further than every before, and Kate certainly rose to the occasion. There were a couple interesting moments when the pool balls stopped rolling and it sounded like everyone had frozen to puzzle over what the hell was going on on the other side of the room.

We didn't expect much different from a sports bar, but the exciting thing was how many people stuck with us, through the background noise, and clearly engaged with the play. We had a few good conversations with some really appreciative audience members, even some of the regulars who didn't know we were coming. We crashed with some activist folks who run the very active food not bombs program in town and told us some of the history that the trolley tours we dodged that afternoon leave out.

Also, they had this big white tropical bird that they'd recently rescued from somewhere but hadn't yet found a proper new home for. When we tried to go to sleep it insisted on crawling under the covers, stationing itself in between Kate and I and nibbling on our sides, which tickled something awful and kind of fruck me out. I envisioned a confrontation between it's irrational reptile mind deciding to tear and claw into my belly for no reason and my hesitation to defend myself for the sake of it's delicate wings and beautiful feathers.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it, or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear from you because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 45: Jacksonville @ 323 Modernism

Turnout: 20-ish

Monetary Votes of Support: 38

Personal Injury Report: 4th cement floor in a row, no harm done.

Show Description (by Ben): Fun show in a HUGE new art gallery space in the very Baptist town of Jacksonville. Performed with ambient guitar drone from Carlos Andujar and romantic singer songwriter Michah Davis. JD (the gallery owner and our enthusiastic host) took a ton of really great pictures that we'll put up here soon. There was this junk-art sculpture JD made the night before right behind our performance space (you can't see it in this picture, but it's cool) and there's an old electric metronome in the middle of it. The metronome was running, clicking throughout the performance, just loud enough that you could only really hear it when Kate was silent. It filled those silences with this really interesting steady beat. Like a heartbeat, or a ticking away of time, adding a layer of tension and urgency to the strange silent breaks in the play.

We crashed upstairs and headed out early enough to think about taking a swim in St Augustine, which turns out to have been a mistake...

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it, or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear from you because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 44: Savanah GA @ The Wormhole

Turnout: 10 to 4

Monetary Votes of Support: 20

Personal Injury Report: Nothing much, third show on concrete in a row, not bad though.

Show Description: Bar Show on a Monday Night. One of the guys was from Reinlander, then he moved to Savannah and then he left our show. All around, this was a pretty good performance. The people were nice but some had to leave because it was getting too late.

We ended up attempting to drive to Jacksonville that night and didn't make it, ended up sleeping in the car in some hotel-ville. No good discussion afterwards, but still not bad for a Monday.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, comment on it or ask us some questions. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 41: Johnson City, TN @ Projexx Studio

Turnout: 35 ish

Monetary Votes of Support: 67
Personal Injury Report: Ben: Elbow bruises, kicked in the head twice (once by audience, once by fellow actor), indigestion, Kate needs to be reminded how to do stage punches in the gut and she um kinda caught Ben in the zipper a little.
Kate: Knee cap accumulated more scrapes and is still all loose.

Show Description: This show was brootal! In addition to the long list of personal injuries we also played with Compulsion Analysis (fucking great audio visual assault) glad to play with them again and had some lip-licking delicious potluck food. Excellent.

Also, there were a bunch of strange internal things that happened, like during the show, there were moments when I would hear or notice the audience shift or adjust in their chairs which, being in a quiet room and at a bit of a loss for focus this show, made the self conscious part of my brain ramp up into medium-high tickish gear saying "why are you moving, oh no please don't leave, I will be interesting in just a second, just a second, I'll do something, alright, alright everyone just please stay in the room, I'm sorry, really very sorry."

Also, the gallery space was positioned perfectly to catch people who were walking by outside off guard. There were big glass windows facing the sidewalk and so we occasionally got to see people stop, stare and try to figure out what was going on during our set and Compulsion Analysis's.

Did you see this show? If you did, write a review, ask us some questions or comment on it. We'd love to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 32: Asheville, NC

Turnout: 1

Monetary Votes of Support: 6

Personal Injury Report: Our feelings were hurt.

Show Description: Everyone whose hands are not above their heads in the above picture left during the first ten or fifteen minutes of the show, also another dozen or so people were hanging out in the cafe on the other side of the curtain. I could say something about the peculiar kind of complacency that seems to come with life in a hippy enclave town like Asheville, but I'd rather give people the benefit of the doubt and say they must have had more important things to do.

I'm not counting the guy with his hands over his head as "turn out" cuz he was pretty clearly in his own little world, when he wasn't answering his cellphone, that is. The girl stuck around and had some good things to say, about the play, about people, and about how that guy might be a sociopath or something.

Not much else to say, weeknights can be rough sometimes. Keep on livin.

Did you see the show? If you did, write a review, comment or ask some questions. We'd like to know what you thought was so fucking funny, because we believe in artistic transparency.

Show 31: Johnson City, TN @ The Hideaway

Turnout: 13

Door: 40, Merch: 38

Personal Injury Report: Someone got their tits cut off with a hedge clippers. Oh, no, that's the video.

Show Description: Bar show. There was this great video projection slash noise act before us, Compulsion Analysis 7, with pictures and, of course, video of how fucked up our world is and that that's obvious and that it's been fucked up for a long long time. (etc.)

Nothing like seeing only a torso of a person alongside some footage of snake handling Pentecostals in nice olden-day suits and daisy printed dresses flailing about underneath pianos and then a very mundane smiley family photo to make a person not want to feel anything because you'll never be able to feel enough.

Not to mention that footage of a teenage girl cutting her lips off.

Spirit Iron Knife played before Compulsion Analysis 7 and to link the two, SIK seemed to express one way of reacting to the things CA7 was depicting. So, what I just said about wanting to not feel anything because you'll never be able to feel enough, Spirit Iron Knife did that and turned it into an alcoholic misanthropic thrashingly hateful and futility induced bottle flashing set. Excellent.

Performancewise, Kate thought the show went alright, Ben did not. This is probably due to that Kate can ignore the barness of the bar, Ben cannot. And other things went weirdly. But hey. We went to a diner anyway.

Kate also victorized this entranceway, the only thing remaining of J.B. Roithner Jewelers. It only looks like she's just lying there.

Did you see this show? Comment on it, write a review or ask us some questions. We'd like to hear it because we believe in artistic transparency.