Saturday, July 7, 2012

Funny Bone in Westport

I went to the 10pm show at the Funny Bone comedy club in Westport Plaza in Maryland Heights tonight. It was just a few miles from my hotel. I think I had seen the headliner, Jeremy Essig, before in the Twin Cities. The joke about the menagerie in rural Ohio sounded familiar. The MC explained a few jokes that didn't need to be explained, the feature was pretty good. It was the kind of jokes I had heard before, like date rape drugs, the Penn State scandal, and pet insurance. When the headliner said he suffered from depression, he then said 'hello comedy'. I laughed, but normally I would have said 'yep', meaning I'm agreeing with it but didn't necessarily think it was funny. I can relate as to how and why I got into comedy, as well as writing. Both were a healthy outlet. He handled it well when there was an outburst from the crowd, something about Al Gore inventing the internet. He asked the crowdmember if he came for other dated jokes like Monica Lewinsky. Then I noticed the club manager came around and warned him, how he would be ejected if he did it again. There was some good art on the wall inside the club, like Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, and Jay Leno. Another was of  Jim Belushi, if I'm not mistaken. At the club entrance there was a Chris Farley portrait, I got a picture of that one. I had a local beer, Schalfly (sp?), brewed right in St. Louis according to the label. The server went through beer choices, I wanted something different and was told it was a pale ale, so I was fine with it.
  The day began with getting the rental car from Enterprise at an airport suburb, Berkeley. It is spelled just like the famous college town in California. I got a piece of lemon poundcake and some orange juice before getting on the shuttle, hadn't found breakfast any earlier and wanted to be close to the reservation time when there was a schedule to keep. Then it was on to the post office in the same town, the Enterprise employees had no idea where it was even after I gave them an address I found online. It meant going just a mile or so, and right off the interstate exit. It was an 'Aloha' stamp I got so I could mail a card to a friend back home.
   After this it was on to the Cathedral Basilica, an idea I got from a Youtube video, a song by Jewel. The tour was in progress, but I was there early on so I did partake in the lion's share of it. I was craning my neck a lot to look at the mosaics on the ceiling, and there was plenty about the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1999. I often refer to him as 'JP2' as others have, since he had rock star status.
   My meal schedule is off on this visit, as I didn't have lunch until I got to the stadium for the Cardinal game in the mid-afternoon. The Cardinals beat the Marlins 3-2. Plenty of runners were left on base, same as Friday, but they scored enough to win. The errors were lower, which helped. I stayed in my seat for the first 5 innings, but the sun moved and I was right in the sun after a while in the upper deck. So I left my seat and didn't return for the rest of the game. I wanted to stay where it was cooler, and I found some places where one could see the action real well while being shielded from the sun. I was not alone, I could tell. There were heat warnings on the video board as well. Wanted to continue keeping score, and I did.
   After the game, I got a few more pictures nearby. Some were of the hotel downtown near the Tums building (yes, the antacid) as I recall staying at the hotel as a teenager with my dad. He thought I had run off, I just wanted to know which front desk was for the Clarion hotel. He stayed there as he wanted to get close to everything so he wouldn't have to drive much while in town. He hates to drive in big cities. I also recall him getting a 'wrong number' saying the caller expected a hooker in the room, per what the man's buddy said. My dad matter-of-factly said 'All I have here is a teenage son' so some comic might turn this one into a joke somehow.
   Also got some pictures of events at the Arch, where a festival was happening. I got up to the Arch and touched the bottom of one end of it. There was samples of a new kind of Pepsi nearby. The server wanted to see my schedule of events to see who was playing music on the stage at that time. Apparently, the headliner wasn't on just yet.
    After getting back to my hotel I did have dinner at the restaurant inside the hotel, and they did have toasted ravioli available as an appetizer. The manager came out to ask how everything was, I said I saw George Clooney's picture on the computers and was told that the movie 'Up In The Air' was filmed at the hotel. Liked seeing the TWA posters in the dining area, a holdover from their time doing plenty of business in the area. It was advertising many of the places the airline would fly to, a good number of them were international destinations. The airline no longer exists, bought out by American Airlines over a decade ago. The Rams stadium, the football dome downtown, once had the name 'TWA' or 'Trans World' but the naming rights were re-sold to Edward Jones. This was the sponsor of the replica World Series ring giveaway on Friday. The server heard my plans to attend a comedy show tonight and said 'don't bust a gut'.

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