Comedy Anyone?

Today’s track is a joke, "Owner of a Broken Car," created sometime in the early 1980's. I’m thinking that at some point Scot must have gotten the weird notion that there might be room in the world for another Weird Al Yankovic. Scot took the production of this song real seriously. He is once again playing on all the tracks. What made me pull the tape was that I came across a .25 throwaway tape, on which he was working out the harmony part of the chorus, signing over of the “Yes” version he’d recorded off the radio. I’m pretty sure that some of these car sounds are real.

What I love is how thoroughly he takes on his song persona. Scot was, in general, frequently an owner of a broken car. He didn’t cotton to the idea of spending a lot of money on a new car, and then having to pay to maintain it. We mostly drove our mom and dad’s (or grandparent’s) old cars. We did buy a ’66 Dodge Dart (with cassette tape deck) for $300 in 1981 when we headed out for Europe. We drove that car across the country and back--on the return trip seriously overloaded--and the poor thing finally crooked. We got a lot of transportation bang for those 300 transportation bucks. Dodge Dart—that was a good car!

OK, went to hear (?) see (?) some comedy last night. I was really up for something different and my friends had invited me to a new comedy club here in Bloomington. It was a pretty slick little club, and booked there last night was Maria Bamford. My friends had lately seen her in Chicago on a night they too needed something different. The salve of humor.

We learned of Scot brain tumor after he had a terrible Grande maul seizure. Both Scot’s shoulders had become dislocated in the course of this seizure and as a result, he had to wear (?) an orthopedic device 24/7 for six weeks. I'm looking for a picture of this. You won't like it. It was not funny, One of the first things I did was to ask friends to go to the library and find every good comedy movie they could find. We watched the Mark Brothers and Chevy Chase and Robin Williams and Bill Murray and whatever else was available from our wonderful public library.

Scot also got seriously into watching music DVD’s. Late at night, if he couldn’t sleep, he put in a new disk. He actually bought a lot of music DVD’s. For him, this was quality bang for the distraction buck. Most of the time he’d jam along, his bass plugged into a mini-amp sometimes, sometimes not.

I chose today’s artwork because this guy seems like a jester. Interesting concept the jester… Weirdly powerful. Last night at the club, we had three warm-up comedians. The room is packed. I’m told that the club we were seeing Maria Bamford in, was a way more intimate setting than one usually gets to see her in. We were maybe ten unobstructed feet away from her. Maria hit the stage like a well-fired cannon ball. BOOM! Now, I'm here to tell you, Maria Bamford is FUNNY-—serious funny. Not unrelated to this blog, however, we had--shall we call it a slight phenomenon? About three sentences into her act, Maria mentions that she’s heard that there’s a guy who lives here in Bloomington that played with “The Who.” My friend blurts out, “Yeah, and she’s his wife,” pointing to me. I’m sure she might have been actually made speechless, for about a half a second. Think about it though. It is kind of weird. Unfortunately, she had not heard that Scot had passed. Now I find myself wondering where she might have gone with it? I did try to get information about the blog to her after the show.