Of course, what do they have to do? Seat us up front. Great, I thought to myself. One of us is going to be picked on.

All the comics were funny. The MC was a lady who was quite funny, and the first male comic was somewhat nervous and probably just starting out, so you have to cut him some slack that his routine was more like a twelve minute rant than a stand-up bit. The second guy was quite funny, and the headliner was Billy Gardell , who was just completely hilarious. However, he decided that I was a good prop. He picked on me twice!

For a while during his act I could see him making direct eye contact with me. I didn't know what to make of it at first, but now I know he was sizing me up to see if I could take a joke. The first time, he joked how in Los Angeles he was much larger than the average person there, and he was glad to be in Houston where he was a more normal size. He said that with a nod to me and said, "god bless you, sir." Well, okay, that's not so bad; I did notice for the next couple minutes I couldn't really join eyes with him again.

It was later that he was talking about nine-year-old kids now who were too smart for their own good, spending their time on the internet building websites with kids they only knew online in other cities rather than going outside, breaking windows with kids their parents don't like and lying about it the way nine year-olds should be. He asked me, "sir, were you smart as that when you were nine years old?"

I turned to my mother, and she nodded an emphatic yes! towards the stage. I could just say, "she says I was, so I suppose I might have been." Not being what he wanted to hear, he kept going with the same line of thought. What's funny is that at that age I was a math geek; I could do some basic programming by then, and when I was eleven I started using BBSes.

Oh well. What's a little picking on the audience geek?

restlessmind