Just got to Seattle for the day and we’re taking over the @bumbershootfestival for a few hours. Gonna go try to find myself some trouble. 📷: @wooofy
For me, Bumbershoot opened with the Super Secret Comedy Show in the Cornish Playhouse. It was put on by Mike Coletta and Monica Nevi, who host the HugLife podcast and make the monthly Super Secret Comedy Show a monthly occurrence. The lineup they had for a Sunday at 2pm was ridiculous. For an hour long show, they had six comedians performing about 10 minutes each, and it progressively had gotten better after each one (or so it felt). Nevi hosted. Here’s the lineup: Mike Coletta, Mitch Burrow, Bryan Cook, Solomon Georgio, Hari Kondabolu, and Sean Patton.
Though it was kind of a dude-heavy lineup (which I give a pass to because I also caught the “Scary Feminist” panel later in the afternoon), but there were a lot of lines that I found myself laughing about later in the day. My girlfriend used to work in the helicopter industry, along with a large sampling of her circle of friends, so I was pleased to bring home some helicopter repair humor, courtesy of Mitch Burrow. Bryan Cook made note of a Romanian princess who was arrested in Oregon for taking part in cockfighting. I didn’t think something like that could be real, but I looked it up and it is. (I’ll save from revealing the punchline because it’ll spoil the story and ruin the joke, and I don’t remember the exact wording). Hari Kondabolu made note of doing a show in Amsterdam Denmark and bombing. Someone in the crowd told him “Go back to America.” He said he’s been told to go back to many countries, but that was the first time being told to go back to America.
Bumbershoot Highlight: Watching the elderly flee a @bridgeteverett show.
— Bryan Cook (@BryanCooking) September 6, 2015
After that, I made it back to the Cornish Playhouse to see Bridget Everett’s show. Having seen her perform before, I knew what I was getting myself into, but with an event like Bumbershoot, one can expect mostly first-timers in the crowd – and that was most of the fun. She has a standup/cabaret set that is part hilarious musical numbers, part crowd work. Men and women, old and young, were made to feel uncomfortable by making random people in the crowd props for her highly-sexual personae. She flirted with two teenage boys in the front row, while one’s mother was a few rows back. I’ve seen porn that is more subtle. (I’m also pretty sure they were the same teens that Annie Lederman treated the similarly on Saturday afternoon. I would imagine they have all kinds of stories to tell their friends when they go back to school Tuesday morning.) An elderly man named Clark got much closer to Bridget Everett than he would have ever expected. I saw the same man in the crowd near me for Nikki Lane’s set (which began a few minutes after, at 4:30), and I wanted to ask him all about it, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Nikki Lane is a Nashville via South Carolina country singer-songwriter who had a midday set on the #NeverTamed Stage. She was in a cowboy hat and Budweiser sweatshirt. She has unimpeachable “Outlaw Country” credibility because she’s been touring with Social Distortion (who also played Bumbershoot on Sunday). As I let the rain (and threat of more rain – I had already gotten soaked midafternoon) keep me from Kacey Musgraves’ set Saturday night, Nikki Lane was to be my country music fix, and I was not disappointed.
Lane’s set was a perfect midday Bumbershoot set because it attracted as many fans as strangers who were checking out a new act because the time was convenient. She sounded great and had funny stage banter. At one point towards the end of “Man Up,” she removed a ring from her hand and then gave then put up both of her middle fingers. Her set had a duet with Jonny ‘2 Bags’ Wickersham of Social D (they sang Lane’s song “Love’s On Fire”), and Buddy Miller and Bob Dylan covers. I think my favorite songs, though, were the two openers: “700,000 Rednecks” and “Highway Queen,” both new songs that haven’t been released yet (as far as I can tell). They were upbeat, country-rock songs that were irresistibly catchy.
At one point in the set, she introduced her band and said that she tours here often because her rhythm section lives in Port Townshend (or is it Port Angeles?) and she wants them to see their families. She then pivots and said, “I wanted to have a family once, and I was even married. Then I said ‘hell no!’”
The Scary Feminist panel was the first thing on the Words and Ideas stage I was able to catch (I pretty much camped out there last year). It featured xoJane editor-at-large Mandy Stadtmiller interviewing transgressive musician Peaches and author Chelsea Cain. I had just recently read Cain’s brilliant serial killer novel Heartsick so she was who I was most interested in catching here (though I’m also an admirer of Peaches and plan on catching her Key Arena set on Monday evening).
Cain and Peaches both talked about the transgressiveness of their art and Peaches had a comment that I think is correct, but doesn’t get said often, and that’s “I don’t buy into the idea of people being ‘shocked’ because I think they love that.” I have a theory that people often will tell you how uncomfortable they are with some piece of art because it lets them off the hook for their enjoyment and for the reasons they might seek something slightly out of the mainstream. Cain, for what it’s worth, noted that with her Gretchen Lowell novels (Heartsick is about a serial killer who turns herself in and continues to manipulate the police officer investigating her while she’s in prison), “I think the hot serial-killer-on-cop action shocked people.”
It was a topic they came to often, and I think it is important to press because it is confining to art. Chelsea Cain said, “Very reasonable people with very reasonable haircuts will ask me ‘How can you write that as a woman?’” I assume it’s a question that Gillian Flynn and Mary Gaitskill and nearly every other author I love has been asked. Joyce Carol Oates has written about that very topic almost thirty five years ago. I find it utterly amazing that someone will insult the work of an artist to their face as an effort to maintain some sort of normalcy.
I noticed that there were a lot of men in the crowd (myself included), especially early as the room was beginning to fill up. Peaches had a message for us, as well, by saying “I sympathize with what men have to go through [to identify as a feminist], but you just have to do it.”
Stadtmiller made a comment about Jill Soloway’s story “Courtney Cox’s Asshole.” I don’t remember what the point was, but I knew I had to find that story. It’s here.
The panel was smart and often quite funny, but not as scary. As Chelsea Cain told the crowd, “When I show up to an event, people are disappointed I’m not scarier.”
The final event I caught was the very fun taping of the twice-weekly podcast “Alison Rosen is your New Best Friend.” Rosen, a writer and the former co-host of “The Adam Carolla Show.” She had on her panel musicians Rachel Ratner of the Wimps, Hutch Harris of the Thermals, and comedian Mike Lawrence.
During one segment, the panelists had the chance to tell someone off. It felt liberating for the crowd, on musician TrappDog’s lead, to sing “Hey, hey, hey, go fuck yourself” for that segment. Mike Lawrence had a funny line about how “not being born to rich parents is the first lottery you lose.”
That felt like a good, solid, Bumbershoot day.
Nikki Lane’s setlist:
- 700,000 Rednecks
- Highway Queen
- Good Man
- You Can’t Talk to Me Like That
- Love’s On Fire (duet with Jonny ‘2 Bags’ Wickersham of Social Distortion)
- Gasoline and Matches (Buddy Miller cover)
- [Unknown – but it has the lyric “Don’t let the darkness get you down”]
- Man Up
- Right Time
- All Or Nothin’
- You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Bob Dylan cover)
Glad you enjoyed the Super Secret Show!