A 71 Year Old Woman with French Ticklers as Finger Puppets
This past weekend, I went to Carolines on Broadway to watch one of my acquaintance's return to stand-up comedy. It was the finale of a beginner’s stand-up comedy class that ended with a performance at Carolines, which was taped in broadcast quality. This guarantees you a variety of performers of different levels, from “Impressive” to “The horror, the horror!”
My acquaintance, a bartender/manager who I will call Fuel, closed the show and his timing was impeccable… easily the best performance there. Fuel had a great support group of friends, co-workers and acquaintances in the audience cheering him on, especially with the two drink minimum/no maximum going on.
A seventy one year old woman was the penultimate act. Nothing is less funny to me than older women or men talking about risqué things, because it’s tired and a majority of us will be that age someday, and I plan on talking about risqué things until the day I die, and would appreciate not being laughed at about it, thank you very much. This woman was different however. It got off to a slow start, but after she related to us her story of how she came to discover that she was “AC/DC,” I started warming up a bit. Not because she was bisexual, but that she used the term: AC/DC.
I had not heard that term in quite awhile, and apparently a lot of people in the audience didn't even recognize it. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language says that its origin is: From the likening of a bisexual person to an appliance that works on either alternating or direct current. Now that is a creative metaphor. Maybe it’s just me and a lack of electrical systems knowledge, but that is not what comes to mind when the term AC/DC is uttered. No, instead I think of this AC/DC, of which I can probably name one song off the top of my head: Highway to Hell. As you can imagine this is probably not the best association that one could come up with when hearing a euphemism for Bisexual, but I digress…
Eventually she got around to talking about gay couples who are parents, and how she thinks that it’s a great step forward. She went on to, I guess, look at some of the decriers of this new fangled thing called Gay Parenting. She referred to gay parents singing songs to their kids, but with a twist. At this point she started to sing the classic children’s song: Where is Thumbkin? However, at the point when Thumbkin and the thumb trying to locate Thumbkin came out from behind her back, they were both wearing French Ticklers. Now this woman was about the same age as my Nana when she used to sing this song to me, and of the same build and height, and all I could think of was my Nana with French Ticklers on her thumbs, singing me to sleep. This image was temporarily displaced when the comedienne was singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star as she was raising a light-up, rotating vibrator at the end of her act. Yet, as she was done, my Nana was back in my mind with French Ticklers on her thumbs. Fortunately, Fuel took to the stage at this point, and I felt safe again to enjoy the performance.
After the show, and congratulating Fuel, my friend and I went up to the older woman. We congratulated her on a job well done, and then my friend asked the most important question. The older woman’s companion replied that we could purchase props similar to the one's used in the act at The Pleasure Chest on Seventh Avenue in the West Village.
Fuel's Comedy is My Drug.
My acquaintance, a bartender/manager who I will call Fuel, closed the show and his timing was impeccable… easily the best performance there. Fuel had a great support group of friends, co-workers and acquaintances in the audience cheering him on, especially with the two drink minimum/no maximum going on.
A seventy one year old woman was the penultimate act. Nothing is less funny to me than older women or men talking about risqué things, because it’s tired and a majority of us will be that age someday, and I plan on talking about risqué things until the day I die, and would appreciate not being laughed at about it, thank you very much. This woman was different however. It got off to a slow start, but after she related to us her story of how she came to discover that she was “AC/DC,” I started warming up a bit. Not because she was bisexual, but that she used the term: AC/DC.
I had not heard that term in quite awhile, and apparently a lot of people in the audience didn't even recognize it. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language says that its origin is: From the likening of a bisexual person to an appliance that works on either alternating or direct current. Now that is a creative metaphor. Maybe it’s just me and a lack of electrical systems knowledge, but that is not what comes to mind when the term AC/DC is uttered. No, instead I think of this AC/DC, of which I can probably name one song off the top of my head: Highway to Hell. As you can imagine this is probably not the best association that one could come up with when hearing a euphemism for Bisexual, but I digress…
Eventually she got around to talking about gay couples who are parents, and how she thinks that it’s a great step forward. She went on to, I guess, look at some of the decriers of this new fangled thing called Gay Parenting. She referred to gay parents singing songs to their kids, but with a twist. At this point she started to sing the classic children’s song: Where is Thumbkin? However, at the point when Thumbkin and the thumb trying to locate Thumbkin came out from behind her back, they were both wearing French Ticklers. Now this woman was about the same age as my Nana when she used to sing this song to me, and of the same build and height, and all I could think of was my Nana with French Ticklers on her thumbs, singing me to sleep. This image was temporarily displaced when the comedienne was singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star as she was raising a light-up, rotating vibrator at the end of her act. Yet, as she was done, my Nana was back in my mind with French Ticklers on her thumbs. Fortunately, Fuel took to the stage at this point, and I felt safe again to enjoy the performance.
After the show, and congratulating Fuel, my friend and I went up to the older woman. We congratulated her on a job well done, and then my friend asked the most important question. The older woman’s companion replied that we could purchase props similar to the one's used in the act at The Pleasure Chest on Seventh Avenue in the West Village.
Fuel's Comedy is My Drug.
posted by trog at 10:19 AM
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