Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Bridgetown Comedy Festival And Other Drunken Things

This last weekend I attended my very first Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, Oregon.  I don't make visits to the PDX all that often, generally only when I visit two of my close friends (also known as bridesman/maid from my first failed wedding) Tim and Carli.  Buddies of mine whom I met when we all lived in the zine-making/secret cafe/dumpster diving/punk house/hippie commune which is our state's capitol, Olympia, Washington.  Fortunately for all of us, they moved down to a bigger, less government official filled version of Olympia in Portland and I moved up to the similar style with more Ethiopian restaurants version known as Seattle.

The Bridgetown Comedy Festival, now only in it's third year, felt like a city-wide staple.  Most events were fairly crowded, but never in a completely uncomfortable way (although I was drunk most of the time so comfort zones were non-existent).  Not only was I able to witness back to back comedy for four long days with the likes of Kyle Kinane, Jimmy Dore, Doug Benson, Moshe Kasher and Margaret Cho, but I met and saw now new favorites, Emily Heller, Nikki Glaser, Hannibal Buress and Paul Danke.

Comedy aside, Portland is full of cheap and delicious food.  I probably ate more gyros and pizza than I have in all of my twenties.  It was awesome.  Not only that, but good beer, weird ass novelty shops, awesome comic book stores and a giant retro-style arcade filled with 80's-90's arcade staples and pinball machines.  Some people leave their hearts in San Francisco, I left a high score on the Streetfighter II machine at Ground Control in Portland.  Sure a couple of the theaters I sat in smelled like garlic and BO, but I had lots of fun drunkenly doing time at the Tanker open mic, was able to spend time with old friends, bought some pretty sweet trade paperback comics including Henry & Glenn Forever, ate pre-mentioned foods and had a drunken conversation with Kyle Kinane (and yes, most of what I did was drunken while there).  Oh Portland, you definitely put a bird on it.          

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