It's Not the Heat, It's the Heat
August 8th
Driving East from Los Angeles we entered Arizona, because that’s what happens when you do that. If we had driven West we would have hit the ocean and the comedy scene there is a little dry for my taste.
The exciting thing about Tucson, and I promise that there is one, was that it was our first stop that was not in California and consequently the first venue we’d be performing at where I didn’t know at least one soul in the audience and consequently consequently the first place we’d be camping out of necessity instead of for pleasure. We didn’t get to “enjoy the great outdoors” at this stop as we arrived in the early afternoon and the ranger station was manned by a woman who I schmoozed into offering us a two-tent spot for the price of one. I’m always the person trying to make the person behind the counter smile. I’ve worked in counter service places long enough to know that any pleasant break from the monotony is a welcome one and in establishments where one cannot tip: grocery stores, visitor’s centers, phantom tollbooths, I make and effort to engage.
Some therapists among the readers might look at that tendency alongside my chosen art and posit that I am a deeply insecure individual who craves the attention of others. They might surmise that I’m a needy little beetle who needs the praise of strangers, to be “the favorite” in every transactional relationship. These same therapists might even theorize that it is a tell-tale sign of a troubling, abnormal behavior. They might think all of this but
We took a nap in the arid Arizona afternoon while we waited for the open mic to start. Not every state on this tour was going to get CLOWNFISH in its entirety. Some towns, no matter how much I followed up on my initial e-mails and calls, just did not have a venue that wanted to give me the time of day. Not content to pass the opportunity to perform if I could help it (and besides, I’d already made the T-shirts) an open mic played Miss Congeniality to my aspirations.
Jori and I both did sets at The Surly Wench and followed some of the comics to a debate-style second show. On the way we were accosted by a man we assumed was under the influence of the popular drug methamphetamine, who told us that we was going to kill us as he vaulted out of a dark alley. We politely fled from him into a nearby Tiki bar where the aforementioned pros/cons show was starting. I don’t remember if I was pro or con anything, but it was a nice way to kill a few hours.
August 9th
The next day we visited our second National Park of the trip (and already the Park Pass paid for itself) and wandered around some trails in Saguaro. Camen played with his new and freshly mounted cameras and we took a lot of footage of us pretending to be lost in the desert. I made him point it at me while I pointed an imaginary gun at the cacti, with their iconic arms already reaching for the sky. Jori adopted a small one she named “Patrick” and placed him on Crybaby’s dash. She got very annoyed with me for saying “cacti” every time she said “cactuses”. We saw pictoglyphs and a visual aid to determine how dehydrated one was based on the color of one’s urine.
We drove through Tombstone, where my pink hair proclaimed ahead of me to everyone we encountered that we were just passing through on our way to Bisbee. A woman in the tchotchke shop told us moving to Arizona had done wonders for her arthritis, Jori and I enjoyed our limber young frames by staging a showdown and doing prat falls in the dust.
In Bisbee we actually had a bed (or in my case, pullout couch) to sleep on in a BDSM dungeon-themed AirBnB we booked for the novelty. It turned out to be something of a queer guest house and we met a couple of lovely young bachelors who stayed there for extended periods every year.