As of today, I have now been fully vaccinated for over a month, and, in many ways, it’s everything I expected it to be. A visit from a New York grad school friend spiraled into a spur of the moment road trip, and the slow return of full-fledged in-person theatre has been downright marvelous to behold.
Since I spend so much of the rest of my week toiling alone at a computer, I’ve always had the impulse to jam-pack my weekends with as much running around as I can handle. Of course, my pent-up energy after so much enforced time inside had me even more eager to explore than usual.
After a venture to some Thursday night beach yoga, next up on the agenda was my first outing to Delray Beach’s The Coop Comedy for their monthly Friday night stand up show. Known by day as the Tradition Tattoo parlor, this unconventional venue got us off to a raunchy start even before the show, as we were suggestively told to enter the space through its back door.
The stand-up comics who performed only continued the racy trend with some audaciously hilarious material. But unfortunately for me, my mother took one comedian’s jokes about his mother’s repeated attempts to set him up with dubiously appropriate potential partners as an invitation to let him know that I was single after the show (I promptly scurried away before any further conversation could be had.) And now, probably also unfortunately for me if I make it into her material, she’s thinking of performing her own comedy set at their next weekly open mic!
Then, on Saturday morning, it was off to Bob Carter’s Actor’s Workshop and Repertory Company, my first South Florida theatre home. There, I’d taken some of my first acting classes, nabbed some of my first starring roles, and had my first short plays performed to exhilarating standing O’s. I’d arrived to volunteer at their work party, which they had organized to clean out and rearrange the place as they prepared for their upcoming reopening.