The germination for starting a standup comedy troupe in Aspen started at a Y-shaped barroom called the Rose and Crown in Palo Alto, California. The open-mike nights on Mondays drew comics from San Francisco and beyond by offering snacks and beers. Simple stuff but it worked.
Comics treated warmly will perform for you. Funny, funny people coming together and turning dead Mondays into the busiest night of the week. A very warm memory.
Cut to Aspen and my job selling tickets at HBO Comedy Fest. The late night set of Dave Chappelle was going well. The topic was Aspen.
“It’s really nice to be here in your little Smurf Village,” said Chappelle. “I’ve been here three days and already I hate poor people.”
It killed and I wondered what a local comic’s perspective on living here would be like. I really wanted to be IN the HBO Comedy Festival, but I knew I didn’t have the comedy chops myself to break the first screen. I thought a standup show made up of locals might be different and groovy enough for the festival. Plum TV agreed to tape the show for us and to create a DVD to showcase our entry application for the following year.
Eager to recreate that feeling I had from my Rose and Crown days, I asked my former employer in Glenwood to help me with some ads for a troupe of people to make fun of Aspen and below. I cold-called the Crystal Palace and asked if they would permit me to hold auditions there. G.M. Nina said yes in a heartbeat and thereby allowed a really cool idea to be born.
Another employer, Conundrum Catering, dished in with breakfast for everyone who wanted it. We witnessed a raw and funny parade of folks who came to audition and one who just saw the sign and thought he’d give it a try. Nine were selected:
Frankie Safferwich
Beth Brandon
Karbon
Michael James Robinson
Mike Milota
Don Chaney
Mark Thomas
Michael Yoder
Arthur Piubeni was out of town and agreed to a private audition when he returned. We met half-way between his house in Carbondale and mine in Glenwood at the scenic overlook off of Highway 82. Arthur ranted about smoking at his kids soccer games while a family of workers picnicked at the shady table. Arthur originally asked me to bill him as Ray Arthur because he thought Piubeni might be too hard to pronounce for people. When I pronounced it right he said OK bill me as Arthur or Art Piubeni. Either way, he auditioned at a rest stop and killed.
The tenth member was me, your host and emcee. You are reading the first of five chapters of the Laugh Your Aspen Off! story this week on aspenpost. It all leads up to our grand finale show this Saturday 8/25/07 at 8:30 p.m. at the Wheeler. Folks can get tickets while they last (the house has 53 fewer seats already due to opera staging) at wheeleroperahouse.com. (The face value of tickets is $10 but last February they were scalped out front for $100. True story. This blog is on me.)
Over the next week you will have my recollections of founding this troupe through the highs of selling out our first five shows, the lows of having comics split before our HBO run (by our sixth show the first five names on the list above were gone), and the highs of returning to full strength through auditions. It is an interesting tale of the coming together and dispersal of comedic observers of Roaring Fork Valley life. Along the way, we brought standup comedy back to a place that had nothing going on until we rocked our first Eagles Club audience last October.