Opening night
The very first Laugh Your Aspen Off! show was a benefit for Eagles Club Aspen’s scholarship fund. The club agreed to open its doors to the public for the first time in a long time by charging five bucks at the door and allowing us comics use of their upstairs meeting chamber as a green room.
Conundrum Catering, for whom I had worked ever since I tried to sell them an alarm system during my year with Proguard, came through with the food and drink. One by one the comics arrived, having been together only twice before; at auditions and at a rehearsal, which is simply not done in standup comedy.
Arthur Piubeni, the most outspoken and irreverent of the troupe, let me know loudly and often that comics do not rehearse. I saw it as an opportunity for a bunch of first-timers to work through a few kinks and get used to the room. Arthur, Michael Yoder and me were the only ones with any standup experience. I had started in 1996 at an open mike at Comedy Works in Denver, and had been working at it for ten years while I toiled away in big-city newspaper advertising management jobs at papers across the Sunbelt.
Michael had notched a few dozen performances as both amateur and paid comic at some clubs in New Mexico. Arthur had supplanted his considerable stage experience as an actor a few times with standup gigs in Minnesota or LA or who knows where. A born salesman, Arthur relayed just enough fact to establish himself in my mind as a guy to pay attention to.
As the comics arrived and paced in the Green Room, a surprisingly steady flow of folks made their way into the only ghetto-like place Aspen has. The Eagles Club is a dark place tucked back from the road and at the time had as its across-the-street neighbor a forlorn construction site called Obermayer. My crude vinyl sign could not be seen at night because the Eagles could not get it together to replace the bulb on their porch light. A nice bunch of fellows, the Eagles congregate around one central activity and everything else sort of happens or doesn’t.
They made this night special and very happening by busting ass all week to clean the place. Layers of smoke and grime were scrubbed away and rafts of extra chairs were hauled down from a balcony to make the place all of a sudden look like a comedy club. People quickly filled the place, which I attribute to a month-long print ad campaign donated by the Aspen Daily News and a saturating radio schedule of ads produced by KSPN, where I also worked part-time as a KNFO board operator and later a fill-in DJ on the rock’n’roll side. GM Colleen Barill overdelivered on her promise to run a few spots each day, and allowed our ads to dominate the station for almost three weeks. And whereas ADN Publisher David Cook had promised us a black-and-white ad to run at least once or twice each week, he actually delivered a nearly daily supply of full-color ads which invited readers to see local comics telling local jokes about, as we called it and still do, “Aspen and Below…”
The whole key to our success would be this notion that Aspen is prominent and self-secure enough as one of the pinnacle places for the rich and famous to vacation and/or live part-time, that we could toss a few bricks at it. We saw everything as below Aspen, either geographically or socially, and we came to exploit that notion which also seemed established in the minds of its inhabitants. Comparing Aspen to the places we comics had come from and/or, better yet, to towns down-valley, was a magical elixir for laughter. Or soon we would discover.
Sara G., formerly of KSPN and one of the sweetest, hardest-working folks I knew in the Valley, had agreed to open the show by welcoming the crowd and introducing me. She also had the foresight to bring a camera, so our little ragtag band of comics was documented in a couple of happy, can-you-believe-we-are-doing-this photos snapped upstairs at the Eagles.
Before showtime I gathered the comics into a circle and asked them to put their hands in. “Repeat after me,” I said, and then intoned a chant which I hoped would center everyone on what needed to be done: “Fear not silence. Own the moment. Release the laughter.” Over time it became a ritual of sorts, but more than a few comics told me that it helped them onstage when the crowd had gone silent and they knew enough to take it all in and be in charge rather than shrinking. We trained ourselves to believe that the laughter was out there. It was our job to find it and release it.
Release it we did, although my own first set as the MC was just OK. The comics had coached me during rehearsal to use my time to explain to folks why we were there, what was up with the cameras, and how we hoped to get into next year’s Comedy Fest. It was great advice because from the first performer forward, everyone in the room knew they had permission to laugh and to relax and to take these comics at face value: funny locals with something to say.
Our first performer was Frankie Safferwich, the guy who had seen the audition sign out front of the Crystal Palace that September and had decided to just come in and tell us about getting arrested in Aspen. With no apparent nervousness or stage fright, Frankie proceeded to murder the Eagles Club audience with his relaxed, matter-of-fact retelling of how he tried to stall the cops from jailing him by pointing out and asking questions about all the nice features in their Volvo police cruisers.
The order after that doesn’t seem to matter much now as each comic did a stellar job of bring his or her truth to the stage. The only “Her” at the time was the remarkable Beth Brandon. Recruited via my wife, Mary, who met Beth at work in a law firm, Beth had plenty of acting chops and had even tried standup once at a local Gong Show. When we first met over the phone Beth told me she had been gonged mid-sentence for describing too well a visit to her gynecologist. As we got to know each other I coached Beth to eschew the ob/gyn material in favor of stuff about her life in the Aspen working and dating scene.
Beth took the suggestion and, at the Eagles Club on our very first night, brought folks to tears with her plaintive delivery about life as a gorgeous brunette fending off posers and players in Aspen’s thriving, working-class social whirl. It was a stunningly pure performance which had women, especially, in awe. When she came off the stage and we whispered briefly mid-room while the next comic took over, Beth said to me, “Clifford, I feel home.” It was a proud moment later matched but never exceeded for me during the entire run of this troupe called Laugh Your Aspen Off!.
Next: Another day, another sellout. LYAO! catches favor and fire and can’t seem to print enough tickets to satisfy demand. In fact, on one memorable night we sell too many. To which Lon Winston of Thunder River Theater Company might reply: “What you mean WE, white man?!”