Gosh. A tour blog. Exciting. Especially considering I haven't updated my actual blog in months. I've been making the excuse that my life has been going really well, and I haven't wanted to stop to retrospect. But this tour. Well. It really does warrant a blog. The tour is sort of a crazy, new, cool thing for Kaitlin and I to be doing.
Buckshot N Benny started because Kaitlin and I were living in the same town (NYC) for the first half of 2006. We were friends from college, in Vancouver. Kaitlin was a freshman when I was a senior (sorry to our Canadian writers for throwing such Yankee terms at you). We felt like we both had a lot in common, were becoming nice friends, and then, right when our friendship was going to become pretty concrete and stable, I moved to New York. I spent my first few years there with my mouth hanging open and in a daze. It was magnificent and terrifying, all at once. Those were the years that Kaitlin was going through the whole University thing.
We kept in touch for a few years, knowing there was something special about our friendship, so I was pretty excited when Kaitlin came to NYC in 2006 to intern at Spin. At the same time, she took a class with the great improv guru Armando Diaz at the comedy theater where I work - The Magnet. There's this awesome show there called Ampers &nd that features rotating improv duos. Many people who don't normally get to work together team up to do a duo and stretch their improv skills a little bit. We signed up for a slot, just because we thought it would be fun to do a little bit of improv together while she was there. We practiced with my buddy Shannon directing us and had a pretty good time. But something happened during our show. The performance ended up feeling really good for us. Meaningful and fun. We had some sort of advanced chemistry that I don't think either of expected.
So, with Kaitlin moving back to Vancouver, we did something pretty silly. We vowed to keep going. We made this decision that we were going to do a show whenever we were in the same city together. We've done the Vancouver improv fest two years in a row and people seem to dig us. We did a Magnet Mixer in NYC the spring of 07. And we broke into a lounge at UBC and performed for friends in December of 06.
But now we're going on tour. I want some of these places in Canada to see Ampers &nd/Magnet Style improv who perhaps haven't seen it yet. I hope they dig our style. I want to have great shows with Kaitlin. We've actually only done 8 shows over the last 3 years as Buckshot N Benny. This tour will show us if we can keep the special feeling between us, doing a bunch of shows all quickly in a row. I want to see parts of Canada that I've never seen before with friends I really like. I kind of feel like I'm coming back to Canada and bringing some presents with me.
While continuing my activities in the city that never sleeps - teaching and performing with my new favorites The Story Pirates, video editing high school plays, teaching adorable teenagers improv, performing around the city with my Magnet house team the Yes Andersens, with my amazing NYC comedy partner Angela as After School Music Club, and in my little ukulele shows... whoo, that's a lot - I've had this nagging feeling for the last few months in the back of my head. Am I doing enough for the tour? Neither Kaitlin or I has ever organized anything like this before. I know that I need to e-mail my friend Becky back about making buttons for us. I need to set a time for our Calgary gig with the Kinkonauts at Dancers Studio West. It's a lot of work and is hard to all keep straight.
I hope that by the time our tour kicks off on May 23rd - only two weeks away - that everything will be good to go. I have a feeling I'll be working until then to have it all come together. Then, ready or not, I'm really excited about getting on the road and seeing where Buckshot N Benny takes Kaitlin and I next.
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