Friends of the Show at Bridgetown Comedy Festival - trip report

[Gleepglop]

For the past three years my brother's been flying up from SF to join me in Portland to attend the annual Bridgetown Comedy Festival.

Some quick Friends-of-the-Show highlights from the 2015 fest (last Thurs-Sun):

• On Thursday night at the first Baked show, we got to see Andy Kindler sing and play guitar, and saw Jonah Ray shred on drums. We saw Kindler at least three times through the festival, and each time he was great.
• After Kurt Braunohler's Roustabout show on Friday night, a glammed-out marching band that looked like something out of Rocky Horror Picture show emerged from backstage and led us five blocks down the street, where we were greeted by this guy for a live performance in a used car parking lot.
• On Saturday we managed to be among the 43 people Kurt kidnapped and blindfolded for a live taping of his K Ohle show.Matt Braunger and Jonah Ray were blindfolded along with us- and we didn't get to take them off until we reached the secret destination, where we had a hunt for easter eggs and booze. Kurt took this picture of us all on the bus, and here we all are at our destination.
• We also got to see Neil Hamburger (Gregg Turkington) several times, and he delivered every time. The best was during a show called 7 Minutes in Purgatory, where the comics had to perform their sets on camera in a back room while wearing noise cancelling headphones, so they had zero audience feedback. Like Kindler, Hamburger's set was different every time, whereas a few other comics we happened to see more than once mostly just had a fixed set that they worked into each one of their appearances.

Another highlight was a live performance of Dr. Katz, with Kindler, Janeane Garofolo (she was great), Dana Gould, Brendon Small, and Ron Lynch.

Great time, but still detoxing from all the craft brew.

[Jixby Phillips]

I need to bump this!

Me and a group of FOTs wound up getting some nice face-time with Kindler, who was chowing down on a pizza slice and gesturing with it ("it's my new thing, pointing with food!"). My wife bragged about securing our very own Gary the Squirrel puppet, "it has the nut and everything". Andy's response: "That nut is unbelievable."