Trying to get some sketches written for the Whirled News election season sketch show.

Lately, it's hard to find time and energy for all my various creative projects (including this one... short entry).

Shotts sat in with us during our Diplomat Motel show tonight (several people were out of town for an improv festival in New York).

Otis has been broken up for over a year now and it was fun to play with him again.

There's some extra seating downstairs in the cabaret at iO, tucked away in a weird side corner near the back. Some people call it the Hamlet Lounge. Unless a show is packed, the Hamlet Lounge is usually half filled with a smattering of late-comers and students. It's the worst place to see the show from. Improv is very immediate and intimate. You can feel the show getting less funny the farther away you are.

Still, I have some fondness for the Hamlet Lounge. When I first came to Chicago and first started taking classes at iO, I saw a lot of shows sitting back there. Students get to see shows for free but have to give up their seats to paying customers. If I got there early enough and the show wasn't too packed, I could usually sit in that front row on the Lounge, right at the shelf table.

And I usually did get there early enough. I knew almost no one in town at the time, and not that many people at the theater. What else did I have to do? A few times a week I would take two long bus rides to the theater, and sit there with my nose in a book, shyly waiting for the show to begin. And I ate it all up, loved every minute of it. Some of what I saw was bad, but I didn't care, and some of it... well, some it still seems like it must have been the most amazing stuff I've ever seen, like a first rush of a drug or a first flush of love.

This blog would be very different if I were writing it then.

I still love improv, but we are an old married couple now. We have a more hard-eyed view of each other, and we're lucky to do it once or twice a week.

This text message exchange represents a kind of joke that is imminently easy and lazy in a "that's what she said" kind of way, but is also irresistible to almost every funny person I know.

"That's going to be the title of my autobiography."

"That was my nickname in high school."

"Wasn't that the title of your band's first album?"

It's an almost compulsive response to an unintentionally evocative (or yes, just dirty) turn of phrase. They're not even jokes, really. I think it's mostly a way of saying, "I like those words together." Taking someone else's sentence and florescent yellow highlighting the part that tickles us.

About a month back I was at the ComedySportz bar and ended up hanging out with Ben for a while. He had just returned from a long stint performing in a Second City show on a cruise ship.

Ben: I hate it when people say, "hey stranger" to me. It implies some kind of ownership. I get it. I've been gone a while.

I have to admit, hanging out for an hour or two, an awful lot of people came up to him and said exactly that. "Hey stranger."

Later, backstage, Sarah and I were getting ready to leave and so was Ben.

Ben: I just have to put these pants back in the Lost and Found box.
Me: ... have you been wearing random pants from the Lost and Found?
Ben: No. I don't have a locker so I keep my show jersey in the Lost and Found box.
Sarah: You don't have a locker?
Ben: I don't even know where they are. Where are the lockers?
Sarah: Man, you have been gone a long time.

To go along with the giant popcorn box (or maybe just to get it out of his house) Steve-o brought in a giant styrofoam Twinkie he'd made for some comedy shows years ago.

If you look closely, it's apparent that a lot of work went into it, attaching layer after layer of styrofoam, sanding them down into a smooth Twinkie shape.

Steve-o: It took hours. And when I was done I was like, "I probably shouldn't have been breathing this stuff in." I looked it up online, and yep, it was some of the most carcinogenic stuff possible.

Innis and I verbally stumbled over each other, trying to make the same joke at the same time. Two different versions of, "It was still probably better for you than an actual Twinkie."

The end of the trip.

Here's Meador and I posing with the t-shirts we bought at the local Walmart.

Nick was staying on a few extra days at the cabin. His wife and daughters are going to come down and join him, but he was going to have to spend one night alone by the lake.

Nick had also seen the movie 'The Strangers' and we talked about the possibility of a band of masked teenagers tormenting then murdering him.

Nick: Yeah... when it gets late, I'm going to be a little scared.
Me: Does it make it worse that you won't have a car? No means of escape.
Nick: Even if I did have a car they'd obviously disable it before starting anything. That's horror movie 101. I guess I could try to escape on the pontoon boat.

Later that night, back in Chicago, just as I figured Nick was getting ready for bed, I had Sarah call the cabin, and like the creepy girl at the beginning of 'The Strangers' say into the phone, "Is Tamara there?"

I could hear Nick yell, "Real funny, freaks!"

As fun as the cabin trip is, by the end, most of us are tired and a bit cranky.

Tonight we sat down to watch the Russian vampire movie 'Day Watch.' It's the sequel to 'Night Watch' which most of us had seen together in the theater, and although I wouldn't call it "good" exactly it was weird in a particularly fun way. So Nick rented the sequel for the trip, thinking it would be fun to watch it together.

It wasn't.

Maybe we were just all burnt out, but watching the movie (which involved vampire-like creatures trying to find a magical, and ridiculous, Chalk of Fate), and Nick's refusal to turn it off, just seemed to make most of us angrier and angrier. Young actually stormed out to the porch grumbling, "Why are we STILL watching this stupid movie!"

After the movie was over, we tried to redeem the evening by playing our yearly game of Tip the Cup. It's basically just a drinking game, but we start each round by making funny and unapologetically sentimental toasts. A nice tradition.

Me: Who wants to make the first toast?
[tired, grumpy silence]
Nick: Uh... I'll go I guess. Well, I know we usually start with jokier toasts, but I just want to talk about something that, I think, is important to all of us. I'd like to make a toast to... the Chalk of Fate, deep in Samarkand, hidden away in Tamerlane's tomb, holding the power to undo any action, and to undo the fragile peace between the forces of dark and light...

Trupe, hungover, on pontoon boat. He kept the sunglasses on even when swimming.

Hansen's been incredibly busy with work lately. Most of the last few months have been spent up in Wisconsin working on a court case.

Hansen: It's tough not seeing my daughter. My wife told me they were watching the weather channel and something came on about the weather in Wisconsin and my daughter said, "That's where Daddy lives now."

Understandably, we weren't sure if he'd be able to make it on the cabin trip this year. I mean, he'd said all year he'd be here, never said he wouldn't, but as the weekend drew closer, we mostly just didn't hear anything from him no matter how often we tried to get in touch with him (although he did pipe up once up via e-mail to make fun of Martin for canceling).

This morning, as we were all groggily stumbling around, Trupe said, "Guess who just sauntered around the side of the cabin?"

I thought maybe he was joking but there was Hansen, with a "what, of course I was coming" attitude.

Unfortunately, by nightfall he'd gotten a message on his Blackberry summoning him back to work for a last minute case-related emergency.

Still, we got one day of Hansen.