There really are coincidences; I wanted to tell the drunk girl at the bar at Giggles who was spilling her apple martini all over my cowboy boots. She was practically in my lap at this point. And I was between shows… I was a hostage. I sat there trying to remember how I got into this ridiculous conversation that had no end in sight.
“Oh yeah,” she had told me. “My boyfriend’s dad just died a month ago and he hasn’t laughed in a month and you made him laugh”. I should have known by that too intimate opener that she was crazier than a shit house mouse, but instead I said, “Really he liked my act?”
Now she was opening up to me about all sorts of shit that I just shouldn’t know. She continued, “I mean, you know, men are dogs! I didn’t have sex for like a year and when I finally did it was with a guy who hit me.” Yipes! Heavy! Too heavy!
“Jesus,” I thought as she blathered on about her tatoo, “What is it about me, that gives her the feeling that I want to go do the next show with her psychic
jiz all over me?” She answered my question.
“After watching your set, I really feel like I know you. You know?”
I reviewed my set to see what bit could have possibly said: “Hey! I’m off my fucking rocker, so if you are too come talk to me after the show!” I thought they were just dick jokes, but apparently there’s a hidden subtext in them that you can only hear if you’re off your meds. Maybe it’s not my set. Maybe it’s just that, because I’m a woman I seem more approachable than the guy comics. And that by the time we move past the flattery, she’s saying shit that’s too heavy for me to cut her off. Maybe men deal with it too. But as I listen to the drunk girl at Giggles, I think of some of the male comics I know. I’m sure by now they would have shut her down or at least had her blow them in the walk in fridge. It must be me. I seem to attract the one girl in every audience with no boundaries that needs to talk. And I have heard it all: drug addiction, car accidents, herpes, cancer, Satanism, break ups, gang bangs, near death experiences, psychic powers and Wicca. I ask her if she needs to get going. To which she replies, “No, I’m staying for the second show. I want to watch you again.” I tell her that there won’t be any new stuff in the second show, but she doesn’t seem to mind as she looks at me with her Charles Manson eyes and says, “You know there really are no coincidences.”
The show starts and I point her into the show room. She reluctantly goes in and I start looking at my jokes and try to forget all the things she just told me. While I count my blessings that she didn’t try to get me to exchange numbers with her, I hear a commotion coming from the show room. Clearly an opener is being heckled, but I ignore it and go back to my notes as the show moves along. But, the commotion gets louder so I pop my head in the show room to see my drunk girl, while being escorted out by the manager, shouting at the comic onstage, “You’re not funny! You wouldn’t know funny. If it was funny you wouldn’t know it! You don’t know funny!” I go back to the bar trying to extricate myself from the situation. But as they drag her by me on her way out the door she makes
eye contact with me and screams, “That guy wasn’t funny!
You’re funny!” And as they take her the last ten feet to the door I think, “Great girl.” Then I notice the comic, who was just onstage, has come off and is standing at the bar watching me. He looks at me dubiously for a moment before saying, “Friend of yours?”
