damned vulpine

Another night in Austin

In which our hero takes half a day off and drives an hour and a half to see a friend make a fool out of himself in a re-treaded bar with pictures of large-breasted women on the wall.

"Excuse me. Does anybody in the house have any Clown White makeup? No? Anyone?"

That was Ratgirl, the persona of Stephanie Towery when she wears a tail made of garden hose, toilet paper and duct tape, as well as any other random items of clothing no human being should wear, paints her nose black and talks through it. And that was me in the corner, bearing witness on a Tuesday night at a 6th Street bar called the Jackalope.

Stephanie is Clay Towery's wife. Clay is aka Uncle Cuddles, when he paints his face in faux kabuki style and puts half a stocking over half his bald head. Only tonight, Uncle Cuddles told the crowd that he was a "fucking idiot" who left his white makeup at home, so a powder base had to do. Uncle Cuddles spoke in a flat Bavarian accent by way of Texas, telling the audience that he was performing at the bar as a favor of its new owner Jason, "whom I met on the streets of Berlin, when I was starting out as a clown and he was sucking cat dicks ... I dreamed of perfoming with all the great European circuses, and he dreamed of moving up to black men."

I usually work Tuesday nights, but it wasn't every night I got to see Clay perform. The Uncle Cuddles act had moved out of the East Austin drive-by theater known as the Vortex, shed partner Spiccy the Clown and one of two Ratgirls and crammed onto a much smaller stage, but it was still variety and still (mostly) funny.

Everett Lee and Toby Ford came to the show, too. Toby's still programming for Shadowbane (Clay is an associate producer) while Everett used to be an animator (he's now at Acclaim's Austin studio working with ex-Wolfpack Studios artists Tre Zieman and Billy Arnold, do tell, with programmer Rusty Koonce on a separate project. Austin's a small town with lots of game jobs, go figure.) It was good to see them, too.

We were a team in the final act of a show, an audience participation trivia game. I convinced Toby that heat waves killed more people than tornadoes and hurricanes, and he convinced me that solar waves sometimes change the path of asteroids. Our team, the Underage Clown Pornographers, got 9 out of 15 right, slaying the competition. I got a nail clipper with a print of the Virgin Mary on it, and Toby got the crummiest looking hula girl statue I'd ever seen. It was that kind of show.

I don't get out much for various reasons.

Posted by j at February 18, 2004 02:39 AM