Seven years? Let’s see… ’99, ’00, ummm… That’s right, this is our seventh year covering the Just For Laughs Festival. Each year, right before we take off, we think something terrible will happen– This will be the year that JFL won’t grant us Media passes and won’t let us back in to cover it. This will be the year that we won’t be able to write about anything. This’ll be the year that we’ve finally pissed off so many people that we’ll round the corner at the Delta we’ll be reviled; the object of scorn.

Of course, it’s probably just the fatigue talking. The road will do that. As will oppresssive heat and humidity. Bounced checks, the usual. Whatever it is, it’s totally unfounded. Hell, if Andy Kindler is welcome up here year after year, after saying the vicious things he says, anyone is welcome, right? What is one year of our humble publication’s squeaks and moans compared to his annual hourlong tirades? Nothing! We’re here. Again! We do no harm. We cause no consternation, we are merely a diversion. A cat toy to the giant striped tabby that is the standup comedy industry!

Having said that, we took precautions. We changed our appearance. The Male Half of the Staff bleached his hair and now looks like a member of the ’02 Rumanian national soccer team. The Female Half went jet black. Perhaps we’ll escape any possible scorn by claiming mistaken identity.

Of course, there’s a danger in changing one’s appearance at a gathering such as this one. If you don’t look like you usually do, there’s the increased possibility that someone will “go owl” on you. That’s a term we coined at SHECKYmagazine HQ. It’s when you accost someone whom you’ve had meaningful dialogue with in the past, you say your name and they say, “Who?” It’s very strange to experience. It can get to you if you let it. (“I can’t believe it! We talked for a half an hour! He showed me pictures of his dog! Six months later, I see him, the sonofabitch went owl on me!”) It’s just a symptom of sensory overload. Sensory overload combined with life-altering schmoozing and anxiety over sets yet to be performed or sets past. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen often. If we contribute anything to this crazy world, let it be the term “he went owl on me!” (Note: We even have variations on it, in case it eventually suffers from overuse. Consider: “He went strigiform on me!” A bit more obscure or intellectual, but it gets the point across.) (Editors note: 72 hours later, comedian Greg Rogell showed SHECKYmagazine editor Brian McKim a photograph of his dog. This is strictly coincidental. The above comments do not mean to imply that Mr. Rogell would ever “go owl” on Mr. McKim.)

Our Festival contact, upon laying our laminates on us (and upon seeing us flip them over to see which venues the bearer was entitled to enter with said laminate), said, “It doesn’t get you into a whole lot.” Indeed! And the list grows smaller every year!

Fortunately, one of the places we can get into is the Monument National. It’s a theater and they’re screening three of the four of the films we dearly want to see this year: “Hell Gig Reunion,” which is the presentation of the edited footage shot during the Hell Gig America (“50 Days, 50 Shows, 50 States!”) and will be marked by an appearance by all three of the principal comics from the tour, John Wessling, Tommy Drake and Chuck Savage. “Patriot Act,” a short film directed by Jeffery Ross, a documentary about Drew Carey and others performing in Iraq. And “The Comedians of Comedy Tour,” a docu about four comedians (Brian Posehn, Patton Oswalt, Maria Bamford and Zach Galifianakis) on tour.

The other movie, at the Imperial Cinema, is “The Aristocrats.” We’ve posted a ton on that and you know the deal.

Brian McKim, Howard Lapides, Eramelinda Boquer, Adam Gilad, Kent Emmons, Traci Skene at the Delta!

We headed over to the Delta last night with the ultimate intention of heading over to Monument National (it’s a theater, not a monument) to see “Hell Gig Reunion,” the hastily edited and cut final product of over 200 hours of video shot during the Hell Gig America Tour.

Tommy Drake, Chuck Savage and John Wessling at the Monument National

And there they were, Tommy Drake, Chuck Savage and John Wessling, being interviewed by the CJAD folks in the Delta mezzanine. After their interview, we were invited to plug our humble publication to all the CJAD audience as well! (Which we did.) Also conducting the interrogation were Kent Emmons, chairman and founder of Comedy Express TV and Adam Gilad, programming director of National Lampoon Radio (of which Mr. Emmons is also the chairman and CEO).

We knew that Wessling intended to make a movie out of the adventure, but we had no idea we’d be seeing the finished product. this soon. During the changeover, we secured tickets to the screening from Drake, and headed over as soon as we got off the air.

As Wessling tells it, the three (and their respective better halves) were in the airport in Hawaii, finished with the Hell Gigs and awaiting a flight back to the Mainland, when an email from the JFL folks asked if they could exhibit the filmed record of their adventure six weeks hence in Montreal.

50 days of hell gigs were then followed up by six weeks of frantic editing- all leading up to this evening. The exhausted threesome presented their baby last night to an appreciative crowd at the MN, then took Q & A for a while afterward. (We hasten to add that, during the Q & A Wessling thanked the fine folks at SHECKYmagazine.com– for their assistance in getting out the word– as well as our table mate (and SHECKYmagazine Big Mover), Paul Ogata, for his assistance in swinging the Kona, Hawaii, venue, which turned out to be a bowling alley!)

Paul Ogata at the Comedia presentation of “Hell Gig Reunion” at Monument National

XMRadio’s Joel Haas was also in attendance. Haas and XM lent support to the Hell Gig tour and the Roady made it into a few shots, but, as Haas noted with exasperation, “It was never turned on!!”

The film did a splendid job of portraying comics as normal people. Creative people, to be sure. But most people envision travelling comics zooming down the highway mooning other drivers or tossing televisions into the pool. Drake noted that of the 50 gigs, 37 were actually paid gigs. “And the money we made was enough to cover… tolls… and some gas.” Also appearing in the film were Ralphie May, Carl Labove, Marc Ryan, Peter Grumbine, Sandy Hackett and Schully. There was a particularly touching sequence that featured interviews with the recently departed Mitch Hedberg’s parents.

(Also worth noting: Our own Big Mover, Ogata, was in town coincidentally to attend the FantAsia Film Festival (fantasiafestival.com). Seems he was the featured performer in a short film, “Amazing Asian,” which was part of the Asian film festival’s superhero-oriented “Square Jaw Theatre.” Check out Ogata’s website. Ogata assures SHECKYmagazine readers that the move to L.A. is imminent and that he’ll bang out an installment or two of The Big Move when it happens!)

Brian McKim and Jon Dore

The Homegrown Comedy Competition, hosted by Jon Dore, was held Wednesday night at Cabaret Music Hall. The winner was Kyle Radke and Kelly Taylor came in second. The participants were: Mark Bennett, Jasen Frederickson, Jy Harris, Dylan Mandlsohn, Ben Miner, Erica Sigurdson and Kwasi Thomas.

We had the pleasure of working with Kelly Taylor at last year’s Calgary FunnyFest. And we also had the pleasure of being present the very first time Mr. Dore ever mounted a stage. It was at the now defunct Goodfellows in Ottawa, in 1998! (We remember the year, because we were enthralled by the CBC coverage of the Nagano Olympics– live, a lot of it! The Female Half of the Staff was especially enamored of the curling coverage (her Scottish heritage?) and was, for a time, the only American comic doing a Sandra Schmirler (may she rest in peace) impression!

The Delta reached critical mass at about midnight. Not a sweaty, heaving mass like on the weekends, but a healthy, party-size crowd. And what would a gathering at JFL’s Delta be without a conga line of transvestites? The Kinsey Sicks, on the Evening at Eve’s Tavern, are men. Let it sink in: Evening at Eve’s Tavern… all-girl show… men… in dresses. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the Female Half of the Staff was disturbed at the Las Vegas Fest a coupla years back when the all-girl show she was on was hosted by famous cross-dresser Kenny Kerr. “Stop with the chicks with dicks on the all-girls shows!” she implores. “Aren’t there enough funny vaginas to go around?” She also points out the irony of the transvestites being the only “women” on the bill wearing dresses! PS, she adds: They’e not chicks with dicks, rather, they are men with boobs! (Since dying the hair black, she has become “Evil Traci!” A rather soap operatic doppelganger that is a bit edgier than her old, blonde self.)

The other folks on the Eve’s Tavern show (who were anatomically correct) were: Kathleen Madigan, Deb DiGiovanni, Kyra Soltanovich, Sommore, Tracy Esposito, Kitty Flanagan and Erin Foley.

While waiting in line for a Labatt’s, we were greeted warmly by Chrysi Rubin, the proprietor of the Edmonton Yuk Yuks, whom, you may recall was heavily featured in our postings on the Andy Dick row last April. In tow was her father as well (the owner of the joint)!

We head over to Just For Pitching this afternoon. One of the potential pitchers assured us that he had closely studied our coverage of the past two Just For Pitchings! How about that? We’re able to help out!

We had some tech difficulties this AM, but they’ve been ironed out with the use of Picasa (a free photo editing and uploading utility from Google) and hello (an adjunct program to Picasa) that has enabled us to upload our pics to our blog when our FTP client failed to let us into the server! We highly recommend both programs in a pinch!

Take me to THURSDAY’S Update!