Misty, water-colored memories

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on October 20th, 2010

We were in Hilton Head up until Sunday night (working at the Hilton Head Comedy Club), but our minds were somewhere else– specifically, we were already thinking about the next seven or eight weeks and what we’d need to do to get in fighting shape for a rather unusual gig in December.

Part of that training would involve reviewing old video tapes from past performances. Well, we have no shortage of them. We’ve got three of those faux-wood VHS tape drawers filled with cassettes and we’ve got a box or two more of tapes… and a good number of those are recordings of performances from about 1985 to about 2000.

So we plotted to purchase a honkin’ external hard drive and digitize them… thereby making them easier to zip through and review.

We finally managed to cop an Iomega 1 TB external hard drive at a Best Buy in Bluffton, SC, for about $50. That’s nearly one thousand gigabytes! That’s a lot of real estate for a little bit of dough! (931 GB, to be exact.)

The project is going smoothly. We hooked one of the Acer laptops up to the Happauge WinTV tuner and we piped the ol’ Panasonic VCR through it and now we’re draining one after another onto the external HD. So far, we’ve pulled about 15 shows off of the Mylar and it’s only soaked up about 20 gigs.

Since we’re going from analog to digital, we’ve got to do it in real time. Which means that it takes 30 minutes or so to convert a 30-minute set. Add on a minute or two for cueing up the tape, and you see it’s a time-consuming process.

But it’s alternately cringe-inducing and fascinating. Sets from the Comedy Factory Outlet, the Charlotte Punchline, Rochester’s Red Creek Inn and some place called “The Uptown Comedy Club” (?), along with early television appearances (including a very young Louis CK opening up an episode of VH-1’s “Fools For Love” from 1993– what a lot of thick, red hair he had!), are quite interesting for a variety of reasons.

For the last couple months, we’ve worked very hard on our acts– corralling material, arranging it in .txt files, re-writing it, writing new stuff and honing it– and we’ve dredged up a lot of stuff that we haven’t done since… well, since we did it on these very sets that are unspooling before our eyes on the laptop screen!

It’s a crazy trip down memory lane. And, we hope it will lead to a certain kind of confidence, an unprecedented tightness and competence that we’re shooting for.

It takes a special person to get past the mid-80s fashion choices. Once you whip that, everything is easy.

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