The first thing you need to understand about Chocolate Cake City is that a lot happened, a hell of a lot, and who knows how many voices I’ll be able to recreate, whether or not Dan and, say, Michael Lore somehow manage to consult everybody and all the rest of the former troupe comes to the very specific and definite conclusion that this should be a banjo-based history and only that, and anything that doesn’t come from that tradition ought to be shunted off into the wings where they can burst like hand-claps of flour in our private hearts, because who am I to speak of these particular loves of mine? When you try and recreate an entity like this with one voice — the kind of thing where strangers come up to us and quote our sketches back to us — are you allowed to get away with this? What if you want to jump ahead to other bits, like when Sarah asked, “Where’s Dan?” and caught in a lull of complacency, I replied, “Oh, he went to pee outside,” only realizing my error when I was hit with a bug-eyed, “What?” (the crushing logical inconsistency being that there was a bathroom right up the stairs) — can I get away with that?
Perhaps because of a life-shift — towards what, I can’t explicitly say — I’ve decided to put to paper some reports and incidents if only to share one of the knotting and unknotting strings of joyful chaos I carry in my heart. Now that most of those with whom I shared 2004 to 2008 have settled across the country while I continue to grind against the wheel of unemployment, I can offer this as an opening salvo to latter musings, missives, misgivings, remonstrations, an umbrella tossed up for us to latter gawk at at coming get-togethers, during the middle of continuing friendships, when we heal breaches, or even just simply whether or not a physical copy of this essay could achieve some legitimate form of anti-gravity status — whatever the case, whatever the result, all of these things are on the table.
A lot of the experience is, simply, in the performance, whether hidden or not, autobiographical or not, and outside of that, one feels helplessly reduced to either a series of anecdotes or an onslaught of clinical, analytical language, neither of which I want to immediately indulge, but I can offer this: what you see in these sketches has a direct connection to who we are. We are and are not our creativity. This thing/non-thing is explicitly there, interwoven into our lives, and when it takes a sharp form, then it takes a sharp form, and I almost wish I could say that that’s all there is to it, and that it’s as simple as that.
I recently “sat-in” with the troupe when they shared a performance with We Do Stand-Up at Yale, and while we were rehearsing “Poker Face,” come the musical interlude that took us towards the climax, where we normally play the theme to “Rocky,” we instead starting in on a beatbox-ladden version of “The Final Countdown,” and we ended up performing it that way, and — to a degree — that’s what I mean by the above paragraph. It just appeared. It was a second kind of jazz.
And sometimes people don’t get this kind of thing. It’s no knock against them, but it sure was strange to encounter a melody of things from peers your age, like, “Hey, Evan, I hope you’re enjoying school and I just wanted to say that I admire you and everything you stand for!” and if you were eighteen and seeing that message for the first time you thought, “Stand for? What does she think I’ve been standing for?”
Or a year or two would pass, and you’d try and make your way through a thicket of conversation like:
“Are you happy?”
“Yes.”
“So, there’s a problem?”
“… What?”
Thankfully, these two parts of my life didn’t start to grate against each other until another time mentioned in another essay. The only other memorable time it did occur was in the winter of 2005, I believe, when Sarah had asked Steve and I for help with a “Field Production” class.
I can’t remember too much about the day — at least, not the amount I usually can: I remember it was bitterly cold, that I directed an illegal immigrant looking for help regarding his status to City Hall, and that Sarah tried balancing a single cherry atop a chunk of ice in an alleyway off of Hanover Street, saying, “Be beautiful, damn it.”
After Steve’s departure, Sarah and I went to Ernesto’s and then Mike’s Pastry, where we took almost as much joy out of warming up as we did the food. It was in Mike’s Pastry that I ran into a classmate I had met when I first entered college, enthralled by the fact that I could come up with lengthy rhymes on the spot and had a fairly good handle on the french language.
“Evan!” She called, and came dragging a young man over by the hand. “This is my boyfriend,” she said when she reached our table, not even bothering with the name. Turning to the boyfriend, she said, “This is Evan, the smartest man alive.”
I tried not to outwardly cringe. “He’s just unbelievably clever,” she said, going on.
“Well,” I emphatically said, hoping to put a stop to it. “If you ever want to solve the Von Neumann hypothesis or, uh, have someone help you commit tax fraud, I’m your guy.”
By the way, one thing I will say about the “is and is not,” challenge-the-X-Files-to-a-freak-out-contest paragraph up above is that it certainly is an odd experience when you see a comedian start to speak in a voice that in some way helps you piece together the rest of their melodies, because that means that the moment where you will be able to weave the whole thing together is coming or on the way.
And sometimes the melody would manifest itself directly into the shows: people would sing along with every single set change song. They’d keep time clapping. The campus lost its mind. Moses and the Israelites entered the stage at one point to “Hey Ya,” the music cut in time with the opening claps, and then Jonathan would bluntly shout, “I’m Moses,” and we were off and running.
2:
Cortez Street pointed towards the South End. It was the back pointedly turned towards the rest of the city with a little shoe-box diorama worth of highway chunked out in front of it. It looked like something you’d see down on Marlborough, the street, but this had the benefit of being a stone’s throw from Downtown proper, though in my mind, whatever radii managed to encompass Somerville, Cambridge, and Roxbury is downtown enough for me.
Cortez had the benefit of one weird memory laid to it before it became the next place for our comedy caravan to decamp for a while, and the thing didn’t arrive until Jack invited me over to visit — if I’m recalling this correctly, Dan, Josie, Sarah, and I were trying to fix a time to do something later on in the evening. Dan said no, because he had to go to a party. Sarah said no, because she had to go to a birthday party. Josie and I might have gotten pizza down on Charles Street (where they used to give me free slices), and when Dan later invited me to the party, I figured I’d drop by.
It was — a surreal clump of kids from stair-top to stair-bottom, and when I entered the host apartment, the music was blaring so loud the air buzzed and no one could hear anyone else talk and when I entered the host apartment, I looked to see if there was anyone there I knew and started to make my way towards what looked like the bathroom when I saw a young woman bent over the toilet wildly and gaily waving a dollar bill in the air at someone behind me and before I had the chance to turn and look the door was slammed by an unseen hand and I changed my mind and my direction and decided to head to the roof.
Up there, I ran into Graziani. “I thought you said you were going to a birthday party,” I shouted. “Goober,” she said, “this is a birthday party.” I looked around. “Really?”
Our earlier camp was up on Beacon Hill — when the show would approach and the thing would become a week-long all-nighter and no one would leave the other’s side for more than a class’s worth of time (and we’d often skip those, too); where we would wake up in the spring to all the trees in the morning and their petals in such a state I wanted to find Coleridge’s grave, thump it with a balled-up fist, and shout, “Damn it, Sam! Wake up! You’ve got to see this!” and walking out and breathing in the air that was already on the joyous prowl; and it was where we could respectfully and thoughtfully indulge our appetite for literature —
3:
And the process? The same as it is anywhere else: it is a process of reinvention as detailed as any moment can be and as wide as history — an extraordinary sloughing off of anything vaguely dusty and a blast of life to the calcified. It is that hurricane of joy that is almost impossible to stop once it starts. It’s about the act of paying attention. It’s the “Why?” and “Why not?” and “What if?” turning over some Rubik’s Cube-like situation.
4:
For four years (and one year after that — when the next generation asked me to do one for them, too), I wrote the programs for each show. Here are some excerpts:
Banks, But No Banks:
Invest with CHOCOLATE CAKE CITY in the BANKS, BUT NO BANKS Quality Investment Program.
So — you want to invest with Chocolate Cake City.
First of all — thanks for choosing us! We know you’ve come a long way before this — a long way — and we appreciate the fact that you’re willing to give CCCQIP a try. We’re also aware that the name of our QIP might discourage investment. We assure you this should not be the case.
Chocolate Cake City can offer a personalized, quality investment portfolio for your investment needs, or your investment can take the form of our members’ well-diversified portfolios. We encourage you to take a look inside and meet our team.
OUR TEAM:
Chaz Formichella has a secret, fool-proof plan to save the economy that we’re revealing here for the first time: (1) become President, (2) invent a number, (3) create a dollar bill using your face and that number, (5) try and figure out what that gets you when you use it (preferably, ‘everything’), and when that fails, (6) give up and rob a bank out of exhaustion.
Steve Donovan doesn’t understand why the Financial Industry is the only Industry that attracts neck jowls.
Whenever Sam Clarke writes a letter to his investors, he always ends with the signature “yours in Christ” — not because he’s religious, but because he’s stuck in the statue in Rio de Janeiro and can’t immediately think of a better way to express his plight.
Phil Hamilton time-traveled to the future to see what the ‘future of American investment’ would look like and was taking out his notebook when he realized oh my god he just used a time machine.
Andrew Higgins thinks that all financial markets should be moved to a single time zone because he truly believes that making money is about friends, people getting along, and that capitalism is a system that can include everybody.
…
Josie Campbell - Josie Campbell was recently arrested for the theft of Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans because she — and we quote — “wanted to use them as giant business cards.” She’s here tonight on probation.
Sarah Graziani - sarah graziani captures balloons and tames them before giving them to animal shelters so families can take them home and have a happy balloon of their own. ‘til they realize what they got ain’t a puppy.
Jonathan Ade — Jonathan Ade can act his way out of a paper bag — even if the bag is large, maze-like and holds a cheesy reward at the end. Like this joke.
Marly Halpern Graser - Marly Halpern Graser is the author of the recently published children’s story The Phantom Tollboothstory, the tale of a young boy driven by his family to the beach who meets a bearded Russian in the highway tollbooth expostulating on nonviolent resistance and realistically describing Russian life in the 19th century. And you know what? Marly’s glad the book didn’t sell any copies. Like you’d read it. Jerks.
…
Patrick de Nicola - Patrick de Nicola has braved the Antarctic, tackled the South Atlantic, and run out of verbs somewhere near Asia Minor.
Marly Halpern-Graser — For far too long the world has gone on without Halpern-Grasers; now that they’re here, that problem’s pretty much solved.
Sarah Graziani - Sarah Graziani was responsible enough to give us her actual biography. This isn’t it.
…
Sarah Graziani - sarah graziani is a well-oiled machine that runs on hugs and treadmills. Once she picked up a car, then another time she smiled. she enjoys her family and her friends and she loves Frisbee very much.
…
Patrick de Nicola — President, debutant, scholar — just finished translated The Hulk’s autobiography, “Smashing, Smashing, and Me,” and finds a perverted pleasure in conjugating the verb, “RARGH.”
…
FROM THE FORTHCOMING MERRIAM-WEBSTER 2008 EDITION*:
Evan Fleischer - V. — “To Evan.” (Pronounced, tuh-oo Ev-ahn) 1. To make little to no sense. 2. Of, or pertaining to, Evan Fleischer. 3. To know sense, and know him well.
Josie Campbell - N. (Pronounced, Camp-Bell.) 1. A ruthless dictator, capable of speaking to her secretary for hours on end. 2. The most terrifying despot Chocolate Cake City’s ever seen. Known as ‘Campbell the Campbabell,’ she ate many of her enemies, all, strangely enough, by mutual consent. 3. Of, or pertaining to, Josie Campbell.
Jack Waz - V. — “To Waz” — 1. To have performed an action in the future. “I waz marry Tom Brokaw’s wife.” 2. Of, or pertaining to, Jack Waz.
Dan Perrault - Declarative - (Pronounced, Perr-ault!) 1. A German cat ordering you to stop. 2. Of, or pertaining to, Dan Perrault. 3. To indicate the greatest degree of mental deficiency, where the mental age is 2 years or less, and the person cannot guard himself against common physical dangers.
Michael Lore - V. — “To Lore” — 1. To have a hunched back, often say, “Yessss!” in a thin, raspy voice, and frequently star in movies like “M.,” “Arsenic and Old Lace,” and the TV show “House.” 2. Of, or pertaining to, Michael Lore.
Sarah Graziani - N. 1. An in-grown ability to use single words to communicate a vast and comprehensive range of ideas and emotions. 2. Of, or pertaining to, Sarah Graziani.
Chaz Formachella - N. (Pronounced, Formachella.) 1. Amoeba-like pasta. 2. Of, or pertaining to, Chaz Formachella.
Allen Glover - V. 1. (Pronounced, Glover) To run into a small space that can’t contain one’s body, usually the size of one’s hand, i.e., “Run for glover!” 2. Of, or pertaining to, Chaz Formachella. 3. To misidentify someone with someone else.
Melody Conte - V - (Pronounced, Atonal.) 1. To be world-weary and bitterly cynical. 2. Of, or pertaining to, Melody Conte.
Steve Donovan - V. (Pronounced, There is A Mountain) 1. To sing the “Gilligan’s Island” theme to poetry that doesn’t belong to Emily Dickinson, i.e., Bukowski, Franz Wright, and others. 2. Of, or pertaining to, Steve Donovan.
…
Monty Cole - N. (Slang) - (Pronounced, Coal) 1. Derived from the slang “The Full Cole”; to don the entirety of one’s wardrobe. 2. Of, or pertaining to, Monty Cole.
Lindsay Cutler – N. – 1. The state of anxiety one’s in when one finds oneself being tickled at a funeral. 2. Of, or pertaining to, Lindsay Cutler.
Charlie Pieper – Int. – Slang – 1. An exclamation of frustration made after hearing a literary pun, i.e., “Why are the chickens eating madelines?” “They’re coming home to Proust.” “Aw, Pieper!” 2. Of, et. al.
Danny Madden – N. — 1. A small, carnivorous plant that traps flies via monotonous football commentary. 2. Of, et. al.
Rosie Moan – N. — 1. 2. To have no definition at all. Of, et. al.
