January in NYC – say it soft and it’s almost like praying
After being harassed by the cunts known as the TSA because they couldn’t understand how someone with a ticket for dean cameron and a credit card for dean cameron and a couple of other cards for dean cameron could possibly have a drivers license for dean cameron eikleberry. they made me go back to jet blowme and reprint my ticket with dean eikleberry. then, i told them they were destroying the country so they searched my bags like i was a nigerian packing tnt in his anus.
Good thing that i had stuff saying ‘NIGERIAN SPAM SCAM’ on it, eh?!?
But… i had the entire back row to myself…
Until a woman who took a handful or two too many xanax and jack daniels’sses collapsed and hit her head on the armrest, knocking her doped up self out.
They had her lie down in the aisle for 2 hours. i couldn’t really go back to sleep because that’s what an asshole would do (shut up!) so i feigned interest until…
“Do you mind if this woman sits here?”
“Um… no… of course not…”
So i didn’t really sleep.
There’s snow here.
It seems that my cabbie, a recent graduate of the cliche nyc cabbie school, had been told that ice and snow improve traction and braking times but was confused as to why it didn’t seem to work like that. Instead of vomiting, I got out at 6th and waverly and walked a fair distance instead of the location i can’t mention because i’m staying at a paranoid famous person’s place!!!
Ah well.
I’m thinking that having a child later in life as I’ve done is a good thing because I can’t stop thinking about how cool it will be to see him experience new things… snow, for example. It’s going to be difficult to be the “seen-it-all” guy with a little guy so full of joy and wonder at all of those beautiful things.
There’s that, too.
Besides the last 5 or so hours, I have a delightful life. My wife is beautiful, sexy, funny, smart and makes cookies… and I have a son who only wants to laugh and be happy.
But really. Fuck the TSA. Right in the fucking neck.
I have an atom’s worth of understanding what it must be like to “drive while black”. An RCH of understanding. To be regarded as guilty before proven innocent is a horrible thing and that is how the TSA is destroying this country.
Spam Scam @ Jackson, MI – II – Electric Boogaloo
8:15pm – The venue is a state junior college. Each of us silently take note of the paucity of cars in the parking lot as one of the tech guys meet us at the back door. We scurry in like people late for a performance.
The guys at the venue are, thankfully, ON IT and have all of the required cables, stands and screens set up and ready to go. I plug the show iPod in to their video cable and it works the first time. That’s never happened. I check and make sure that I have the right set of slides (there are three versions of slides) and I do.
I head up to the light booth and set up Paul’s computer and iPod for the audio as Victor and he set up the computers and props for the show. Victor irons his shirt. The computers are all set up, I pass Paul, give him a quick primer on how to make sure levels are good for the phone calls. I change shirts stage right as they let people in.
Total pre-show set up time: 2 minutes.
8: 17pm – they let the audience in. All 11 of them. Eleven people are there to see the show. We’ve done a couple of state schools and both times the taxpayers have paid our salary and it looks like this is no different. Good thing Michigan is doing so well.
8:25pm – “Dear sir, may the blessings of allah be upon you and grant you the wisdom and sympathy…”
We perform the show. This is the beauty of having performed a show over 150 times for the past 5 years. It goes great. The 11 people love it. Laugh in all the right places. Scream at the reveals, etc. Were you there? Killed.
9:40pm – instead of going out to the lobby for the crap collection, we just jump off the front of the stage and chat with people. Ellen Sawyer, a person I worked with at iWin.com when this whole thing began has brought her boyfriend and four other people. They have no idea where to go in Jackson and neither do we. We don’t even know the name or location of our hotel. After some conversation with our superstar tech guys, we figure out where we’re staying and where to go for foodstuffs. We are verrrrrry hungry.
9:55pm – We say our goodbyes to the staff and head off to the hotel. Usually, after a show, there is a nice glow… a nice feeling. It’s such a fun show to perform and we LOVE doing it, but we realize that we don’t really remember doing the show tonight. The show was secondary, at least, to everything else that has been going on. It’s not a great feeling. We do realize that the benefit of having spent so little time there was that we didn’t have any opportunity to feel badly that there were going to be 11 people in the audience. That’s the silver lining, apparently.
10:30pm – We find the ho-tel. It’s fine. Basic business traveller chain. Great. The restaurant is next door, we eat, have a nice time with Ellen and her friends. I have a nice hot fudge ice cream treat and we’re back at the ho-tel by midnight.
Our return flight on Spirit doesn’t leave until 7:30pm the next day. We get late checkouts and agree that we can sleep in and then maybe go exploring beautiful Detroit – Rock City.
12:30am – My room. Sleep of the dead.
11:30am – It seems that the housekeeper didn’t get the memo that I had a late check-out and she wakes me up. Ah well. I get up, pack what little i unpacked, check out and walk across the street to have a nice, leisurely breakfast at the Cracker Barrel.
1pm – As I sit down, Victor calls. He decided to double check our flight and learned that if one misses their initial flight on Spirit Airlines, you forfeit your second leg, ass well. We have no return flight home. We are, once again, fuckity fuck fuck fucked.
We get a hold of Paul, and get in the car and begin driving back to Detroit before we have a plan. We know that we probably don’t have time to have breakfast at the Cracker Barrel. Victor checks the web on his iPhone (technology saved us, by the way) and there’s a 2:15 flight on American for $175 each. Knowing the speed of Budget, we’ll never make it. He checks Southwest. Nope.
We’re laughing. Every time something’s happened, we just laugh. It got horrible so quickly that we didn’t have time to get bummed, it was just funny the entire time. I mean… yeah… so.
I’m driving really fast. Really. Fucking. Fast. Maybe we’ll try for the 2:15 flight, but Victor finds ANOTHER American flight at 5:30 for the same price. He calls, books the tickets and we are golden.
That’s basically it. We stop at a truck stop for breakfast, which is good, as the coffee at the Cracker Barrel was asstastic.
Once we get to the airport (Returning the fucking car took less than a minute. No fucking lie.) and are all checked in with boarding passes in hand, I see the Spirit counter and I get the idea to go over and fuck with them. Just because I can. The reason I booked the tickets on Spirit was that they were the only ones with a non-stop flight and the tickets were about $150 cheaper than the real airlines. But, they charge for each bag each way and also they charge for picking seats in advance. So, it ended up being about the same as I would’ve paid on a real airline.
We’re out just over a grand for the tickets on Spirit, and we’ve spent about 1200 for the emergency flights. It’s all covered by our booking fee and we’ll still make *some* money, but… one must subtract the cost of the extra flights now…
I head over to Spirit and I figure, instead of harassing them, maybe I’ll just try to get my money back. Once again, I use Aye Jaye’s excellent line. “Hi there… I have a bit of a problem and if you can help me, you can have the rest of the day off…” I explain (or ’splain, as ricky rickardo would say) what has happened and the woman takes my ID, punches up stuff on her screen. “It says here, you have three seats booked on the 7:30 flight.”
“What?”
“You’re booked on the flight at 7:30 tonight.”
To make a very lonnng story shorter, I’ve kept my cool and haven’t been an asshole traveler to her so she is able to refund five hundred bucks. It’s not the whole shebang, which I’m going to try to get (that’ll happen) but it’s five hundred bucks that we didn’t have a few minutes ago. I’m stunned. I aks her who I need to talk to so I can really try to get her the rest of the day off. She laughs and says “If I can’t go to L.A. where it’s warm, I might as well just stay here…”
The other silver lining is that we didn’t have to find a way to get from LAX to where I was parked at BUR.
Plus, at least the show killed. I think.
Nigerian Spam Scam Scam – Jackson, MI
Nigerian Spam Scam Scam show in Jackson, MI – at a small college a little over an hour from Detroit.
Curtain is 8pm Friday, Rocktober 23.
9:30pm Thursday, Rocktober 22 –
Thursday night – arrive at LAX 9:30pm for a 10:30pm flight on Spirit Airlines. Spirit was chosen for their non-stop to Detroit, which saved us from sitting in an airport in Dallas for an hour. Heh.
Spirit Airlines has cancelled a flight to Ft. Lauderdale. The counter looks like the US Embasy during the fall of Saigon. Victor, Paul (the tech guy) and I move to three separate lines. I get close. A woman in front of me begins yelling at me after I tell her that the Ft. Lauderdale flight is cancelled. She doesn’t, apparently, understand the “don’t kill the messenger” concept. Ah well. The two people who are behind the counter are mobbed. We can’t get to them. Finally one guy comes out and yells at everyone who is yelling at him about Ft. Lauderdale. I signal Victor to aks him about Detroit.
“That plane has departed. We made an announcement.” and he leaves. He vanishes.
10:30pm – We are stunned. Shocked. Pissed. We had plenty of time. Okay. We’ll deal with Spirit at another time, they are crushed by the pissed Ft. Lauderdale folks.
We look for departing flights. I call the savior, Colin Summers as we scurry through the airport looking for flights. It’s late. We’ve just missed a flight on United. I’m talking to Colin as we look at the displays. We see a flight to Cleveland. Victor calculates that it’s a three hour drive to Detroit. We could get in at 6am and then drive to Jackson… we wouldn’t get much sleep but we’d be okay.
Colin’s talking about different flights. I mention Cleveland. There’s an American flight to Detroit for 2grand. No. We can’t do that. Colin mentions a flight on some other airline that gets in at 5pm the next day. That gives us time to at least drive to the venue… it’s a bit over an hour from Detroit. The show is a breeze to set up. We’d get in at 5. Get to the venue by 6:30-7pm. We’re golden. Colin books the flight.
“Okay, you’re set on flight such and such arriving in Cleveland at 5pm.”
“CLEVELAND?!?! WHAT?!?!?!”
In the confusion, I’d confused poor colin and… yeah…
Victor finds a flight on Southwest that gets us to Detroit at 5pm the next day. Colin manages to cancel the ticket and tells me he’s going to bed. We’ll be fine. We’ve found a flight.
Victor gets on the phone with Southwest to book the tickets. He’s on hold for 17 minutes. Finally he gets an agent and begins going through the process. He puts the phone against his chest to aks me a question and hangs up the phone.
12am – We’ve gone to Northwest to see if there’s anything.
In Aye Jaye’s schmoozing book, he has the best line to use on someone like a harried ticket agent or some public servant who hates people. I’ve used it in the past and it is a terrific ice breaker that immediately puts them on your side. You have to say it the right way, or you could come off like a condescending (that means “talk down to”) prick.
I’ve used the line “Hi there… I tell you what, if you can help me out, you can take the rest of the day off, deal?” on the Northwest Ticket agent and she had gone through every airline’s schedule for us, trying to find a flight that gets us to Detroit at a reasonable hour.
She wasn’t able to find us anything that we were satisfied with so we thank her profusely, I tell her to let them know that she can go home she laughs and we split.
About 10 minutes later, I realize that I’ve left my backpack at the counter. We head back and it’s gone. One of the “security people” says that the cops came with dogs and they took it away. “You’d better hurry, they usually destroy those.” (she actually said this to Victor who, wisely, didn’t tell me this until much later)
Oddly, she’s not able to get in touch with the police. That makes sense. We go to my buddies at the TSA who, also aren’t able to contact the police but a teenager with a TSA badge sternly akses me about the bag and why I left it. He departs.
The bag is important, by the way, because it has the two iPods that control the show. Yeah.
He comes back and says that it was cleared and is now down at the Northwest lost baggage area.
I head down there. Victor and Paul continue searching for flights on Victor’s iPhone while I wait with three others in line as an old woman tells her sob story about her bag and how important it is to her. The other two have learned to just describe their bags and get on with it. As I approach the counter I see my bag, point to it and it’s returned. Whewwww. I’m an idiot.
1am - Victor’s found a 7:30am flight from Burbank to Detroit. It gets us in at 5:05pm. 5:05pm. At this point, it’s our only shot. If it’s on time and everything goes smoothly, we get to the venue in time to set up and go before curtain time. The problem is, the return flight on Spirit gets takes us back to LAX, so we’ll have to find a way to get from LAX to my car at BUR. Ah well. We just need to get to the DTW.
2am – Back at the house, Victor heads home, Paul sleeps on the couch. The good thing is I get to see Duncan and feed him and then go to sleep.
5:45 am – Victor arrives at the house we head to BUR.
7:00 am – We board the flight to Phoenix to get our 10:10am connecting flight to DTW.
8:45am – Arrive EARLY in Phoenix. Yes, of course, the flight to DTW is delayed by 1/2 hour. It gets us there at 5:30. Okay. Still we have time to get the rental car and drive quickly to Jackson. Sure. Okay…
11am – Wheels up to DTW. The plane has been delayed longer than 1/2 hour. Fine. We can still make an 8pm curtain. We just need to be on the road from Detroit by 6:30pm.
5:30pm – DTW. Victor y Paul go to baggage claim to get the show bag (we haven’t entertained the idea of the show bag getting lost. We can’t fathom it.) I catch the SHUTTLE?!?!?! to Budget Rent-A-Car.
5:45pm - Budget Rent-A-Car – There are 10 people in line in front of me. 10. I’ve now looked up the distance on my phone and it’s 65 miles. We are right by the freeway and the venue is right off the freeway, so there’s not *that much* surface street time. But. These fuckers in front of me need to hurry or die. They don’t. There are four rental agents. Well, until one goes on her break.
The night before, I’d emailed our contact at the venue about our situation and assured her that we’d be there and all would be fine.
Paul y Victor arrive with the bag and Paul gets on the phone with his tech contact and they go through the lighting set up. He sort of techs the show over the phone. Nice.
6:15pm - Apparently, the two sistas in front of me who have never rented a car before today, had reserved a Ford Expedition and weren’t getting one. Instead Budget was renting them a mid-sized SUV (like we were getting), but they had their hearts set on that Expedition. Okay.. at least the other agent is finished… wait what? That agent is now helping the guy get them their fucking Expedition. She saunters away and the sistas chat with the agent about the weather. I am muttering. I have begun muttering and am very close to being “that crazy guy who went nuts” so I begin deep breathing and trying to relax. We are now going to miss our 8pm curtain. It is obvious.
Victor calls our contact to tell her. It looks like we’ll be rolling in about 7:45 at the earliest, 8pm at the latest. We’ll only need 10 minutes to check levels and plug everything in. Victor says “So I guess we’ll need to hold the curtain.” She says “Yeah, you think so?!” in a strangely snide way.
The Expedition sistas are now aksing about EVERY option on the rental car contract and the Budget guy is doing his best to Upsell them on said options. The sistas have actual discussions about the pros and cons of getting the GPS upsell, the gas upsell, the insurance upsell. Then, they have that “argument” about who is going to pay for the Expedition.
I’m hugging myself and rocking back and forth. Really.
The sistas finally get their car. I am conscious of not being “that fucking asshole” so I wait until the agent calls me. I don’t want to rush him. He is quiet and seems skittish and I can tell that if I get at all aggressive with him, he cares so little that he will make my life much worse than it is at this moment, so I get calm and direct and smiley.
I gently convey that we are having a really hard time and if we can get this over with faster than slower, it’s fine with me. He doesn’t really seem to hear me. Okay. That’s fine. Strap in. Stay the course.
I get all the shit done, the good news is that since we didn’t pick it up at 5am like we were supposed to, we won’t be charged for the day, so I apply that money to the foolish upsell insurance because I am suddenly superstitious that something is going to happen to the car.
6:50pm - We are on the road. The dark, windy and rainy road. Victor brought his GPS and has it set. He relays the conversation with the woman and how she seemed strangely pissed. “I wonder if curtain was actually at 8pm…” He checks that web site. Curtain is at 7:30pm. Ah. Okay. That makes sense now. Of *course* we have to hold the curtain. Double doi.
My two friends, Colin y Kramer, who both drive like drunken teenagers late for their SATs would be proud of my driving from DTW to Jackson. Oddly, we didn’t get in a crash, have a blowout or get pulled over by the fuzz and we arrive at the venue at 8pm.
… to be continued…
some good news, sorta
Downsize DC is embarking on yet another grassroots campaign (it’s what they do) to roll back the wildly unconstitutional USA PATRIOT ACT. (I exaggerate to clarify)
The good news is that some parts of the PATRIOT Act could expire at the end of the year. This provides an opportunity to roll back many of these dangerous provisions. Toward this end Senator Russ Feingold introduced the JUSTICE Act (S. 1686) on September 17, Constitution Day. JUSTICE stands for the Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts.
Penn y Teller
Penn & Teller have been using the Bill of Rights – Security Edition cards in their live show for a while now and USA Today picked up the story. Pretty cool.
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/columnist/baskas/2009-05-13-penn-teller-tsa_N.htm
Reading the comments on the page, it’s always sad to see how readily people will just give over to authority. It’s not about being made to wait in line, it’s checking to see what one would give up to feel safe. We all know that it’s for show. We know the searches at the airport are useless. They’re simply so some people feel safe and because “they” had to “do something”.
In other news, I’ve been doing web contract work at Disney Consumer Products. It’s been pretty great (and I would still say so even if it wasn’t great, so you really can’t tell, can you…) but it looks like it’s going to be ending next week.
In other noose, some big shot says they’re going to pay me to write The Nigerian Spam Scam Scam movie. Bring it. I’ll certainly have time. Well, until late July.
Man, the bride looks like she’s trying to shoplift a watermelon, unsuccessfully trying to hide it under her shirt. Lengthwise. Duncan seems to favor her right side.
He’ll be a right-winger as a kid and then grow up and be a fucking loser hippie. He hates me already.
Stewart Lee
A million years ago when I was performing Spam Scam in other countries, I was introduced to Stewart Lee by Paul Provenza.
He helped create “Jerry Springer: The Opera”, which was destined for hugeness over here until christians IN THE UK got upset. Ultimately, Stewart Lee was brought up on charges of BLASPHEMY.
Yes, blasphemy. He has a great joke about that, but I will let you discover it for yourself.
Needless to say, if christians in the UK were upset, imagine what would happen to them here, so it pretty much destroyed any chances for big productions in the U.S.
That is all beside the point of the show. It’s just a bit of background…
When I returned from Montreal, I was raving to everyone who would listen (the bride, really) about Stewart Lee and his show, 90’s Comedian. When you see it, you see what stand-up can be and why someone like Dane Cook gets so much shit. It’s an arena where important and beautiful ideas can be conveyed. I am of the mind that stand ups are the philosophers of our society.
On the other hand, watching his show throws me in to the same sort of sadness that happens while watching a perfect movie like Eternal Sunshine… or Being John Malkovitch. I realize that I’ll never do something that great. (I aspire to that sort of thing… which is why I never get anything done… whole other story.)
I mentioned this to Stewart Lee and, instead of poo-pooing it, he owned it and said that it was the culmination of over 20 years of work. So… without further ado.
The final performance, ever, has been documented on DVD. Get it. At the very least, it’s funny. I mean, there’s that. On the other side of that you’ll see a perfect hour of theater.
http://www.gofasterstripe.com/cgi-bin/website.cgi?page=videofull&id=6
Cameron’s Travels
1st off: The bride has started an awesome blog called “Rational Moms” (no, but we’re trying) and you can read all the rational awesomeness at rationalmoms.com.
2nd off: Though nothing is ever certain, I’m told that the song I co-wrote with Russ Parrish has made the Steel (Metal Skool, Metal Shop Danger Kitty) Panther record. I’m sure they’re just telling me this to be nice and will let me know later that the record company changed their mind and it’s not going to be on the record but sorry dude we really wanted it on there but you know how it goes. For this pessimistic reason, I remain cautious. That will be the 4th song I’ve ever had on a record. Pretty nifty.
So that’s that…
For the past three weeks, I’ve been acting in a movie called Par-Fection: The Golf Movie aka Dean sure hopes they change the fucking title. An old friend, Drew Rosenberg, was hoping to get Eric Stoltz and me to play a pair of evil plastic surgeons who… well the plot is quite convoluted and byzantine, but for various reasons, we end up putting a young guy under to give him breast implants against his will.
Yep.
Well, Eric passed on it and drew was in for a penny, so she got stuck with me. I think it worked out quite well, though. I tried to get Rod Maclachlan, Lorenzo Poindexter or Stuart Fratkin the gig as the other guy, but she found a guy named Christopher Showerman. We had a splendid time and I think that Chris and I had a nice thing going. We attempted to add an enormous level of homo-erotic subtext to the parts and, well, I’m pretty sure it’s inescapable.
Happily, there were a few truly wonderful things about the experience…
One of the things that has bummed me out so much about having almost had a really successful career in showbiz was the realization that the parts I *do* get are small and I’m destined for nothing but double digits on the call sheet… i’ll never get another lead role in anything. They’ll all be “cameos” which is simply a nice way of saying shitty little bone of a part. As #3 on the Golf Movie call sheet, I was happily proven wrong. As a skeptic, I love being proven wrong and this was no exception at all!!
More importantly, much of the cast and crew were literally children way back when I was on the map and they’d all grown up watching my youth on cable. It made them happy. I had a very nice Sullivan’s Travels experience learning that even though I’m probably going to be, as the The Movie Channel promo was so nice to point out, a footnote in the history of showbiz, there are people who have been affected & effected (but not impacted, damn it!!!) by the stuff I had done. I’ve always been aware of it, but for some reason, it sunk in during this experience. One of the leads told me one of the reasons he’s an actor is because of Summer School.
I’ve always enjoyed working with female directors, too. The lack of on set dick waving is really nice and allows one to do work instead of see who is smarter, cooler, richer or whatever. Director as mother is better than director as general. Working, even if it’s a stupid fucking golf movie about a guy who gets tits against his will, is already an internal battle. It’s nice to not have one going on externally, ass well.
I also got to go out of town for an extended period of time to a beautiful place called Borrego Springs. Yes, it was almost as hot as the surface of the sun, but the room sure was nice and the desert is so lovely during the late summer. Shooting was at the resort where we were staying, so I’d finish my day, walk to my room, change and be standing in the pool within 10 minutes of wrap.
The bride was able to come out and hang so that kept me from missing her and getting depressed.
Mainly, I didn’t beat the shit out of myself. I was rusty on my first day and encountered some memorization issues, but after that nightmare, it clicked in and I was able to do stuff I wanted to do. I kept feeling a hammy/mugging urge and was able to resist it for the most part, though some hacky shit managed to shit its way out of me, I’m sure. Perhaps the stuff that I’m hoping is “good” is boring. Dunno. I was attempting to simply let my inner conniving prick ooze out. We’ll see.
It was a good time. I was #3 on the call sheet. How cool is that?
Hello Dere!
Marty Allen y Betty Ford Center out of their minds on blow. I think that’s Harvey Korman over Marty Allen’s shoulder. It’s as if Korman is saying “hello dere”.
I was having dinner by myself at the Old World restaurant in Beverly Hills back before you were born and Marty Allen was at the table next to me.
The bride and I saw him perform with his new wife doing all of the Rossi bits 7 or 8 years ago. It was truly awesome and I don’t mean that in the ironic sense. He was funny and cool and knew what was up. Really cool.
I think I might be the next Marty Allen. That bums me out, but I think that’s my slot.
Hello dere!
Nigerian Spam Scam Scam Review – Reno, NV
A really great review from the Reno show. Not just because it’s a good review, but he also writes about a couple of the important ideas. (important in terms of the show… not in terms of the real world)
BY FORREST HARTMAN • FORREST @ RGJ.COM • JULY 31, 2008
Nearly everyone has received one: An e-mail from a supposed Nigerian, desperate for assistance from an American who will help retrieve millions of dollars from the Nigerian government. Usually, the e-mailer promises a huge sum to the kind soul who provides a few thousand dollars for bribes or other incidental expenses.
Most people recognize the scam and delete the message immediately, but there are those who respond. Dean Cameron, architect of “The Nigerian Spam Scam Scam” theatrical production, says the results can be disastrous. In some cases, Cameron noted during his Tuesday night Artown show, Nigerian scammers have kidnapped and killed Americans. So, he didn’t feel at all bad for striking up a long-running correspondence with a scammer and turning it into an extremely funny show.
In presentation, “Spam Scam Scam” is simple. Cameron and his costar, Victor Isaac, stand behind podiums. Each has a laptop, and they do the production reader’s theater style, illustrating points with graphics displayed on a large screen between them. Sometimes, Cameron even pauses to play recordings of actual phone conversations.This is theater for the electronic age, with computers and digital photos key to both the show’s presentation and concept. The technology does not, however, make things sterile or cold. Cameron’s personality is infectious, and his sharp sense of humor is everywhere.
“Spam Scam Scam” starts lecture-style, with Cameron talking in brief generalities about Nigerian scams. Then, just when it seems he will deliver a PowerPoint lecture, he slips on a red satin smoking jacket and takes on the affectations of a very different Dean Cameron. This version lives in Florida, is more than a little off balance and was able to pique his scammer’s interest with one simple line.
“Great! Do you have any toast?”What follows is snippets of Cameron’s correspondence with his Nigerian pal, carefully edited to keep things moving. Cameron reads his portion of the e-mail with a nasally voice and zest, and on the opposite end of the stage, Isaac handles the responses. While it’s likely that one man wrote all of the e-mails to Cameron, they supposedly came from multiple people, so Isaac creates distinct characters for each. And he is great.
Even better than the performances, is the material itself, all culled from the most unlikely conversations you can imagine. Cameron repeatedly prodded his would-be conman with purposeful typos and ridiculous misunderstandings, including references to the Western Onion wire service, a request to know which city he should visit in Amsterdam and the following jewel, written in response to a request to ship money via DHL.
“Who is DHL? Is that a hockey league. There is a minor league hockey team in Miami, but I don’t think they are Nigerian.”
Folks who want to read more of the correspondence, can do so at Cameron’s Web site — www.spamscamscam.com — but that’s not as much fun as watching Cameron and Isaac deliver the lines live.
If this show ever makes it back to Reno, theater lovers will do well to attend.
Pretty nifty, eh? I like the good reviews. Especially when they’ve actually been watching and listening!
Yay!!!
nigerian spam scam scam
The heroes at windwood theatricals, savings and loan, got us another booking for next Jan 24 y Jan 25 in beautiful Largo, Florida at the Largo Cultural Center. After adding it to the schedule at spamscamscam.com I realized that we will be doing this years’ entire season (except for next week in reno) in the space of three consecutive weekends.
We’ll also probably be doing the showcase the 3rd week of January. (Unless jewtopia fucks it all up again)
We’ll basically be on the road over four wees. Sort of like we’re on tour or some something. That’ll be pretty cool. Unless I have a job. Sucks to be Victor!!!
