Wisconsin Idyll Involving Funny Hats and Rocket Launches

A Memory Lane Re-Post, Put Up Again In Honor of My Friend Phil’s Birthday. I Love You, Phil!

Me, Kenny, Phil, and Ann Marie, in the photo booth at Lounge Ax in Chicago. On a “Pat night”.

There are people in our lives associated with a very specific time and place. And that’s okay. But I feel lucky that some of those relationships have moved forward into the present day. Continuity. I’m a big fan.

One of the most specific times in my life, so much so that it is practically an anomaly, was living in Chicago and participating in the ritual of going to the regular Monday night Pat McCurdy shows at Lounge Ax and also then singing with Pat McCurdy and becoming a tiny bit famous, at least in that small world, and that whole crazy Ann-Margret time of my life. It’s like something drowned and captured in amber, an Atlantis, but … it did actually happen. I have the photographs to prove it.

The “Pat McCurdy crowd” are all friends on Facebook, and we’ve all moved on from those wild sleepless nights in Chicago so long ago, when Monday night at Lounge Ax was THE place to be, and we were all there, come hell or highwater, year after year after year.

Once I stopped going to Pat shows, I lost contact with a lot of people. This was before the days of Facebook, or even cell phones. I moved to New York. That was that. But slowly, some of us have found one another again. Phil and I have found one another.

The “Pat McCurdy crowd” was a gaggle of people who convened at Lounge Ax every Monday. Lounge Ax was right across from the Biograph Theatre, and so often, after emerging from a Pat show, we would go into the alley beside the Biograph, at 1 o’clock in the morning, and re-enact John Dillinger’s death. Taking turns being Dillinger or the Lady in Red. We would whoop it up “at Pat” and then go out to a bar afterwards and play the jukebox, play some pinball, yell and scream and laugh, and then stumble home at 3 a.m. with our respective significant others. Only to do it all again the following Monday. We had no Internet. No cell phones. We just knew where to find each other. We always knew where we would be on any given Monday.

One summer, Pat McCurdy hired four of us – me, Phil, Kenny, and Ann Marie, see above photos – to perform with him at the Milwaukee Summer Fest. It was an enormous undertaking, hilarious in the extreme, it involved a very complicated process of giving names and checking in and it was personally a very important time in my life, but I will try to be discreet for a change. Everything changed for me that weekend. I made some decisions that weekend that ended up having vast repercussions, fallout that I couldn’t foresee at the time.

On the flipside, it was, hands down, the most fun I have ever had in my life. Pat and I holed ourselves up in a little Milwaukee recording studio one sunny afternoon and recorded our duet (which appears on his CD Showtunes). And at night we performed for 3,000 drunken people at Summer Fest. I had a solo, the song I always sang with Pat, and I wore a black bustier, biker shorts, combat boots, and a black derby. Where I got the cajones, you’ll have to ask the entertainment gods. At one point during the show, after I sang the song, I had the unreal experience of having 3,000 drunk Wisconsin residents chant my name over and over, like I was a dictator or a Pharaoh. That’s as famous as I have ever felt.

Imitating Madonna in Truth or Dare, Pat gathered us all for a prayer circle before each show. The four of us were so excited it was EPIC for us. Pat was more quietly amused about it all. He had played such crowds many times before. Our prayers were a mixture of manic joking and intense sincerity. One moment I remember: we were all holding hands in a circle, a la Madonna and her dancers. I was holding hands with Pat. I started my prayer, in my bustier and derby hat, and it was an earnest moment of thankfulness for me, and Pat was looking down at me as I prayed, and here is what happened.

Me: “Dear God, thank you so much for this great experience, with these great friends. We are so happy to all be here–”
Pat: (interrupting, he couldn’t help it) “Sheila, you are stacked.”

So much for my prayer.

There is a photograph of me backstage after one of the performances that captures in all its blurry chaos, the high of those nights. (It is a strange photo that I cannot sufficiently explain, and I am also sort of in my underwear. Actually, I am totally in my underwear. In public.) The “PAT” spelled out behind me was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Before the weekend in Milwaukee, Phil and I traveled with a big group of people to spend a weekend at Kenny’s family farm out in the wilds of Wisconsin. We were at the farm for three days or so, before we trekked into Milwaukee to join up with Pat at the Summer Fest.

About 15 of us convened at Kenny’s farm. Tents were erected in the yard, we crashed all over the house. It was an unforgettable weekend. I only knew three of the guys there – everyone else was new to me, but the 15 of us clicked as a group. Many of us were actors, of course, but there were plenty who were not, and everyone shared a sense of whimsy and fun that made the entire weekend a nonstop laugh-riot. We were gay and straight, men and women, and we somehow mind-melded into one continuous organism. You know how it happens that way sometimes? Magic. We cooked mounds of food. There was too much pasta salad to feed an entire army, let alone 15 people, and so periodically one of us would get on the microphone and blast our voice out over the grounds saying, “Yes, there is a Pasta Salad Blue Plate Special going on right now … Please … I beg you … come eat more of this shit … we need to finish it …”

I took long runs through the countryside, returning to the house drenched in sweat. We played volleyball. We did nothing. We took naps. It was so awesome. We were kids, really, but we knew how to organize a weekend.

There was one notorious incident when the house ran out of food (including pasta salad) and so we all decided to travel, via caravan of cars, into the town about 10 minutes away. Many people had been drinking all day, so there was much drunkenness exacerbated by panicked hunger. A couple of us (including myself: I wasn’t drinking at all at that time in my life since it would interfere with my fitness regimen which I was devoted to with the heat of 1000 suns) were designated drivers. So I got behind the wheel with a bunch of drunken yahoos (ie: my dear friends) in the back seat and headed into town.

I was pulled over by a cop for going 55 in a 25 mile-an-hour zone, which wouldn’t have been that big a deal except for the fact that I had five wasted men, all of whom HAD BEERS IN THEIR HANDS, crowded in the car with me. One of them had been taking a huge swig of the beer just as I careened by the cop car. The cop gave us a hard time (naturally), but it was all softened since Kenny grew up in the town, and knew the cop, and the cop knew his Aunt Sally, or whatever. But still, they made me drive to the station where I had to take a breathalizer test. We had been DESPERATE for food, having eaten all the food in the house, and the cops in the station treated our predicament with some bemusement, giving us suggestions on good places to eat (as I blew into the breathalizer machine). “Have you tried the bowling alley? They have great burgers.” (I kept blowing into the machine.) “There’s a fireman’s picnic down the road aways … might find some food there.” My friends Phil and Kenny stood on either side of me, rubbing my back soothingly as I nervously blew into the breathalyzer. I hadn’t had alcohol in weeks, but I do have a guilty conscience so I was sure that SOME of that would show up in the results.

There Phil and Kenny were, actually wasted, rubbing my back, saying, “You’re doing so good, Sheila …”

I got a speeding ticket, that’s all, and then we went to meet up with the rest of our friends, who were at the bowling alley, eating. And freaking out because they had seen us over at the side of the road with the cop car. More hilarity. Ah, youth.

Kenny’s family had a yearly farm ritual, which he introduced to us as a group activity. Here is how it worked:

–Buy a rocket, one that you can launch.
–Go to the dollar store and buy paints and brushes.
–Spend a leisurely day painting the rocket together. Make it flashy, make it fabulous.
–At sunset, put on funny hats (there was a box of them in the closet) and walk down the dirt road to the nearest field to launch the rocket off.
–Wander through the field looking for all the pieces.

There we were, strangers to one another, strangers to Kenny’s family, but we all fully embraced the ritual. We were kids in our mid-20s, but we spent hours huddled over that rocket, detailing it, painting slogans on it … and then, at happy hour time, someone made a vat of cocktails, we all got drinks (mine was virgin!), we all put on funny hats and we trooped down the road to launch the rocket off.

I don’t know why that night stays so vivid in my memory.

I wonder if it is because I took so many pictures of it. Memory is a funny thing that way. But the night was beautiful, a real country night, with crickets chirping and the air filled with the scent of hay and cut grass. The company was good, the mood rather hilarious and ribald. I had a huge girl-crush on one of the girls there (take a wild guess which one in the photos below), and I have to say I still really like the pictures I took. They capture the feel of the weekend.

If you see anyone wearing a white T-shirt with a strange cartoony face on it (and there are many), that is a Pat McCurdy Tshirt, cartoons by Pat McCurdy. Everyone at that house was a serious Pat-head.

Maybe I also remember that weekend so vividly because everything was about to fall apart. I would stop going to Pat shows. I would lose track of that crowd. I would throw myself into a relationship with Michael in 2 month’s time (I didn’t even know Michael existed during the Milwaukee Summer Fest weekend, which seems incredible to me now: there was a time when Michael didn’t exist for me?). I would move from Chicago in less than a year’s time, to New York City, much of my decision to move having to do with what went down during this particular Milwaukee Summer Fest weekend. Or at least: what it revealed to me and how it all played out. It was a potent time, full of import – none of which I interpreted correctly. I guess that’s life.

Ultimately, what really remains, though, is the memory of that group of people at the farm, a respite, an idyll, the warm sun on our backs, the leisurely energy on the porch, the rock-solid comforting knowledge that you had nowhere else on earth you would rather be, and none of us had to be anywhere else anyway, our obligations were minimal. What remains is the cool twilight air, the shadows lengthening as we wandered through the big empty fields, looking for the pieces of our rocket that had launched up into the empty air, blazing with color.

Happy birthday, Phil. I love you. I’m so glad our friendship was not just a “time and place” kind of thing. Go check out Phil’s blog, Love, a Lawn and a Labrador to see what he’s all about. Wonderful writer, wonderful man.