From the archives (October 12, 2011): Wisconsin Idyll in Funny Hats with Rocket Launchers

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

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 singing with Pat McCurdy and becoming a tiny bit famous, at least in that small world. 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” have 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. Once social media became a “thing”, some of us found one another again. In fact, in 2017, Pat and I got on the phone so I could interview him about Elvis. Those old ties will never die.

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 a great music club (immortalized in High Fidelity). Sometimes, after emerging from a Pat show, we would go into the alley next to the Biograph, at 1 o’clock in the morning, and re-enact John Dillinger’s death. We took turns being Dillinger or the Lady in Red. “We” means: me, Ann Marie, Phil, Kenny, Pepper, sometimes my M. I still remember M. as Dillinger, staggering through the darkness. There were more people who would join. There we would be, swooning to the ground in the alley, pretending to be John Dillinger. We would whoop it up “at Pat” and then go out to a bar afterwards, 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 getting us hotels, organizing our time, taking time off work, putting together the show itself. Everything changed for me that weekend, lots of fallout I couldn’t foresee at the time.

Ann Marie and I in the hotel room in Milwaukee, having the most hilarious 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). He wrote it for us! And at night we performed for 3,000 drunken people at Summer Fest. I had a solo, the song I always sang with Pat, called “We Made Love” – and I wore a black bustier, biker shorts, combat boots, and a black derby. Where I got the balls, you’ll have to ask the entertainment gods. At one point during one of the shows, I finished the song and then had the unreal experience of hearing 3,000 drunk Wisconsin residents chant my name over and over, like I was a Pharaoh. That’s as famous as I have ever been.

Imitating Madonna in Truth or Dare, Pat gathered us all for a prayer circle before each show. The experience was EPIC for the four of us, but somewhat rote for Pat. He was quietly amused about it all. He had played such crowds many times before. Our prayers were a mixture of manic joking and intense sincerity. I was holding hands with Pat and he was looking at me. Well, not at my face. I started my prayer, in my bustier and derby hat, and I had an earnest moment of thankfulness. 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: “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 I cannot sufficiently explain, and I am sort of in my underwear. Actually, I am totally in my underwear.) The “PAT” spelled out behind me speaks volumes. It was too perfect.

Before the weekend in Milwaukee, Phil and I traveled with a big group of people to spend a couple of days at Kenny’s family farm out in the wilds of Wisconsin. We chilled out, doing nothing, before trekking into Milwaukee to join up with Pat at Summer Fest.

About 15 of us convened at the 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 organism. You know how it happens that way sometimes? We cooked mounds of food. There was enough 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 fields saying, “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 …”

You didn’t have to participate in group events. You could sit on the porch and read for eight hours if you wanted. I took long runs through the countryside, returning to the house drenched in sweat. We played volleyball. We did nothing. We took naps. We were kids, really. Chosen family, really.

I had a mild crush on one of the girls. She was an actress, had just played Imogen in Cymbeline at Chicago Shakespeare, and she dated our friend Jeff. She was blonde and pale, wore a jumper-type sundress, and had this Zen quality, undercut by her deadpan voice. She seemed cool, not cool like ‘over it’, but cool like “has her shit together”. I have no idea what happened to her, but I remember her fondly, swinging on the swing, standing at the end of a dirt road, staring across the fields. Friendly. She never seemed to be just one thing. I found her captivating, which I think is evident in the photos I took.

In the photos, if you see anyone wearing a white T-shirt with a cartoony face on it (and there are many), that is a Pat McCurdy T-shirt, with cartoons by Pat McCurdy. Everyone at the house was a serious Pat-head. To this day, I have a number of “Pat T-shirts” in my drawer.

There was a 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 hunger. A couple of us were designated drivers. I wasn’t drinking at all then since it would interfere with my fitness regimen which I was devoted to with the heat of 1000 suns. I got behind the wheel with a bunch of drunk guys 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 cups of beer in their hands, crowded in the car with me. One of them was taking a huge swig of beer just as I careened by the cop car. The cop gave us a hard time (of course), but the mood all softened because Kenny grew up in the town, knew the cop, and the cop knew his Aunt Sally, or whatever. They made me drive all of us to the station where I had to take a breathalyzer test. We were DESPERATE for food, having eaten all the food in the house, and the cops in the station treated our predicament with some amusement, giving us suggestions on good places to eat (as I blew into the breathalyzer). “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 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 also freaking out because they had seen us on the side of the road with the cop car. They drove by, staring out at us, horrified. Much hilarity.

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

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

There we were, strangers to one another, strangers to Kenny’s family, but we fully embraced the ritual. We were kids in our mid-20s, but we spent hours huddled over our rocket, detailing it, painting slogans on it, taking turns, making suggestions. You can see us painting the rocket in some of the photos.

At happy hour time, someone made a vat of cocktails, we all got drinks (mine was virgin!), put on funny hats and trooped down the road to launch off our the rocket.

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

I wonder if it is because I took so many pictures. Memory is a funny thing that way. But the night was beautiful, a real country night, with crickets chirping, the air filled with the scent of hay and cut grass. The company was good, the hats were funny, the mood hilarious and ribald.

Maybe I also remember that weekend so vividly because everything was about to fall apart. I should say “change” but “fall apart” is more accurate. 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 to New York in less than a year’s time, much of my decision to move having to do with what went down during this particular summer, and this particular weekend. It was a time full of import, warnings and signals, much of which I interpreted incorrectly. I was about to make some major choices I regret to this day.

Ultimately, what remains, though, is the memory of that group of people at that particular time, kids, really, out at the farm, having a respite, an idyll, the warm sun on our backs, the leisurely energy on the porch, the comforting knowledge that we had nowhere else on earth to be, our obligations were minimal, we were free. What remains is the cool twilight air, the shadows lengthening as we wandered through the fields, looking for the pieces of our rocket which had launched up into the empty air, blazing with color.

2026 thoughts
Nothing really new to report, the piece captures what I wanted to say. I still love the memory of the time at Kenny’s farm and our time in Milwaukee right after. Time marches on, but if I could stop time and stay in one spot forever – that whole week would be a top contender. I knew what was going on was an anomaly – never to be repeated – I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to be performing at Milwaukee Summer Fest again, or be right there at that time always … I did appreciate it as it was happening. The moment before life got real serious and things happened you couldn’t take back.

From the archives archive
I Was Told I Would Get Wings (2004)
My Situational Crush (2006)
Chicago: The Cold Extreme (2004)
A Sea-Level Kind of Girl (2006)
There Was Already Something a Little Off… (2003)
“Go Ask Sheila.” (2010)
How We Talked (2011)