Denis Leary

leary
Originally uploaded by tonbabydc


Not a bad night, though nothing particularly exciting happened. No porn stars, no hollow apologies for my bad taste, (and certainly nothing as embarrassing as Denis Leary's own career decisions), just another night out with Pornmaster-T and Captain Sensitive.

Leary was coming off the success of his first album back in 92 or whenever, and was doing a tour in support for his upcoming HBO Special. Most of the material was about parenthood and the new (at that time) trend towards gourmet flavored coffee. Nothing really amazing....

The standout bit was probably his story about accidentally farting five minutes into a transcontinental flight (Alaska to Asia).....I'm not going to try and recreate it, but I think you get the schtick: he has a 20-minute layover, he smokes a cigarette, eats an egg salad sandwich from a vending machine and drinks a warm soda before getting back on the flight, whereupon he busts ass and pisses everyone off as the air is recycled over the course of the next 11 hours.

The real star of the night, though, was undoubtedly opener Jeff Garlan (Jeff Greene...the fat guy from "Curb Your Enthusiasm"). Garlan was absolutely kick-ass. He improvised liberally through his set, touching on his experiences with phone sex, his technique for stealing hotel PPV porn, and a completely hysterical bit about reaching 40 and realizing that your college diploma is worthless, and your wife despises you because her butt has gotten too big for her liking. (The repeated exclamation of "SHITTY PIECE OF PAPER...BIG FAT ASS!!!!!" was central to this bit, and became an annoying catch phrase for myself, PMT and the Captian for several months after this show).

I'm struggling with how I'm going to wrap this one up, so I'll just go for the easiest way out:

As you will notice on the stub, this concert took place during the summer, with an abnormally early door time. This meant that the sun was still up when we drove down and parked for the concert. But it was well into the night time when we walked out.

Now, listen, I sometimes like to embellish how much shadier and more dangerous the U Street area was back in the mid-90's, but it was never quite as bad as I like to make it out to be. (Compared to the sorrority house traffic nightmare that U Street is today, however, I think the tall tales serve an important purpose). The neighborhood *could* be a little rough back then, and my car *was* broken into that one time. And so was Joe's from the Milkomatics, as he was loading out from a gig at the Velvet, now that I think of it....Oh, and then there was that time when one of the neighborhood crackheads pulled a knife on me (well, a steak knife, to be honest) as I was trying to get in my car.

But bottom line, if you kept your wits, these incidents could be kept to a minimum.

There was no assuring PMT and the Captain of this as we crossed V Street. What we had on our hands were two very frightened white people. In fact, other than the one or two times that the Captain came out to the Velvet Lounge or the Black Cat to see my old band, I can say with relative certainty that this was the first and last time that either of them ventured into the non-Smithsonian inner-reaches of the dark city. In fact, since then PMT has moved to West Virginia.

That's right. West Virginia.

One night in Shaw made a hard man humble.

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