I went to the weekly standup comedy showcase at Niagara, a bar on 7th Street in the East Village (of Manhattan). As I walked in, an overweight Irish comedian named Sean Donnelly was saying, “You know how every house has a junk drawer? You can tell how rich or poor a family is by the junk drawer. We were poor — my father was a prison guard — so our junk drawer just had a few coins, some string. When I went to my rich friend Mikey’s house, I’d look in his junk drawer, and they’d have $100 bills, the keys to the Jaguar, Toblerone.
“So one day I was rummaging through our junk drawer, looking for batteries, when I found this strange little object — a metal half-circle with a handle, and the inside of the circle was sharp. I said to my father, ‘What is this thing?’
“He replied: ‘Do you really want to know?’ (That should have been a warning sign.)
“I said, ‘Sure.’
“He explained, ‘That’s what we use to cut down the prisoners who hang themselves.'”
There is nervous laughter.
“What I want to know is,” asked Sean, “what was that thing doing in the fucking junk drawer?”
After Sean finished, Erik Bergstrom, the MC, mused: “New York — if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere! Except the woods. You probably can’t make it in the woods.”
Next came Claudia Cogan, a young lesbian who lives with her mother. She revealed, “I go to lesbian bars. You’re not allowed to dress up for a lesbian bar, but you can look like your favorite writer: ‘Oh, there’s Kurt Vonnegut talking to Virginia Woolf!'”
Last was Myka Fox, a blonde who recalled: “One time I was having sex with a guy, and he started barking like a dog. I didn’t know what to do! I couldn’t bring myself to meow. I started thinking, ‘Maybe I should be the dog owner, and say, “Bad dog! Get off the bed! You know you’re not allowed on the bed!”‘”
The show is free, every Monday night; it’s called “Crickets”!