By Chris Quilter
A while back, I became worried about my old friend Ted, not that he deserved it. We were back in touch after our last falling out but hadn’t come close to our next one. So when he didn’t reply to a couple of emails, I thought he might be dead, which is a perfectly reasonable example of octogenarian thinking. How typical of Ted to die without giving me a heads up, thus depriving me of the chance to pretend not to take some satisfaction in outliving him. But then Ted (“Ted” by the way) checked his inbox, and our 50-year friendship continued to muddle along.
Ted is one of those high-maintenance friends who gets under your skin, itches like mad, vanishes in a huff, and then returns unannounced as if nothing had happened or was your fault if it had. I always “took him back,” even when I wondered why. Is there a lower bar in friendship than in love? Maybe, even if there shouldn’t be. Still, I think the main answer to “why” was what Jessica Rabbit (“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”) said when asked what she saw in the supremely annoying Roger Rabbit: “He makes me laugh.”
Making me laugh meets my minimum acceptable “c**p-to-cash” ratio. (I’ve censored myself because this is a family newspaper, and if you can’t read between the asterisks, you’re not the demographic for this column.) Simply put: no friendship and nothing worth doing is ever free of asterisks. It’s all about the ratio, and I owe a debt of gratitude to Bree Burgess Rosen for introducing me to this life-altering metric some years ago.
Rather than bask in the afterglow of her recent Art Star Award from the Laguna Beach Arts Alliance for creating and being the driving farce behind Lagunatics, Bree has been busy doing it again for the 31st time. I was her happy helper for fifteen shows. Then my mojo got clobbered while I was dodging Covid, doomscrolling world events, pushing 80, fighting Measure Q on Nextdoor, and being a cog in the wheel of an up-to-now doomed movement to build some affordable housing in town. The asterisks had spoken.
Why then, did I ask Bree to admit me back into the town’s best adult sandbox to work on “Laughing Matters,” the latest Lagunatics? Because I needed it. Barring a personality transplant, a moody bugger like me needs a counterbalancing RDA of laughter, ideally of the helpless kind. So I scraped the barnacles off my sense of humor and rejoined Bree and her stable of unstable writers. We’ve written songs about taxes, surveys, fire pits, Rivian, the 133, evergreen staples like goats and parking, and, yes, even the viral vixen of Victoria Beach. And we’ve convinced ourselves that we have a show whose cash ratio handily exceeds the cost of a ticket.
“Laughing Matters” is also the definition of a play on words. Is there a better use for words than playing with them and then setting them to music? I mean, what if our species is the last of the carbon-based life forms? What if the Singularity doesn’t find its creators adequately amusing or doesn’t sound like Scarlett Johansson? What happens if we don’t live long enough to find out? I have no idea either, but don’t you feel a song coming on?
“Laughing Matters” runs from late September to mid-October at No Square Theatre in historic Legion Hall. See NoSquare.org for tickets and deets.
