2006-07-18
14:25
YOUR NEW CREDO
I was on stage at a bar called Dante’s in Portland Oregon, It was the end of the weekly open-mic and about 6 of my fellow comics and I where on stage performing drunken improv for the two dozen or so customers that remained. Dante’s is an interesting kind of bar, it’s the kind of place that on a given night the entertainment may be a lesbian rapper, cowboy poetry or naked women on a trapeze, in short it’s the bar Stanhope plays when he comes to Portland. . To add to the ever present weirdness the bar management employed , and by employed in mean gave free drinks to, “Prozac The Alcoholic Bunny”. Prozac’s job description consisted of two things,#1 sit at the bar and consume alcohol, and #2 wear a full length pink bunny suit including head, that’s it, no standing on a street corner handing out fliers while wearing a sandwich board during lunch hour, just drink and wear the suit. I would say that out of all the jobs that exist that require warring an animal costume this was a pretty good one in fact I would guess that in the animal costume wearing community the prospective applicants for this job probably rivaled the Packer season ticket waiting list. The only potential shit-end to this vocational stick is that there are members of the dinking community that when presented with a 6 foot pink bunny take the opportunity to wrestle it, which leads us to our story.
Around midnight the staff from the local comedy club rolled in. At the time Portland boosted only one week long club ,which for the purposes of this story we will call “Harvey’s“. A few members of the staff have remained consistent throughout the 15 year life of “Harvey’s” one is the manager-bartender who we will call “Tim”. The thing about the staff of comedy clubs is that they work there for the same reason the comics do, we are not 9-5 type people. We are night people, the type that like to drink too much, consume illegal chemicals and hangout at bars that employ giant human stuffed animals. I guess their is a case to be made that Tim’s assault on the bunny was just an overly friendly greeting gone awry ,but in any case this is what I witnessed.
I looked in to the crowd to see Tim holding Prozac in a headlock yelling “you got to get up there, you got to get up there“, the sight of a grown man doing battle with a mascot was something that I shant soon forget, then a ruckus as bar security moved in pushed all the action out of the bar and into the street, I leapt from the stage and out the door to find people pushing each other, Prozac’s head was completely off now breaking down the third wall of disbelief ,or is it fourth wall, anyway I found Tim his shirt ripped bleeding slightly from the lip and I asked him what happened. His response was simply
”I was just fucking around and then the bunny got serious”
It took a moment for the sublime beauty of this statement to pierce my consciousness .The subtle perfection, it was Bukowski meets Gump, who among us has not gazed into the bathroom mirror and had that same thought. Your bunny may be your relationship or your job but at one time you tried to give your bunny a bear hug and things got out of hand.
So heres to you America, may you never stop fighting that bunny.
