The story of how I came to be in the band known as “Awesome”

I used to be in this show called Carlotta’s Late Night Wing-Ding. I played Carlotta’s wayward son Slaw (named after my daddy’s favorite salad – if I was a girl they was gonna call me Ambrosia). Occasionally I’d play the banjo. The show would have musical guests, and one of them was Jose Bold, aka John Osebold. (Now John and I had a tiny bit of overlap in the theater department at UW, but we didn’t really know each other from back then. Also, he used to have a band named Player King and I used to have a band called Mah Jong, and we both played together one night at a crappy bar in the U-district. But other than that, we didn’t know each other.) John invited me (as Slaw) to play a song with him (I think it was an arrangement of Dueling Banjos), and then another. (Click HERE to hear one of these things, a song John wrote to celebrate the 8th year of the Wing Ding.) Around the same time John doing things with John A and Evan, and pretty soon the four of us were doing things together and we called ourselves “Awesome,” as a joke more or less – I mean, I know that I didn’t at that time think that it was a permanent thing. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that we’d still be playing together 5 years later. No one said, “hey, let’s start a band and really make a go of this. And I have our band name – It’s ‘Awesome’.” We just kept playing together because it was fun and the name stuck.

So anyway, I haven’t performed with the Wing Ding in a couple of years now, but the reason I started thinking about all this is that this weekend (Friday and Saturday, 10:30pm at Open Circle Theater), I’ll be in the Wing Ding again, reprising Slaw. So if anyone wants to see me do a southern accent and fall down a lot, this is your chance. Oh, and the Half Brothers will the be musical guest, and we’ll be debuting some new songs from a piece that we’ve informally been calling The Chicken Cycle – it’s basically a Sgt. Rigsby’s shadow puppet show with Half Brothers music.

Oh, and this weekend is also NAKED NIGHT at the Wing Ding: If you come half naked, you get half off your ticket. Come buck naked, get in for a buck. (Nobody’s required to be naked of course. Most people don’t.) But you may see people in various states of nakedness. The Goddess Kring (of cable-access-TV fame) will also be a guest. It’s going to be a strange strange night.