Mic 14, and 15 Monday Nights
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Venues: One Star and 5 O’clock
Hosts: Bill Squire and Jimmy Killius / Big Rich Greene and Tyrone Gaines
Shows: Fight for Your Right / Monday Night Wrong
Set Times: 3, 5 Minute
Mid-March, and I hadn't been out in a couple of weeks. I work close to Lakewood on Mondays, so I can stay later and head straight to comedy.
I got to One Star Bar at 7:00 and found out there was a private party, which meant we were moving into the big room.
Bill was going to be late, and Jimmy was handling things himself.
The big room had challenges. Bill and Jimmy handled the back room like it was an aging Labrador retriever—slow, loyal, familiar. But the big room? That was an angry Chihuahua with a mind of its own. It was hard to hear, people kept talking, but Jimmy was doing well.
I did a set about matriarchs.
We are a matriarchal family. Every firstborn for generations has been a woman—tough, self-sufficient, and mildly feral.
Cockroaches with good shoes and handbags.
My mother was the matriarch, so succession planning started when I was born. First steps, first words, first hostile takeover of the playground.
By ten, I was shadowing leadership—learning to ignore passive aggression and hanging pictures of myself on other people's refrigerators.
When my mother died, like all families, I immediately held a press conference in the hospital lobby.
"Thank you all for coming. Please take your seats. Phones off. There is a media blackout. You couch-commentating Wi-Fi hermits cannot be trusted."
This was in response to the surge of self-appointed content creator cousins live-posting family commentary to Facebook.
Let me clear up a few things:
My mother was no one's second mother. She did not love you like her own. If anything… she considered many of you unfinished projects.
I held my own, but it was a struggle. Jimmy was managing the noise, working the stage, and greeting people walking in the door directly behind him.
I may have said something from the floor about the room, the noise, and Jimmy's heroic multitasking. Jimmy responded by bringing me back to the stage to co-host.
It was fun. It was also weird.
Jimmy had started calling me "Vana." It was the kind of nickname that was half affection and half insult. He'd toss it out from the stage and follow it with jokes that walked the line just carefully enough to stay funny. Not mean, not kind—just calibrated low-grade sexism with stage lighting. The kind designed to see whether you could laugh at yourself or if you were going to file a complaint with management. I took it as comedy mentorship.
When it was over, we went to the 5 O'Clock after. I had no material, but it is such a welcoming room I figured I would see what improv skills I had. To be fair, I had been at a funeral earlier in the day for my daughter's father-in-law, and it provided some great material.
The funeral was at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. Old churches have the best statues. From my pew, I had St. Lucy and her eyeballs on a plate to my left, California Jesus with blue eyes and yellow flow dead ahead, and on my right—in direct contradiction—brown Joseph holding brown baby Jesus. It was a lot for the senses.
The 5 O'Clock has an energetic crowd, and when I mentioned Lucy's eyeballs, I was stopped with a loud "WHAAAT THA?" I then had to explain how she was martyred and had her eyeballs plucked out, which is why she is often depicted holding them on a plate. Yes, I understand how weird this sounds. Yes, these are my people.
I liked winging it. It felt good to be more free, less tied to a script.
So that became the routine — Mondays out for two mics: scripted new jokes at One Star and off-the-cuff material at the 5 O'Clock.
I call the girls sometimes on the way home to tell them about the sets. I told them I co-hosted but that it was a little weird and demeaning. In the telling I started to hear the material for the next set.
There is so much out here I'm not sure about or comfortable with. But I can push back — as long as it's funny enough.
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