Seattle Update
Saturday, March 13th, 2010Hello all,
I post this from the lovely city of Seattle, the Jewel of the Western Something or Other. Accompanied by my head of security Vinny, we have eaten and drank a swath across this mountainy land. We’ve had a wonderful few days in this lovely city, enjoying all the beer, food, and kindness that the people of the Pacific Northwest have to offer. As we prepare to depart for our next stop of San Francisco, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on Seattle.
The beer: Being from Boston, I likes-a the beers-a. (Apparently, I’m an Italian cartoon character as well now). Luckily, Seattle is a great beer town. As I do whenever I travel, I tried to keep it local. Luckily, there are tons of microbrews in the area. My two favorites were Manny’s and Mac and Jack’s. Although the area is also known for some good wines, I stayed away from the vino because I’m not a foppish dandy.
The food: We have eaten a lot of it. As we shoveled clam chowder down our gullets this afternoon, Vinny thought long, hard, and deep and said, “We’ve been focusing too much on drinking. (pause) We should try to eat three lunches today.” He’s an American hero, that Vinny. The seafood here certainly didn’t disappoint, but the star of the Seattle food scene is most certainly a Cuban sandwich joint in Fremont called Paseo’s. This was, by a longshot, the finest sandwich I’ve ever had in my life. Roasted pork, caramalized onions, some sort of delicious sweet sauce, awesomely toasted bread – I wanted to climb into the sandwich like a womb and live there for nine months until my gender could be determined and then I’d eat my way out and cry for the next eighteen years that the world is such a horrible place to live in compared to being in that sandwich. It was a good sandwich.
The sites: We didn’t hit too many of the touristy things, but I did take a poop at the top of the Space Needle, fulfilling that gypsy’s prophecy from when I was ten. (That’s right – I’m not afraid to repeat jokes from my facebook status updates). Vinny and I were considering – what if for whatever reason, I developed a psychological problem in which I could ONLY poop at the top of the Space Needle? Something about the elevation and the gravity’s effect on my bowels made it the only place on earth I could poop. I’d have to move to Seattle, figure out a way to afford the $17 admission price three times a day – it’d be horrible. (That’s right – I poop three times a day).
The people: Luckily, I have a few friends and fans in the Seattle area, so we were able to hang with some cool folks for pretty much our entire stay. I found the people of Seattle very friendly, although there was a lot more “street people-style” yelling at random bystanders than I expected from such an ostensibly mellow town. My friends who have lived here for a while used words such as “nice to your face,” “uptight,” and especially “passive aggressive” to describe the characters of their Seattle brethren, but I didn’t find any of those things to be true during my stay. Of course, how could I? If they were being nice to my face, I’d just assume they liked me. Hmmm… what a conundrum.
The rock: My show at the Skylark Cafe was very fun. I was warned that West Coast audiences could be a bit standoff-ish, so I wasn’t sure whether I could win them over. But my fears were baseless – people were polite, attentive, and engaged. I even got some sing-a-long action going on “Monica Monica.” That’s when you know people don’t care if they’re coming off as cool or not – when they’re squealing high-pitched “Oo oo oo’s” at 8:30pm on a Thursday night. People were definitely into it and wanted to buy CDs. When my credit card swiper didn’t work, we worked out this very hippie “CD for pitchers of beer” exchange program. It was groovy, man.
Overall, Seattle has been very good to me. I look forward to visiting again soon, assuming Paseo’s hasn’t done enough damage to my heart that I’ll drop dead before my show in San Francisco on Monday. Baby I hear the blues a-calling, tossed salad and scrambled eggs…
