Cho Dependent

So one of our neighbors - I could interchangeably have said good friends, but the neighbors who live upstairs and down the hill are kind of a wonderful group in my mind so they are all the neighbors, despite their very distinct differences - anyway, one of our neighbors helps to put on the New York Comedy Festival every year, so we was able to get us all tickets to difference comedy shows last night. Aviva and I lucked out and got tickets to see Margaret Cho doing her "Cho Dependent" routine and it was awesome ... actually so was the whole night ...

We met up with all the neighbors at a restaurant called Braai, a South African place in Hell's Kitchen. Braai actually means roasted meat in Afrikaans, and is often used as another word for BBQ. The place was pretty good, the leftover appetizers that we got to try when we arrived were nice, as were the ribs and the ostrich steak. The best meal was the "bunny chow" that Aviva got, which was a curried lamb stew in a hollowed out half a loaf of wheat bread, topped with a crusty piece of french bread.

After dinner, we all went to different shows, Rosie O'Donnell, Joel McHale and our show, Margaret Cho's "Cho Dependent" at the Beacon theater on 75th and Broadway. The show started with a second comedian, John Roberts, who basically put on wigs and did impressions. It was passable, and if I were at a club with a 2 drink minimum, I probably would have laughed a lot, but as it was he was only okay. After about 15 minutes Margaret Cho came on, and proceeded to rock the house for the next hour and a half. The show was hysterical and incredibly raunchy and politically incorrect, with a lot of discussion of cock, blow jobs anal sex and a good deal of focus on the perfection of being a gay man and having gay sex all the time, and also a lot of focus on being asian, being LGBT and being a minority in general. There were a number of songs from the new album, "Cho dependent", about murder, loving cock and older women's pussies.

Something I had not realized is that Margaret Cho is much funnier in person because she has fantastic comic timing in combination with really great use of facial expressions. The theater had a huge screen set up over the stage with close-up on Margaret, so that everyone in the room could see her face very well. Although a good number of people (probably 15 - 20 over the course of the show) left during the performance, almost everyone else seemed to love it. We laughed loud and long, with many tears ... though not nearly as much as the group of gay men behind us, who were laughing so hard it sounded like they were having asthma attacks the entire show. The final act was a song about loving dick, in conjunction with the Empire city gay men's chorus ... which was a nice touch. The two encores were also both songs, which were funny, but did not hit the heights reached in the middle of the show when she was imitating her Korean mother.

After the show we met up with all the neighbors at the Atlantic Grill on 65th for the after party. We were actually on the list (I have never been on a list before), which was kind of exciting, and once we got in it turned out that everything was free, which was awesome. We parked ourselves at a booth and enjoyed some Jameson and a variety of Absolute vodka flavors (sponsored by absolute and Jameson) - Absolute Mango and Absolute Vanilla are both delicious, and various American style tapas - beef tenderloin with blue cheese, little dollops of ice cream on a stick, cheesy profiteroles, a lobster bisque cappuchino, various types of sushi - it was a lot of fun. Aviva and I took off early, around midnight, because I needed to work the next day and she was prepping for her upcoming thesis defense. We almost didn't make the train because of stalled subways, and ended up running down 42nd street at 1225 (Aviva was a trooper running several blocks in high-heeled thigh high boots) and barely making the 1230 train ... but overall it was a really fantastic night out - huge props to AJ for setting everything up.