Thanks to the intrepid emailing of our fabulous intern Sally, we now have a date booked at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA on Tuesday, March 23rd in their West Lecture Hall! Considering everything I know about Amherst I learned from Running With Scissors (the book AND the movie!), I am excited to see how the actual town compares to the memoirs of Augusten Burroughs. Hopefully in visiting Amherst I won’t somehow get adopted by a crazy psychiatrist who will trick me into attempting suicide in order to get out of school (um.. spoiler alert?). Anyway, if you have never read the book or seen the movie you should go and do that because they’re both great.
Anyway, if you are in the Western Massachusetts neighborhood on Tuesday, March 23rd you should come see us perform our comics slideshow/music thing at Hampshire!
As I (Liz) have been struggling to finish the 4th and 5th Chapters of Freewheel before the end of February so I can have the book out to print in March so I can get them back by April and have them on the tour in May (phew!), I’ve been having some trouble keeping up with booking the remainder of the tour (being some of Leg Two and almost all of Leg Three). Since time is of the essence when booking a tour, I enlisted the help of our new intern, Sally Bloodbath!
Sally had already agreed to come on most of Leg Two and all of Leg Three (including our just-announced OFFICIAL last stop EVER at Heroes Con!) to help us keep organized, do some grunt work, and do a bunch of driving in exchange for the promise of adventure and the lure of being paid in not paying for gas. When I started freaking out last week about not being able to keep up with all the tour emails (and all the people who hadn’t been replying to them), I suggested she take over booking duties and she willingly complied. What a great intern!
Sally comes to us with several years of experience editing the celebrated comics anthology, Always Comics, with her co-editor Erin Griffin. She’s also been on the minicomics scene for a few years (which is how I met her), putting out such hilarious autobiographical tomes as Girls Don’t Make Passes at Boys With Moustaches (how could you resist that title?). She hails from Philly but currently resides in the Big Crapple, where MK and I both live and Gabby is soon to live. She is also a very snappy dresser and even if you don’t like to wear dresses she will wear them so well in front of you that it will make you think about it for half a second.
So, if you got an email from her about the Punchbuggy Tour, fear not! She is not a serial killer (yet), she is our first and most beloved intern. Let us give thanks unto her.
We’ve started trying to practice and record songs that we either played during the first leg of the Punchbuggy Tour, or think we might play on one of the next legs in spring 2010. Our plan is to hopefully have a little homemade CD of about 6 songs to sell on the next tours. So far we’ve record two, in an extremely lo-fi sound, because all we have access to is Garageband and my computer’s internal microphone. So it kind of sounds like we’re playing in a bathroom but like… that’s cool right? Isn’t that what the kids are into these days?
The name of our “band” is the New Depression Good Time All Star Jamboree Rest Stop Players. The name is something MK and I thought of as a joke before the first tour, back when we didn’t even think we’d be playing music on the tour. We thought we might bring our ukuleles and ask Gabby to bring his banjo so we could earn extra money busking at rest stops and we would only sing songs about being poor because of the new depression. MK and I wrote one song which is a recipe for soup, but other than that we never really wrote any original songs as the NDGTASJRSP.
It turned out that when we did bring our ukuleles and Gabby brought his banjo, we ended up learning new songs together on the road, and played them for people at our readings, and people seemed to like it so we kept doing it. Some people wanted recordings of the songs, but we didn’t have any. We decided for the next two legs of the Punchbuggy Tour, we should have something to sell for those few people who do want something to take home with them.
Gabby was in town last week so yesterday he and MK came over and we recorded two songs. The first was a cover of the Mountain Goats song “the Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” which we played at some stops on the tour, and the second was a cover of the Tommy James & the Shondells (though mostly known by the Tiffany cover) song “I Think We’re Alone Now.”
WOOPS. It looks like the place we were using to host our songs (imeem) has just been bought by MySpace… so I guess you’re gonna have to hit one of our tour stops to hear our awesome rendition of I Think We’re Alone Now!
The first inaugural leg of the Punchbuggy Tour has come and gone, and with its passing it leaves only empty bottles of beer and bitters, a small pile of empty Faygo bottles, and a sad, lonely van from New Jersey without a sense of purpose.
If you’re interested in seeing photos, video and blog posts about the first leg of the tour, check out the “Dispatches From the First Tour” links on the right.
At the moment, we (meaning… me, that’s Liz) are in the process of booking the second and third legs of the Punchbuggy Tour in Spring 2010. We have a TON of cities we’re planning on hitting, so please check out this page to see where we want to go and how you can help (yes, YOU, fearless reader!).
In the meantime, please enjoy this short video tour of the Grimace, our trusty and beloved home away from home:
Feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed (that link up top there on the right) to get up-to-the-minute updates on upcoming legs of the Punchbuggy Tour!
