R.I.P. Chuck

In a long run of shows, you have your ups and you have your downs. This past weekend’s BOOM performance went fine, I guess, though not as well as the previous three. It could have been a lot of factors – it was raining outside and the theater was pretty humid – but I maintain that the show’s overall mediocrity was the direct result of a negative karmic energy surrounding Elephant Larry.

…and it involves the murder of an innocent.

One of our sketches involves Alex eating a clam right out of its shell. For the past three shows we’ve used half of an empty shell, no problem. But unfortunately, this Saturday the shell had disappeared. We asked a waiter at a sports bar around the corner to steal one from his kitchen, but the chef didn’t go for it. So Jerf and Geoff ventured down to Whole Foods to see what they could do.

Twenty minutes later, they came back carrying a small plastic container with a tiny air hole cut into it. And wouldn’t you know it, inside was the smallest, littlest, cutest clam you ever did see. Well not really, but I’m trying to evoke a sense of sympathy here. Either way, it was definitely breathing and undulating and clamming with the same life force found in all of us, and for some reason Jeff had named it Chuck.

Turns out, Whole Foods didn’t have any dead clams lying around, and the employee in charge of clammicide was on break. And since no one else knew how to properly kill a clam, Jerf and Geoff had to buy Chuck living and still in one piece.

When Alex saw it, he freaked out a little, worrying that Chuck was gonna bite down hard on his lip and get stuck or something when he was onstage pretending to eat it. We told Alex to calm down and talked about how Chuck would be our new mascot. How for the next six weeks, we’d take care of it, nurture it, thank it at the end of the shows. Things were exciting; there was a new member of the EL family!

Or so we thought.

Apparently, it wasn’t meant to be. Soon enough, on our backstage prop table, just before the start of the show, there rested an empty, half of a clam shell.

I’m not entirely sure what happened, and I don’t really want to know. But what I do know is that a little clam named Chuck was with us for less than twenty minutes, and a troupe of insensitive comedians is to blame, myself included.

I read recently that maybe you don’t go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don’t do.

So I’m sorry, Chuck. You’ll never know how much you would have maybe have meant to us perhaps. And I think it’s time for the murderers to fess up.