Olympics Humor

My new site for the duration of the beijing Olympics. Trying to compile and comment on the funny side of the games. So two chances to grab some laughs; Olympicshumor.com and UsingHumor.com. More Bomblet history soon.

East Side Cafe

One of our next performances after Greenstreets was at the East Side Cafe on Greenville Ave north of Park Lane. It was a small place with concrete floors and a lot of glass. This was definitely a "live" venue. Bill Millet set this up and used his connections to get Time/Warner Cable for the cit of Dallas to tape the performance. Time Warner had a new remote truck and they needed to try it out. So, just a few months after starting out the Bomblets were being professionally taped. In addition to this Bill knew Mark OConnor the virtuoso violinist who also performed on with Spatz, Bill's band. 

We learned something at this performance. The audiences for bands and for comedy are completely different. Comedy audiences need to listen to get the jokes, band audiences can't hear anything during the show because the music is so loud, and they can't hear anything during the breaks because everyone is yelling after the loud music. 

We performed one set during the first break, and I think the twelve or thirteen people who could still hear enjoyed it, the other twoo hundred people all seemed to be ordering blender drinks at the same time. 

We bailed and went home after the first set. 

Thanks to Diana Galloway-OConnor (no relation to Mark) who jogged my memory.

Greenstreets

Our first paying gig was at Greenstreets on Walnut Hill Lane near
Composite in Dallas. This was restaurant row, at one time there were
over a dozen restaurants on this strip, eventually access killed it and
the entiore group moved farther south to the intersection of Stemmons,
Loop 12 and Northwest Highway. But in in 1982 it was till hopping. We
performed for four weekends I believe on Friday and Saturday nights.
This was the first public showing of a standard, Copy Machine, Arlene did her Cucumbers Are Better Than Men solo, and others I will remember when I edit this post.


We met Bill Millet and his band here and eventually
performed with them several times over the next couple of years. he was
married at the time to a beautiful Hawaiian woman. Another trend we
atrted here was playing at venues on the verge of bankruptcy.
Greenstreets went into receivership before we finished out booking and
we had to get with the landlord to rescue the props we had stored
there.

First Show

The first public performance took place in February 1982 at a dance studio in Downtown Dallas. We had 17 performers. We performed a smattering of the improv games we had learend in college that we had been rehearsing for the last few weeks, including Story/Story complete with deaths for missing the pick-up, This is a This twisted into pass the Ketchup/Pass the Salt, First Line Last Line, and various others I don't remember right now. 

This was also the last performance for 11 performers, leaving the "original six" in place for the next show. Which I believe took place in May 1982 at a place called Greenstreets on Walnut Hill near Loop 12.

Random Order

Since I am writing this sixteen years after the fact, memory my not serve me as well as I would like. Couple that with the messy divorce te group went through in the early nineties and I don't have some resources to draw upon. So bear with me, and if someone knows better than I about some items. Send me a note. Thanks.

It Began...

Officially on January 2, 1982. But the seed was nurtured in the months preceding. We had all been out of North Texas State University for about five years and had been getting together at parties since then. and no one was doing anything in the theatre in Dallas, no one was trying too hard, but there was a closed feeling to theatre at that time. So it was thought we could do something on our own. 

At North Texas there was a tradition of doing two student led and produced shows, through the University Players. These were called Cabaret shows and were essentially revues with songs, dancing and comic interludes. Most of us who became the Bomblets were involved with the comedy troupe, since singing was not our strength, although Arlene and Diana did participate in the musical portions, and Allen was incredibly talented at that stuff.