Indianapolis & St. Louis
(Comedians Steve Raines (White) Brando Harris (wearing slides) oct. 5 2024
The first show of the week on the road was Friday in the small room of the Indianapolis Helium. It started at 8pm in between Lavell Crawford shows in the big room downstairs. I brought Steve Raines and Brando Harris to open and despite the character building hotel and lack of personal space (3 guys, 2 beds), I think we had a pretty solid start to the trip.
The small room that we played in is actually a closet with 50 seats and a microphone stand bent against a dull gray wall. To the untrained eye it looks like the inside of a shoe box but it's actually a comics wet dream. A small dark tightly packed room with low ceilings is all we could ever ask for. Steve was talking about open heart surgery for pigs and Brando was talking about Seinfeld and Indianapolis had a good night. 38/50 seats were filled and we got to watch Lavell Crawford’s late show after we ended with some of my college friends that came to see me. Its humbling to watch somebody truly great do the thing that you think you’re good at. I’m glad everybody got to see Lavell. He’s the real deal.
The last few times I’ve been to Indy I headlined a comedy club that was also a therapy office. It was nice to finally be performing inside of a mall where god intended comedy to live.
We hit Waffle House, went to bed and hit the road for the next day in St. Louis.
St. Louis I can’t say much about other than the hotel had long term residents. The towels had piss stains and we were across the street from a Rally’s and an abandoned used car dealership. I was catfished by Hotels.com and I’ll never let it happen again. When I first got the club I thought we somehow sold a bunch of tickets but Earthquake just added a 4pm show since he sold his other four shows out. I didn’t sell many tickets so the show wasn’t great. It was also in the same room as the service bar for the main room and you can hear everything that the bar tender does while you’re on stage. A 5:30 show is hard in a city that you’ve never been to but I guess that's how it is sometimes.
We saw the Arch. We ate at Panda express in the mall and the boys took the bus back to Chicago the next day as I started my journey to Nashville, Tennessee.
