Saturday, July 10, 1982

Comedy Celebration 1982

Official Program for Comedy Celebration 1982

In the early days of San Francisco's Comedy Day, aka Comedy Celebration, a program was supplied as an alphabetical roster of those performing. The physical program encouraged the audience to "Give Your Spirits a Lift, Support Comedy" Perhaps this was a subtle suggestion to become patrons of the five comedy clubs that also graciously sponsored this bright daylight performances in an open-air venue.

The performers, unaccustomed to working during the day under a limitless height of ceiling space, much less a vast sprawling lawn or grove of trees, needed to adjust to the circumstances by 'playing to the balconies'. Femprov did their best to adapt with sketches suited to the enormous outdoor venue. By way of introduction, our piano player, Jim Cox supplied musical accompaniment for our BIG musical number of the time. This year in particular we performed our Motown-inspired piece 'You Can't Hurry Us' sung the tune of 'You Can't Hurry Love' by Diana Ross and the Supremes. Our entrance was frantic and chaotic to cover as much stage space during the opening bars, until we settled in front of the microphones spread wide across the stage to belt out the parody. The conceit was we were touring backup singers who's sequined evening gowns had been stolen 'somewhere near Barstow' suspiciously at the same time of the disappearance of our lead singer. Consequently, the vestiges of our costumes were our long white evening gloves. In this case, they worked like flags on our wildly gesturing arm dancing to let our presence be known. We likely added a quick round of L.A.Tag to fill our 5 minute slot. And then Jim played us off to the thunderous applause we earned. 

Pre-show gathering or post-show debrief
Jim Cox, the glue for our musical numbers.

Steven Pearl photo bombs Femprov.
Confessing "We're just here to improvise"