Blood on the Cutlass

Been posting many new videos on the Logbook page at the Imagine Pirates website. Here's some fragments of a couple shows we did last year...

We're looking to add four new pirates to the crew for upcoming gigs. If you've got piracy in your blood, please email Bullet at Info@ImaginePirates.com . Godspeed!  

Pirates Murder Shakespeare...

We had a five person show ready to go then lost two pirates at the last minute and had about six hours to rewrite the scripture for three pirates and rehearse intensely to absorb the new script whilst unlearning the previous version. For a moment we considered canceling the gig but one should never run from a good challenge. 
    We did it. We slayed. It's what we do.
    More pictures are on the Imagine Pirates Website.

Hollywood Pirates

We had the good fortune to appear in a film last month. It's called Timecrafters: The Treasure of Pirates Cove. It's a kids movie about time-travel, pirates and treasure. i play three minor roles in the movie, one of which is a pirate named Scar who sails with Captain Lynch, played by Malcolm McDowall.

Imagine Pirates in Hollywood 2019

Here are some scenes from Mary Widow's cell phone at our Boobie Trap show:

Pirate's Life in Los Angeles

Just testing my uploading abilities here. A couple videos of pirate life...

Safety Last (part 1): Finding the Sense of Danger

 "Nobody ever went into battle shouting: 'Give me safety or 
give me death!' And neither shall we go on stage preoccupied 
with our physical well-being. The show is bigger than any of 
us, so if you're more concerned about your own survival 
than about performing a great show, then you're on the wrong 
pyrate crew! Safety is not worth dying for, and it's 
not worth the show dying for..."

In the early 1990s i wrote my first script for Brethren of the Coast. Our director complained the script was "unperformable" and demanded changes. So i changed the director. The new director didn't work out either so i directed everything myself from then on. The next year we did a new show, 'Sanguinarium,' which i proclaimed to be my masterpiece but which Wolf described as: "an anguished cry for help." Before our first performance i said a few words to the cast to get them into the proper spirit:

"The sound of an audience laughing and cheering is worth 
more to me than my own life. So it's certainly worth more 

than any of your lives. Therefore: i don't care who gets 

the laughs, just as long as the show is funny. And i don't 
care how many of you get hurt or killed, 

only that the fights look good..."

Bullsh*tting the crew. i've got skills at this.

     In truth, there were only a couple of the crew whose deaths i would have been indifferent to but it was Brethren policy to cultivate our reputation as reckless, heck-raising pirates so i did my part.

    Wolf and i had spent some weeks and broken some swords choreographing a double-cutlass duel. i wrote a quick five-person skit that incorporated the duel so we could perform it for the rest of the Brethren on Catalina Island. During that voyage Lazarus drank 12 bottles of Guinness, puked on himself, then passed out below deck. We revived him when we docked at the island and he hiked to the isthmus with us to perform. Badly, very badly. The skit got a great reaction though so i rewrote and expanded it into a 12-person show that became 'Sanguinarium.'

Lazarus: Hours away from a great performance.

    The gist of the plot was: each of several pirates attempting to steal a box of treasure from the others thru fighting, palaverance, backstabbing, treachery and dirty tricks. Beginning with a dozen pirates it got down to four, then two who seem to have co-conspired against the others but, naturally, they betray each other until just one wench, Severine, is left on a stage covered in dead pirates, she thinks she'll finally claim that treasure until…

In those early days our pirate "look" was not even passable.

    i felt it was better if every performer got a few laughs and memorable moments so there were no "leads" or stars in this show, no heroes, just vile reprehensible characters whose sole redeeming attribute was that they were interesting to watch. i wrote the script to fit the cast -rather than casting it to fit the script- so everybody was portraying themself; Wolf, Lazarus, Severine, Winifred, Francisco, Baxter, Drake, myself, and Captain Bellows. (the few other roles were played by different people each time according to who was available).

    We did 'Sanguinarium' at different venues throughout the summer and something always went injuriously wrong. Winifred stabbed my hand in one performance. It swelled up before the second show, two hours later, so much that i could barely wrap my fingers around a sword hilt and when the blades met during the double-cutlass the wound popped open, squirting like a fat angry zit. The hilt became wet, slippery then sticky, i struggled not to drop it. The fight was awkward but the show prevailed.

    A week after that i cracked Wolf's nose with a belaying pin (not intentionally). He had to wipe with his sash and snort blood before each line to finish the show. A couple days later i stabbed Lazarus during rehearsal, into the back of his hand and out the palm. It was bloody. He had a gig that night with his band and went onstage with a wad of cotton taped to his palm and a maxi pad over his knuckles. They were punk rock so nobody noticed.
    For the first dozen shows someone got hurt in every single performance yet we always got more applause than the other acts so we began to suspect that, like a NASCAR race, certain people watched us just hoping to see a wreck.

    But after we'd done it enough times it started going smoothly. We'd adapted to the complications of blood-wet slippery stages and stepping over the dead during combat. (the dead always had their eyes open in terror that a weapon would land on them) We also got comfortable with the sword choreography and this was not a good thing. It didn't seem as piratey when everything worked. The fights were tighter, even graceful, but the audiences weren't gasping or cheering as much. The verbal jokes still got laughs but something intangible was missing. We had evolved into a polished theatrical troupe and polish did not work when you were a pirate.

Winifred, Lazarus, Severine.

    Lazarus did tattoos at Voodoo Ink on Hollywood Blvd. We were there one afternoon drinking tequila shots, watching a stripper get her nipples pierced when he proclaimed: "Something's wrong with the show! It's not fun anymore."

    "i know it, man. i know."
    "We're just a bunch of actors now. I don't feel like a pirate anymore."
    "Maybe we need a new show."
    "We can't do a new show. I finally have my lines almost memorized." (by "memorized" he meant able to remember that he had a line when it came up, not so much able to deliver the line correctly)
    "The jokes still work. It's something else..."
    "It's the fights. That double-cutlass thing used to be the sh*t, but it doesn't pack a punch anymore. It looks like choreography."
    "That's because we don't screw it up like we used to."
    "That's what's wrong with it! When you look too rehearsed people realize they're just watching a show. There's no sense of danger unless you f*ck up once in a while so it looks like a real fight."
    "Sh*t! We should drink before the shows, so we're sure to f*ck things up."
    "Good idea!"
    Naturally Lazarus thought it was a good idea, he'd never done a sober show yet. Still, i resolved to test this theory (strictly for science) so at our next show i stealthily downed a few jiggers of rotgut rum just minutes before stagetime. i was discreet about it because i'd always discouraged the cast from over imbibing.

    The show began with a three on one fight against our captain, Jaimie Bellows, with him prevailing and vanquishing us. The liquor crept up on me thru those first moments. i couldn't tell what effect it had on my swordfighting but it sure well worked on my mind. i felt GREAT! Like a true pirate, completely in character. This was awesome! The only thing that went wrong in the whole show was a squib not breaking, nobody even got hurt. What a triumph.
    "Helluva show!" said Lazarus.
    "What a show," said Bellows. "Now we can get a drink, finally!"
    "Umm, yeah," i said. "Let's get a drink." i was already four sheets to the hurricaine but i presumed they couldn't tell. (they could tell but i was too drunk to tell that they could tell)
    Severine wasn't fooled. She began shouting at me: "What the hell were you doing, going onstage drunk?!"
    Had i been sober at that moment i would have realized the futility of trying to explain it to her but, alack, in my diminished state, i tried: "i thought the show might look more natural if i wasn't so sober."
    "Well it didn't. You forgot half your lines!"
    "You're exaggerating. You're a pathological exaggerator.."
    "And you totally grabbed Winifred's ass in your scene with her."
    "i don't remember that." If i had done that i regret not remembering it.
    "Oh yeah, and you scared the hell out of Cabinboy." It had been Cabinboy's first show with us. (We called all the new recruits Cabinboy until we came up with proper pirate names for them).
    "Why? What's his problem?"
    "When his squib didn't break he was afraid you were going to stab him for real just to get some blood in the scene."
    "He's right. Blood is very important for this show. Next time i will stab him to get that blood. He moved out of the way this time." i meant that as a joke, of course, (no, honest, it was a joke).
    "You should go talk to him and tell him he's safe. He thinks you're mad that he didn't let you stab him. Now he's afraid to do the next performance."
    "No, he isn't."
    "No, he really is! You need to talk to him."
    "Balls to that! i'm drinking."
    i staggered off toward the bar. Severine followed. "I need a drink too…"
    Cabinboy didn't show up for the next day's performance.

Severine.

    i had resolved not to drink for the next show but it was too late, the precedent had been set: "If the director can drink," the crew reasoned, "then we can drink too." It was immediately clear that something was wrong. Wolf was slurring his words. He was thoroughly, obviously drunk. This is going to go badly, i thought. And it did. The fights did not look like choreography though, and the crowd applauded during the double-cutlass.

    Bellows got us gigs like the CutThroat Island screening and the Redondo Beach pier opening but we also did a few non-piratey things like histrorical festivals and faires. i really hated the faires. They always contained at least a few meddling, busy-body, "safer-than-thou" types. (Lazarus called them "safety-nazis"). Sword performers who held to a narrow opinion of how things should be done and were hostile to anyone who deviated from their orthodoxy. These were broadsword/rapier/etc. fighters. As pirates, we used different weapons hence we did things diferently. We didn't criticize them for being different but they sure came after us.

    At those events we could measure our success by the amount of hostility we got from the other performers. We quickly realized that whenever someone told us how bad our show was it was usually because our show went over better than theirs had, it was just jealousy, so if we came off stage to the rebukings and admonishments of other artistes we knew we'd done well.
    Some criticisms were reasonable, like: "Maybe you guys need to rehearse more." i would respond by pointing to the Brethren of the Coast placard next to the stage and asking, "Does that say 'Refined demonstration of thespianic skill?' No, it says: 'PIRATES!'"

    Sometimes the older sword performers would try to lecture us, affecting superiority and then boring us with "safer-than-thou" platitudes and suggestions -like "Never drink before a performance"- that would have only weakened our act until it sucked as bad as theirs had.
    We pirates felt that, as long as the audience didn't get hurt, the performers were adults who could decide for themselves what risks we were willing to take by getting onstage with one another, we could only blame ourselves for our injuries so it wasn't anyone else's concern. But these "lecturer" types presumed that we were trying to do what they did: polished proficient swordfights. They were wrong; we were pirates and there is no polish or gracefulness in piracy. It was they who wanted what we had: the fun of performing.

    One memorable "Safety First" crusader insisted on condemning us for recklessness after we'd done a particularly successful show. This guy got so angry that Lazarus and i couldn't resist antagonizing him, we eventually made a sport of these perpetually outraged busybodies. This fellow berated us for several minutes, seriously shouting things like: "Your whole crew is dangerous and you shouldn't be allowed to perform anywhere, at all, ever!" i again pointed to the placard. "Does that say 'Polished demonstration of the proper and gentlemanly techniques of swordplay?' Well, does it? No. It says: 'PIRATES!'"
    "Well I'm reporting you for drinking!"
    "Dude, we're pirates. PIRATES!" He just didn't comprehend it.
    "You're the most unprofessional group I've ever seen!" He was furiously mad even though we'd given him no provocation other than winning over an audience he had failed to, and our cheerful demeanor (which we knew would get his goat). He finally stomped away, probably to yell at somebody else he disapproved of. There's always somebody who'll try to make you feel bad about feeling good. F**k those people.
    Bellows asked: "Who's he going to report us to? The Temperance League?"      Lazarus said: "Let's get a drink!"
    We never discovered what that guy's problem was but i will speculate that he suffered from a bad case of Pirate Envy.

The lessons to be learned from this: 1: There is no polish or gracefulness in piracy. 2: If Patrick Henry had demanded "Give me safety or give me death!" nobody would remember him today.  

Godspeed!

Thanks to Jessica Black Photography for several of the pictures here.

Harry And Roscoe...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to two of my favorite people! Roscoe Arbuckle (b. 1887) and Harry Houdini (b. 1874).
    In this picture Roscoe is performing the East Indian Nail Trick which Houdini would later adapt into the Needle Trick (okay, i just made that up). Houdini is holding the hat to conceal his forearm which was broken and in a sling (no, i didn't make up that part, it's true). These fellows knew one another thru their friend Buster Keaton. Houdini had given Buster his name and Roscoe had discovered and made Buster (already a vaudeville star) into a film star. 
    What do these guys have to do with pirates? That will be explained in an forthcoming post.
     
More about Houdini at: WildAboutHarry   
More about Roscoe (and Buster) at: Silentology  

When the Show Isn't Seaworthy

Here we are making the right decision...

..because a pirate has to have high standards.

The Pressgang Cometh...

Imagine Pirates are looking for a new female performer who can make it to rehearsals twice a week. Preferred attributes (other than punctuality) are: work ethic, big personality, physically healthy and energetic, passion for performing… If interested, please email: Info@ImaginePirates.com

And Godspeed ye.

Sea of Darkness 3: Inveiglement, Sophistry, Epiphenomenalism

Concerning Revenge From The Sea's third Voyage and Complications 

overcome to achieve said Venture, viz; the slothful Saboteurs and irrational 

Accords endured by our valiant Crewe in their Pursuit of theatrical 

Grace. With certain Names altered to protect the easily butthurt...

In most cases no single actor can save a show yet any one actor can ruin it. When someone screws up during performance somebody else has to cover for them and a painful truth of theatre is that the one doing the covering is usually perceived by the audience to be the one screwing up. For this reason most troupers are wary of going onstage with anyone they suspect is unprepared, or incompetent. Yet it's a pirate's lot that such situations will occur.. 

Lazarus drew the invite cover for the third cruise.

     In Los Angeles there are plenty of people who want to be movie stars but far fewer who are competent actors, and fewer still who own a proper costume/cutlass/pistol/etc., hence during my early years of pirating, casting a show required lowering the usual theatrical standards and settling for people who were already pirates. 
     i'd never believed that talent or experience mattered as much as reasonable intelligence and a work ethic. To show up at the requisite time and make a good-faith effort to do the work was all i asked. If anyone drank liquor during rehearsals i wouldn't give them some soberer-than-thou rebuke, most pirates drank, as long as they knew their lines and blocking it didn't matter. Lazarus came to rehearsals sober but he would be drunk during performances. i still considered him one of the better performers though because he never complained about things and there were certain lines he could deliver better than anyone else, like the definitions. Whenever any character used an obscure or uber-nautical term that the landlubbers in the audience wouldn't understand, (i.e., Moses Law, Keel-hauling, Rosary of Pain, Marooned, etc.)  Lazarus would follow by defining that term for everybody. But whether he remembered the definitions depended on how much he'd drank, and there was no way to predict that.

Bastard and Wolf.

    In Sea of Darkness 3 my character, Mr. Crow, insists the reason they've all been lost at sea for three years is because the crew's refusal to stop frigging has lost them favor with the Lord. Lazarus stepped forward to define the word "Frigging."

Scripturally, the scene went thus:

CROW: "Faith indeed, if we are to rediscover His graces and hence find the isle we seek, you must all refrain from this incessant, unholy, and nigh constant frigging!"

LAZARUS: "Frigging: That kindly, though solitary, easement of nature commonly practiced by seafaring men particularly on lengthy and arduous voyages when feminine compire is most lacking. Their worn and calloused hands, indeed providing but the barest relief from that incessant and reoccurring swelling which doth afflict and torment them."

But Lazarus had some difficulty with the line:

Here's Lazarus blowing his line at the final rehearsal, 

yet still not nearly the worst actor in the show.

    After Lazarus blew the line four times at our final shipboard rehearsal i tore that page out of the script and pasted just the one line on the side of his tankard. During the show he held it blatantly in view of everyone yet still read the line incorrectly. He didn't break character at all though and the crappy delivery came across so natural it didn't detract from the efficacy of the scene. No one really expected Lazarus to know his lines because he wasn't an actor; just a pirate pretending to be an actor.

Lazarus eventually paid for his lack of preparation.

    Lazarus was worth the trouble he brought because he was a good enough pirate that his acting skills were irrelevant. Not everybody justified the rest of us hauling their weight though. i knew who was good and who wasn't, and scripted the shows so the good pirates got the bigger parts. This caused some grumbling by the incompetents, several of whom quit (as i'd hoped they would), so by the time we did Sea of Darkness 3 there were enough good pirates to carry the show and we were stuck with only a few useless people. A vestigal Idiot Faction.
    Nobody is discouraged by a bad actor who is trying to do better, but the ones who don't even try are a poison to the morale of everybody else.
    Two of this Idiot Faction were blatantly detrimental to the show. Their very presence was dispiriting to the people who were actually working. These wankers had nothing to offer yet felt entitled to be involved simply because they'd been around so long (that is, they were too dense to realize nobody liked them or wanted them around). You probably know their type: lazy, complainers, excuse-makers, takers of frequent cigarette breaks, habitual fomenters of gratuitous interpersonal drama, constantly affronted by irrelevancies, gigantic egos with irrationally high estimations of what they contributed to the shows. Eventually i outright fired these morons but in those days i had to make Faustian deals just so the shows could go on at all.  
    One of the Idiots, Monkeyass, (i'll just use the name the others used when speaking of him) had the line immediately following Lazarus definition of frigging:

MONKEYASS: "Do you mean waxing the bowsprit?"

LOUIE: "I think he means climbing the mast one-handed."

DOXY POX (losing patience with their idiocy): "He means jerking-off!" (she moves her hand bell in an illustrative motion)

CROW (to Doxy): "Measure thy words! Abbreviation is kin to sloth and is the Devil's playground."

WOLF: "Well so is my left hand!"

    i had triaged that line to Monkeyass because i knew that if he blew it (as i expected him to) Louie would be there to immediately deliver his own line and give Doxy her set up. The line could be omitted completely without effecting the scene at all. i didn't think the scene itself was funny though. When the crowd cheered and clapped for Doxy's line i attributed that to their drunkenness and her bawdy delivery. The "dumbing down" of the dialogue from Lazarus lengthy definition to Doxy's quick punchline seemed very obvious and downright uncreative. The joke was almost dependent on the audience being drunk.

Doxy Pox practices her delivery.

   i decided to reverse the concept: Rather than 'dumbing down' the joke we would 'wise it up.' Instead of reiterating an idea in ever simpler terms until the crew finally grasped it, we'd go the opposite direction and restate it in degrees of escalating complexity, finally culminating in a sesquipedalian gallimaufry of six-syllable words forming an overlong sentence our audience would be tortured to comprehend. It wouldn't be gibberish, it would convey a specific and clear idea, the logic would just be difficult to follow. Having established with the "frigging" joke that the crew were simpletons, this reversal of the approach would be unexpected and, hopefully, funny.
    i worked hours on just the one line, an act of pure science: first listing a few dozen five and six-syllable words then struggling to cram as many of them as possible into a single sentence which conveyed a definable thought. Wolf was the only one i trusted could handle the line. i presented him the page of script as a challenge to his thespianic skills. i didn't actually think this would challenge him -he'd been an actor since he was five years old and starred on Broadway at age six- but hoped if i expressed some doubt in his abilities he'd be inspired to excel all the further.  (Yes, i really did read Dale Carnegie and remember some of it)

Al Pacino and B.J. Barie (the future Wolf Dekardson) in 'Author, Author'
That kid could act!
    The Idiot Faction of the cast were impressed by the long words and thought it must require a supremely skilled actor to remember and deliver such dialogue. But i thought the big words by themselves almost substituted for delivery: they just sounded like great acting no matter how you said them (unless you said them incorrectly). i began to apply simpleton-psychology to Bugger and Monkeyass whenever one would screw up during rehearsals: "Dude," i would ask, "If Wolf can memorize that long and inhumanly complicated line why can't you even remember to say 'Aye!' on cue?" Wolf went along with this too, playing up the difficulty of the line to the point where the rest of us were treating him as though the entire show depended on his getting that one thing right. The Idiot Faction would shut up their complaining for a moment but neither would work any harder, they just came up w/ new excuses for their failures. 

Scripturally, the scene went:

WOLF: "Quiet! Now be cautious! We all know Mr. Crow has a dodgy way of speaking so don't let him confuse ye with his quick words."

LOUIE: "Quick words? What do ye mean by that?"

LAZARUS: "Aye! What does that mean?"

     (several others express their lack of understanding..)

WOLF: "I mean don't let him bamboozle ye with his double-talk!"

LOUIE: "I still don't understand."

LAZARUS: "Nor do I."

    (others reiterate that they don't understand either..)

WOLF: "I mean don't let him attempt inveiglement of your perceptions via sophistries appealing to yer subjective predispositions to the point of obfuscation of our collective intentions by exploiting susceptibilities often epiphenomenal to your inebriate dispositions!"

BUGGER: "Oh, I get it!"

LAZARUS: "Why didn't ye just say so?"

RUBY: "Long winded son of a Dutchman..."

       (the rest of the crew express their sudden comprehension as well) 

Here's Wolf getting it ALMOST perfect in the final, shipboard rehearsal.

    i construed Wolf's long line as a balloon being blown up to complete fullness as he delivered the words, the words filling it to nigh bursting, followed by a half-second pause and then: "Oh, I get it!" spoken fast, like a pinprick, bursting that fat balloon in a loud, sudden POP! 
    But Bugger didn't POP the balloon as intended. No, he just let the air out of it steadily, gradually. He didn't quickly proclaim: "Oh, I get it!" Instead he said: "O-o-o-o-o-o-o-oh, I-I-I-I get it..." Rather than the punctuating 'POP!' it was just a slow deflation to nothing followed by the others who had waited for him to finish before they piped in with their own lines. Instead of a gloriously shocking loud noise followed by laughter, Bugger's delivery left us with just an empty balloon, limp and wasted. He may as well have been a deliberate saboteur. 
    Why had i cast this undisciplined moron? Oh yeah, because he had whined and begged to be in the show and -idiot that i was- i pitied him. My bad. My very, very Bad. i learned from this experience that an effective director must be Without Pity for anyone or anything except the show itself. 
    My mission now was to thwart the Idiots so that the competent people could shine. To save the joke somebody else would have to deliver the line. But Bugger wouldn't just forfeit his dialogue to another, better, actor. He was difficult. A Four Star General of the Butt-Hurt Brigade, he would pout and be a bitch about things and slow down the rehearsal process with his bullshit when we were too close to the performance date to waste time dealing with nonsense. i had to be crafty.
    On the very last day of rehearsals, after weeks of insisting the performers not step on one another's lines, i took Doxy Pox aside during a break and told her: "i need you to betray one of your fellow actors."
    "What do you mean?"
    "i want you to step on his line, to actually say it before he does. Quicker, and louder too, than he does. Steal the punch from him before he ruins it."
    "Whose line?" 
    "Bugger's."
    "Hell yes, I'll do it. He sucks and he's an a**hole!"
    i didn't even have to explain which line i was referring to, she knew.
    "Don't do it in this rehearsal though. Wait until the actual performance so he doesn't know it's going to happen."
    "Easy."
    "Thank you," i whispered. "You're saving the show."
    "I know."

    One of the setup lines got blown and other things went wrong but Wolf delivered his line perfectly (people even applauded) and Doxy Pox came in just in time, loud enough to follow it to maximum effect. So the joke worked, mostly, and the show was saved.

    Mary Widow had printed up two documents on parchment paper, one of them affirming that Wolf had, indeed, delivered his line correctly and awesomely "..as witnessed by all of the crew." the other declaring that Wolf had "royaly screwed up and failed" to deliver the line. We intended presenting one or the other to Wolf after the performance to commemorate his success or failure.
    We got about half the crew to sign them, thinking the rest could sign on the ship. But the 'success' paper got misplaced and left ashore. 
    "Damn!" i said, "Wolf won't get his commemorative document."
    "Unless he blows the line," said Mary. "I still have the 'fail' one." So Mary went about the crowded ship, dodging drunken pirate-folk, surreptitiously getting the rest of the crew to sign it. 
    Wolf, of course, delivered the line perfectly, ergo it was with some apologies that we had to present him with a parchment proclaiming his complete and utter failure. 
    Oh well. Sorry, Wolf.

    A few years later that original parchment, the 'success' one which had been left ashore, turned up in a pile of documents betwixt D.B. Cooper's birth certificate and William Kidd's privateering commission. Behold:

Gardiner's Island Shoot

Our beach shoot looked something like this. Thank you California for perfect weather even in December. 
Worth growing a beard for? Aye!
Worth wrecking a car for? You decide.

Days of Low Adventure

From the Revenge archives circa 2006:

Illustration by Martin Abel (Here's his Official Website )

During those unspeakable horrors known to Revengers as "cruise preparations" we were asked to perform at something called the Hollywood Pirates Ball, which would take place at the Key Club, one of my favorite music venues. The Key Club was on Sunset Blvd. at the very site where the famous Gazzari's rock club had stood from the 1960s to sometime in the early 90s. Old Bill Gazzari, the 'Godfather of Rock'  would do radio commercials where he liked to point out that this was "..the same stage where the Doors, Van Halen, and Ratt started!" i'd always wanted to play Gazzari's on a Saturday night and here, at last, was my chance. Never mind that we weren't actually a rock band. Band of musicians, band of pirates; the difference was trifling.

    There was no profit in it for us, only a promise (which remains unkept) that we'd receive a video copy of our performance. We didn't have time to put an act together and there was a certain lack of enthusiasm among the others to do this unpaid gig. In fact, it wasn't until the morning of the event that i exerted my dictatorial influence to get them to do it at all.     

   

   After a long and despairing morning of cruise rehearsals, i asked my core pyrates to stay late. i opened my first beer of the morning and told them: "Let's just take the next hour and pull a show out of our arses and then go and do this thing tonight!" The decision had been made.

    We arrived an hour before stage time and were led thru the crowded club and out a door to the back rooms and out another door and to our dressing room, which was an old tour bus parked in the alley behind the back exit of the building. There were couches and a mirror and a plastic bucket full of ice and beer. Naturally, i wondered if this was the same tour bus "where the Doors, Van Halen, and Ratt" had drank beer before their gigs (it looked old enough). The walls and ceiling and floor were covered in band stickers. It looked like every single band that ever played here had left a sticker. There wasn't a square inch of surface that didn't have a sticker on it. Severine spoke first: "I've got one of our bumper stickers!"

Brandi, Bullet, Severine in the bus.

    She pulled it from her bag. It was a big, lame-arsed oversized rectangle that someone had rush printed for us one night when we were desperate. Black lettering on white, sans even a jolly-roger, that read: "My Chest Was Plundered by Crewe of Revenge." It was embarrassingly clumsy to behold.

    After several minutes scanning for the perfect spot to stick it, she gave up. It was just too damned big, there wasn't enough empty space to stick it on and Sev refused to cover any of the other stickers, "That would be really rude of us," she said.

    "But we're pyrates. It's our privilege to be rude!" 

    "No." she said, and opened a beer. "You guys just really need to make some smaller stickers."
    "Actually, we need to make cooler stickers."

    That was six months ago and we still need cooler stickers.

Key Club.

    We drank and practiced our skit in the space betwixt the bus and the building. The girls had come up with something they wanted to surprise me with, so they wouldn't rehearse in front of me. This irritated me because if their "surprise" happened to suck i, as the director, would be blamed for it. i grilled Brandi to tell me what it was. "No!" she said. "Sev and i worked all week on it, and it's a surprise."

   "You know what?" i said. "You're fired!"

   "Oh, you'll just hire me back again tomorrow."

   "Not this time! There's the plank, take a walk."

    She didn't move.

    Spillit kept interrupting our practice to talk to the groupies who were watching from outside the alley gate. He had been assigned groupie-duty since he was the only single pyrate in the show. Sporadically, we ran thru our half-arsed sword moves.

    "Dude," said Spillit. "You really have to stop firing Brandi all the time."

    "Dude, quit yer bellyaching and go grope a groupie. Or else we can do something bizarre and drastic like rehearse our fight a couple more times so we don't completely suck tonight."     

    He walked toward the gate where a wench in a skirt and biker boots was waving at him. i opened another beer.

Other vaguely piratical acts.

     Louie wasn't performing with us this night. We hadn't even seen him at all since he'd started POTC3. But he had made it out to the Pirates Ball and was hanging with us -if only for the free beer- and when we went to the backstage door he came with us. 

    i entered from stage right a minute before the others and immediately i knew that something was wrong. Most of the time we have to perform a good show and win over the crowd before they cheer for us but this time i just had to walk out onto the stage and they were screaming bloody mad. i hadn't even done anything yet. It didn't make sense.

Brandi, Spillit, Bullet: Live on the Sunset strip. (pic by Tiger Lee)

    Spillit and i had some dialogue but we weren't wearing microphones and the crowd was never quiet enough to hear it, so we gave up and just pantomimed some business which included him throwing a coin toward me as an insult, thus provoking our fight. It went over fantastically. They laughed and then cheered as the swords came out then pressed toward the stage during the fight. The girl's were next and their "surprise" was the addition of breakaway clothes, which they tore off of each other during their catfight. i liked it and so did everyone else, apparently. Brandi and i then did a double-cutlass duel to climax the show and then we were done. The whole thing had lasted about six minutes.

Severine.

Brandi and Sev.

    Louie had followed us out onto the stage and when we took our bows he came right up to the front and bowed alongside the rest of us even though he hadn't actually done anything in the show. That took nerve and i totally respected him for it. What a f**king pirate!

    i noticed my hand had been bloodied during the show but i couldn't locate the cut...

    Back in the tour bus, Spillit asked me: "Did you hear that crowd?"

    "Yes," i said. "But something's wrong. We just can't be that f**king popular."

    "We're not," he said. "Remember what you did on that pyrate cruise? When you planted people in the audience?"

    "You mean quackers? To incite the crowd..."

    "Yeah. I put Adam out there. I told him to get some of his friends and to all scream loud as hell as soon as we came onstage."

    "How many friends did he have?"

    "Only like three, they were just really loud and got everyone else going!"

    "Sh*t! i'm gonna buy him a beer!"

    Some rocker kid stopped me at the bar. "You guys were f**king great! That was the coolest sh*t I ever saw!!"

    "Thanks," i said, and dove into my first rum and coke of the evening. The kid didn't go away.

    "I'm Steven," he said. "I'm writing an article about the Pirates Ball. Can I interview you?"

    The last thing i felt like doing was talking to him but.. "Alright." i said. (we're media whores, have you noticed?) "Just promise me you won't say 'arrrgh'."

    "Why not?"

    "Either promise or i won't talk to you."

    "Okay."

Louie, Brandi, Bullet.

    There was beer in the trailer so we went there. He said he'd arrived just as our show started so he missed the performances before us. i told him what happened, careful to mention only our friends by name, viz: Shelby, Courtney, and the Scarlett Harlott, of course.

  We had been playing up the rock star/pyrate parallels in every interview for the past few months so i encouraged him to use that angle. After we plied him with beer and sent him on his way, Sev asked: "Do you think he'll give us a good write up?" 

    "Of course he will. i told him you'd hack him to death with your cutlass if he said anything bad about us. He's terrified now."

   She laughed. "Damn! I never would have thought of threatening a reporter."

   "Well, you're not the only one who knows how to work the media."

In the interview i'd had to spin some of the difficulties we'd had that night... 

SPUN 

(from Rock City News): 

According to Bullet: "We made a point not to use any of our usual FX. No gunshots, blood splatterings or bottles breaking over heads. We wanted this one to stand on just the sword work alone. Like an acoustic set. Revenge: Unplugged."

UNSPUN 

(what really happened): 

Sev forgot to bring the breakaway bottle, Bullet brought the blood squibs but forgot to fill them before going on stage (he'd been drinking), the venue threatened to sue us if we used gun powder. 

    A few weeks later it was on the newsstands. Spillit called me as soon as he read it. "Accoustic set?" he said. "What kind of bullsh*t did you shovel on that guy?" 

    To which i could only retort: "Dude. If it was in Rock City News, it MUST be true!"

   Well, as you know, the dedicated pirates of Revenge were born and are destined to suffer, and to that end we had to awaken early the next day as Spillit, Louie, and myself were committed to do an appearance in Long Beach. Ah, those wonderful post-pyrating hangovers! 

   i began suffering land-sickness during the ride but a quick stop to lean out the door and things were much less bad. Pyrate Wisdom: Always remove your seatbelt before casting up accounts.

   We stopped for a bottle of rum and drank it in a hurry as we gassed up the car. i began to feel optimistic after a few swigs of the pirate potion. i found my bottle of sunscreen, alcohol based, and squeezed some onto my left hand. Immediately i located my wounds from the previous night.          

    "AAaaaaaagghhh, sh*t!!" 

    There were four small, almost invisible cuts at the base of my fingers. i blamed Brandi for it.        

    "That bitch! She's fired! She's so f**king fired! i'll kill her!" 

    My pirate brothers only mocked my misery.

    Louie: "Oh my god! He fired Brandi!"

    Spillit: "Again? You bastard!"

   And the worst was yet to come...