It's still the only full episode of Portlandia I've seen, because I went to the McMenamin's Mission Theater for a public screening. I wanted to see the crowd I'd been in a few months before, background for a sketch. I watched the show, and enjoyed it, but I left wanting to write about that theater's audience. It seemed very self-satisfied. They acted In On The Joke, maybe mainly because they were in the city where the show is made, watching said show. Or maybe as if they were part of it. I was getting this vibe well before the night's broadcast even started.
It got painful for me at one point. A musician went on stage before the episode aired and sang a song about Portlandia to the tune of Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline." I started mentally rewriting the song to be, in my mind, funnier, because it wasn't. (Idea: when writing new lyrics for a song, don't so quickly repeat a line from the original song; repurpose a line late enough and in an unexpected way and it might work better as a call-back, and a well-executed call-back adds to the funny. This musician opened the chorus with "Porrrt-land-ia... Good times never seemed so good..." Lame, I thought.) But it was funny to that crowd.
I left right after the broadcast, because the theater was planning some sort of improv event afterwards that would involve the crowd, or at least people who had filled out a form saying they were willing to take part. I saw the paperwork and thought No, I don't want to see this crowd try to be funny. Improv is really, really easy to do badly, and then it's painful. Also, the improv performers were an unknown quantity to me; how much funny could they wring out of the event? (The previous December, I'd watched a local improv group and had not been impressed. I was even more guarded about improv then than usual. So no, not interested.)
I compared that Portlandia night to how much fun I'd have at the Midnight Movies that were still going on, or at Geek Trivia, or at the gatherings for local radio shows' fans, and I knew this was just not my crowd. And I didn't want it to be my crowd.
But I didn't write that entry then; and now, I'm mainly writing about that year-ago audience to get the thoughts out of my head. Maybe more thoughts that are blog-worthy will show up then, and I'll write about them.
What else have I not written about? Just keep trying to make it interesting to me, and maybe it'll be interesting to some of y'all...
