The place is Books With Pictures, a comic book shop doing a damn good job of being welcoming, inclusive and fun: a bright-walled, airy space filled with books, zines, art, and comfortable seats. The shop has events: talks on comics history, artist get-togethers, workshops, and more. I do some of my comic shopping here (on top of the titles I subscribe to and buy via my usual shop, Bridge City Comics); I want to support it.
It's extra-easy to support Books With Pictures when, like it did Friday night, it hosts a concert by The Doubleclicks! The Doubleclicks, the sister team of Angela Malena-Webber and Aubrey Turner, do geek-folk music, often gentle, sometimes sly, usually hilarious, and they've been doing that since 2011 when they formed in Portland. They sing about Dungeons & Dragons, inconvenient superpowers, falling in love with your childhood friend who became a supervillain, and being a geek in this world that's sometimes weird about it, AND being a geek in this world where even some other geeks are weird about it. Their anthem "Nothing to Prove" is about that.
Angela now lives in Los Angeles, working in the city's comedy and improv scene, but came back for this concert (plus they tour nationwide; they'll play DragonCon in Atlanta later this summer). The people packed into Books With Pictures were excited. It was, ultimately, Standing Room Only. It was also all-ages friendly, with lots of kids, so "Sexist Bullshit" and "Oh Mr. Darcy" were out, that second song because of the line "Not every asshole has a heart of gold." (Angela did make sure it'd be OK to sing their newer song "Sensitive Badass.")
"This is a song about feeling awkward and not wanting to go out!" Angela said to introduce "Cats At Parties," their opening song. More than once while introducing songs or bantering in-between songs, Angela would bring up something and say "I should write a song about that," and she often does, so hey, audience, maybe you inspired a song. (One song that night was created Mad Libs-style. It included the fantastic word "crepuscular.") There were singalongs, people pretending to be cats, people pretending to be velociraptors, and good-natured jokes. The closing song was the love song with the line "I love you like a burrito."
After the show, Aubrey and Angela posed with kids for photos, signed copies of the issue of the Marvel comic Mockingbird that featured them as characters, and caught up with people. It was a feel-good night. I wrapped up by buying some comics (another way to support Books With Pictures!), checking on a book I'll buy later, and headed home.