I’ve been going to JoCo Cruise since it started in 2011, and this year I finally had the nerve and organisation (okay, so actually Phil organised it) to take part in running a shadow event. What with this and MarsCon, apparently 2019 is my year for getting on stage at events I’ve long frequented.
There are many official celebrity guests on JoCo Cruise, but anyone can request a space and time to host their own events, whether concerts, crafting workshops, jam sessions, locksports seminars, hydrating face mask parties, PGP signing parties, space dog slideshows, scotch or foreign snack tastings, meetups of people who are various flavours of non-heteronormative, religious, merfolk, impaired, purple-haired, or scientists, or just a session of yelling at the moon. All of these things are real events that happened this year. This ‘shadow’ cruise, as it’s called, took up 292 of the 605 hours of programming.
My little corner of that was Angela Brett & Phil Conrad with Friends, later referred to as the ‘Hastily Assembled Entertainment Taco’, after the official event ‘Hastily Assembled Entertainment Burrito‘. The friends involved included Randy Parcel on vocals, Ryan Nathan on drums, Joey Marianer on vocals and ukulele, and Jeff Kahan on oboe. You can see the full show in the YouTube playlist below, or read on as I self-indulgently embed the specific parts I had a hand in, along with a few others from the open mic night.
The show started with excellent covers of Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Octopus‘ and Da Vinci’s Notebook’s ‘Title of the Song‘ where my only role was enjoying the great harmonies. Then Randy and Joey sang a parody I wrote of Tom Lehrer’s ‘Selling Out’ about how quickly JoCo Cruise 2019 sold out once They Might Be Giants were announced as guests:
Then Joey sang my poem ‘They Might Not Be Giants‘ to the tune Joey came up with earlier:
and Joey and I sang ‘I Love Your Body‘ (my words, Joey’s tune):
Then it was time for me to hold the stage on my own, so, having seen Katie Mack the night before and got excited about science, I recited one of my poems about CERN, Grand Unification:
I did this one again at sea monkey open mic night, where I think I did a better job of explaining it:
But back to the shadow event. Next I did ‘Why I Perform at Open Mics‘, which I’d also done at MarsCon, only this time there was no need to censor the word ‘f🦆ck’:
I finished it off with ‘The Bookshop‘, which I had performed at open mics before but never put on YouTube:
Phil rounded out the show with a few of his songs, including a duet with his girlfriend Silvia (which he also thinks went better at open mic night), and a performance of Feeding the Monsters with Jeff on oboe.
Another performance I contributed to was Joey’s performance at open mic. Partially because Beth Kinderman’s performance of ‘Stop Covering Hallelujah‘ at MarsCon had put the tune in our heads, we wrote a parody of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ about the inside joke that was created during the New Monkey Orientation, purple guava. Joey sang it at open mic, and the crowd joined in with more beautiful harmonies than a coloured piece of fruit has any right to:
I also participated in the Fancy Pants Parade, as usual, but that’s a topic for another post. Also as usual, I recorded about 25 hours of video during the cruise, which I am uploading to my channel in chronological order.
Creative Output 