This is a guest blogger...my friend, Maggie Garcia. Before you start reading, I want to let you all in on a little secret. Maggie Garcia is white. You'll see what I mean. Enjoy. XOXO, Merekat.
An Open Letter to Dave Chappelle
Dear Dave,
You don't know me, but I fucking hate you.
Wait, let me back up.
When I found out you were going to be in Memphis, there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to see you. I have been a pothead for the past 10 years and I am thus a huge fan of your work. In fact, some of my best memories in high school are riding around my hometown in an overstuffed vehicle, listening to burned CDs of your stand up. My favorite bits are the ones about Sesame Street, Purple Drank, and the Baby selling weed on the corner in the ghetto.
The tickets could have been $200 and I still would have paid it. This isn't to say that the almost $60 I paid wasn't something of a hardship. But in addition to my money, you wasted something much more valuable - my motherfucking time.
Your show started at 7pm. I work in healthcare policy and social justice, which is a 24/7 job in Memphis, but I average about 60 hours a week. I rarely take a break, but I was going to make an exception for you. Yesterday I got to work super early, parallel parked my ass, Super Woman'ed the shit out of three meetings and was desperately trying to finish up a teen pregnancy report when I realized it was 5:45pm and I needed to un-park my ass and head to Wheelz's apt.
Wheelz is my life partner (I would marry him, but I hate him) and he uses a wheelchair. He has a van with a ramp that we use to bebop around Memphis. Last week, the van's ramp broke. This means that in order to get to the Orpheum, we had to spend 20 minutes manually operating the lift (which, as Merekat pointed out, sounds sexual), then another 20 in the parking lot to get Wheelz out of the van. As soon as we approached Downtown, my agita kicked in. I was surrounded by white people, most of them in polo shirts. You've probably never navigated a hoard of entitled white people in a wheelchair, but let me tell you, it sucks. It especially sucks when you're stoned out of your mind.
We were excited about hanging out with our friends, word on the street was front row tickets. Imagine our disappointment when we realized we were in the last row of the Orchestra - in the ADA section. But, whatever, we were still excited. I then stood in line for 20 minutes so I could pay almost $40 for two drinks. When I made it back to my seat, your opening act had already started. He was funny as shit. When he left the stage, Wheelz and I were a little drunk and super excited. We locked fingers, and passed bits of your act back and forth like notes in elementary school.
I was still a little irritated by all the white people in the room, especially the douchebag frat boys who kept walking up and down the aisles and yelling to one another. But I thought to myself, "Oh, just wait, Dave is going to put you in your motherfucking place, white dudes." I was positively salivating at the idea of Dave Chappelle using "Chip" to shame these assholes.
At 9pm, you came onstage. By this time, nobody was stoned anymore, but Memphis went crazy anyway. A few minutes in, something became very apparent to both me and Wheelz (we are connoisseurs of stand up; we frequent live shows) - you didn't seem to have any material prepared. Rather, you seemed content to respond to the inane shout outs from the annoying audience. You might not have had any interest in policing white assholes, but Memphis doesn't take kindly to those types and there were more than a few instances of audience members yelling "Shut the fuck up!" at each other. You couldn't see this far back, but the three rows in front of us were cleared out by security because people were literally brawling over someone "shushing" someone else (that's why Memphis can't have anything nice).
Wheelz and I were right - you didn't have anything prepared. And not only were you not shaming the random white guys who kept yelling shit at you, you were responding to it! After about an hour of saying random shit to people in the audience, you started to awkwardly try to get off stage. You kept saying "Ok guys, I gotta wrap this up." Wheelz and I thought this was a joke, of course, that a few hours in and DC would hit his groove, that you would go for one of those marathon sessions you're so admired for. You, in fact, hinted to this - saying things like "Y'all can keep leaving, I can outlast all of y'all. Haven't you heard? Dave Chappelle takes a while to get warmed up." Needless to say, this didn't happen. You didn't just not bring your A-game ... you didn't bring any game!
You said during your brief time in front of my face that you really appreciate all the working people of Memphis filling up the Orpheum on a Tuesday night. But I don't believe that. The Bath Assaults learned a valuable lesson, that our time is better spent answering questions about today's date than listening to washed up comics who've forgotten where they came from.
xoxo,
Maggie Garcia
No comments:
Post a Comment