I was kind of a loser in the early 90’s.

So it speaks to exactly how successful Shawn Wayans was that even I knew his name.

I didn’t watch “In Living Color”, I hadn’t seen “I’m Gonna Get You Sucka”, and I’m sorry to say that I missed out on “The Wayans Bros” sitcom—a TV show that aired on the WB network before it decided to retool its lineup to cater to bookish 14-year-olds fixated on vampire-slaying and teenaged superheroes.

So the first time I REALLY knew who Shawn Wayans was when I was forced to watch Scary Movie 20 or 30 times in a row by my new roommates in San Francisco (who had JUST arrived in “the big city” from Kansas—yes, Kansas).  It might have been the slapstick comedy; it might have been Shawn’s striking good looks; or it might have been the drugs that they suddenly realized they could buy on the corner of Fillmore and Eddy.  But whatever it was, they just couldn’t get enough of that movie.

Probably it was the drugs.

Anyway, the first 8 or 9 times I actually found it pretty funny—and I was sober.

So when Lori and I got the chance to interview Shawn about Dance Flick, the new film he co-wrote with his brothers, we jumped at it.

INTERVIEW W SHAWN WAYANS

PS I hope that my former roommates are sitting somewhere in a drug-induced haze reading this with jealousy.  (Preferably in Kansas.) Thanks for depriving me of all that sleep.

I don’t like to play favorites.

Oh wait, f*ck it.  I do.

And one of my new faves is Sake Tumi, the new sushi place on State Street.  One of the reasons I love Tumi is that it proves the “haters” wrong—those that say that a trendy, upscale, student-friendly restaurant in downtown Bing can’t survive.

And now they’ve fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinally got their liquor license.  Jesus, was anybody else tired of doing Jose Cuervo shots next door at On the Roxx so they could tolerate their dinner company?

Anyway, the sushi has been consistently good; the service has been consistently fast; and now the lunch can be consistently liquid.  Life is good.

So the big question?  Will the sake-bombing frat boys make nice nice with the suit and tie set from the Press Building?  Or will the flowing liquor make a dent in their classy rep.  I think everything will work out just fine; and I expect great things for the future of Bing’s first downtown sushi joint.

PS Rumors are that the “official ribbon-cutting” will go down next week.  I’m not one to give advice, but I think free sake-bombs might be a draw…

PPS The “dessert sushi” roles are phenomenal.  The words, “Oh my God, I’m so f-ing stuffed, I couldn’t eat another bite” have left my vocabulary.  Thankfully.  New motto: Dessert now, gastric bypass later.

Busy, busy week.  Last night, Lori & I interviewd Hinder on their tour bus at the Arena.  I’ll be posting that little nugget later.  THEN the KGB boys announced live on stage that Buckcherry will be coming to town (the Arena) May 20th.

THEN an even bigger announcement as far as I’m concerned;  Melissa Etheridge is coming to the Anderson Center on August 23rd.  SHE IS KICK ASS LIVE.  Buy tickets.  Now.  Oh wait, you can’t yet.  They go on sale Monday.  But you CAN win them if you listen to me blather on the radio.

Some robots like to morph into a human form and shoot you (like in T2).  Some robots like to take over your spacecraft and shoot you (like in Battlestar Galactica.)  Some robots like to have identical evil twin brothers that shoot you with phasers (Star Trek).  And still some other robots will terminate your life functions while you lie helpless in suspended animation (2001).

If sci-fi has taught us nothing else, it’s that your robot will kill you one day.  (It’s good to see that the US military is putting this lesson to good use in Pakistan; I can’t imagine any way THAT little technology could go awry.)

So that’s why it’s probably appealing that somebody has created a robot too dumb to kill anybody.  It’s called the tweenbot.  Which in some obscure language must translate to “brown paper lunch bag with smiley face drawn on it”.

And that’s exactly what the Tweenbot looks like.  It was a research project for NYU ITP student Kacie Kinzer.  If you’ve never heard of the NYU “ITP” grad program—I hadn’t—it describes itself as the “Center for the Recently Possible”.  You know how the Sharper Image sells a whole bunch of crap that uses fiber optics and lasers to look really cool but not function in any useful way?  The NYU ITP center does kinda the same thing—except it probably costs $40,000 a year instead of 99.99 (which is what everything at the Sharper Image costs, until it goes on clearance at TJ Maxx for 5.99).

Kinzer created the Tweenbot to answer one simple question:  Are New Yorkers really @ssholes?

The answer?  Surprisingly not.

Here’s how it works:  Build a stupid robot that’s too cute for words and is only capable of going forward.  No sensors. No artificial intelligence.  No weapons.  No fun.  Then attach a sign to it that’s drawn by the same girl who drew hearts, flowers, and teddy bears all over your high school yearbook.  The sign should say (in happy bubble letters with appropriately ridiculous flourishes) “HELP ME. I need to get to the Southwest corner of Washington Square Park.”  Then take it to the Northeast corner and let it loose.

42 minutes and 29 pedestrian helpers later, the robot will arrive at its goal.

Kinzer believes that this says something about the Washington Square Park crowd; that it says something about New Yorkers; that it says something about human nature itself.

I think that it says something about the power of cute.

And makes me want to hurl just a little bit.

Artsy people aren’t always good at pimping their s@%t.  So that’s why it’s nice to see the KNOW Theater (Caroll Street, Binghamton) working their marketing machine as hard as their method acting.  KNOW’s dedicated themselves to producing less commercial theater.  And if you think it’s tough getting people to live theater in general, just imagine what it’s like when you don’t have some old Andrew Lloyd Webber shriek-fest to cart out of the cobwebs when money gets tight.

No, you’ll definitely see some more “interesting” fare at KNOW.  And that’s why they have to get so creative when it comes to getting noticed.  They know how to do it low-budget marketing.  And they know how to do it on the web.

Take their latest show: The Two of You.  It’s a play that was first produced at the Kitchen Theatre in Ithaca about a well-to-do social-climbing couple living in Boston during the 1950s.  They’re just going about their business when a girl shows up at their front door claiming to be the husband’s daughter.  The girl’s name is January Aloha Ireland.  Congratulations; you now know the sum total of everything I know about the plot of the play.

But here’s where the KNOW folks get clever.   Rather then run some lame-ass marketing campaign, they’ve decided to create posters advertising January’s search for her father.  “Do you know Hank?” they ask, in bold letters across the top.  “Hey! My name is January Aloha Ireland.  I’m in town trying to find my father Hank.  He doesn’t know about me yet…” And so on.

The posters use pics of the actual actors—further blurring the line between reality and theatrics.  And they haven’t stopped with posters.  January’s got her own Facebook, and she’s friending the hell out of everybody in Binghamton.  Check out her current status “I met this opera singer guy Matt who said I should be using Facebook to help in my search, he suggested I friend you if you don’t already know me. Visit my blog http://doyouknowhank.blogspot.com/”.

Go to the blog and you’ll find even more of the story—a journal of January’s quest to find her dad.  The campaign’s so cool, I’m starting to worry that the play will be a let down.  So I tracked down the Artistic Director of KNOW to find out more…

I know you’re being a bit secretive about the ad campaign for “The Two of You”.  But tell us as much as you can (without having to kill us afterwards).
We are taking the story to the street and internet in a way no one in this town (or possibly anywhere) has done before.  At KNOW Theatre we, maybe I should speak for myself, I don’t see these people as characters, I see them as people.  I don’t see theatre as “a cute play”  I see it as an event.  I see people with a back story, with a life that could exist somewhere else besides on the stage.  We’ll call this idea a convention.  If we accept different types of theatre may open up different conventions than what we’re used to on a stage, the possibilities are endless.  In this case it just happens that in my mind, the characters are currently alive and well.  And although everything they do off stage may not agree with what they do onstage, it still makes things interesting and opens up a wide range of possibilities for advertising.

So you’re obviously thinking outside the box in terms of advertising your next show.  But I’m told the writing of the show itself is kind of “outside the box”.  How so?
When a new play is written, it is often taken to a workshop where other writers and audience members give feedback and help the playwright perfect his work.  Theatre also has an un-written list of conventions.  For instance one character may talk to the audience to tell their story, as in Glass Menagerie, but no one else on stage does and no one else is aware that “Character A” is conversing with the audience.  For this show, all the typical conventions are blown out of the water.  Everything is fair game.  The playwright has acknowledged in his work that this is a show being performed post workshop and it becomes clear things are maybe not perfect yet in some minds.

If you had to describe the plot in say, 25 words, how would you do it.  Use more and you get a penalty.  I’m serious.  I only pay for so much disk drive space on BingPop.
Husband, Wife, girl enters via elevator.  Surprise!  Where was he 21 years and 9 months ago?  Living in the 80’s…friends with benefits…unexpected results.

How’s the campaign working so far?  Have people actually bought into the idea that this girl’s looking for her dad? 
Depends what you mean by “bought into the idea”.  Are people helping January find her dad, yes.  She has a growing following on Facebook (search her by e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and she’s started a Twitter and YouTube account.  You can also check out her website at http://www.DoYouKNOWHank.com I’ll tell you a little secret, we haven’t announced it yet, but in about a week, KNOW Theatre is going to officially join in the search and open our e-mail list to her.  I feel for the poor girl.  As for the public, one of my students saw the poster and offered to have his father, a cop, do a background search and see what he could come up with.  Something told me that was not a good idea, and some poor guy named Hank pulled over on 81 might have a hard time explaining, so we passed on that.  But generally people have been very supportive, a little confused, but lets face it, finding ones biological parent(s) isn’t always simple or easy. 

If people are going to see a show at the KNOW Theatre for the first time, what’s the one thing you’d want them to walk away saying, if nothing else?
Wow!  That was better than some of the off-Broadway shows I’ve seen!  (We already hear that, we just like to hear it repeated)

When you plan a new show that’s a little less traditional, do you get any pushback—any “nobody will come to see that”?  If so, how do you respond?
Sometimes.  Many theatres are stuck in a place where they have to sell large numbers of tickets to keep the doors open.  Luckily, we can afford to take risks here and there.  We’re not out to produce every controversial, cutting edge play ever written.  We just feel like sometimes there are shows that haven’t been given a fair chance, and we want to breathe life into them so the people of the Bing can make their own conclusions.

Owego has been declared the Coolest Small Town in America by Budget Travel Magazine.  Duh, we could have told you that.  The results of the Budget Travel poll were announced moments ago on CBS’s Early Show.  In addition to having a postcard perfect downtown and "fish", Owego was commended for quirky touches like the Jailhouse Restaurant.

We called Mayor Arrington for his immediate reaction (CLICK TO LISTEN).  Lori and I have decided that he’s adorable.