GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Big Hurrah in New York

Big Hurrah in New York: NOTE: You may have seen me before, but unless you've seen me in a theatre (especially in a really top-notch theatre like Ars Nova, you haven't see the half of it. Light craziness, sound craziness, slides, lunacy. . .everything I can't do in the restraints of a comedy club) One night only:

Hey Everyone!

I will be performing at Ars Nova Theater in New York City on Wednesday, Sep 3 at 8pm. For ticketing and more details, please go to:

http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showcode=WIL14

Here's what they have to say about me:

"Will Franken's outrageous wit will drive you to the brink of hysteria in his latest solo show. Tackling topics from the sacrosanct to the obscure, this is Franken doing what he does best: inhabiting a myriad of characters at lightning speed like a demented, one-man Monty Python. Praised by the New York Times for his 'erudite wit and highly developed sense of the absurd' and recently dubbed San Francisco's 'Best Alternative to Psychedelic Drugs,' Franken hits the Ars Nova stage for one night only."

For more information about Will Franken, please contact Steve Cleary, Marketing Director at 609-576-7552

Ars Nova NYC (54th Street at 10th Avenue--next door to the Colbert Report)
8pm
Wednesday, September 3rd
$15

Two Things I Have Never Loved

1. Uncertainty
2. Silence

I probably dislike uncertainty a bit more as it tends to linger a little longer than silence. Plus, one can easily break a silence. It's harder to break an uncertainty.

This is why I have always held a morbid (and narcissistic) fascination with death. Death being the ultimate not only in certainty, but in silence as well. Perhaps I can suffer the silence with ease if a certainty such as death be its cause.

But a living silence? Ooh, I don't like that at all. To be silent and uncertain? To live through the silence and the uncertainty simultaneously? Maddening! Maddening!

I am after certainty and NOISE!

Would that death could leave a loud corpse, I would have gladly died a thousand times by now! A parade for each disembodiment!

So I live now with uncertainty.

But mine is a LOUD UNCERTAINTY!!! Ever so noisy!!! Noise to abate the silence of uncertainty!!! Sis-boom-bah!!! Sis-boom-bah!!! WE SHALL NEVER DIE!!!!!

Checking in. . .

CHECKING IN

I'm sitting in Central Park across the street from where John Lennon was killed.

I'm so lonely and sad right now. I wish I were performing tonight. I'm so happy when I am performing and so lost and rudderless when I am not.

I'll go anywhere and perform. I don't want to teach anybody anything with my comedy anymore. I don't want to be pedantic or abrasive. I just want to let my natural God-given gifts shine forth, for I do believe in God and I do believe that my gifts were bestowed upon me by Him, who I prefer to call Him. I take no credit for that which I can do. I can only attribute that to the Divine.

But what I destroy--that is all mine. Destruction of one's abilities comes from the Self.

I don't want to be subtracted from humanity. I want to be poured into the stream; giving to life and not taking from it.

Children in strollers still piss me off, though. Yelling balls of compressed want, they seem to me.

Dogs are nice, though. I love dogs. I make a point to stop and pet every dog I see.

I wish I had more time to write.

I am a comedian. I am performing September 3rd, my one-man show, at Ars Nova at 54th Street at 10th Avenue. I am also performing Monday, August 25th at the Algonquin Theatre at 123 East 24th Street.

I often worry I will not have achieved anything before I die.

I told this girl after the show in San Francisco that I liked her glasses. She let me try them on. I was going to ask her out before I remembered that I lived in New York now.

That was a very fun show. I always feel like I'm coming home when I perform at The Purple Onion. I think of Mario, the owner, and how cool I feel to be embraced by real Italians. "You know this is your room," he always tells me.

So much I have taken for granted this past year. For there is so very much I have to be grateful for. Yet there is a undefined longing that has always existed deep inside me. I feel its pains in moments like this, after 4pm in Central Park when shafts of sinking sunlight sift through foliage overhead and humanity in its various shapes and sizes and colors and age brackets flow in and out

How can I start over? But not start over entirely, for that would be too painful. How can I pool my resources and proceed from a position of strength and not weakness?

Are we not all of us alone? Am I not unique in this regard?

I am a comedian. When that fact is aligned with my present state, and only then, does my world make sense and things seem not so very bleak--or, at best, not completely insoluble.

Hello San Francisco

I'm looking forward to seeing you again tomorrow.

Kisses until then.

Will.

I'm Going To Be a Nice Person

I'm going to be a nice person
and offer you my cup.
When you are done drinking from it,
please throw it away.
I don't want your disease.
That would be taking something from you.
I don't want to be a thief.
I want to be a nice person.

I'm going to lead the way in goodness
15 percent more efficiently than the nearest competitor.
People will know where to go for goodness.
When they see my name, they will think of "halo".

Smiles and hugs will abound like ringworm did on Old Yeller.
For every illegitimate child, an ice cream cone.
For every unwed mother, a shot of tequila.
For every deadbeat father, a Greyhound ticket.

No expense will be spared in this all-out assault on wickedness.
I will not short-change my ability to wage war upon the inhumane.

I will take all that which is cruel and self-serving and strangle it to death
in a wheat-field where a pentagram sits in the center and,
with backwoods invocations,
I will summon the Diabolical Dove of Understanding
to round up the nattering nabobs of negativity and have them all euthanized in the name of progressive science.

I will stab, bludgeon, strangle, and rape my way into your heart!
I will beat you mercilessly until your only recourse is to accept my overwhelming kindness.

You are doomed--DOOMED!--to accept the love that gushes forth from my bosom like a sea of stained razor blades riding the surf of a teenage girl's wrist.

I'm going to be a nice person, you miserable motherfuckers.

Here's What You the Readers Had to Say! The Girl WAS a Hooker!

THE VOTES ARE IN!

(NOTE: If confused, please see previous entry "Was This Girl a Hooker? Let Me Know! Your Opinion Matters!" from 7-28-08)

Austin from San Francisco: "Schizophrenic homeless hooker"

Jeff from San Francisco: "A hooker, albeit a homeless one, probably her first night on the job"

Heather from Washington, DC: "If you were walking around in the movie version of Breakfast At Tiffany's, then I'd say she was a hooker. . .in real life, however, I vote for borderline personality disorder chick. . .if she'd gone on a bit more about identity theft. . .I would have added a touch of schiz to my diagnosis

and Mike from the UK: "She was a prostitute"

So three for hooker (or prostitute) and one for borderline personality!

Democracy calls it--the girl was a hooker!

Thanks everybody!