On Friday evening, I enjoyed a multi-media performance by Jill Pangello and company. When I read in my email about the event, I noticed the connection to Mike Albo and I knew I should try to go. My professor, Peter Hall, recently recommended I look into Mike Albo’s work, which I subsequently checked out on YouTube. Albo is a comedian who kind of strings random, ordinary fragments of thoughts together in hilarious, nonsensical ways, creating new meaning. This way of taking ordinary pieces of information out of context to form new meaning is a reoccurrence in some of my design work too.
Anyway I’d never heard of either Mike Albo or Jill Pangello until this month and the performance at Fiesta Gardens was hilarious. Mike Albo wrote two of the scripts for Pangello’s acts. Even though the night was unexpectedly chilly and every seat was taken, it was good to smile and be around amused people for an hour. Oh, earlier that day too, Jacqueline told me she’d seen Pangallo at AMOA before and she is great, and she was. My favorite acts of Pangello’s “Let Me Entertain You” set were:
1) One about facebook where she played a person trying to write her “25 Random things about Me” (that exercise that ran around facebook a month or so ago)
2) One about a cat which you just have to watch for yourself
3) The voicemail episode (written by Mike Albo) where a woman leaves this poor man a voice mail message that is a rambling, unedited streaming of her thoughts (as they can pop up as you’re trying to go to sleep or something) from one to the next, silly, unimportant, self-absorbed.