Living and Dying in Seattle

Boy, I feel old now.  After listening to John Keister stand-up comedy show last night, Living and Dying in Seattle, so many memories have returned from the days of his local hit show Almost Live! from 1984 to 1999 that was about all things Seattle.  The show was so good that back then we would video tape it on our VCR and save them.  They were classics.  Like the sketches of the Californians all moving up to Seattle, Dick's Hamburgers turned into "Dudes"; the espresso babies needing their espresso fixes; Arthur Denny and Seattle's founding fathers pulling up onto Alki beach for the first time and hear that familiar sound of the steamed milk, SSSHHHHHH, with an Indian behind the espresso machine;  The High-Fivin' White Guys, who Keister referred to last night as saying he never thought he'd be spending the rest of his life giving people high-fives; the Ballard Driving School and how much Ballard has changed now.  He recalled the show's "For Sale" sign in front of a house that had rolling numbers on it because of how fast prices kept going up.  Little did he know how true all his sketches were becoming.  But he did say his comedy wouldn't be funny if those things weren't already happening.  And we loved to laugh about it back in those days with no hard feelings.  Like his sketches on "The Cops of ....Mercer Island, Wallingford, etc", the Bill Gates sightings with the actor portraying Bill Gates as such a total nerd; the bashing of all of different neighborhood personalities like Kent, Renton, the Eastside; he told about the trouble he got into after the show's 1989 April Fool's Day joke of the Space Needle falling down.  The sketch was a breaking news "War of the World's" special reporting format and people thought it was real.  That one even made news across the country.  Or his "Lame" friends that he recruited from his days of writing for the Rocket, a music newspaper, to do the "Lame" sketch that was one of our favorites. "Lame, lame, lame!" We still imitate those guys to this day.

Last night John told about his days of editor for the U.W. newspaper and the trouble he go into at that job. He loved doing headlines about the "Husky Women...Lick the Beavers", etc.  Or the time they removed the "time capsule" put in by the administration.  After sneaking it out of the building and analyzing it, he and his friends thought it was pretty boring so they spiced the contents up a bit by adding a Hustler magazine, a Twinkie, some pop rocks candy, etc.  Sure enough, when it was opened in the early 2000's, the headlines read "Red Faced U.W. Administrators Opened Time Capsule..."  John  Keister was definitely a trouble maker and we loved him for it.    

Then he started telling stories current Seattle.  He told about his visits to some of the tech industry buildings and meeting some of those people.  They have beautiful buildings over looking Elliot Bay with breath-taking views, yet when he looked around, he was puzzled how everybody was just hunched over their computers.  He had a tour of the Facebook building and it was pointed out all the services provided right at work like dry cleaning and Amazon deliveries.  He wondered, do they ever want to go home?  And then there's Mark Zuckerberg's original couch from his Harvard dorm room.  Keister asked, "are we suppose to genuflect or something?"  He doesn't quite get it.  And neither do most of us old timers.  Times have changed in Seattle, for sure, and those of us who are the era of John Keister, feel it.  I wish we could look at Seattle now with humor but it's just not the same as the old days.  Keister's humor would most likely not be acceptable anymore because so much of it was making fun of other people and places that we could just laugh about back then.   He said this will be his last show because even in a year from now so much will be different and can we really laugh about it then?  The era of John Keister and Almost Live! is just another part of Vanishing Seattle.  I'm glad I was around to remember what it use to be like before it vanished.