Current mood:	giddy
Entry tags:	eddie izzard, quote

Eddie Izzard at The Coronet, Monday 22 October
Yesterday's performance at The Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles began with what seemed more like a conversation than anything else. Eddie opened with comments on the fires in Southern California and wondered why the winds were named after Santa Ana ("Who is Santa Ana? Why did she get wind?"). Someone a few rows back responded, "That's not the original name. It used to mean Satan's winds." Eddie asked if that was true, and someone else in said loudly, "I'll check my iPhone." Eddie Izzard then pulled out his iPhone and looked up the Wikipedia article to read along with the audience member ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_wind ). After reading a few introductory statements, they found the etymology of the word:

"Santa Ana winds may get their name from the Santa Ana Mountains in Orange County, the Santa Ana River or Santa Ana Canyon, along which the winds are particularly strong. There are also claims that the original form is Santana winds, from the Spanish vientos de Satán ("winds of Satan", Sanatanas being a rarer form of Satanás), and that this in turn is a translation of a native name in some unspecified language."

All of this was incredibly funny in ways that only Eddie Izzard can pull off. Since we spent a good five to ten minutes doing all of this, Eddie finally said, "What are we doing? Okay, the show's starting now," for which he received massive amounts of applause.

I had an opportunity to see Eddie perform at The Coronet in August, and I sensed that this time both Eddie and the audience were more engaged with and responsive to the material. He repeated many of the topics from the last show I saw but frequently departed in very amusing ways. He also did a lot more miming than I remembered from the last show, and I think that energy helped. He had apparently flown in from Germany that morning (woke up around 5:30am), so maybe he was feeling a little loopy after a bit of sleep deprivation. In any case, the show was great and I highly recommend going to his live shows.

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Just for fun, here are some miscellaneous quotes from the show:

-On hunter gatherers: "They wore pants everywhere because they looked fantastic!"

-On the Amish using the horse and buggy: "Wasn't that the Ferrari of the 1700s?"

-On the Queen's wave: "That's not a wave--that's feeling the outside of a cup."

And here are a list of some of my favourite mimes:

-The Obesity Wars

-Spartan Women Giving Birth

-Giraffes Doing Charades