Current mood:	chipper
Entry tags:	eddie izzard

Eddie Izzard, Coronet Theatre, 12 January 2008
Using my fast-approaching birthday as an excuse, I once again returned to The Coronet Theatre with a group of friends who had never seen Eddie Izzard live. From the moment we arrived (around 6:45pm) until the In N Out Burger run at 1:30am, the entire evening was truly and utterly memorable.

Having waited in line at The Coronet before, I decided to do so again in order to let my friends wander for a bit. I ended up near the very front, where two girls were seated and talking with one another. We talked for awhile, another one of their friend's arrived, and I quickly discovered that they had only just learned about Eddie Izzard performing in the area and this was their first live show. In preparation for the event, they had decorated t-shirts with a variety of Eddie Izzard references, including cake or death symbols and quite a few bees. My friends joined us for the last forty-five minutes of waiting, and we all had a chance to talk about random things before the show.

The show was great, and Eddie definitely did a ton of adlibbing. He slipped into some of his earlier work a few times, which was pretty amusing to watch (he realized midway through one of his set-ups that it sounded very similar to "Cake or Death" and finished it that way, which I thought was pretty great).

The experience after the show was a bit surreal: earlier in the performance we had heard sirens and screaming outside the theatre, but learned from Eddie at his curtain call that a shooting had taken place a short distance away (someone recently drew my attention to this blog, which explains what happened: http://www.danielkells.com/?p=149). Consequently, we exited the theatre to find police cars everywhere and helicopter search lights shining into the alleyway. A few of my friends and I, along with the three girls we had met earlier, stayed for awhile and ended up getting some good pictures and chatting with Eddie for a bit. I had an opportunity to talk with him briefly about his speech on the Critics Choice Award. I spent a longer time answering a question he posed in the show about the Weird Sisters in Macbeth (specifically, why they have to be "weird"). Having translated Old English literature in the past, I knew that the Old English word "wyrd" essentially means "fate," so I explained that these characters were associated with fate in the story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd). One of my friends and I also talked with him about Babylonian creation epics like Enuma Elish, which may actually have influenced the creation story in Genesis. For example, mention of "the deep" at the beginning of Genesis could be based on a similar placement of deified bodies of water in the Babylonian texts; the key difference is that, while the natural elements are considered gods in the Babylonian creation epic, Genesis presents these same elements as existing under the sovereignty of one God (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enuma_Elish). At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to get these web pages to him because he was interested in knowing a bit more.

After taking some pictures we drove to In N Out Burger for a 1:30am meal, which in itself was a somewhat strange experience (how is it that I always end up arguing with people about the origins of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_in_the_Sky_with_Diamonds).

I suppose that's all for now. Feel free to add other anecdotes from the evening in responses to this post.


The aforementioned t-shirt people:


Group Photo:


Me and Eddie: