I saw TJ and Dave at the Goodman Theater in Chicago on Saturday night. Individually, TJ and Dave are spectacularly talented improvisors: together, they are sublime.
In Chicago, they draw a sellout crowd that includes actors currently working here. Saturday, David Eigenberg (Hermann on Chicago Fire) and Christian Stolte (Mouch, same show) were seated near me. At intermission, I interrupted Eigenberg’s conversation with someone, and proceeded to make an ass of myself.
In my defense, I’d had a beer on an empty stomach when I said, “I’m sorry to interrupt…” Eigenberg graciously replied “oh, that’s ok,” while smiling and leaning in, seemingly interested in what I had to say, and not irritated at all, which tells you what a great actor he is.
I said, “I just wanted to thank you for Christopher–he sounds EXACTLY like my late father in law!” So, I compared Mr. Eigenberg’s depiction of a fictional character to an actual deceased person. Great start, Annie!
But oh, just a start. “He was a West Side Polock and you sound just like him!” I know Eigenberg spent some of his youth in the Chicago area, but I don’t know whether he uses that moniker for a person of Polish descent affectionately, as my Mike did, or whether he regards it as an unspeakable epithet. Strike two, Annie!
Then I told him that the way he said “dat’s da Stanley caaaahhp!” in the episode which included the actual Stanley cup was why I refer to him whenever I’m asked what a real Chicago accent sounds like. But the Stanley Cup made me think about hockey, which made me think of Mike, which somehow led me to say how my late husband (great! dead guy again!) was “half Polish, half Italian, and I forget what the other half was…”
As further confirmation of Mr. Eigenberg’s acting skill, he didn’t laugh in my face. He just smiled and replied with a gentle chuckle, “you only get two…”
(The third “half,” I remembered moments later, is Irish, which completes the Chicago Catholic white guy heritage trifecta. But I didn’t get there while talking to Eigenberg. And, although Mike’s Dad was Catholic, Mike was more of a student of many religions, all of them well outside Catholicism).
I wasn’t done interrupting celebrity conversations yet! TJ and Dave’s opening act in Chicago is Ike Reilly, whom my Mike knew as Mike Reilly 36 years ago when they both worked at the Park Hyatt hotel on the Mag Mile in Chicago. Reilly was a doorman, and my Mike was a room service waiter. I said a nasty thing about Reilly in a blog post a few years ago. I take it back. Reilly couldn’t have been more gracious.
Reilly was talking to Stolte. I picked a brief lull in their conversation to stick my head in and say, “Hi, Mike, I’m Anne P…” and he immediately said, “oh, Mike’s wife!” Then I said, “I don’t even know if you guys were as good friends as Mike said..” to which Reilly said, “oh yeah, we were friends — he came to my house a few times!” (We live quite close to the town where Reilly lives).
Then I said “I don’t want to bring you down,” (another great start, Annie! Set the guy up for some bad news!) but I thought you might want to know that Mike died ten years ago (awesome! Another dead guy icebreaker!) so I wanted to thank you for that song about absent friends…”
Reilly performed a song about an older man who befriended him decades ago, when he worked at a cemetery. Reilly told the story of their friendship, and then announced that the man had committed suicide by self-immolation (you started that dead guy thread, Reilly). He told the audience that if they’d lost someone, they could invite that person’s spirit to stop by and listen.
When I thanked him for the song, Reilly smiled and said, “maybe Mike stopped by” and I got choked up and thanked him again and went back to my seat. Almost. Took me a few seconds to realize I stopped short, so I got up and made it back to my actual seat just as TJ and Dave stepped out on stage.
I console myself knowing TJ and Dave were so good, so sidesplittingly funny, so astonishingly adept at trading characters back and forth and moving their one-act forward brilliantly and hilariously, that no one, not Eigenberg or Stolte or Reilly, is going to remember the absurd short fat widow woman yammering about her dead husband and father in law.
Or if they do, at least maybe I gave them a good laugh.
Hoping this story gave you a good laugh too, I remain,
your socially inept, celebrity-interrupting, clownishly sentimental fool,
Ridiculouswoman
You were brave!! And sweet.