my travels | Erin Jackson | Stand-Up Comedian

A Gay, A Jew & A Black Walk Into A Bar

So, remember last year when I worked with my favorite, Wendy Liebman and Carol Leifer at the Women in Comedy Festival? If not, feel free to click the hyperlink in the previous sentence. Well earlier this year Carol contacted me and said she’d like to put together a show with her, Wendy and me and asked if I’d be interested. Duh. So fast forward a couple months, and “A Gay, A Jew & A Black Walk Into A Bar” hit the stage at the Armstrong Theater in Torrance, CA. Woohoo!

The audience was really great and being on a theater show with these two ladies made me feel legit! I really hope we get the chance to do it again. An than after that, again. And again.

Ce Ce, Centric and Communism

So I was in Chicago this past weekend for the launch event for a special I taped a few months back, and as we were leaving the club, we ran into Ce Ce Peniston of “Keep on Walking” fame on the street. Doesn’t she look fantastic? I said something very drunk as I asked if she’d take a photo with me — something like “Thank you so much ’cause girl, you coulda kept right on walkin’…” Yes, really. And she still posed for the pic. What a gracious lady! Damn you Makers Mark!

Be sure to keep an eye out for the Stand Up For Family Vol. 4 special airing on Centric this fall! Here’s a sneak peek…

Continue reading →

Directions

This morning I found myself in Springfield, OH at the corner of N. Western and W. North. Who named the streets in this town, Kanye and Kim?

Wild Turkey and Tyrone

Leaving Kentucky yesterday morning, I saw a sign on the highway for the Wild Turkey Distillery. I’ve never been a big fan of their drank, but I’m a huge Bourbon nerd and I’m trying to get my Bourbon Trail Passport all stamped up so I decided to check it out. Booker T, remember this post about the actual wild turkeys I found hanging out down the street from my house?

But I digress.

There was a church called Tyrone Baptist just down the way from the visitor’s center. Tyrone Baptist is precisely the kind of name I’d expect a church next door to the Wild Turkey distillery to have. Continue reading →

Oooh, babeh babeh

I’m in Cleveland working at the Improv here this weekend, and I trekked over to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame yesterday. Can I just say — AH-MAY-ZING?!?! I spent 4 hours there, So much to see. I’m definitely gonna do another blog/vlog about everything I saw, but the thing that blew my mind the most was this jacket (above). It’s the jacket Pepa wore in Salt-n-Pepa’s “Push It” video. Whaaaaat?!?! If you’re a brown woman (don’t mean to exclude other women but…) of a certain age and you didn’t want the outfits, hair cuts and know the dance routine from this video when you were a kid, you did childhood wrong. Seeing this jacket took me back to me and my cousin Mel dancing and trying to learn the words to the song off the cassette we used to tape it off the radio. I wanted to call 10 friends and plan a caper to “Ocean’s Eleven” that joint up out that museum. Exhale…

It was part of the exhibition about Hip-Hop and Rock & Roll. Man that whole exhibition made me so proud. RUN-D.M.C., Public Enemy, The Furious Five, Jay-Z, Biggie. To quote the late, great Christopher Wallace, “You never thought that hip hop would take it this far…” More on this trip later, but this jacket made me so happy I had to post about it right away.

Wine and dive

So I was leaving San Marcos, TX this morning on my way to Houston when I passed this sign for Three Dudes Winery. ‘Dudes’, ‘winery’ and ‘Texas?’ OK, I am intrigued. I doubled back and saw that it was open from 12-6. I looked down at my watch and it was 12:30 so I figured what the hell? I didn’t have anywhere to be until 7.

From the street, I wasn’t sure what kind of place it would be, but when I got down the drive I could see that it was adorable back there! It sat right on the San Marcos River and had a great river deck for tastings and receptions and such. Continue reading →

Brown Swan

Tonite when I arrived at the Texas State University Student Center for my show, this sign greeted me. See the little girl in the duck costume? That’s me. Whomever designed the poster for my event decided not to use my headshot, but instead a #ThrowbackThursday photo I posted online a couple months ago. I guess I kinda asked for it. The second I saw it, I laughed out the deepest belly laugh I’ve probably ever laughed. The guy and the girl sitting on the bench near the door had no idea that was me, and thus thought I was a lunatic. It was hilarious.

I can’t even be mad.

We ate good and laughed our Ashevilles off

I just got home from the 7th Annual Laugh Your Asheville Off Comedy Festival in Asheville, NC. Such a good time! I had a show at the University of Georgia the day before I was headed to the fest, so I pitstopped in Atlanta, met up with my girlfriends Angela and Courtney and we made a road trip out of it. To say it was an eventful 48 hours would be the understatement of the decade. More on that in a later post. Angela’s been to Asheville a ton of times, and my love for this adorable town has been well documented in this video, but it was Courtney’s first visit. We wanted to give her the full AVL experience so we encouraged her to Google photos of the Biltmore Estate as we drove by it… because ain’t nobody got $65 to walk around somebody else’s big-ass house. Good times. As soon as we checked in, we freshened up and headed out to Angi’s favorite local restaurant, Cúrate. The food was AMAZING. We ate all the tapas. Poor server was taking our order real skeptically, like ‘there’s no way y’all are gonna finish all that.’

Silly server.

Saturday was my day to pick the restaurant. So of course we went to 12 Bones. Yum. With that good barbecue, cheddar jalapeno grits and corn pudding in our bellies, we were ready to head out on the town for some shopping and sightseeing. Asheville has such a cool vibe. Musicians and street performers on every corner, great vintage and souvenir shops. I found this Obama magnet in a local bookstore called Malaprop’s. It looks more like Herman Cain. Or Sherman Hemsley. Or Lou Rawls.

Continue reading →