Morning Thanks--Triple Espresso

We didn't do much drinking on New Years Eve. In fact, the motel bar was just closing when we came home, and it wasn't even eleven. We didn't stay up late either, although we did manage to keep our eyes open until just past midnight. 

We didn't do much partying, but we sure as heck laughed a ton--at these guys, the three stars of Triple Espresso, laugh-a-minute entertainment that has a story line, but mostly features the bedeviling antics of three slightly woebegone entertainers--a "just about" musician, a pained magician, and a comedian who's sometimes a joke more annoying than funny. On their own, they're wannabees, but when they combine forces in this hilarious show, they're Keystone Cops, the stand-ups who couldn't shoot straight.

Funny?--you wouldn't believe how. You got to be there to know. At one point I told myself I had to gather my wits because I could not stop laughing. Triple Espresso is a thousand puns and prat falls that together create a gag show that's a good deal wittier than the Three Stooges, with just as much hoopla. It is, as its title argues, highly caffeinated comedy. Moments come along when you have to remind yourself to breathe.

We saw Triple Espresso first twenty years ago, when the show went up at the Cricket Theater in Minneapolis, where it became the biggest hit in the theater's 26-year history. Neither it nor the three clowns who do it have lost a step. 

Years ago, we saw it in the Cricket because we had met one of the guys some time earlier. Through the years we kinda' stayed in touch, enough so that that we still felt that guy at the piano to be a friend. We've followed him and his wife via Facebook, watched his family grow, in fact, even through the kind of tragedy that's difficult to talk about--they lost a son to suicide. 

Watching him pull faces, listening to his character, a lounge lizard, tickle the ivories, letting him and his sidekicks entertain us--it was especially wonderful on New Years Eve, even more wonderful than it was on another frigid Minnesota night a couple decades ago when we saw the show first. This time there was more story than simply madcap hilarity on stage.

Look, Triple Espresso left us in stitches twenty years ago when we saw it, and it did so again on Monday night, in spades. We left perfectly punch drunk on New Years Eve.

But somehow, this time, it was better--just as funny, but somehow richer, knowing what we knew. Last time, it was simply hilarious. This time, New Years Eve, it was even joyful.

This morning, I'm just plain thankful for the show, and the story we saw up there on stage at the Park Square Theater on an otherwise frigid St. Paul New Years Eve.