Fifteen years wasn’t that long ago, but life was quite different then. It was before #metoo, before cancel culture, before Trump took over everyone’s mental bandwidth and sucked out the air in every room. Silent Theatre was coming off a crazy productive year, and we had ambitiously started to present a monthly open-run variety show. But Chicago was ripe for it. The venue we rented welcomed us with open arms - to this day, the most at home we had felt as a nomadic performance group, was at Prop Thtr. They even handed us the keys and let us simply lock up when we were done.
And we would sometimes be done rather late. Or early, as in early in the morning, depending on how you looked at it, and yes, since a few of us were also employed at the same place, we would sometimes just crash for a few hours on the theatre floor before having to report at our day job at 7:30a. Youth carries with it an unrivaled vitality and zero care for the amount of sleep loss.
This particular night stands out because once the show was done, during the afterparty, there was a large influx of people who arrived late. What was even more curious was that this new flood of people looked rather young, and what became rather alarming was that they were definitely on some kind of drugs. It took us a bit to figure out that they were kicked out from some rave they were attending and somehow found out about our late-night post-show party scene and showed up in droves.
Since we didn’t want to contribute to the debauchery of minors, we cut the night short. No harm, no foul. Or so we thought. Apparently, one of the other theatres renting space at the Prop Thtr came in the next day to do their show and found that the empty jugs they were using as props now had pee in them. For some inexplicable reason, the teenage ravers emptied their bladders backstage in unoccupied milk jugs and left them there. It was an embarrassment that the show’s stage manager would not let us forget to this day. We were lucky that we weren’t asked to leave for good.
On that note, please enjoy the uninterrupted Wild Party Variety Hour from way in the dusty bins of our archives. This is a deep cut that features Nemesing, Brian Parenti, Brett Schneider, and Lady Jack and was hosted by Silent Marvin and Nathan Paul.
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