(11.4) Existential dread got you down? Sometimes booze and drugs just aren’t enough and the upcoming week promises huge doses of soul-scraping anxiety. Here’s my prescription: Tig Notaro is performing this Friday at the Columbus Theatre and you should go.
Stand-up comedian doesn’t quite capture the space Tig Notaro now occupies in the popular imagination, due in large part to her now-famous 2012 set in which she announced her very recent cancer diagnosis (as well as all the other horrible life events that were occurring to her simultaneously). In that classic ‘parking lot moment’ NPR fundraisers are always going on about, I got stuck in my car for about an hour as the set was aired on This American Life. (When, during all this sturm and drang, did she write this set?)
From Rolling Stone magazine,
(The album she recorded of that set, entitled Live, would earn her a Grammy nomination; it’s been hailed as “masterful” and “genius” by no less than Louis C.K. and Bill Burr.) The sound of her voice, located somewhere between dry and monotone, has an oddly calming affect.
Notaro followed that with a personal documentary, and a tour (and HBO special) in which she famously removed her shirt off. This last bit of business may have her linked to the whole breast cancer thing more than it should. She has so much great material — it’s not the breast cancer show.
For instance, go here for her wonderful “Mississippi Relatives” . . . 3 minutes.
$40 day of, doors 7pm, show 8pm, Friday, November 4, the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, (directions)