The Brady Bunch

We had a wonderful surprise a few Saturday nights back. Wayne Brady came to play at SAK!! He called me about 6:00pm and said he was in town and would like to play in with us. I immediately said "Of course!" and asked when he'd like to do that. "I was thinking about tonight," was his response.

Thus began the whirlwind. I was not scheduled to play that night, but of course I wanted to be there. We already had 180 reservations for the night by that time so I didn't think it would be a good idea to try to blast the word out to our e-mail list. I did, however, send to our internal SAK groups to let them all know.

As you might imagine, though, word still spread quickly. We ended up with an extremely packed house, people sqeezing into any corner or crevice that could keep their butt comfortable for 30 minutes or more. It was a great show and a lot of fun.

For me, it was a little weird - in a good way, but still a little weird. I have performed with Wayne quite a few times over the past couple of years and was just with him in Vegas about 5 weeks ago. But these have always been Wayne on the road personal appearance shows - very high profile. It's been an extremely long time since I've been on the SAK stage with Wayne. It was interestingly, strangely and joyfully familiar. The big difference was that there were many new faces on the stage from the days when Wayne was with us regularly. But it still all felt so comfortable. That's one of the beautiful things about improvisation. When you have the skills it's quite easy and quite fun to blend in just about anywhere. That has always been especially true on the SAK stage. I think the other performers were very excited to be on the stage with Wayne. It was a great show - the audience loved it.

Oh, and we regularly do something at SAK called the "Slice of Life," a scene in our show dedicated to a specific audience member who's celebrating a birthday, a marriage, etc. In that night's performance Wayne played the girl who was soon to be married. Can you imagine? You set up this thing at SAK, they play a scene and at the end of the show you get to take home a video of the performance - and it's WAYNE BRADY! Playing YOU!!! Definitely an extra value added to that deal.