Mary Prankster Live: a case of encores, more more more's, and...mind numbing psychic frostbite?

I’ve been sitting here staring at a blank screen for too goddamn long and still…there is nothing. I’m numb - psychically frostbitten - and I can’t seem to put a pair of thoughts together about anything, let alone the exhausting first class rockroll show I’ve just witnessed tonight. But ‘numb’ isn’t probably the right word, it implies a certain kind of anesthesia, a deadening desensitization, and, although I’m drunk and very tired, and although I am hopeless to find the right words to explain away the incorrigible performance I’ve just seen, I am far, far away from the sort of ragged stupor that could confuse the events of the evening into hyperbole.

Geez man, get to it already! What’s with all of the bullshit hem-hawing? Just cut right to the chase my man. Words are your friends – just don’t try and turn them into something more than the utility that they are…now, take a fucking breath and write what you think (assuming I’m in any kind of 3:30 a.m. shape to think about a goddamn thing). And remember – good is good, and there’s no crime in saying so.

There’s nothing like a little self-administered good advice, but like every other stupid covenant in my life, I’ve gotta learn to learn to listen.

Tonight I enthusiastically embraced a royal rockroll ass whooping like so few others these days. And I, as I explained earlier, am psychically frostbitten. It’s 3:37 a.m. and my life is barely two hours removed from a harsh (and I do mean brutal) rockroll whiplash mugging which has revived my previously beleaguered spirits and has left me dumbfounded. This audacious bolt of rockroll energy who calls herself Mary Prankster along with her flat out forceful-as-fuck rockroll cohorts ("Good evening," Mary herself began the night, "We’re the Mary Prankster Experience and we’re here to fucking rock!") - Mr. John E. Cakes, stage right, viciously choking out big, fat, sexy, grooves on his bass guitar and Mr. Phil Tang spanking his drums, pushing them around in chase of Cakes bass – came to my town, torches in hand, and burned the whole fucking place down.

"Committed" is the way off the mark exact word I used to describe Mary Prankster to a friend who’d been privy to the recorded version of the Prankster experience but was unable to attend the live ass kicking with me. Committed, dedicated, loyal, devoted, stanch, steadfast, unswerving, and faithful, Mary Prankster was the thesaurus’ paradigm of rock and roll’s final true believer: belief in the energy, the necessity, the catharsis, the pomp and the circumstance, belief in the power, in the audience, herself, her band, all the people who still want to share in the belief that rock and roll is concentrated passion. Fucking eh she was committed. All of which showed everyone who fucking ALIVE she and her band are/feel, and ultimately pinning your own lame ass to the wall and forcing that life right down your throat. Who wouldn’t walk away grinning? Nobody in the place I was when Prankster played, that’s for damn sure.

As a matter of fact, after around an hour or so of the Prankster band taking her bawdy-at-times-borderingonbrilliant songs and revving them up into an Indy 500 "gentlemen start your engines" roar, after coyly eyeing the audience and announcing a song called "Mercyfuck" as a beautiful "love" song (yeah, if love is all pain, self-realization, and barely-concealed anguished catharsis - but there’s no arguing that the song has always been beautiful), and after writhing, gyrating, come-hither-ing, sweating (god I love this rockroll thing, it’s soo blatantly sexual – and why not? At it’s best it is an aural manifestation of the physical), and all-in-all seducing the audience with power and prowess, with fire and finesse, the audience – this adoring but smallish crowd of rock remnants – called out to the Prankster gang for more, more, more. An encore.

Cries of "More tits! More Whiskey!" followed Prankster’s tune "Tits and Whiskey" – a song that was apparently supposed to be the closing number. The jukebox tempted the nights end but the people wouldn’t have any of that recorded rockroll nonsense while the live wire hot-to-the-touch real thing wandered the filthy floors of the club, so they voiced their opinions repeatedly, and loudly. For a moment, Mary herself seemed taken aback, choked-up in fact – oh, pleased to be sure, but also shocked and proud; as she should have been, because tonight she went a long way toward winning back the rock flock one lost fan at a time. It was a night when Rock and Roll ministry was paying off, and I’d be shocked if every last body in that damn dirty bar won’t be there when the Prankster’s return to this new baptismal of the reborn.

Committed – hell yes, in all ways. "We don’t know how to do it any other way," Mary said to me when I thanked her for restoring some lost faith after the show. I was compelled by the events of the evenin, to react physically, it was probably beyond my control - so I hugged her; which was likely viewed by someone who’d just left everything they had up on the stage as a fairly pathetic gesture. But I had to hug her (or somebody, anybody…but, obviously, preferably Mary) – and I did. She graciously (although perhaps not so willingly) reciprocated, and after the show she’d just delivered I swear to whatever God any of us believe in that I never, ever wanted to let go.

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