*This was my friend Travis’ band, not the English group.
**Specifically the Alegretto from Sonata #17 in D Minor. Ha.
In 1997, I moved out of my parents’ house and got an apartment with my best friend Sarah from college. She was getting a Ph.D. in Biology at UC Berkeley, I was attempting to be a theatre director, doing tech at small theatres in San Francisco and paying the bills working in the call center at UC Berkeley Extension. We lived in a ground floor flat in a crappy part of Berkeley, the kind of place only students would be stupid enough to move into. But it was $900 a month for two bedrooms, our own laundry and a weird study-like room which we used as a closet/office. We thought it was charming, even though we sometimes had no heat, there were bars on the windows and we had a surfer landlord who turned out to be the son of an infamous slumlord. On our block lived a couple who had their own trapeze and some alcoholics who held a year round garage sale on their lawn. Upstairs a hippie family strung Tibetan Prayer flags across the entryway. The thumping bass from passing cars rattled the windows hourly. I once described the neighborhood as “more of a wino neighborhood than a crackhead neighborhood.”
Sarah and I had one of those intense girl friendships. We spent all of our time watching Black Adder and Absolutely Fabulous on VHS. She put up with my being crushed out on the actor Tim McInnerny and I put up with never getting any phone calls because she was on the phone with her boyfriend in Cleveland and we couldn’t afford call waiting. We went out for dinner at Pirro’s Unpretentious Dining. We bought used furniture from a place called “The Family Jules.” We went to the movies and made fun of the promos for Landmark Theatres. “The language of film is universal,” the ads would repeat in different languages. “WHAT?” we would say, “SPEAK ENGLISH!” As it faded out we’d end with “I don’t get it!” We stalked Stephen Fry at the preview for Wilde. (!) We hung out in the Castro and got interviewed at the Barbra Streisand Museum. We were 23 and thought we were so goddamn funny.
After a year, Sarah left Berkeley and moved in with her boyfriend in Cleveland. On her last day, before I drove her to the airport, we recorded our ultimate mix of all our songs and decorated it with NeoPrint stickers of us and Bad Batz Maru. Oh yeah, we were also really into the Sanrio store. I had a series of short term roommates and then realized that I was sick of doing theatre and that my apartment was a mildew-infested shithole with a slow gas leak. So I moved back home and went back to school.
Sarah and I talk on Facebook or on the phone a couple times a month. She is a biology professor in St. Paul and married the boyfriend. I moved to LA to do comedy. I am funnier now than I was then.
We still hate ska.
Lesley Tsina is a writer and comedian originally from Palo Alto, CA. She is a Contributing Editor for the comics and satire quarterly The Devastator. She’s written sketch shows with the Upright Citizen’s Brigades’ Extreme Tambourine and Paddington. Her videos have been featured on Funny or Die and UCBComedy.
Lesley can be seen in the series “Funny or Die Presents” on HBO as part of the mini-miniseries “Designated Driver” with Rob Riggle and Paul Scheer. She performed standup comedy on “Comedy Death-Ray, “The Tomorrow Show,” and others. She also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace and in several national commercials. She has appeared onstage at SF Sketchfest, The San Francisco Improv Festival and the Del Close Improv Marathon in NYC. Most recently she performed her solo show, Lord of the Files at the Comedy Central Stage in Los Angeles.
