Weekend review: heart-shaped laughter

Tacoma was filled with date-night events last weekend as Valentine’s Day set out to drain wallets with offers of chocolates, flowers and dinner specials. There were a few refuges for those single folks among us, and I set out to find them.

Paul Ogata’s set at Tacoma Comedy Club  was hilarious. There is good reason Ogata was once crowned the Funniest Asian-American Comedian in the U.S. and then the winner of the 32nd Annual San Francisco International Comedy Competition. This put him in the alumni club of Dana Carvey, Sinbad and Jake Johannson. Being an Asian comic performing in Tacoma, he was almost obligated to mention the “Tacoma Solution” that led to the Chinese expulsion in 1885. Knowing the date and details of that fateful day made me the butt of many a joke throughout his set, but heck, being made fun of for intelligence is hardly insulting.

Sunday’s Tacoma Cult Movie Club screening of sexually transmitted disease horror movies at the Acme Grub Cage was just precious (to say the least). Stepping outside the venue, mildly sordid events transpiring along Tacoma Avenue only served to confirm the event was a heart-warming affair.

Good times, good times. Then came a trip to Seattle to see “Vanities: A New Musical,” directed by David Armstrong, which opened a Northwest premiere at Seattle’s ACT theatre..

The show follows the lives of three high school cheerleaders who then go off to college and seek their “perfect lives” in a Steel-Magnolias-meets-Fried-Green-Tomatoes-set-to-music sort of tale.

South Sounders will likely notice one of the actresses in the trio, Cayman Ilika, who plays the ever-organized Kathy was in “Patsy Cline,” an ACT joint production with Federal Way’s Centerstage Theater. The show runs through May 1 at the In the Falls Theatre.

And with that, the weekend ended on a day of rest.