Laura Bidgood and Curt Lund

Check out Laura and Curt in Slow Jobs: Servicing America for $12 an Hour at the 2009 Minnesota Fringe Festival!

Overworked and underwhelmed? Punch the clock with Fringe favorites Laura Bidgood and Curt Lund as they relive first jobs, creepy coworkers, minimum wage, office romances, and doing whatever it takes to pay the bills. What did you want to be when you grew up? And what the hell happened instead?

Performing July 31 through August 8. More info available soon at fringefestival.org. From the nerds that brought you the Fringe hits "Boys Don't Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses", “Take a Left at the Giant Cow: A Beginner’s Guide to North Dakota” and “Two Queers and a Chubby”. Laura and Curt's comedy storytelling dorkfests promise to tickle you with real life observations from the nerd perspective.
"Storytellers Laura Bidgood and Curt Lund revel in geekdom... side-splittingly hilarious"
(St. Paul Pioneer Press)
The Twin Cities’ GLBT magazine Lavender calls Laura and Curt a “zany pair”. With stories from kindergarten political campaigns to falling in love under the World’s Largest Holstein Cow, they spin gold from the straw of their awkward childhoods and the road to adulthood that is sometimes painful, usually embarrassing, but always laugh-out-loud funny... and yup, still awkward.
"Storytelling at its finest... a thinking man’s Will & Grace. Funny, honest and proof that the art of storytelling is not dead... a must for those who enjoy spoken word."
(Los Angeles playwright Tony Figueroa)

Laura and Curt are writers first and foremost, and it shows in the "remarkably artful turn of phrase" (Fringe blogger Phillip Low) that characterizes their performances. Spoken word storytelling is a hybrid of memoir, monologue, stand-up comedy and theatre performance, which can send the audience on a teary-eyed sentimental journey one moment and have them rolling in the aisles the next.
L'etoile Magazine declared Laura and Curt’s first full-length show, "Two Queers and a Chubby", an "über-hit". Okay, so that's not a real word. But the sentiment was echoed in media from the Minneapolis Star Tribune ("extremely enjoyable") to Twin Cities alternative press The Rake ("a Fringe hit... hilarious") to local radio:
"A very funny group of stand-ups mixing queer and straight viewpoints about relationships, coming out, weight issues, travel, stereotype labels and turning everything upside down. If you want to laugh, this is the show." (Dixie Treichel, cohost of KFAI Radio's "Fresh Fruit")

Laura and Curt hit the boards again at the 2007 Fringe Festival with "Take a Left at the Giant Cow: A Beginner’s Guide to North Dakota". More sentimental but no less hilarious, this show excavated the two performers' North Dakota roots and threw closet Lawrence Welk fans into a frenzy, selling out all six Fringe performances, and earning invitations to remount the show twice for a total run of 15 performances. Minnesotans apparently cannot get enough of North Dakota. (Who knew?)

Local and regional media cheered the "terrific tales" (St. Paul Pioneer Press), and audience members chimed in as well:
"Witty, poignant tales of growing up awkwardly next to the norm... immensely funny."
"Wonderfully relevant and irreverent. Everyone can identify with this material... the comic timing was often brilliant. One of the best I've seen this Fringe."
"Laura and Curt are excellent, funny storytellers. I was surrounded by many, many people (a sold-out house!) who were laughing their asses off."
"Clever, queer and queer-friendly, and genuinely funny and human."
"I love their low-key, smart, 'This American Life' vibe... this one's way up on my list."
Their most recent full-length show, "Boys Don't Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses", packed them in at the 2008 Minnesota Fringe Festival and earned "Must See" ratings from both the St. Paul Pioneer Press and City Pages ("an hour of nonstop, hilariously self-aware riffs on the tribulations of growing up nerd").
Curt and Laura are both founding members of Rockstar Storytellers, a spoken word and storytelling company which performs regularly at the Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater in Uptown Minneapolis. Recent appearances include GLBT Pride festivals in the Twin Cities, North Dakota and (soon) Des Moines, Iowa, as well as at open mics and cabarets and colleges and rooftops around the Twin Cities and beyond, from Las Vegas to Chicago to Vermillion!
"Nerds shall inherit the earth, and I want these two to lead us there!"
(-Fringe audience member)