It’d been a little over a year since I first went to see The Paper Machete live magazine at the Green Mill on a Saturday afternoon. I learned from that experience that seats are hard to come by (the Wednesday evening show, at least the one time I went, isn’t as crowded), and so arrived an hour and a half before show time, which was only 15 minutes earlier than necessary to avoid unintentionally making lots of new friends among a crowd of people standing around, pressing their bodies into an insufficient amount of space.

Getting there early also affords one the opportunity to watch emcee Christopher Piatt, standing behind the bar, trying to not so subtly rehearse his frenetic Danny Kaye court jester lip-synching routine.

Piatt is a constant, but the rest of the cast of The Paper Machete changes from show to show, so it was an amazing coincidence that Becca Brown, whom I saw perform there a year ago, was again on stage, showing off her strong singing voice.

The comedy also was good, as before, but I was there primarily to see Big Red, that is Meghan Murphy, do her thing, as I have done at Theater Wit, Steppenwolf, and Venus Cabaret.

She didn’t disappoint, capping off her performance by holding the last note of her set long enough that I could have read a couple chapters of a book, had I brought a book.

Piatt, in thanking Murphy and expressing his admiration of her talents, referred to her as the personification of Jessica Rabbit, which seemed to please Murphy.

Fanboy that I am, I couldn’t resist approaching Murphy after the show as she sat at the bar drinking with friends. I introduced myself and fawned over her for a respectable, but not creepy, amount of time before going on my way.