The night gave all who participated a taste of the upcoming seventh season of the Lincoln Lodge, a much-awaited room after their summer hiatus. Speaking of, it was officially announced to the Bastion that new Lodge cast members for the season have been added: Chicago beloveds Brady Novak and Allison Leber! Congrats to both!

Saturday night the Bastion decided to check out the third and final night of the Chicago Cheap Drunkard Comedy Fest, a three-day long festival in three different venues, produced by Chuck Roth, who some would call the leader of the newest batch of comics emerging on the scene (fondly nicknamed the Chuck Roth Crescendos, or the Crescendos for short). Saturday night the show was held at the Underground Lounge in Wrigleyville (neighborhood of i.O., Wrigley Field, and the Metro, quite the dichotomy of venues in our opinion), and while both the turn-out and the management in this basement bar were not 100 percent on board for the show, the comics certainly were, and included Dean Carlson, Brendan McGowan, Victor Marinier, Jeb Cadwell, Chad Briggs, and of course, Chuck Roth.

After the show, we followed the crew to a party hosted by stand-up comic Mike Lee and roomie Leo. Not just a party, though, a THEMED party -- a MySpace themed party.

While MySpace is the new hack of this generation's comedy, this party was anything but, and included polaroids for the "profile" pictures, walls covered in white paper suitable for "leaving comments", Sharpie markers a-plenty, and lots, and LOTS, of beer. Sufficed to say, the hosts probably awoke the next day to a haze of graffitied walls in varying degrees of legibility and wondered what the hell happened the night before.

Sunday the Bastion was snatched from sleep for a full morning of moving into the abode of comedy groupie superstar, Angel Busque, and after approximately seven hours of unpacking, decided to relax with Bad Dog's Sunday night showcase, Your Sunday Best. The showcase was packed with the heavies of Mike Bridenstine, Renee Gauthier, Robert Buscemi, and host James Fritz, with first-time showcaser Elena opening the show. The Bastion was looking forward most to the open mic portion of the evening, however. Mike D. of Red Bar Radio was going up for his very first time, and we were literally on edge to see it go down. He did pretty well for a first-timer, with an unsurprising comfortableness on stage. We do have to say that our favorite part of the evening was sitting with Mike at the bar during the showcase and watching his nerves get worse and worse, to the point that he couldn't eat his order of fries because of the butterflies in his stomach. It was rather cute.

Photos by Krystle Gemnich. From top to bottom: Renee is surrounded by friends; Brendan McGowan schools his audience; a room becomes an interactive version of MySpace.