John Bizarre stood near the back of the club Tuesday night as openers Steve Wilson and Brian Noonan warmed up the crowd. He smiled a bit, sipping his drink and mellowing out. Certainly not the "cartoon come to life" promised on the bill.

Then, as Wilson called him to the stage, a different man emerged. It was like he was hit with a bolt of lightning - his step sprung up, his arms flew around him, and his expression twisted and contorted with the music. He shouted at the crowd and went into a funky white boy hop, approaching the mic and pulling back just before he would have started speaking. The cartoon had come to life.

It wasn't as if Bizarre even needed the mic. It was handy that it was on stage, but when he ignored it, moving around the stage, no one missed his words. There was as much energy in his voice as in his movements. And this was, he would say later, a down night. It's hard to imagine an "up night" might be. He makes late night Starbucks junkies look relatively calm.

As he launched into material about Tom Jones, beating drunk driving tests, and losing his drivers license, he seemed more edgy than enraged. In his clear announcer's voice, honed from stand-up and voice-over work, he tells the audience how life would be different if he were running things. First thing gone - Olympic diving. "Skinny guys making the smallest splash possible." He turned up his nose. "Pooh!"

He prowled the stage, thinking of his next target - confused vegetarians. If you eat chicken and fish and claim to be a vegetarian, you might not want to bring the subject up with him. It's not that he's a vegetarian - he loves meat. He just wants people to know that "pig" is not a vegetable.

Bizarre listed a few of his least favorite stupid questions, which he numbered in the billions. So if you ever find yourself in the bus station next to a rubber-faced guy with a vague resemblance to Betelgeuse without the party make-up, don't ask him for spare change. Look around, and remember where you are. He would appreciate, and you would be spared being a part of the act.

For a time, Bizarre stopped moving around the stage quite as much, giving the audience a breather. He doesn't seem to need it, himself, though I would find out later that he had been shuttled around so much that day he hadn't gotten a chance to eat. The pause lasts less than a couple of minutes before he's back to himself again. If he was drawing energy from anywhere, it had to have been the crowd.

He asked if anyone smoked, and went out into the audience to find someone with a leather cigarette case and slim cigarettes. Though he has quit smoking himself, he doesn't pretend to be against it. It was just time for him, he says, when he started coughing up blood. That was ample motivation. Before then, he would try to avoid buying cigarettes by the carton, saying that was an admission he had a problem. "It's the same reason you don't buy toilet paper by the crate," he said. People see all that toilet paper, and they know something's not right.

He returns the case and cigarettes and finds somebody - more specifically, Neil - whose birthday is that night in the crowd. He plays happy birthday for the guy by squeezing his hands together, tightening and releasing for different pitches the way you might have stuck your hand under your armpit in gym class as a kid. When it came to the name, Bizarre sang out, "Neil," then finished out the tune. Admittedly, it's a difficult scenario to describe. "Try explaining that one at work tomorrow." Just to make the nerd writer's job a little but harder...

The show began with music, and that's how it ended. Until a certain moment in the show, I never would have believed that one guy with a microphone could pull off an accurate impression of an Iron Maiden show, complete with screeching guitars and drums. But, hearing is believing, I guess. For the close of the show, Bizarre turned up the sound system and improvised heavy metal songs to women's names shouted out by the audience. That means Sue, Deena, Julie, Erin, Wendy, Laura, and Kelly now all have their own metal songs.

Kelly was immortalized in song, the last chord hit, and the lights came up, far before John Bizarre's energy had settled in the room.