“At my first job, I made $48,000, I worked in philanthropy and I worked directly under this 60-year old white woman who was intent on giving me an eating disorder,” Chika Ekemezie told a crowd of some forty people or so inside Life World (563 Johnson Ave.) on a windy, late winter night. The crowd was audibly unsure whether to laugh, before the tall, tattooed Ekemezie returned with a whipsmart smile: “Don’t aww! Obviously it didn’t work.” Ekemezie was playing host at “NYC Vs. The Rich,” a fundraiser for a DSA-supported campaign surrounding the state budget in Albany. “$1,859,” a lieutenant for the party would tell me upon departing the show. They were fundraising to support protests the party is throwing upstate to pressure politicians to support higher taxes. Some of that money, I imagine, came from Fran, a nervous-looking man wearing a candy emerald Met’s baseball cap whose hand stayed up the longest when the short and stodgy, bearded experimental theater maven Peter Mills Weiss—co-director at the Brick, recently profiled by the Times—started shouting out salary numbers, i.e. “more than 60…more than 70…more than 80…110, 120, 130, 140, 150. Wait…hello there.” Ekemezie had made a beeline to Fran, armed with an iPad loaded with the campaign’s donation QR code. Fran was new to Bushwick, he later told me, he and his wife had moved to the area about a year ago, perhaps among the neighborhood’s new crop of homeowners. Yes, he worked in tech… “I was a little nervous before I came up here. I know a lot of you look very virtuous. I’m seeing a lot of Apple Watches,” said Victoria Pandeirada, a local comedian who said she had been booked at the last minute and had returned with some of her classic bits about looking like Dua Lipa (“without the face or body”) and the continued travails of her long-distance relationship. Among the scheduled lineup who did make it was Meg Bitchell, a local comedian and Twitter celeb, who appeared in an inspired improv duo with Andrea Rose. Wearing a large nurse white Miu Miu top, Bitchell looked something like Flo, that luminous Progressive Insurance mascot (sidenote: are insurance companies sufficiently revered to be allowed mascots?)… The jokes were about tackling the struggles of various jobs in this economy, etcetera. etcetera. Also, of course, there was a closing set from Mr. Anders J. Lee himself, who runs the whole “Paid Protest” operation, a sometime funding apparatus for DSA programs, and also co-hosts the podcast “Pod Damn America.” Lee wore a suit, so he did a version of Alec Baldwin’s monologue in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross,’ but I think it was about being a stoner? He was waving around an unlit joint, at any rate. I thought about Fran, whose wife’s friend has dragged him here to be momentarily the butt about a larger conceptual joke about our ranked salaried lives in the debt state; the joke should be on all of us, whose endless cups of coffee fund the leverage that floats his $150K+ salary, except Fran’s so incredibly anxious about being here or anywhere, so he probably doesn’t like it either, even if he’ll probably buy a second car before I do. Mr. Lee, who had lowered his hand quickly during PMW’s role-call, was telling me that he’s been in ‘the party’ himself for about a decade and currently works in a cafe somewhere in Ridgewood, pouring you or someone you know a coffee, in between sets—

The next ‘Paid Protest’ event is a roast of Congressman Dan Goldman, happening at Caveat in the Lower East Side, a fundraiser for the group “Track AIPAC.”

Comedians Anders J. Lee, Chika Ekemezie, Victoria Pandeirada, Meg Bitchell, Andrea Rose, Peter Mills Weiss, Alise Morales, Whitley Watson and Bianca M all appear at ‘NYC Vs. The Rich’ inside Life World on Johnson Avenue. (above)

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Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.