Comedians and improve groups from Cerritos College gathered at the Leche Café and Bookstore in Norwalk on Friday to a seemingly full audience.
Graphic design major, Jamar Miller aka “Mac Fly” was the host for the night and got the audience involved early in the show with jokes and asking the audience a few questions, one of them being if they knew what “turn up” meant and an audience member screamed out by answering with “It’s something that you eat.”
“I just try to get them involved as soon as possible and that’s one thing I found to be effective,” Miller says.
Among the talent was comedian Evan Cassidy who performs his creative character comedy and brought out two characters within him as “Barry” and “Sketchy Eddy.”
“Barry is an engineering student, kind of a timid guy. Sketchy Eddy is a surfer type guy,” Cassidy says.
Cassidy started doing stand-up comedy 7 years ago when he was attending UC Irvine and says that he didn’t know anyone on campus so he started to crash parties at dorms by knocking at the door and acting as a French man.
Just like every performer that night he enjoyed making everyone laugh at the Café.
The Leche Café is a new establishment that opened three months ago and the employees are working on building an audience and a name for themselves with having locals come down and show what they have to the community.
Event coordinator, Danielle Acevedo was pleased with the outcome of the comedy show. “It’s wonderful.” she says, and expects to have more in the future.
“(Leche Café is) about culture, building a community together through arts. Through the diversity of the arts and communication especially, and through literacy.” Acevedo says.
The Café hosts comedy shows, open mic, kid’s talent shows, bands and book signings.
Audience members Mychella Orozco and Mitch Yolton were impressed and shred their thought on the show.
They were both in agreement that the show was both hilarious and amazing.
Among the audience was also the owner of Leche café and bookstore, Jesse Pelayo.
Pelayo is a teacher that has been teaching high school students for 15 years and owns six bookstores in L.A. and Orange County and promotes literacy for kids.
When opening Leche Café, his focus was to get the community involved and offer different programs and a place to share their talents since there are not plenty of them.
“It’s needed I think. A lot of people from Norwalk, Cerritos and Downey, they don’t have a spot to express their talents and they end up going to Hollywood, Downtown L.A., different places,” Pelayo said.
He also offers free tutoring in math and reading having students from college, high school and middle school come down and volunteer their time to help others.
Pelayo was very happy with the outcome of the show.
“I am very pleased man, I am pleased that the community is coming out and supporting.”
There will be an open mic night of February 28 from 6:30p.m. to 10pm.
Leche Café and Bookstore is located at 11723 Firestone Blvd. Norwalk, CA 90650
For more information and upcoming events log onto www.lechecafe.com
