Found on fifty VHS tapes
Vi Childs
& Darby
Stand-up from a tavern in Buckley, Washington — performed every night by the woman who owned the bar, with her daughter playing the straight man.
“I make ’em squirm.”
The short version
She was 34, divorced,
and couldn’t play the piano
Vi Childs — everybody called her Moon — spent the first half of her adult life doing none of this. She taught Sunday School at the Buckley Presbyterian Church. She worked at a meat plant in Seattle.
Then, at thirty-four, newly divorced and raising children alone, she walked into a bar and decided she was going to be a piano player. She couldn’t play. She found a teacher who refused to take her on, and taught herself anyway.
Her first job was the Skyroom at Boeing Field, around 1962. She lasted two years, then went out on the road — Juneau, St. Paul, St. Petersburg, the Epicure in White Center, Diamond Jim’s, the Las Vegas lounges, Carnival cruise ships.
Somewhere in there somebody handed her a microphone between songs, and the jokes started. She never planned that part.
Around 1980, Darby told her about a dumpy little bar for sale in Buckley — a logging town of 3,200 people. They bought it. Vi played the piano and told the jokes; Darby played guitar and set her up. Mother and daughter, comic and straight man, in their own room, for twenty years.
The act
One woman, twenty-four faces
This composite was Vi’s own promotional sheet — effectively the index to the entire act. Two dozen characters, mostly photographed in the bar, captioned simply VI ···· CHILDS.
The costumes were not thrown together. She collected hats the way other people collect records, and when someone handed her a sign or a hat she pinned it to the wall. By the end the room read like a joke book.
Weekend crowds ran two hundred people and ranged in age from 21 to 95. Regulars drove in from Bremerton for sixteen years running. Neither of them drank or smoked, and the night ended with the whole room standing, holding hands, singing God Bless America and the Mickey Mouse song.
Vi’s Place · 737 Main
In her words
“Dumb and crappy humor”
“My jokes are ordinary, peasant-type of jokes. It’s dumb and crappy humor.”Tacoma News Tribune, 1982
“The walls are tacky-looking. If anyone gives me a sign or a hat, I pitch it on the wall.”Tacoma News Tribune, 1982
“I have three brains — I sing, tell jokes and think about the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I’ll have after the show, all at the same time.” Klipsun, 1996
“I get people in my crummy little place from 21 to 90. I want the young people there. I want them to see I’m old and I’m humorous.”Press, 1997
“Humor is the basis of sanity, and medicine is for the sick and depressed.”Klipsun, 1996
“I don’t tell filth. I don’t say the f-word.”Press, 1982
New clip every night
Watch the channel
The tapes were in a box: about fifty VHS cassettes, most of them unlabelled, recorded by whoever happened to have a camcorder that night. They are coming out one clip at a time.
Every clip is read before it goes out. Vi worked in the 1980s and her act reflects it — material that would land badly today is catalogued and held back, not deleted. The archive stays complete; the public channel stays curated.
737 Main
The store
They already sold things. Vi and Darby hawked their own joke books at the show for five dollars, and the joke book is real — thirty-odd pages of her actual material, transcribed off the tapes.
The store is being built. When it opens it will carry reprints of The Bad Book and The Good Book, the twenty-four-faces poster, bumper stickers, joke cards, coasters, and a hat pin — because she collected hats and the ceiling was covered in them.
737 Main
The store takes the name of the pub — the address it stood at, and the name on the gold sign under the awning.
The record
Sixteen clippings
Every part of the story above is backed by a dated newspaper — the Tacoma News Tribune, the Courier-Herald, the Timberlane Voice, the Anchorage Television Guide. Together they turn a box of unlabelled tapes into a documented career.