I’m prone to exaggeration for damn sure, but I am not lying at all when I tell you that the story presented below is one of my favorite stories I’ve ever seen at The Moth. For real.
Brett Pederson is from Minnesota, and happened to be in New York on business. He told me that he’s a big fan of the Moth podcast and was pretty stoked to go to a story slam in person. And he figured “what the hell,” and just kinda went ahead and winged it, threw his name in the hat and told this story.
I don’t usually recommend that folks wing a story. It usually goes really, really badly. But man, am I ever glad to be wrong here. Brett’s story has kind of a Wells Tower/Cormac McCarthy thing to it — stoic, manly dudes working out their feelings by setting stuff on fire.
For this month’s Hotsy Totsy Burlesque, Brad, my Co-producer Joe the Shark and I have combined two things we love:
Dr Who and Burlesque.
I love our show. Each month we write a new script in sort of an on-going burlesque soap-opera.
For those of you in NYC, here is the info:
HOTSY TOTSY BURLESQUE
Tuesday, August 17th, 9:30pm
@ The Delancey Lounge 168 Delancey, — just two blocks from the F/J train stop. 9:30, $8.
Cherry Pitz and Joe Shark are unaware – but something weird is going on at the Home for Wayward Girls and Fallen Women. Something that only one person can understand. Dr Who. Whatever you do … don’t blink! You’ll miss the boobies!
Cherry Pitz is your host and the show features RunAround Sue, Clams Casino, Apathy Angel, Misty Lux and Billy the Id & Special Guest Candy Cory!
My wife and I went and saw Winter’s Bone last night. It is a small release film concerning the Meth trade in Southern Missouri.
I was raised in a family that was pretty much evenly split between Evangelical Christians and a meth cartel in the Saint Francois Mountains, on the Missouri side of the Ozarks. In the county where I was born, they discovered 76 Meth labs in 2004. In the county just north they found 259. This does not mean that Saint Francois is any better than Madison, but rather that Madison is on the Ozark Plateau and is mostly wide open space, where as my people are in the mountains where you aren’t going to find anything that means to be hidden. At any rate, in the same statistical year, Missouri had more known labs than any other state by more than a thousand, the runner up being Iowa (2,788 vs. 1,300)
I write on this subject a lot, having lost three siblings to the trade in one way or another, and watched a great portion of my family turn into rabid animals who act as if they always have one leg in a trap. But there is something about seeing it as written by someone else. Something so intimate and invasive. It is like being stolen from and awarded something all at the same time. Like having a stranger on the subway tell you that you have the most beautiful scars. Walking out, I teared up for dead people whose funerals I skipped at the time.
All of this emotional catharsis in the sushi place after the show means, of course, that the film is brilliantly executed. I am ashamed to say that it captures it quite well. There are other sides it does not capture, like the inherent comedy of some of the redneck antics, but it is a movie, not a TV series, and it has two hours to tell a story.
Just to have it said, my solo show Monsters In The Wood and the forthcoming book based on the show does cover those other bases. Just to have it said.
Anyway, see this movie. It is ugly and beautiful and it made an Ozark refugee get a little weepy on the Lower East Side last night.
Times Square. I started crafting my own adjective-laden metaphor for that nexus of sensory overload, but then I realized that it might work just as well to list a few results of a web search for the phrase “Times Square is like”. So… “Times Square is like Las Vegas times 10!”
“Times Square is like Disneyland. Really!”
“Times Square is like some great cosmic porch light, and we’re all moths to the flame.”
“Times Square is like getting a root canal.”
And my favorite pair, which came up in direct succession: “Times Square is like no other place in the world!”
followed immediately by: “Times Square is like Piccadilly Circus in London.”
But I was surprised that it took until the fifth page of search results for someone to say something like “Times Square is like the holy grail of promotion”. ‘Cause hot damn is it ever true.
But a gentleman from The Netherlands by the name of Justus Bruns has decided to make it his mission to turn as many of the Times Square ad spaces as he can, for however long he can, into places to display art. He’s calling the project “Times Square to Art Square”, or TS2AS, and this is his pitch:
This week’s Moth podcast is really exciting for me. It features two people that are not only great storytellers but great friends of mine: Brad Lawrence and Juliet Wayne.
Brad’s way too modest to say so, but he is tearing UP the NYC storytelling scene right now. He won two Moth GrandSlams back to back, which is not unlike Ian MacKaye starting both Minor Threat and Fugazi — except tinier and more fleeting. He and Cyndi Freeman have a new storytelling show out in Brooklyn called The Standard Issues, and he’s blogging here AND his personal blog, too – you’ve heard me mention that ad infinitum.
Juliet Wayne has been a great friend to me since the night we met. She’s a hilarious storyteller and a caring soul who once painted me a picture of a pink cockroach with one testicle while I was recovering from surgery. She lives in Philadelphia and occasionally creeps up here on a Chinese bus, lays waste to a roomful of people and then goes back home and hides in her attic until next time.
And this is a video of Juliet Wayne doing what she does best. She actually performed this story the night that we met for the first time. It was my first Moth event, and it felt like pulling a sword from a stone. I’d been looking for something to do and some cool weird art form to dive right into, and that lightbulb went on during Juliet’s story. I ran up to her after, trying really hard not to be a creepy fan guy. Turns out she was just as stunned as I was. She’s helped me shape a lot of my stuff and is always there to freak out with over the telephone.
Being friends with Juliet reminds me of being in high school, where we talk on the phone late at night and say outrageous stuff to each other and are both way too sensitive and passionate. We got in a fight once like a couple of teenagers and it felt like one of my legs got cut off until we made up.
As the weather has gotten nicer and the day job has slowed down, I’ve been able to get out into the world with the bag o’ art materials here and there. Here are a couple of interventions that I slapped down recently:
Before I get to the cancer news, let me get something right up front: it has been a spectacular weekend. This weekend was like a commercial for weekends written by writers from the Wonder Years and shot by Robert Altman.
A bunch of my best friends came up to visit this weekend — two guys I’ve known since kindergarten, one guy since the seventh grade, and then my friend Mark Koch who’s been on the scene since ninth grade. He’s the new guy.
It was Mark’s bachelor party weekend. Nobody’s going to make a smash comedy hit out of it, as the whole enterprise was more bourbon and burlesque than blow and strippers. We had dinner at Peter Luger, hiked over the Williamsburg Bridge to have a look at the streetcorner that was the cover of “Paul’s Boutique,” walked the boardwalk from Coney Island to Brighton Beach and saw a hot and hilarious burlesque show at Bar on A.
My roommate and upstairs neighbor kindly gave up their rooms for the cause and let us spread out in the building a little, too.
Not too shabby at all.
I haven’t laughed that hard in a long, long time. And at points I had my hands over my incision, afraid I was literally going to bust a stitch.
Instead I just stretched. Stretched and healed. I haven’t felt this good in a really, really long time.
So here’s the doctor’s news from the other day:
I’m healing up fine, textbook perfection, basically. The CT/PET scans showed one questionable lymph node up in my throat, but he jabbed around in there with his fingers pretty hard and said “whatever, I’m not feeling anything in there, so let’s forget about that one for now.”
There’s these markers in the blood that cancerous tumors give off — they differ by the type of tumor. But for simplicity’s sake here, let’s collectively call them Carl.
Normal levels of Carl in a healthy adult male might be between 0-5. My Carl quotient was burying the needle at 1,250 before surgery. So they drew blood from me a week after surgery, and whatever my Carl levels were, that’s the baseline right there.
Say I’ve got a Carl of 100 a week after surgery. Then a week later, my doctor expects me to have half as much Carl — a level of 50. A week later, Carl’s supposed to be down to 25. Eventually, those levels will bottom out and kinda flatline. And if Carl flatlines at a level that’s higher than normal, we start chemotherapy.
Awesome. Really, that makes sense to me — it’s careful and cautious, and following the results scientifically. What I wanted was for my doctor to clap and dust his hands off, then say, “that’s it, you’re done!”
But that’s not gonna happen for a good while yet. As a wise man named Tom Petty once said, “the waiting is the hardest part.”
Hey there, visitors — there’s more (and much better) photos of this here — check ‘em out.
I got another cryptic text from a friend last Friday afternoon: “Fight Club in Union Square. GET HERE.”
For those who don’t live in New York, Union Square has historically been a giant meeting place for political protesters, social activists, and merchants of all sizes. In the days following September 11th, it was a meeting place for rescuers and mourners alike. Now it’s home to a multiplex, Ann Taylor Loft, a Whole Foods, and a Diesel store.
So really, it makes perfect sense that in the inner chamber of Manhattan’s consumer culture, right there in Union Square, there would be a massive, public fight club.
There’s a pretty cool piece of wheatpasted subway art on the Uptown-bound side of the A/C/E at 23rd street in Manhattan. The posters are pasted in what had been empty spaces for advertising — these knocked my shoes loose a little when I saw them on Saturday morning:
For Google/ machine-reading purposes, the posters are images of Marilyn Monroe looking particularly lost and dazed with bleary, Warhol-style makeup. The text of the poster reads:
Then it hit me. I’m not going to be famous. I won’t get to be a rock star. I am going to be stuck on the payroll doing work that doesn’t interest me for a very long time.
