October Hodgepodge

October tends to always be the busiest month on my calendar, despite not having one of the travel holidays, such as your Thanksgivings or your Christmases, to gum up the scheduling works. Halloween travel's rarely a “thing,” unless you’re a van-nomad member of the Scooby Doo gang or something. Still, October manages to cram my calendar all the same, because my friend group is overwhelmingly made up of nerdy Halloween adults (including myself), so there’s always this or that horror screening or party to attend, but also, I think there’s just a general sense that October is a nice time to be out and about. The too-hot sloth of summer has yet to be replaced by the too-cold sloth of winter, offering a brief Goldilocksian window when everything seems just right to be overbooked.

With nothing else tugging at my brain to write about this week, I thought I’d share a few of the non-Halloweeny things I got up to this month.  

A couple of weeks back, my friend Stuart and I got a text from my old Daily Show colleague/current podcast network cohort John Hodgman, asking us if we would like to have dinner with him and George R.R. Martin, author of The Song of Ice and Fire series (basis for HBO’s Game of Thrones, for the tiny subset of people who need this parenthetical).

I won’t share much about dinner – not because I learned anything scandalous, but because I try to be conscious of which tales are mine to tell. Also, frankly, I rarely recall the details of conversations, especially whenever I mix with Hodgman, a practice which tends to involve martinis, God’s great brain-erasers. 

I don’t mean to have a sieve for a brain. I’d certainly be a better writer and probably a better person if I retained more conversation – and my wife, Audrey, who loves nothing more than gossip and news would probably score me higher on annual performance reviews. I feel bad about the slim pickings I deliver. For this evening, she noted that most of my debrief focused on the hugeness of Mr. Martin’s navy seal security guy, a man I described as “not as big as Jack Reacher, but definitely big enough to be the guy Jack Reacher fights.”

Sorry Audrey. Maybe I was too far from the action – my friend and podcast co-host, Stuart, is one of the world’s great George R.R. Martin fans, and he thanked me several times for “letting him sit by George,” even though it never would have occurred to me to angle for a more central seat, as a real “let’s not make a fuss over me” guy from way back. I'm glad Stu got to live his dream, though – it was a long time coming, considering this was a make-up dinner of sorts. We’d been invited to a previous dinner with John and George (half of the “nerd Beatles”) a few years back, but Mr. Martin had needed to cancel. Disappointing, but only until halfway through that meal when beloved (and, apparently that evening, bored) character actor Richard Kind texed Hodgman to crash dinner.

So we had dinner with Richard Kind, who did not disappoint by being exactly as Richard Kind-ish as you would hope. Again, I’ll stay mum on the details, but will report (1) on the dreamy look in Richard Kind’s eyes when someone mentioned the Avatar ride at Disney World, and the lilt in his voice when he said “Isn’t it wonderful?” and (2) that Richard told me to read the memoir “Shy” by Mary Rodgers, a terrific recommendation that I now pass along to you. Rodgers was the daughter of Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein) and a Broadway composer in her own right – most famously for Once Upon a Mattress. She was also lifelong best friends with Stephen Sondheim, contributed music to the 70’s hit oddity Free to Be… You and Me, and wrote Freaky Friday and its sequel. If you want dishy Broadway tales from a sharp woman who's too old to care about lying or protecting anyone’s feelings, it’s the book for you.

Anyway, I guess the point of this story is: if John Hodgman asks you to dinner, you should go, because something great will likely happen. I realize this is some pretty specific advice that won’t be applicable for most, but keep it in your back pocket, just in case.

What else? Music! Even when I was younger and (marginally) less grumpy I wasn’t super into live music, since it tended to come with loud, pushy crowds and a lot of standing, but last week Audrey and I uncharacteristically went to two (seated! huzzah!) concerts within three days. This bizarre, near sci-fi turn of events came about, because – to borrow a line from my podcast’s newsletter Flop Secrets – “Audrey and I both gave one another birthday gifts of music tickets that wound up being on the exact same week in October, like the world’s most boring, no-stakes, no-twist version of Gift of the Magi.” 

Apologies for recycling that line from elsewhere, but it’s only here at SPECIAL INTERESTS that you get to hear what concerts we attended. It’s like I’m creating my own connected newsletter universe over here! The DNU. 

Anywho, Audrey got me tickets for Neko Case, who's one of my very favorite artists... but that means I’ve already seen her live four or five times, which had me wondering whether another show would be worth it. I should not have doubted. This was my favorite performance of all of them. Whatever factors contributed – the current configuration of the band, the acoustics at the Beacon Theater, the settings, Neko herself – really emphasized the reverb-heavy, ethereal qualities of her music, the stuff that makes her feel like something you should be listening to at a neon-drenched, deserted motel in the desert southwest, or at the roadhouse from Twin Peaks (the Lynch vibe was really enhanced by the addition of a saxophone to the ensemble, contributing Angelo Badlamenti-esque background squawks that really filled out the sound).

Some point (or several) at a Neko concert always makes me tear up, and I think it’s because I admire how defiantly herself she is. Her music is beautiful, but often strange, and unapologetic in her strangeness. She’s such a powerhouse, and it’s all the more moving (having read her autobiography) to know how hard-won her strength is, and how much she’s refused to let the collected shit of her life grind her down.

My gift to Audrey was tickets to see Lea Salonga’s show, Stage, Screen, and Everything in Between, where Salonga ran through a smattering of Broadway hits, movie songs, and whatever the hell else Lea thought would be fun to sing. Though I like showtunes and movie songs and such, the concert was firmly in my mental “something for Audrey” bucket until we actually went, and I immediately got why she’s a star. 

Salonga is known for many things, but probably most widely for (1) originating “Kim” in Miss Saigon, for which she became the first Asian to win a Tony for Best Actress, and (2) having been the singing voice for Mulan in Mulan and Jasmine in Aladdin. She’s basically a national hero in the Philippines, so when a friend recently wanted to duet on “A Whole New World” at karaoke and asked Audrey if she “knew this song,” it was very amusing to see Audrey’s incredulous reaction. 

I’ll end with a few paragraphs about one kinda-Halloweeny thing, after all. We went with a couple of friends to see a program of eleven restored Max Fleischer cartoons, focused on those with creepy Halloween vibes – though anyone familiar with the surreal output of the Fleischer Brothers cartoon studio knows that’s basically “all of them.” 

The gem in the Fleischers’ cartoon crown was Betty Boop, but we also saw shorts with their more forgotten stars Bimbo and Koko, as well as some one-offs without their stock company, and the prime defining word for all of their shorts would be “weird.” Fleisher protagonists were usually bedeviled by scores of rubber-limbed creatures, be they criminals, gorilla-like animals, or ghouls, who’d put them through bizarre ringers like a chase through a house of horrors, a night in a cemetery, or a trip to hell, and it would be fairly arbitrary whether the protagonist survived or ended up getting swallowed by a floating skull. (The second defining Fleischer cartoons word would be “horny,” based on the number of times Betty Boop gets chased, spanked, or walks in front of a light source to briefly gift the audience a nude silhouette.)

These toons don’t bother with playing by the rules, in part because they were made so early that there were no rules. Cartoons were only 16-31 years old during the period covered by the shorts we saw, and the only constant elements were (1) a hunger to explore the visual possibilities of the new medium, and (2) an elastic willingness to do anything for a gag.

This unpredictability gives early Fleischer cartoons tremendous anarchic energy, and I was delighted by many of the shorts’ absolute refusal to provide any traditional resolution. Often a cartoon would just… end with the lead character still in some kind of danger. At best they'd get a “happy” ending, in that our hero makes it to some kind of final safety, but not in any way that satisfactorily explains or dispels their lingering disquiet, after the violent stream-of-consciousness gags stutter out. 

Every time one of these shorts ended on an anticlimax, I giggled. It got me to thinking that – while these shorts are brilliant, and not “bad” at all – they share one of the qualities I love about a truly bad movie (the cornerstone of half of my career). They're totally unexpected. Like these early cartoons, a bad movie doesn't know it's breaking the rules, because no one ever told them the rules. If comedy's often about frustrating expectations, well... there’s nothing more frustrating than someone who refuses to play the same game as you.

This "Special Interests" has been a lot less essay-like, and more like a diary of some recent activity, and I hope that's fine with y'all. I don't quite know what people expect from this newsletter (if anything) but think of this installment as one of those holiday letters catching you up on your friends’ lives... except you’re getting it on Halloween instead of Christmas, and instead of hearing about what the kids have been up to lately, you get some lines about Betty Boop. An upgrade, as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve been busy this month, but the subtext, of course, is that I’ve been busy to distract myself. I’m sad about the world, folks. October’s my favorite month of the year, but even October seems grim these days. But bless you all for being my pretend family, and catching up with me in this holiday card.

For earlier posts, check out the archive. In my other life, I’m a podcaster. Listen to my show The Flop House, here. In my other other life, I’m an Emmy-winning comedy writer. If you’re looking to staff, get in touch! And if you love the newsletter, you can always consider tipping me, by enrolling in the paid tier!