Show Log

From backstage

2003-10-18T20:30:38Z

Backstage on Saturday, Mr. Utah Phillips introduced himself with a "They call me Utah" and proceeded to hold forth on topics from Salvadorean poetry to the Lost Dauphin of Green Bay, Wisconsin, to Unitarianism and war protest. He told us about how when he first moved to NYC as a young man, he went straight to the House of Hospitality and met Dorothy Day herself, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

Al Franken was hanging around backstage, too, reminiscing about growing up in St. Louis Park, right outside Minneapolis. He told us about watching comedy on TV with his Dad, laughing along with Henny Youngman and Richard Pryor. He said he recently came to the realization that he actually became a comedian because it's what he did with his Dad as a young kid.

And Tommy Emmanuel was jovial and enthusiastic, impressing the heck out of the musicians and jumping in musically at a moment's notice. The show seemed to go well and the crowd was a lot younger than usual—lots of whoops and hollering from all levels of the Fitzgerald.

The fire this time

2003-10-11T20:29:18Z

The movie director Robert Altman came to rehearsal yesterday and to the show today, scouting the theater for a movie project or something, reminiscing about his days in radio in Kansas City. He saw Guy Noir and commented that nobody is doing this on a stage anymore. He gabbed with Sue Scott and Tim Russell and Tom Keith, whose sound effects he thought were pretty great, and went up to dinner at GK's house and to watch the Sox/Yankees game. Here's a guy who, ever since M.A.S.H., has put out about one movie per year, doing what he chooses to do, bucking the big studios, doing everything from Popeye to Short Cuts (the Raymond Carver one), and now his new picture, The Company, a sort of fictional documentary about the Joffrey balley, comes out at Christmas. He's 80 now, clipped white beard, balding, clear-eyed, looking like an old gunfighter who comes to town not intending to get into trouble but you know he's going to anyway.

And the show wasn't bad either. John Koerner doing Two Songs and Ten Jokes, which he tells as if he were somebody who sat down next to you in the Chatterbox Caf�, and Jeannie Kendall sang "Heaven's Just A Sin Away" and GK and Becky Schlegel sang a duet of the Gillian Welch song, "One and Only." And a moment of radio drama that somehow radio does better—when the 15-year- old Josh saw his mother walk out of the bathroom in the black negligee.

Notes from backstage

2003-10-04T20:28:21Z

It's our second live show of the season, and some of the newer staff members are still getting a feel for the amount of talent and worker-hours it takes to put together a two-hour radio show. Earlier, Rich Dworsky and Guy's All-Star Shoe Band were honing a couple of numbers to perfection, and right now Marcia Ball is leading her band through a sound check. We can hear it all perfectly in the basement below the stage. It's a little strange, though; one hears these marvelous performances going on, and then they get to the end of the song and there's no applause because they're playing to empty seats and everyone in the building is busy getting ready to put a show on. I imagine that's something one gets accustomed to, and that the urge to run out into the house and clap eventually subsides. In any case, I'm sure this evening's audience will more than make up for it.

72 degrees and balmy in the office

2003-09-26T21:14:06Z

Silence. The calm before the storm. Everyone's gone to the Fitz for the first rehearsal of the first show of the new season, which starts tomorrow. This morning was a flurry of intense activity, with scripts flying and cartons of cream cheese toppling to the floor. About a half hour ago, the script manager hopped into his Toyota Tercel to hand-deliver scripts to the theater, and now it's silent in the office, except for the rumbling of a lone desk chair wheeling across the kitchen toward the Concise Dictionary of Battles. See you tomorrow.

Warming up

2003-09-23T21:09:56Z

It's Tuesday afternoon, there are two mystery Volkswagens outside the office, and it's five days till the first show of the new season. Last night we did a live sort of warm-up show at the Fitzgerald in St. Paul. The house was packed, so packed that a deluxe balcony box reserved under the name Jeff Smith was fought over by two completely different Jeff Smiths who both wanted to sit there.

The show had all the musical guests and jokes about chickens of a normal show, but the sketches were infused with the slightly salty taste of fundraising � because stations around the country are going to chop up the show and use bits and pieces for their pledge drives. So Garrison tried to talk Maurice into donating a romantic dinner for two at the Caf� Boeuf to public radio members, and Judy Donaghy coached Garrison on his singing technique, and Scott Rivard gave an impromptu lecture on the physics of radios signals. The show got done around 10:30, and today everyone's pretty exhausted.

Right now we're working up scripts for the upcoming show, recording promos, stuff like that. Oh, and we're putting together some new features for the website, like this show log.