RL101 - Where All the Lilypads Are

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John doesn’t know how to use index cards, referring to John giving his big show at The Rendezvous and not being able to really use index cards to take notes.

The show title refers to Paul F. Tompkins evolving from stand-up comedian to long-form storyteller who can go on a tangent and involve the audience, but he always knows where all the lilypads are to get back to his storyline.

Raw notes
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John’s weekly show Roderick’s Rendezvous (RL101)

Merlin starts the show speaking in a very high-pitched voice that John calls his Scott Simpson voice. Merlin hasn’t eaten. John is happy they found the time to talk to each other today because he has been busy having his big show at The Rendezvous. He puts on a show every time he walks out the door, jingle-stick or no, with a feathered head dress and Merlin has heard good things. The world is just a big proscenium that John just enters and exits at his leisure, standing at the front, arms spread wide in a Jesus Christ pose, and he says: ”I am a golden God!”

The show was a learning and growing experience. He does not know how to use 3x5 cards, which might sounds strange to Merlin, given how well he utilizes them, but John never learned to use them. In Junior High they really focused on making topic statements and outlines and John was sitting on the floor surrounded by 3x5 cards and he had done everything he could to number and order them, but they always got mixed up and it never made any sense to him. His mom was a 3x5 card user, at least she knew how to do it, but they have always baffled John.

The things John ends up writing on 3x5 cards are always random and useless. When he was standing in front of the crowd he looked at them and it says ”ballpoint pen” and he couldn’t remember why he wrote that down and now he was off his game because he was thinking about pens. He needed some notes, he wrote some notes, and then the notes were a constant distraction for him and he would look over to the lectern at his list of notes, but he couldn’t read his own handwriting and he didn’t remember what he meant by the things he had written down.

John needs to learn how to bullet point a presentation and then use those bullet points to effectively jog the speech in his mind, and he is hoping to get Merlin’s wisdom. To get up and give an hour long presentation where you are not a guest on somebody else’s show, you are not hiding behind your guitar, you are not an opener for something, and there is not context other than: ”I am here doing a show!” John has always had a guitar or been part of a larger production, but to get up and say: ”I am going to entertain you with nothing else but my own thoughts for an hour” requires a little bit of organization.

Merlin compares it to making a setlist for the band. Everybody understands what it is for unless you are the drummer and you need some special explanation sometimes.

The job Merlin’s dad used to have in radio was called traffic, which is not how cars are moving, but how you fill time. He had the very unsexy job of sitting with a stopwatch and figuring out exactly how many seconds each thing took. David Letterman used to be booth announcer at a TV station, which is the same super-boring job. A set-list is a cue of what the next thing is and then you don’t need to think about it again until that song is just about over.

Merlin was really embarrassed in 5-7th grade because he thought he was the only person in the world who wrote the essay first and then made an outline after they wrote an essay and then reverse-engineered the index cards from the outline, because all that he had to hand it. It is really stifling to some people. If they can write an essay, let them write a God-damn essay, and don’t make them think they are a dumb-ass because they don’t know how to use index cards. John had completely forgotten why they were forced to use index cards in school because he was exactly like Merlin.

John’s preparation for his show was writing a 2500 word humorous essay with the theme ”Two kinds of people in this world - winners and losers” (lyrics of Go Insane by Fleetwood Mac) and he read it, he honed it until he really liked it, but he couldn’t memorize a 2500 word essay. If he was going to come up with a show that he would take on the road and do 30 times he would spend three weeks memorizing his presentation and the first couple of nights would be a bit rough, but eventually he would get it and do it 30 times, but John is trying to do a show a week and memorizing an essay is not his forte.

Then he thought if the show should be him sitting on a stool, reading his dramatic essay and he read it out loud a couple of times and he dismissed the idea because he is bad at reading essays aloud, and it is not entertaining either. He wrote the essay to get his thoughts going and he is going to get on stage and extemporize based on having written this essay. Then he wrote a second 2500 word essay because when he read the first one aloud it only lasted 15 minutes. He also liked his second essay, but did not intend to memorize that either.

When he got up on stage he spent an hour trying to recall the two essays he had written and half of his attention was devoted to trying to recall the funny way he had of saying the next thing he was about to say, which he of course could not lay his hands on and when he came to that point he bumbled through it like a guy trying to walk up a muddy road and during the whole show he was feeling a state of handicapitude where he had on his computer, sitting feet away from him in a bag, two very humorous essays and now he was trying to impart the gist of them to a room full of people who have paid to watch him entertain them and when he walked off the stage he thought of it as a good learning experience.

First lesson: You cannot recall your essays when you are on stage, and having them in your briefcase next to you there is no osmosis that gets the funniness of them to you, and they are just a distraction. If he had been standing on stage totally cold and your voice from the back of the room had said: ”Bananas!” he could have done three hours effortlessly. Instead he had prepared just enough to hobble himself because part of his brain was tied to the idea that he had already done this better somewhere. The audience probably didn’t notice it, just his mom said that at one point she could see him visibly try to recall something on stage, and: ”Now that is entertainment!”

After a little bit of a rough start he surrendered to the idea that he was going to recapture the fun of telling these stories in real time and he doesn’t think he traumatized the audience. The great hack of this show is that the room has a 75 person capacity, which means it is an intimate environment, although when he walked out on stage it was not as intimate as he thought. The stage is 3 feet hight and 1.5 feet from the first seat, but there were 80 people in the room, which is makes the people from the middle of the hall fade into the mist and there are enough people there, he can’t look down and address everybody by name.

Another hack is something John cribbed from Hodgman: At the end of the night he was doing a dramatic reading of the URL for the ticket link for the next show and for the next 24 hours this link was only open for people in this room, which creates a sense of false scarcity. The next morning John woke up and the next show had already sold out before the tickets even went on sale for the public. This mention here on the podcast is the last time John will ever credit John Hodgman for this idea, and when the Wikipedia entry for dramatic bit.ly-readings will be created in 2025 it will credit John.

John was on stage and he kept standing in front of him and there was a third John that was trying to move John and the other John around. Interrupting people on stage is a John Hodgman innovation (see their show with Scott Simpson, RL53).

John did enjoy writing the 2500-word essay and when he was done he had a 2500-word essay that he wrote, which gives him a feeling of accomplishment, but there is not enough time every week to memorize all the funny turns of phrase, and having written it out and made it funny he has removed it from the realm of extemporaneous story that he comes up with. Merlin admires John how articulate he was telling his miserable United Airlines story on Thank You For Calling (see TYFC) and his turns of phrase were fantastic. John is awfully good at that and it is a reason why people enjoy this program.

This is the learning and growing part because John can get in front of a room of people and say basically: ”Give me an animal! Give me a city!” and then tell a story about a cat in Saint Louis, he would just first have to decide which one. Let’s just limit it to the 1980s. The whole point of doing this show is to develop a new skill with the goal of going into it with a bit of preparation. God bless Bob Dylan! If he hadn’t started annoying Pete Seeger with electric music we would have a very different idea of Rock’n’Roll. When Merlin says that John plays a few notes on the harmonica out of the blue.

A couple of years ago John saw a couple of Paul F. Tompkins shows where he was evolving his act away from straight standup to long-form storytelling in an hour-long show that was basically the story of his job history before he became a comic, all the shit jobs that he had as a teenager and in his early 20s. That is any Roderick on the Line episode and any night at a cocktail party with either John or Merlin. Watching Paul do his show it was evident that his 20 years of standup comedy was greatly his storytelling because his comic timing was not just impeccable, but the laugh lines of the stories wasn’t built around building up to the funny end of the story, but he there would be a little detail in the story that would be the laugh line of the night.

Paul had gone full circle from years of standing up and saying: ”What is the deal with rutabagas?” and now he has evolved and found this long-form humorous storytelling John has been doing his whole life, but all of the work Paul has done in comedy and all of his stage time and the preparation that went into making this one show allows him to have the appearance of extemporaneously telling a story, but he knows every note of it. He still allows for the opportunity of chance, he can still go off on a tangent and respond to somebody in the crowd, but he knows where all the lilypads are, which is so above John’s skill level, but John recognized the framework and he could see the architecture of it and how much he still had to learn.

For the last year John had multiple opportunities to do extemporaneous storytelling and he has done it a dozen times where he told a half-hour story where he was making up the storytelling off the top of his head, and he wanted to switch gears and wants to get better at crafting a thing, but he doesn’t know what to do next. Asking Paul about it is like asking a magician to show you how to cut a lady in half.

John and Merlin have done two shows (probably at SF Sketchfest 2014) and Merlin realized immediately that they had to change the second night because there were a bunch of people in the audience who were part of the bit, and it takes a certain amount of empathy and the ability to open yourself up for that.

About halfway through the show John recognized that he was adopting a Todd Barry-like deadpan. Todd uses a super-low affect disagreeable status-conscious character as a great comedic wedge. Every performer who does a 1-person show find a way to make their character sympathetic and to make the person on stage someone that everybody in the audience can empathize with. Paul F. Tompkins is very animated and friendly and he appears to be a guy you want to know and be friends with. When Merlin gives his Inbox Zero presentations he is the guy that everybody in the room wishes would come into their office and be there with them for an hour.

When John is standing on stage with the Rock band the guitar and the song is so active and there is so much life in the music that he could be a wry voice in between songs and just say: ”You think that was good? Fuck you!” and then go back into the song. The tension and the contrast is exciting and was part of why that character worked. But as he was doing his hour at The Rendezvous he was conscious of his persona and it raised question of: ”Who is this guy?” It was not how he talks to his 3-year old. If he is standing somewhere, trying to get people’s attention he can tell a very animated story, but because he had everyone’s attention already in this quiet room where nobody else was talking, he was down in a very low tone and he was wondering if he needed to turn the energy up on him.

John cannot bear to listen or watch himself perform. He should be reviewing game-day tapes! Merlin can listen to his podcasts and his music, but he doesn’t like watching himself alone on stage doing a thing, not because it is embarrassing, but it makes him self-conscious, but not in a good way. It needs to feel a certain way in the room, which means that he needs to feel a certain way in the room. In comedy people think they can win the room over by controlling the temperature of the room, but you also have to control the humidity and the barometric pressure. It is like kegeling: You discover a muscle you didn’t even know that you had. John tried kegeling and he discovered he didn’t have that muscle.

Kurt Braunohler is a very funny comedian and John did a couple of shows with him in the fall (at The Atlantic Ocean Comedy & Music Festival in September of 2013 on a boat leaving from Miami). Kurt got up cold in front of the room at a Wesley Stace’s Cabinet of Wonders-type show. He was in the incredible position of trying to present to the room a casual comedian affect where you are on board with him right away, listening to him tell a story. He was doing a new movement in comedy: ”A funny thing happened to me on the way over here…”

The framework of it was just the anecdotal storytelling, but a lot of work has obviously gone into this art form where they have done the work and now they can forget it. John has done a lot of that work, but it is a patchwork quilt. His goal for his weekly shows for the next 6 months is to get up there and… a lot of people congratulated him after the show, everybody was very happy, and everybody who was there bought a ticket to the next one, which means John has the opportunity to go up there and fail, but that is not fun, even if you know everybody in the room doesn’t care and wants him to just go for it.

After the show the sound guy from the Rendezvous came backstage to sharpen his pencil and John was looking even at him for validation and he was just: ”Need anything?” - ”No, I am good!” - ”Okay” and when he walked out John was like: ”Fuck!” John didn’t win that guy and didn’t change his life. But John has only done one show and even though the A/V guy didn’t put a Hawaiian Lei around his neck he is still fine.

For example a kid is trying to walk for a long time and falls down you applaud them for trying to walk, although John never did, he was just: ”Get up! You are weak! My mom wrote down the day when I first walked and you are behind 2% already!”, but eventually the kid walks for a while and that is how Merlin feels about a live performance. He doesn’t like talking to people about what he just did because it feels undignified and it is done now, He got to a point where he didn’t worry about what the sound guy thought and it made him a happier person and he felt like he could walk pretty well, but it is just a matter of doing the walking every single day and eventually he will know himself that he is good and it doesn’t matter if you didn’t like it.

Watching Paul F. Tompkins do his show a couple of years ago John was very conscious that the apparent ease and effortlessness of his work surely every night invites 5-10 people to come up to him in the bar afterwards and talk to him about their storytelling talents. It seems so easy, so people are duped into thinking it is easy. John was standing there with Paul afterwards and he wanted to tell him about how inspirational this was, but Paul hears that all the time.

When you get off the stage at a Rock concert there are going to be 5-6 guys who come up and talk to you about their band, but there are so many things you have to do before your band is headlining a show that you can listen to a guy talk about his band, his guitar playing, and his aspirations and in the end you can pat him on the back: ”Good luck, buddy! I hope good things happen to your band!” On the other side, there is no burden of entry to getting up in front of a crowd and hold a microphone in your hand, anybody can do it and take that first step onto the stage, holding a microphone, and the question is: Does the audience leave an hour later, entertained.

When John walked off the stage the other night and people wanted to talk to him about it, as much as he wanted feedback, he didn’t need any. His instinct is always to criticize his own show and turn it into a pile of wet ashes, but he kept saying to himself backstage that a year ago he was massively depressed, 40 pounds overweight, and the prospect of actually booking a show and following through on it was an insurmountable obstacle that he couldn’t imagine doing, but 4 months ago he set some goals and actually wrote them down on a piece of paper:

  • Find an assistant
  • Rent an office space
  • Book a weekly show

… and in the tension and the anxiety leading up to this first show it was very difficult to take pride in having taken any of these first steps, but sitting backstage he was allowing to tell himself that he had accomplished the goals that he set out to do. He had an office and he had an assistant, in fact two assistants and maybe even four, but he hasn’t met two of them yet, and most of importantly he booked a weekly show and he has done the first one and he succeeded at it. Even if he had gotten up there and just stuttered for an hour he could be proud of having taken all these steps.

Every time the voice with the Welsh accent came into his head that said: ”You know that you butchered the show last night and everyone in the room who used to be a fan of yours now realizes that you are a charlatan!” he just repeated: ”A year ago we had Bob Hope and Steve Jobs and Johnny Cash, and now we have a group of assistants, an unusable office space, buy you have done this show!”

Merlin is biting his lip to not put on his Merlin-hat because there is so much about this why people beat up on themselves and end up not only not succeeding, but not even trying, thinking it is easy, but the only people who think something is easy are the ones who haven’t done it yet. Nothing is easy! It is only easy after it stopped being hard, and then there will be five new things that are hard, it is called growth! A goal is useful because it keeps you moving forward and to show up every day and to work really hard and do the right thing until you understand it enough to have a reasonable goal. That is why people don’t get anywhere. They sit there in their little pile of shit and talk about how easy this should be and never do anything to reconcile all of the possibilities that have been introduced into their life and they think the way out of that is to come up with more impossibilities and then be mad at everybody because it didn’t work out.

The process of hiring an assistant (RL101)

The idea that John needed an assistant is less than 4 months old (see RL94). Asking for help was an incredible obstacle to overcome, he didn’t know even whom and how to ask for help. Having asked for it, getting a response from people… The first thing he did was call his and Merlin’s good friend Adam Pranica who is a model of task completion and has been working on The Long Winters documentary for 15 years now. Adam knows a lot of people who are fans of The Long Winters and he is one dimension away from John because he is not know, but he knows a lot of people.

Adam recommended a couple of people, but how could John call those people that he didn’t know very well and ask if they wanted to work for him, so he called another friend of Adam’s, Victoria van Bruinisse, who is an office manager for a non-profit, a very capable active person and a go-getter kind of person. She is a photographer, but she also put together a house show that John played at her house that Adam filmed that is only, the one where he tells a little story and then sings a song.

He called her and asked her what she thought of these people and she said: ”That girl would be good except she is really busy. That other person is not very good for some reason.” She was Dick Cheney-ing him, saying: ”I will find you a vice president!”, and she started to do the thing that John desperately needs and that his dad’s executive secretary used to do, which is call him and ask: ”Why don’t you just tell me the 5 things that you need?” and John would reply, which sometimes took him 2 weeks, but she never got impatient, she was just friendly reminding him.

She came up with an ad, John talked about it on the podcast, and a dozen or more people applied for the job, Victoria vetted all the applications, she communicated with them multiple times, and after a two-month long process she said: ”I think the best candidate is me!” She literally Dick Cheney-ed it. John was skeptical because she already had an office job where she had too much to do, but she said that she was the best candidate to find him a better candidate one day, or maybe to evolve this job into a job that enables her to one day do this job. She was essentially saying: ”I am your assistant until I am either your assistant or until I have grown an assistant from mud that I take from the beach of life!”

At every step of the way John resisted his instinct to micromanage the process, which is step 1, because Victoria was doing a lot of great stuff and John decided to be quiet and he was not going to jump in and tell her that she can’t do the thing that she was trying to do, but he was going to allow her to find her own course. Of all the assistants she interviewed one of them lived in Denver, named Bailey McCann, who managed a chain of coffee shops but did not want to do that anymore and she wanted to live in Seattle, so she and Victoria struck up a friendship online.

This was an unusual interview process because those two were staying up all night, talking on the phone and giggling, but John was going to step back. Bailey has now quit her jobs in Denver, has moved to Seattle, and is sleeping on Victoria’s couch, which is the worst porn ever, and this show that John just did at The Rendezvous he could not have done without Victoria and then Bailey hit the ground running, seriously taking care of business. She even showed up to a meeting John had with the owner of the Rendezvous and she brought two coffees, one for John and one for her. Knowing what you need before you know you need it.

In a lot of different ways along the path to here John could have jumped into this Victoria-Bailey love triangle and made himself the third pode (?), but instead he did what he was asking them to allow him to do: Just think about what he is trying to do, and in fact they both did everything John could have asked for and more. This is working! This is the Jonathan Coulton Kung Fu of just not stepping on other people’s toes, and not getting in the way of people who are trying to help him. It is an ongoing lesson for John that the best thing he can do is to shut up and accept other people’s work, which is so hard for him because especially at 3am he wants to send everybody a 5-page email, telling them all what is wrong with what they are doing. Now they are having a little professional organization. Victoria and Bailey are calling themselves The Roderick Group, which is so cute, and John feels like making business cards for everybody.

Ideas for taking their show to the next level (RL101)

Now John has to do it again and again! When they heard the following day that the second show had sold out, his first instinct and that of John’s think tank in the form of his mom, his friend Ben London and his little constellation of people, a blue-ribbon panel, was that they needed to find a bigger venue or start charging more for tickets and get ready to scale this up. There was a video where Cher is on an aircraft carrier (If I Could Turn Back Time), and that is what they needed to be thinking about. But don’t crush the bunny!

It only took 20 minutes for everybody to come to the understanding that maybe they could charge $7 instead of $6, but that is the extend of how much they should push this. It is an incubator, a little world, and the real benefit of this is going to be in a year when John understands what he is trying to make, not that he made $400 and he needs to make $700. John believes in his little team of people and his little operation and he believes that he can try again next week and do it better.

Merlin’s biggest concern is that John is becoming sane and that he will fuck up their podcast. He doesn’t want John to get too okay, but he needs him to stay a little bit off-balance. What will keep John crazy is that they started doing live Roderick on the Lines that will be completely unpredictable, unscriptable, unscheduleable. They could fly to a different city in America and do a show in a van and only 5 people can attend, but tickets are $5000. They get three fans from Square and they don’t have to work for 20 years. Who thought of that, Paul F. Tompkins? In your face, mustache boy!

All the comedians will say that their whole life was transformed after John and Merlin pioneered the new style. Comedians in vans getting coffee. They could get a nice white Escalade limo and they drive around somewhere that is not too interesting in order to not be distracted, maybe go around the park a few times, everybody gets a bell that they get to take home at the end, and they get to ring it at the occasions where it feels that a bell should ring. ”You get a bell! You get a bell! You get a bell!”

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