Discovery and Obsession
More than ten years ago, I had the good fortune to stumble into a show at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York City. It was as entertaining an hour as I have ever spent. Very quick, very smart people developed a highly-entertaining, hyper-witty story on a stage in real time. It felt like I was watching a mental-Olympics. I returned to the theater on a subsequent trip to New York, and that show was equally impressive. (I remember a performer announced he was leaving New York to move to California and begin writing for an upcoming television show then-known only as The Office-spinoff, so maybe this was 2008 or so.)
Although I haven’t been able to return to the UCB theater since then, I’ve followed the careers of various UCB performers through web videos and podcasts. One of my favorite performers is Connor Ratliff, who ran for president in 2012 on the basis that he was Constitutionally-qualified to do so, as he was over 35 years old. His pollster was fellow-UCB actor, Will Hines, who you can see running a focus group for the Ratliff campaign here. I had the honor of serving as the Ohio-chair for that campaign, for what it’s worth.
Following Hines’ career led me to Don’t Get Me Started, a podcast he co-hosts with another UCB performer, Anthony King. On DGMS, guests are invited to talk, not about what they do, but about what they love. I love this idea so much I’d like to franchise it and start local chapters. Imagine something like a book club, but each month a different member would talk for an hour about something they are obsessed with, providing an entry for the others into a world they might not have known. (If it were socially-acceptable to replace small-talk with “Tell me the latest thing you love,” I’d do far better socially).
DGMS guests have talked about people and things like Bob Fosse, General Aviation, ASMR, Furniture Rehabbing, and Kanye West, who I knew only vaguely, despite his fame. A two-part episode introduced me to the world of Stephen Sondheim, about whom I knew very little. I remember seeing a version of Sweeney Todd on cable in the 1980s, but that was about it.
Sondheim took for me in part because I had been listening non-stop to the original cast recording of Hamilton for several months. I was ready to appreciate musical theater in a way I hadn’t before. My wife and I plunged into the recordings of several Sondheim shows, like Company, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along. We watched productions on Netflix and YouTube and Amazon. I read Sondheim interviews and essays, and Sondheim’s own Finishing the Hat.
Riding the crest of the Sondheim wave, we sent our kids to my parents for the night and took in a local production of Jason Robert Brown’s musical, The Last Five Years, and then we listened to various cast recordings of the musical for the next several weeks.
Meanwhile, my Hamilton obsession led me to read Ron Chernow’s biography, which inspired the musical. It led me to read Gore Vidal’s Burr, and Duel With the Devil, which is the true story of the murder trial that Burr and Hamilton defended together. And all of this led me to Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, which I’m reading now, and Team of Rivals, which I’ve been listening to in the car during my commute each day.
There are two things I want to say about all of this. The first is that almost all of these things I’ve found and loved in these past few months are not new. They existed for many years, and I was simply ignorant of them. And by ignorant, I don’t mean that I was unaware that they existed. I mean that I had not paid them enough notice to see that I would enjoy them. How frustrating is this? Right now there is probably a book that would be your favorite book in the whole world–a book that would resonate with you at the deepest levels of your soul–and you just haven’t found it yet. Maybe you picked the book next to it at the library. Maybe you even held it in your hands, but put it back. Maybe it would have changed your life. So much of human happiness depends upon us keeping our eyes open. So much depends upon the willingness to try something new.
The second thing I want to say is: How random and wonderful is the art of discovery? I went to The Last Five Years because I was interested in musicals as a result of Sondheim, who I found from DGMS, which I listen to because Will Hines was pollster for Connor Ratliff, whose career I follow because I stumbled into the UCB theater over a decade ago. If I had gone to another show that evening, I wonder what I’d be enjoying now.
