We were fine.
So we were wonderful.
1 This was discovered in a University of Iowa study done on older rats, which leads me to wonder, How do you stress out a rat? Tell him that his tech stock is plummeting? Put him in a Barbie Corvette and simulate a car accident? I guess what I’m saying is that I’d be a really good scientist.
2 Fun fact: When Chuck was on the show, our band performed a satirical version of Fight Club, called Fight Club: The Musical, which we thought was a hilarious idea. Turns out that at the time, David Fincher was in talks with Trent Reznor to create a Fight Club rock opera. If you’re reading this, Chuck, you’re welcome to use our song. You seemed to love it! (Note: He did not love it.)
One Last Leap
Wherein I Do the Thing I Should’ve Done Years Ago and Try Not to Wallow in Regret
In the fall, my year of mini-adventures was over, and it was time to start another season of Live Wire!1
I was beginning my third year as head writer and co-producer of the show while Luke Burbank hosted.
During my tenure in this role, a lot of people asked me what it was like to watch someone do the job that had been mine for a decade.
The answer was: It was unusual, but not unpleasant.
The first time I sat at the producers’ table, it felt surreal being on the other side of the speakers, watching Luke talk to the audience that had, just a couple of weeks earlier, been there to watch me. It was like watching a new stepparent with your own kids, if you had hundreds of kids who were all approximately the same age as you and who wore Columbia Sportswear jackets and drank cheap pinot grigio.
Stepping down had been a struggle, and I had immediately wondered how long it would take me to miss hosting.
But I can honestly say that in two-plus years of producing and writing, I never once wished for my old job back. (If you’ll recall, I did sit on a toilet in a bar crying missing the things my job had brought me—but I never wanted the job back. I knew what it would have done to me.)
If I had longed to get my job back at any point, all I would’ve had to do to get rid of that feeling was think of the moments that were crazy-making.
Like the time I thought musician M. Ward was just bashful when he clammed up while I was interviewing him in front of a sold-out crowd, but then he turned his back to the audience and gave me a devilish grin that made me think, Is he fucking with me right now? I feel like right now is a super-bad time to fuck with me.
Or the time comedian Mike Birbiglia called out an audience member for sitting in the front row knitting during our interview, also known as a Peak Portland Moment.2
Or the time we booked a vintner around the holidays to talk about champagne, and for whatever reason, he walked onstage and did not want to discuss anything about champagne. Maybe he was sick of it. Maybe champagne slept with his wife. I don’t know what happened, but it was by far the most excruciating ten minutes of my hosting career.
Listening to the segment again years later, I could actually hear the tension in the audience grow as the interview progressed and he expounded on all subjects decidedly not champagne-y with every question I asked. The entire segment turned into an inside joke between the audience and myself during which we all imagined the champagne evasion couldn’t possibly last another question…and then it did. Once we got past about the seven-minute mark, the audience roared with laughter at every non-champagne-related answer, which was all of them. I finally ended the interview after I was able to get him to answer one question. He then sabered a bottle of champagne before he left (sabering is where expert champagne-bottle openers skillfully pop off the champagne cork, along with the glass bottle lip, simply by running a knife up the bottle with the right amount of force). When he did, the bottle fragment and cork flew into the second row, narrowly missing one of our season-ticket holders.
I’m sure I made some quip at the time, but what was going through my mind was Why didn’t he saber the bottle toward my head so I could be in an ambulance right now?
But I was no longer host, so those moments of terror/wishing for bodily harm almost never happened.
Except this one time.
It was when sex-advice columnist and pundit Dan Savage was about to go onstage for his interview and we realized that he hadn’t approved the sketch we’d sent him to appear in because our producer had forgotten to actually attach the attachment to the e-mail in which she described the attachment, a move I could’ve sued her for using because that was totally my move.
We’d written Dan some lines wherein he asked our cast for sex advice and they steered him horribly wrong, but Dan didn’t consider himself an actor so he was uncomfortable performing lines that he hadn’t had a chance to read over.
When I realized what had happened, a soccer-ball-size dread ball immediately arrived. I wasn’t prepared for this—one of the reasons one goes into comedy writing is that it tends not to put you in emergency situations.
These were the kinds of moments where struggling with anxiety made me feel like a not-so-great producer. Because more than just about anything, a live producer’s job is to appear calm and have a plan no matter what.
There’s an improv tenet known as “fit and well” that’s really about performing, but it works for anyone who’s trying to lead a staff. It is what it sounds like—you come into the situation happy to be there with an open mind and heart, and no matter what happens on or off the stage, you project an unmistakable affect that everything is great and going as planned. If a can light drops from the rig and strikes the announcer on the head, you smile, laugh, and let the audience know it’s a gag while you secretly dial 911.
The problem with me appearing fit and well is that my face wears every emotion I have like a sequined gown under disco lights.
In these cases, I think my staff had become used to the fact that even though I might not have been projecting the idea that everything was going to be okay, I would probably find a way to make everything okay regardless. It wasn’t an ideal dynamic, but just like we learn to deal with parents who have deficiencies, we learn to work with our flawed managers.
Thankfully, because Mr. Savage was a gracious person, he was willing to read real questions he had about sex and have our cast answer those. In the final minutes before being whisked away to do his interview, Dan wrote five questions on the back of a script page. That meant we had approximately nine minutes to write the cast’s responses and get them back onstage.
This seemed like the perfect time for a dread ball to blossom into a full-blown panic attack, but it didn’t. What’s frustrating about these disorders is how capricious they can be. Sometimes they don’t show up when, given the circumstances, they absolutely should (like when you have nine minutes to write what usually takes hours), and sometimes they show up when you wouldn’t expect them to in a million years. (Why did my first onstage anxiety attack happen while I was hosting a breakfast for a nonprofit? Talk about low stakes.)
Anyone who works in a high-stress environment will tell you that sometimes fear serves you. If properly harnessed, it allows you to do things you never thought you could. I just generally didn’t have a very effective harness. But that night, I did.
I wrangled all our actors together and grabbed two guest writers who were standing at the side of the stage watching the sold-out show and pulled them backstage.
Comedian Jen Kirkman happened to be a guest on that show and she was sitting waiting to go on when the entire creative staff descended on the greenroom.
I read each of Dan’s questions one by one, then asked which writer had an idea for how to answer it. The three writers each took one, I took one, and Jen took the fifth one.
Miraculously, because my fear of the show sucking overwhelmed my fear of asking one of my comedy heroes for a favor, I asked Jen if she wanted to write one. She was a huge Dan Savage fan and agreed.
After taking five minutes to write my own response, I went to the writers and asked what they’d come up
with. You’d be amazed at how laser-focused a writer can become when faced with impending public humiliation.
Maybe it was great stuff, or maybe we were desperate, but we massaged each answer as much as we could in literally half a minute, and then I gave all the actors their hand-scrawled scripts just before our stage manager called for them.
At the last second, I realized that Dan didn’t have his script because we’d been using his to write from, so I ran out onto the stage, slowed down as soon as the audience could see me, and casually handed Dan his script just as Luke was announcing the bit.
More than any other time in my tenure on Live Wire!, those nine minutes made me feel like I was in show business. Or, more accurately, like I was in a madcap 1940s picture about show business, where I was the young upstart writer with real moxie who came through in the nick of time.
“See, fellas? Told you we’d get it to ya! Just like my mother used to say—you can always count on a Hameister girl!” [Cue music and credits.]
It wasn’t the best bit we ever wrote, but it was by far the most exciting to write. And when Dan asked if cunnilingus was something straight people and lesbians made up just to freak out their gay male friends and Andrew Harris said yes it was (along with Arbor Day, falcons, and pleated khakis), I felt a real sense of pride that we were educating people.3
So there were still moments happening—moments that I couldn’t have possibly experienced working at any other job, at least not one in Portland—but they were fewer and farther between for me as the show shifted voices and I felt like I had less to say. (You’d be amazed how much verbal ground you can cover in twelve years.)
Which I suppose was a blessing in disguise because after all my mini-adventures were over, it looked like I might be going on another.
During the all-day summer retreat we took every year, the show’s executive team (which included me) continued the discussion about the need to scale down in order to get more intimate, in-depth interviews. We’d been in a beautiful seven-hundred-and-fifty-seat venue called Revolution Hall, which was great when we had huge guests, but it made it harder to get those guests to reveal things. When in front of an audience that large in an imposing venue, people tend to want to perform more than they want to engage in a real conversation. And when you have only a limited time with them, this can become problematic for getting what they call in radio “good tape.”4
So, led largely by Luke’s vision, the team decided to take the show “down to the studs,” a metaphor I assume Luke used because he was doing significant renovations on his house at the time.
No cast, very little pre-written content, since Luke was more of an off-the-cuff guy. Mostly, the show would be Luke interviewing guests with music and periodic comedic interjections from the announcer or a local comic. It would be very much like a staged version of his podcast TBTL. It made perfect sense and we should’ve done it from the very beginning when I first stepped down as host.
But I knew what it meant.
The show would no longer need a head writer.
As I sat there, recognizing that my job was being phased out in what was a surprisingly casual conversation, I knew I shouldn’t fight it. The fact was, I didn’t have much to offer Live Wire! anymore, and it didn’t have much to offer me.
When we were about to break for lunch, our moderator, a great friend of the show who was one of the kindest and most intuitive people I knew, weirdly decided to go around the room and ask us what we thought was the most constructive thing we’d accomplished that morning.
“Courtenay?” he asked when he got to me. “What’s yours?”
I looked at him, almost speechless as tears welled up in my eyes.
“Can I pass?” I said. “I think I’d like to pass.”
Maybe people were being so casual because they knew I wasn’t very happy in my job, but I’d worked on the show for twelve years. I’d never done anything for twelve years except age and eat a lot of carbs.
Plus, you know that thing where even if you don’t really like your dog, you’re still going to cry if it dies after twelve years? I’m not a monster.
The show brought so many extraordinary things and people into my life. It made me a writer. And now it was going away.
If I was honest with myself, I knew it was for the best.
Because after twelve years, I was bored. And a little annoyed.
I shouldn’t have been. This little thing we’d started in a tiny theater in an old Portland movie house twelve years earlier was now syndicated by PRI on public radio stations around the country. We’d done the thing we’d always wanted to do, so I should have been happy.
I was annoyed because I was out of ideas. Well, not any ideas as much as big ideas. Show-changing ideas. I was trapped in all the things we’d done in the past and unable to imagine a different show.
I remember thinking, You can do anything you want. So what do you want to do?
And the only ideas that bubbled to the surface were things I couldn’t do on the show. Screenplay ideas. Podcast ideas. Brownie-recipe ideas. I was in trouble.
Even so, I could’ve found a way to stay if I had truly wanted to. The show still needed writers, and the other producers suggested I could stay on as a freelancer. I considered it, and a year earlier, I might’ve taken them up on it. But I was, ever so slightly, different now. The OFW Project had changed me.
Now, complacency and fear didn’t have to win.
Now, I said, “The show needs to move on and so do I.”
And I don’t know that I would’ve said that if I hadn’t had all my mini-adventures: if some small part of my lizard brain hadn’t learned over the past year that there was a chance everything was going to be okay.
I had a friend who quit a job he’d been unhappy in after seven years, and a couple of weeks later, he left his decade-long marriage. Neither had been working for him, but he had to take that first leap to know that he’d survive the second one.
I think my story is similar. It’s just that instead of taking two big leaps, I took a series of little ones and then one giant one.
I’d written my last column and quietly put the OFW Project to bed just a couple months earlier, but there were clearly some remnants of the “What the hell, why not?” attitude I was sometimes able to muster.
I was proud that I’d done a thing for twelve years that turned into something truly special. But I was even prouder that I’d done a thing for twelve years despite the fact that it scared the shit out of me.
And now I was scared again.
It’s scary to leave a shiny beautiful thing for a new thing whose luster level is unclear.
But standing at the end of a diving board wondering if you still remember how to swim isn’t a sustainable plan either. Eventually you’re going to get cold and need a sandwich.
I worked ten more shows, and I was gone that winter with no earthly idea where I would end up.
So this is one last message for the timid: I’m one of you, and I stepped off.
I didn’t dive in, because that’s how people crack their heads open. And I can’t tell you the water’s fine because I have no idea what sort of chemical maintenance this pool undergoes. Plus, it’s a public pool, so we’re all rolling the dice in that way, but still.
I’d leaped off hundreds of tiny diving boards into tepid little kiddie pools, and that was enough to prepare me for one final, messy cannonball.
I’m a tsunami, motherfuckers.
Deal with it.
1 We took summers off because it was virtually impossible to get Portlanders to sit inside during the sun-drenched summers. Then in the fall, we’d start up our comedy show again, just in time to coincide with the arrival of everyone’s seasonal affective disorder. Genius!
2 I want to make it very clear that I’m not faulting Birbiglia on this, I’m faulting the audience member who could’ve chosen anywhere to knit—the back row, the bar in the theater, her living room—but chose the front row of a theater whe
re a live show was being recorded. Afterward, we had one of our fans knit a merkin and send it to Birbiglia with a note saying that this was what the woman in the audience had been knitting. I don’t think it fit him because we never got a thank-you note.
3 We weren’t.
4 If you’re under the age of thirty, tape was a flat piece of plastic coated with ferric oxide that you could record sound onto. This was back in olden times when people used telephones for talking and called each other assholes in person instead of in the comments section of BuzzFeed.
The Epilogue That’s Really Just
Another Chapter
Wherein I Attempt to Tell You Why You Just Read This Whole Fucking Book
Wondering what happened to me after I left the show? Whether I survived? Whether I started a podcast, like 130 percent of American comedy writers?
I’ll tell you, and I did, and I didn’t. Yet.
As for my romantic life, I’m still with #28.1 It’s been two years and I still love him and he still loves me and neither of us has slept with a field hockey team so I put that in the Win column.
We’ve had suspiciously few issues in our relationship, but that’s probably because we mostly see each other on weekends and problems don’t usually crop up when all you’re doing is having sex, going on road trips, and estate-sale hopping. (“Wanna go see dead people’s stuff this weekend?” “Always.”)
He is an introvert and I wouldn’t describe him as effusive, but even so, I haven’t had to spend a lot of time wondering how he feels about me. After two years, there’s nothing like still hearing “I can’t wait to see you” and “I’m so glad you came over tonight.” He is devoid of pretense, and for a person whose internal radio is always set to the rumination station, that’s quite a gift.
Okay Fine Whatever Page 24