We went to theatre school. We survived it, but we didn't understand it. 20 years later, we're talking to our guests about their experience of going for this highly specialized type of college at the tender age of 18. Did it all go as planned? Are we still pursuing acting? Did we get cut from the program? Did we... become famous yet?
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We talk to star of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Yale School of Drama alum LeRoy McClain! Intro: Aaron survived a heart attack! Marriage is hard. Let Me Run This By You: Love Has Won and the tale of Mother God, Matthew Perry Interview: We talk to star of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Yale School of Drama alum LeRoy McClain about being born in England, being a biracial boy with a British accent in Hawaii, studying at Loyola, seeing community in and discovering a passion for theatre, and the sometimes difficult path of getting an advanced degree at Yale.
1 (11s): We went to theater school together. We survived it, but we didn't quite understand
2 (15s): It. 20 years later, we're digging deep talking to our guests about their experiences and trying to make sense of it all.
1 (21s): We survived theater school and you will too. Are we famous yet?
2 (30s):How's your, how's your eighties decor going for your
Jonas Abry
Episode 11
Friday, January 15, 2021 • Duration 01:10:07
Intro: We should all be paying more for food. Let Me Run This By You: Who would you be if you were ONLY nature with no nurture. Also, Jack White, Fran Lebowitz, and introducing the flexapology. Interview: We talk to Jonas Abry! Getting cut, Tisch, being a child actor, voiceovers, Joe Lieberman, Mother Night, figuring out your identity with fedoras and pipes, Westchester Broadway Theatre, playing the Scarecrow, playing Peter Pan, being a blond-haired blue-eyed King of Siam, playing Michael Banks, Costal Disturbances with Annette Benning, Running on Empty, Slaves of New York, Dorcas Johnson, Police Story, Journey of the Fifth Horse, Meisner Studio, Stella Adler, pivoting to teaching, the performance energy of teaching 9th grade, being Mr. Abry, teacher and Jonas Abry, dad. Also, actor schmactors, Sidney Lumet, being treated like a little brother by River Phoenix, Christine Lahti, Judd Hirsch, Martha Plimpton, rent parties, Apartment 3, smoking cigarettes, and clashing with the Scene Study teacher. Jonas closes by talking about being happy with his choices, leaving acting behind, and embracing family life.
Intro: Boz leaves her MFA program. We talk about the Midwest approach to "sticking it out", the perils of mentorship, consolidating power and amassing fortunes, 2021 as the Year of Big Asks, hiding out at institutions of higher learning, Let Me Run This By You: choosing not to cater to White Fragility, "progressives" and their art, 2021 as the Year of Is This a Waste of My Time?, Interview: We talk to Jess Hanna! Making your living in theatre in LA, Ithaca, Cornell Savoyards, Trial By Jury, Showboat, The Hangar Theatre, You Never Can Tell, Bob Moss, Playwrights Horizons, Bob Fosse, Delroy Lindo in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Gregory Hines in Jelly's Last Jam, Sarafina, Hofstra, Burn This, Bootleg Theater, Aubrey Payne, making changes at TTS, cast list traditions, SITI, theatre in LA, the importance of making sure your are representing your best interests, the realities of making a living as an artist, the importance of early mentorship, and being "in the ring".
Larry Bates
Episode 8
Tuesday, January 5, 2021 • Duration 01:23:04
Intro: Gina and Jen talk peasant DNA, jobs, the specific experience of being employed by the Catholic Church and how that convinced Nicolas Cage to hire Jen, making the quarterfinals of the CineStory TV writing contest. Let Me Run This By You: on the topic of Woo Woo culture, does one have to buy in to the whole culture or can they just adopt the tenets? Also, having a finely tuned bullshit meter, the allure of MLMs, spending $90k at the Bodhi Tree, The Power of Now, The Secret, Oprah's podcast, Interview: We talk to Larry Bates! The agony of clashing with your Audition class teacher, wanting to attend a "prestigious-sounding" school, almost becoming an aeronautical engineer, almost auditioning in New Orleans with a monologue by a quadriplegic character, My Children! My Africa!, the various factors that might play into choosing a school in Chicago (proximity to the Bears among them), living in U Hall, Sanctuary, the bliss of ignorance, choosing to transition away from being the class clown, having to maintain an academic scholarship in a setting where you're being graded on your art, charming your teachers, Antigone, Diary of Anne Frank, A Raisin in the Sun, being pre-cast in Six Degrees of Separation, , , when people with unrealized artistic dreams are teachers who project their inadequacies on to you.
Amie Farrell
Episode 7
Friday, January 1, 2021 • Duration 01:17:58
Intro: Gina and Jen talk about what it means to be home, zero ICU bed availability in Los Angeles, clarifying the aim of this podcast, what it means to survive, surviving one's desire to be famous, and fame adjacency. Let Me Run This By You: Hope in a Jar, putting too much stock in beauty products, wtf is a serum?, Noxzema, multi-level marketing schemes, the Kylie Jenner go fund me campaign (in which Gina was relieved to later learn it was not the conspiracy she thought it was), laying down your life at Water Tower Place, the activism of K-Pop Stans, tweens playing dress-up on IG video chat, finding unity and feeling seen via selfie filters, drinking Kleenex, and Veterinarian's Day. Interview: We talk to Amie Farrell about Into the Woods, The Journey of the Fifth Horse, Joe Slowik, Snow White and Rose Red, , Kansas City children's theatre, , singing , rugby warmups, being a healthy person as an actor, the implicit wish for actors to be "dark and twisty", getting people to cry in voice class, , , acting technique, a stellar scene from , storytelling, and .We didn't talk , , , or the rest of Amie's EXTENSIVE credits!
Tait Smith
Episode 6
Tuesday, December 29, 2020 • Duration 01:21:01
*This episode was recorded on Election Day, 2020* Intro: Gina bastardizes a beautiful e.e. cummings poem Let Me Run This By You: Lack of acceptance, Japanese death philosophy, Unsolved Mysteries, tsunamis, personal responsibility, aggressively fearful flag waving, wearing your fear like a cloak of armor, more on NXVIM, channeling a lil' psychopathy, emotional felonies. Interview: We talk to Tait Smith! Feldenkrais, feeling in over your head at TTS, Le Mars Iowa the Ice Cream Capital of the World, high school sweethearts, seeing Morgan Freeman and Q-Tip at the Michigan Avenue Bennigans, Brighton Beach Memoirs, crying in your dorm room, expanding your mind in college, smoking and wearing fedoras and pagers, the appearance of confidence, expectations of the college experience (football games and cutting class) as compared to the realities of conservatory life (classes all day and rehearsals or performances at night), viewing fellow alums as war buddies, clicking in Improv class, the fabled Apartment 3, waiting for your re-acceptance letter in the summer, work study, Lincoln Park Foods, , , the unreleased film "" starring Tait, , , and . Auditioning sucks. Finding a stage wherever you are and redefining performance and storytelling, life lessons from TTS, differing philosophies about rehearsal, wild improv moments with , the subjective nature of art and the imposed judgment of it that happens in drama school, , the politics of the cut system, big laughs and good times with , artists looking for acceptance and validation, in Chicago, having Thai food for the first time with leading the way, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to do yoga and , making enough money to say thanks to Mom and Dad, , the , with , , , and LSD.
Jen Kober
Episode 5
Tuesday, December 22, 2020 • Duration 01:23:16
Intro: Death Valley, camping, San Pedro, LSD, rageaholics, serial killers Let Me Run This By You: the perils of not letting you be you, codependency is like an MLM because there is no end user Interview: We talk to Jen Kober, who says she was "NOT a happy camper" while at TTS. Getting cut, knowing yourself, being among the first fat girls accepted into the program, being taken "back to neutral", comedy, terrible casting, The Birds, Rob Chambers, the value of knowing yourself, TTS then vs now, Columbia College, Second City, Improv Olympic, The Purge, Marty deMaat, Clinton v. Bush, Betsy Hamilton, Sinbad, Phyllis Griffin, San Francisco Comedy Competition, and Vidzu.
1 (35s): New house? Okay, well we closed yesterday. Well,
2 (39s): Congratulations.
1 (40s): Thank you. House buying is so weird. Like we close, we funded yesterday, but we can't record till today because my lender like totally dropped the ball. So like, here's the thing. Sometimes when you wanna support like a small, I mean small, I don't know, like a small bank, like I really liked the guy who is the mortgage guy and he has his own bank and all these things. I don't even, how know how this shit works. It's like, but anyway, they were so like, it was a real debacle. It was a real, real Shannon situation about how they, anyway, my money was in the bank in escrow on Friday.
1 (1m 20s): Their money that they're lending us, which we're paying in fucking fuck load of interest on is they couldn't get it together. And I was like, Oh no.
2 (1m 29s): They're like, We have to look through the couch cushions,
1 (1m 31s): Right? That's what it felt like, Gina. It felt like these motherfuckers were like, Oh shit, we didn't actually think this was gonna happen or something. And so I talked to escrow, my friend Fran and escrow, you know, I make friends with the, with the older ladies and, and she was like, I don't wanna talk bad about your lender, but like, whoa. And I was like, Fran, Fran, I had to really lay down the law yesterday and I needed my office mate, Eileen to be witness to when I did because I didn't really wanna get too crazy, but I also needed to get a little crazy. And I was like, Listen, what you're asking for, and it was true, does not exist. They needed one. It was, it was like being in the, in the show severance mixed with the show succession, mixed with, it was like all the shows where you're just like, No, no, what you're asking for doesn't exist and you wanna document to look a certain way.
1 (2m 25s): And Chase Bank doesn't do a document that way. And she's like, Well she said, I don't CH bank at Chase, so I don't know. And I said, Listen, I don't care where you bank ma'am, I don't care. But this is Chase Bank. It happens to be a very popular bank. So I'm assuming other people have checking accounts that you deal with at Chase. What I'm telling, she wanted me to get up and go to Chase Bank in person and get a printout of a certain statement period with an http on the bottom. She didn't know what she was talking about. She didn't know what she was talking about. And she was like, 18, 18. And I said, Oh ma'am, if you could get this loan funded in the next, cuz we have to do it by 11, that would be really, really dope.
1 (3m 6s): I'm gonna hang up now before I say something very bad. And then I hung up.
2 (3m 10s): Right, Right. Yeah. Oh my God, I know. It's the worst kind of help. And regarding like wanting to support smaller businesses, I what, that is such a horrible sadness. There's, there's no sadness. Like the sadness of really investing in the little guy and having it. That was my experience. My big experience with that was going, having a midwife, you know, with my first child. And I really, I was in that whole thing of that, that time was like, oh, birth is too medicalized. And you know, even though my husband was a doctor, like fuck the fuck the medical establishment we're just, but but didn't wanna, like, I didn't wanna go, as my daughter would say, I didn't wanna be one of those people who, what did she say?
2 (3m 52s): You know, one of those people who carry rocks to make them feel better.
1 (3m 57s): That's amazing. Super.
2 (4m 0s): So I didn't wanna go so far as to be one of those rock carrying people to have the birth at my house, but at the same time I really wanted to have this midwife and then there was a problem and she wasn't equipped to deal with it. And it was,
1 (4m 11s): I was there,
2 (4m 13s): Fyi. Yes, you were
1 (4m 15s): The first one, right? For your first one.
2 (4m 16s): The first one.
1 (4m 18s): Here's the thing you're talking about this, I don't even remember her ass. What I, she, I don't remember nothing about her. If you had told me you didn't have one, I'd be like, Yeah, you didn't have one. I remember the problem and I remember them having to get the big, the big doctor and I remember a lot of blood and I remember thinking, Oh thank God there's this doctor they got from down the hall to come or wherever the hell they were and take care of this problem because this gene is gonna bleed out right here. And none of us know what to do.
2 (4m 50s): Yes. I will never forget the look on your face. You and Erin looking at each other trying to do that thing where you're like, It's fine, it's fine. But you're such a bad liar that, that I could, I just took one look at you. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm gonna fucking bleed out right here. And Aaron's going, No, no, no, it's cool, it's cool, it's cool. And then of course he was born on July 25th and all residents start their residency on July 1st. So you know, you really don't wanna have a baby or have surgery in July cuz you're getting at a teaching hospital cuz you're getting a lot of residents. And this woman comes in as I'm bleeding and everything is going crazy and I haven't even had a chance to hold my baby yet. And she comes up to me and she says, Oh cuz the, the midwife ran out of lidocaine. There was no lidocaine.
2 (5m 30s): That's right. They were trying to sew me up without lidocaine. And so this nurse comes in, she puts her hand on my shoulder, she says, Hi, I'm Dr. Woo and I'm, and I said, Dr. W do you have any lidocaine? I need some lidocaine stat right up in there. Gimme some lidocaine baby. A...
I've been really like struggling to figure out what I would want a topic for a blog post to be. And, um, so I was looking through my notes folder, where I keep all my little ideas and, and I had always wanted to write an essay about how I've had 37 jobs. And I wanted to write about, yeah, I've had 37 jobs, but of course I don't want to just list all my jobs I have to, you know, and it has to be gearing up to a point, but it got me down a rabbit hole yesterday because I started the essay by talking about how my doing my own DNA revealed I'm 100% peasant. Like there is not one, you know, noble or even anybody living above the poverty line.
Wow. You just, uh, you just keep working, you just, you know, put your head down and keep working. And I'm like, yeah, what's, what's the alternative. But in my family, I think I got my first official job. I mean, it was a babysitter, et cetera, but I think I got my first official job kind of late because I was 17 and my sister worked all the way through high school. She worked, started working at the dairy queen. I think she was just barely 14. And my dad started working early. And, uh, anyway, so it's like, work is like, the work ethic is really, that's the one thing I'll say about my, you know, my family that's unequivocally positive. Is that everybody works hard. Yeah. You know, I have no slackers in my family,
No slackers. And I think, you know, I, the guy I used to date that then died, he used to say, he used to say, um, loopy. That was my nickname. He would say, loopy, you are a worker, a worker, and a doer. You come from peoples that are workers and doers. You're a real doer. And that can be great. And that can also be a trap. Right. So doing, doing, as we know is, but it's gotten me. I've probably had, I probably haven't had 37, but I've had a lot. And you know that you and I had the same job.
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