Another Season 4 Update: Things A’ Brewin’…
What’s this? An update entry that isn’t six months after the previous one? Something has gone horribly awry! Well, I have a lot of news to share, so it would be criminal of me to hold onto it for half a year. Not to mention, if I did wait that long, none of the news would be relevant anymore. Gotta stay hip to keep the youngster’s attention these days (though I’m still never going to get a Tik Tok).
First and foremost, that other podcast I mentioned that I was joining in the previous blog? It’s out! So I can tell you what it is! It’s Weird Pals, a show dedicated to the works of one of my biggest idols, the legendary “Weird Al” Yankovic. My friend and fellow improviser, Tim Duryea, conceived of the podcast as a dissection of sorts, going through the entire discography of the great parodizer (totally a word) one song at a time. I guested on one episode during Season 2, talking about the iconic “Eat It,” but now I’ve joined full time as Tim’s new cohost for the third season, wherein we will be discussing the songs off of Dare to Be Stupid. As of this writing, the first four episodes (and a special bonus ep) are up for your listening pleasure, so check it out! You don’t have to be a Weird Al fan in order to enjoy it, but if you’re not a Weird Al fan, I would seriously suggest you take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror and try to figure out where you went wrong over the course of your life.
The show art hasn’t been updated to include my face yet, but that’s fine.
Secondly, and actually related to the podcast that is housed on the website you are currently visiting, I can confirm that Season 4 is indeed currently in production! One episode has been recorded, and it is sounding very, very good now that we are recording in person with decent recording equipment; funny how that makes a difference, huh? Two other episodes are in the process of being scheduled, and artists have been tapped to conjure up some kick ass posters. The ball is rolling! Maybe I should say balls? Hey, get your mind out of the gutter.
Lastly, I can confidently say Season 4 probably won’t start rolling out until the fall. That’s a huge bummer, but there’s a very good reason for such a late premiere drop.
A couple of weeks ago, some former students of mine at Endgames Improv gave me the shock of a lifetime. I had recently posted photos of their Level 1 grad show from a couple weeks before and shared the link with them, and a few days later, one of them replied to thank me for the photos and to ask me if I was going to the Endgames shows that weekend. Considering that’s pretty much how I spend every weekend, the answer was a no-brainer: “Probably!” I said. She was pleased to hear it, because she had a surprise for me and wanted to deliver it in person.
Now, my first thought was that she had simply baked me cookies or some kind of dessert. I’ve had students do that in the past. And it’s not like the expectation is for students to gift their teachers anything, let alone baked goods. I’ve been given thank you cards and flowers and even a watermelon. I also received a wooden candlestick signed by the students because of an oblivious error I made during the fifth week of class (it’s too long a story to go into, but I’ll just say that the class decided their team name would be “Polishing Candlesticks” because of what I had said, much to my chagrin, so make of that what you will 🙄). In any case, I wasn’t stressing too much about this surprise. I mean, I love cookies, so hell yeah!
I wasn’t kidding about the candlestick.
Also, are wooden candlesticks a good idea? They’re wood, after all.
In between the end of the 7PM show and the start of the 8PM show (fun fact: improv shows rarely start on time), I found my former student sitting in the theater lobby. There was no box or plate covered in foil, so if she had indeed baked me anything, it was stashed away somewhere. However, it became clear that the only cookies in the building were available at the concessions booth and were not free, because she said she needed to wait for a couple of other people to arrive before she could unveil the surprise.
A couple more people? What could this have been? Did they all bake me a giant cake and needed three people to carry it? My actual first thought was a strange one: it turns out one of the students from that class was the sister of an ex-boyfriend of a good friend of mine. I don’t recall ever meeting her when her brother and my friend were dating, and I didn’t bother bringing this up because I didn’t necessarily want to bring that guy back into my life; he hurt my friend and she won me in the “divorce,” fair and square. But once I learned two more people would be arriving soon, I immediately thought that everybody had discovered this, and the other student and her brother were coming so we could all chuckle at this coincidence and pretend there wasn’t any lingering resentment over the downfall of the guy’s prior relationship. I commiserated with the stage manager, “Ugh, I don’t wanna see that guy again.”
One of the two late students arrived, with no telling when the third would show up, so they decided to go ahead and tell me what the surprise was: five of the students from the class had come together and decided to “invest” in me and pay for my tuition and air fare so I could attend the iO summer intensive in Chicago. For those who don’t know, iO is considered a Mecca for improvisers (Chicago itself is basically the birthplace of modern comedic improv) and the summer intensive— six hours a day, four days a week, for five weeks, going over the whole iO curriculum— is something many improv friends swear by and has always been a long, far off dream of mine to attend. And these five folks, people I’d only known for a little over two months, were offering to spend their hard-earned cash on li’l’ ol’ me to go.
Needless to say, I was flabbergasted.
Exhibit A: Flabbergast-ation.
So, I’m going to Chicago in July! My plan now is to get three episodes recorded before I leave, and then do the back half of the season once I get back in mid-August. This puts the timeline at around October or November for a season start. It would be cool if I can get them out earlier (I’ve even toyed with doing a “three now, three later” kind of thing), but the episodes will only be done when they’re done, and I can only guess as to when that might be.
How about that?! It’s quite possibly the nicest thing anybody has ever done for me and it was completely random as fuck; I’m still stunned by it. Hopefully I’ll be able to find someplace(s) to rest my weary head after long hours of making shit up with other aspiring funny people, but I don’t need to go into the drudgery that is scouring Air B&B for rooms I can’t afford. I expect to get some work done on scripts for Season 5 while I’m away, just so I don’t feel like I’m abandoning this project, but my focus will primarily be on harnessing my make-’em-ups. It’s gonna be amazing.
Before I end this, I guess I gotta provide some kind of teaser for S4. So here’s a good, mildly-trolly tease: the first sentence of the first line of dialogue from the 25th page of each script; 25 is my favorite number, so feels appropriate. Scout’s honor, these are real.
“Once we establish it, yes it will, dearest.”
“Whoa, Jack, whoa, whoa there.”
“Ta-da.”
“Why does it sound like you’re trying to start an uprising?”
“I am a thing?”
“Well, you don’t know what I mean when I said ‘just.’”
See ya in the windy city!
—Andy