Last weekend I went to a taping of This American Life, which is currently on tour. It was fantastic. Ira Glass is the man. There he was, master of the entire operation, conducting and mixing the show from his board at stage left. As always with This American Life, there is a central theme, and the tour’s theme is “Lost in America”: being lost, being found, trying not to be found, etc.
Sarah Vowell (who at one point had the entire audience on their feet, singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic”–she has that power), Jonathan Goldstein (recounting his adolescent quest to lose his virginity), and Glass (in conversation with a man enamored by Chicago’s ornate Louis Sullivan buildings) presented stories, and Davy Rothbart of Found Magazine, shared his finds, and had audience volunteers perform a four-page play found abandoned on some sidewalk–though he only could recover pages one, two, and four. Heh. It was so bad, it was good.
The house band was OK Go, whom I was pleasantly surprised to see. I had no idea they’d be there. (In the other cities on the tour, TAL is travelling with a different band.) A while back, I’d listen to Ok Go constantly when their CD was in rotation on the listening parties at Real.com. I like ’em a lot. They played their songs in between the stories, and even lip-synched to their song “C-C-C-Cinnamon Lips,” complete with “boy-band meets ESPN cheerleading” choreography. Hilarious.
Excerpts from the tour will air the weekend of June 7-8. (That’s Saturday, June 7 at 3 p.m., on WAMU 88.5 FM for you locals).
After the show, at the merchandise table I bought a TAL tour poster, which I’ve put up in my office.
