We went to our third live taping of This American Life last night at Royce Hall, this time for their episode entitled “What I Learned from TV.” The house was packed, and its contents included the now-familiar duo of Jonathan Dayton (always with the hat) and Valerie Faris of Little Miss Sunshine fame, as well as Mr. Jack Black sitting two rows behind us. I had mysteriously been able to buy tickets directly from UCLA over the phone weeks before they went on sale, so we had prime seats right in the center, five rows back, and it was great to be able to enjoy it from that close. The other two times we’ve been, both at the Berklee Performance Center, we were in the way back and then in the middle somewhere, I think. We have a poster for “Lost in America,” the 2004 2003 show, up on our wall. I can’t remember what the first show was called, something about weddings and birthdays, but it was in 2002, I think The first time we saw them was in 2000, during their “Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Milestones” tour, which was our introduction to the music of OKGO, which we enjoyed at the time and then sort of lost track of. Flash forward to 2006, and their treadmill video went nuclear, and everyone seemed to know who they were.
Luckily for us, they were back, and they even reprised their first ever, pre-treadmill dance, which was still really impressive. They played five or six songs, in between acts, accompanied by mesmerizing videos of a man dressed in a suit that matched the wallpaper, women being drenched with water in extremely slow motion, and household appliances and other items exploding and coming back together, also in slow motion.
The show opened with a brief story with some great animation (the first I’ve seen) by Chris Ware. The special guests of the evening, in addition to the familiar and wonderful presence of Ira Glass, were Sarah Vowell, whom we’d last seen on stage at Royce Hall in August at the Bookeaters event, who talked about “very special” time-traveling Thanksgiving episodes of sitcoms throughout history; Dan Savage, who talked about the influence of “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” on his son; and John “…and I’m a PC” Hodgman, who talked about life as a TV star after life as an NPR contributor and writer.
Thanks to director Chris Wilcha, the man behind the brilliant The Target Shoots First, we got a look behind the scenes of the making of the new “This American Life” tv show on Showtime, with some montages, selected stories, and outtakes. It looks like it’ll be great, as we all expected.
The night was fun, and felt just enough like radio, with Ira’s exaggerated button-pushing and the need for OKGO to produce exactly 59 seconds of music for stations to do their IDs over, but it was also live, and lively, and engrossing. This time, we picked up a signed poster, which is even bigger than the last one. Who knows where it will go.
