Health

How to Be a Live TV Audience

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Comedy Central’s two main franchise shows are both recorded in a part of New York City called “Hell’s Kitchen,” a section of Manhattan that extends about 25 blocks south and west of Central Park and west of Midtown over to the Hudson River. Most of the buildings in the neighborhood are former walk-ups and townhouses that are now offices for media companies; “The Colbert Report’s” studio looks like it was a house or storefront once upon a time.

The Thursday, September 18, 2014, broadcast of “The Colbert Report” was a very special one because I was in the audience, as I wrote yesterday, in “Four Minutes and 24 Years.” Terry Gilliam, the legendary film and theater director (the list is epic and includes: “Time Bandits,” “Brazil,” “The Fisher King,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “The Zero Theorem”) and Monty Python animator and cast member, was the guest.

The studio is on the same level as the street outside, but it takes a lifetime to get there. Sorry, that was a sentence from a television ad for a college course in broadcasting that I am working on. We should go back outside.

The tickets for live-on-tape broadcasts are free, because these shows need a full and loudly enthusiastic house for each and every show and the producers do not want people who feel that sense of hostile proprietorship that can come with a ticket purchase. (They do not want an audience of people with crossed arms and an attitude of, “Entertain me.”) A theatrical performance in front of an empty house could nonetheless be great but a television show performed to silence and a performer feeding off the silence could be horrifying to watch unfold. (Only Johnny Carson seemed to be able to work with a not-yet-impressed audience.)

The producers also do not want an audience of people off the street, happy to receive free things, but not aware of how to be an audience. Talk with a stage actor sometime. He or she will tell you stories of the weirdest things that have happened during performances: cell phones going off, of course, but also people taking the phone call; people walking across the stage (especially in theaters with the stage and seats on the same level) looking for a restroom; audience members yelling at or asking questions of the characters as if they are in their easy chair yelling at a TV screen; babies crying. The audience is supposed to be separate from the performance, with some exceptions. A live television show audience is not at a stage show; the audience is a part of the show: the audience is the soundtrack.

Thus, the audience is coached on this point by producers before the taping begins. And then re-coached. The performance at first felt like a pop quiz to gauge how well we had absorbed the coaching. It also felt like if we were insufficiently enthusiastic, we would be escorted back out to 54th Street.

The process of acquiring these free tickets varies from show to show but all of the shows use the method to establish that the audience is made up of fans. (Willing to be loud. Happy to pretend to not be faking enthusiasm.) Some shows use online trivia contests to winnow out the casual fans. My method was the easiest for me: I have a friend who has done this before (he attended “The Daily Show”) and wanted to do it again and invited me.

(Would that we had attended “The Daily Show” last Thursday; former President Clinton was there that day.)

The tickets one receives for registering online for a television taping are not tickets as one usually thinks of them. They do not guarantee a seat. They guarantee a spot on line, in a covered alleyway where one waits for the doors to open. We arrived early, chatted with the show assistants, and waited some more. The assistants are talented at a particular task: they quickly learn who is with whom, names, who has special needs. My friend’s wife sat with me at a coffeeshop for a few minutes while he held our group spot on line, then they traded: she went back and he sat with me. When he and I rejoined the line we found that we could not see her; one of the assistants got our attention (not vice versa, They. Ran. Us. Down), gave us our seat tickets, and ushered us into a room in the building, where she already was.

My thumb.

My thumb.

In that room, one goes through a security checkpoint and then waits. For over an hour. It is a square room, maybe 25 X 25 feet, extraordinarily air conditioned. Several monitors play old Colbert shows on a “Best of” loop. The walls are plastered with Colbert memorabilia. Over the next few minutes, the entire audience-to-be was herded into this room, which made clear the need for extreme air conditioning. Seeing I walk with a cane, one assistant walked me through the crowd to a bench.

Twice an assistant addressed the crowd. Both times the message was: “This is very special. Stephen is going to chat with you before the show, so have some questions ready.” (Perhaps he does this every show and they tell the audience it is special.) “When you’re watching the show at home, you only chuckle at the jokes because you’re thinking about your own life and you hear the audience in your TV laughing uproariously. You’re the audience in someone’s TV now. Whatever you’re going to laugh at, laugh loudly.”

The doors to the set were opened and people were ushered in by ticket number but in small groups; my group of four friends went in together. The bleachers do not have banisters, something which I was anxious about as a person with spinal muscular atrophy and thus almost no balance on stairs, even with a death grip on a railing. One of the assistants saw my cane and the four of us were thus seated in the front, over by the interview table. The stage manager and then the warm-up act coached us some more in the finer points of yelling our laughter. (Since all of you have heard my voice in an earlier post, you should be able to hear me clearly if you watch the show. Of course.)

Contrary to what I thought, the show is not taped in real time; Colbert made one verbal typo and they recorded a do-over, the commercial breaks were over ten minutes each, the interview with Terry Gilliam was over 15 minutes, of which about not quite 10 made the show. The affection between Colbert and his staff was obvious: at one point, while a hairdresser was combing his hair, he started pretending to comb hers. He indeed took questions before the show and again after. All told, we were in the studio for a bit over an hour for a 21-minute show.

The broadcast will be available for free on the website for the rest of this week, so here is the link: The Colbert Report with Terry Gilliam. And here is the 60 second edit:

It was a fun day and night in NYC, thanks to Gerry, Theresa, Ron, Bob and Kevin, and all of New York City. Even the panhandler on the train from Secaucus.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for April 9 asks, “If you could learn a trade—say carpentry, electrical work, roofing, landscaping, plumbing, flooring, drywall—you name it—what skill(s) would you love to have in your back pocket?” TV host. I am heading to NYC today with my one and only, Jen, to view tonight’s taping of “The Nightly Show,” starring Larry Wilmore. It is in the same theater as “The Colbert Report” was recorded each night. That is the reason for re-running this column from September. Tune in tonight at 11:30 EST on Comedy Central to see if you catch a glimpse of me and my love. Full updates tomorrow.

Daily Prompt: Punch the Clock

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 21 asks, “If money were out of the equation, would you still work? If yes, why, and how much? If not, what would you do with your free time?”
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I have my final pay stub somewhere around here, detached long ago from the check whose sum it explained. It dates from late June 2010 and I should bronze it like a baby’s shoes.

As it is for me with many other aspects of a common American—well, not just American, human—life, my relationship with work is, um, not uncomplicated. Off the top of my head, from age 15 till 40 I held 14 different clock-punching jobs from almost as many employers, with a couple employers that hired me more than once. Not included in the list is the newspaper reporter job I quit via fax machine the morning of day one, because I really am a terrible employee and I guess I wanted to prove it quickly, and the one time I was paid for an acting gig (onstage with a cardboard box on my head and a ukelele in my hands—it was a little avant garde, and getting paid five bucks made it even more so).

Life for me for the last four years has been nothing but free time, however—yet I have never been quite so productive. I am the person for whom this question was written.

I have not been another person’s employee since the summer of 2010, when I was asked to leave my last job, which I had not enjoyed very much for three years and nine months, because I had not enjoyed it very much for three years and nine months too many. The manager and I decided that I no longer needed to consider him my boss and he no longer needed to consider himself my boss. On that much we agreed, so we parted company and even deleted each other from one another’s Facebook. It was that serious a firing.

The symptoms of my diagnosis had been prominent for most of the three years; I started walking with a cane in 2007. When the symptoms of adult spinal muscular atrophy first showed, they came suddenly. Only recently have I learned that this is a common experience among people with neurodegenerative diseases. When walking becomes difficult—in my case because the nerves that had been sending (ever dimmer) signals to my legs (which had started to atrophy from receiving ever dimmer signals and thus were not being asked to work)—the end of normal walking comes as if everything had been just fine one day and the next day as if one’s shoes had been nailed to the ground or one’s co-workers had painted the floor with superglue. (I must not have liked the job very much, if I thought such a prank was possible!) It is sudden and scary when the progression of deterioration is undetected and even undetectable until the day it is completely not.

Since my last job was not a high-paying one and did not offer free or simply less expensive health insurance, I had none. So I neither spoke with anyone about my developing deterioration, nor did anyone suggest I do so. But being suddenly unemployed (so very unemployed my boss had unfriended me, please recall) meant I could get poor people’s health insurance, Medicaid. (This is before the Affordable Health Care Act, which also has in fact benefited me.)

With Medicaid came the, “Hey, doc, what gives with my legs?” conversation, and, eventually, the answer(s). With the answers came Social Security Disability, which is my sole income as of right now. If I had had insurance at an earlier date, perhaps I would have received the diagnosis and declaration of disability earlier and been able to leave my last employer on better terms. Entertaining such hypotheticals is a highly un-useful pastime, I find.

My barber asked me recently, “What do you do?” And I replied, “I am a retiree.” As I have written elsewhere, I am an alcoholic in recovery, sober several years, and I am living “Mark’s Life, Version 2.0.” The universe has afforded me a second life (not the online virtual community, a real second life), and the opportunity is not being wasted. I am writing, every day, on a schedule of my own fashioning, speaking with and sometimes counseling people.

There are three jobs every person in recovery thinks of pursuing, as I certainly did: becoming a counselor (but the hours of training are arduous), becoming a truck driver (perhaps because a desire to escape partly fueled the addiction and does not leave), and, after being told by enough people, “You oughta write a book about your stories,” a writer. Luckily, I already was a writer.

From Elvis Costello’s 1983 album, Punch the Clock, “Everyday I Write the Book”:

Daily Prompt: Ice Water in My Veins

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Each one of us is a part of an interest group. This does not mean each of us must carry out the duties of being an official representative of said interest group, but, for example, I might be the only Jewish person you know. As such, I try to be a good guy and hope that this represents.

(I have been that one before, actually—when I lived in the Midwest—and had some fun with it. Not that there are not Jewish people in Iowa, but one couple that I got to know had not met one or claimed to have not. Which makes me a member of another special interest group: I may be the only Jewish person you know who was the first Jewish person someone met!)

I am male, middle aged, half-Jewish, half-Baptist, an alcoholic in recovery, tall, thin, and I have a disease that is disabling me. It might be Friedreich’s ataxia or it might be and probably is spinal muscular atrophy, type 4. Do any of these things merit me tapping on your shoulder and requesting attention from your charitable impulses? Or your attention at all?

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 20 asks, “The internet has recently been swept up by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Is there a cause—social, political, cultural, or other—you passionately believe in? Tell us how you got involved—or why you don’t get involved.” The Daily Post helpfully provided a link to the ALS web page, but I also linked to an article explaining the “ice bucket challenge.”

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I have seen this meme almost as frequently as I have seen videos of people dumping water on their heads. It is an old photo and is often repurposed to make fun of Americans.

This will be remembered as the summer of the “ice bucket challenge,” and after a few weeks of popularity, the backlash has begun. The plethora of videos of people, famous and not, giving a 15-second speech about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known in the US as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” and then dumping a bucket of ice cubes and water on themselves “for charity” has led to memes attacking the popularity of the challenge, accusations of “slacktivism,” and some generalized online booing. When we look back at the ice bucket charity awareness campaign, in our heads we will hear someone say, “2014” and “I wonder whatever happened with that? Did they cure … what was it about again?”

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare disease. There are almost 7000 rare diseases, so approximately 30 million Americans, or 1 in 10, suffer from, cope with, accept, or fight against (sometimes all of these in a matter of an hour) a rare disease. A rare disease, as a concept, is not such a rare thing. If you know 10 people, you know a person with one. Multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s are also common rare diseases, a phrase I wish did not exist. And then there are the many, many forms of cancer, a disease that one can not wish—or work—hard enough to make it become rare.

It is not precisely known who started the ice bucket challenge or when, only that it started very recently, in 2014, and it was not about one particular health issue awareness charity. An early version, in New Zealand, was about cancer. (Because it is winter in New Zealand right now, the web site has a warning about doing the challenge outdoors.) A couple people in the United States adapted it to raise funds for ALS research and awareness. It took off from there.

Most of us are not medical researchers but most of us have known or do know someone with a illness or condition. Whether it is cancer, heart disease, or a rare disease, chronic or life-altering illness touches many of us and thus many of us know the powerless feeling that comes upon hearing such a diagnosis. We want to do something about it but we are not doctors. It is frustrating. I have seen the look in my mother’s eyes when talking about my disability. She hates the idea that I have something that she can do nothing about, like cook some chicken soup.

So we raise money for the charities that have been established to support the researchers who might possibly find the cure for the disease that affects your family member or friend. Almost every disease has a support community and researchers devoting time to study—at minimum—palliative care, or to even find cures. And that is where any controversy lies: How do I know that the dollar I donated is going towards a cure instead of merely buying lunch for the people who answer the phones and take the donations? The answer is, you don’t. As long as a charity makes its expenses public, I know that some of my donation may be buying lunch. I hope they are eating healthy. But I also know that some of my donation may be paying for the science-y stuff like test tubes, beakers, and a cure.

As with anything that has become popular suddenly, like a dance craze or a catch phrase, sometimes some part gets overlooked. Is everyone who is posting a video of themselves getting wet and icy explaining how to donate to the charity? Is every video participant in fact donating to the charity that they are raising awareness for? Some are not. Some have misinterpreted the whole thing as, “Get wet to not donate and challenge others to get wet, too.” That is “slacktivism,” but even slacktivism serves a public awareness purpose. There is no such thing as the social media police, even if I wish there was, so some people are simply showing off that they do not know what they are doing. The internet is good for that. The dollar that they do not spend on the charity they are not raising funds for is not a dollar that is making people sicker. They are merely getting wet.

ALS is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease that affects the nerve cells in the brain and spine. These cells deteriorate and die and stop sending messages to muscles anywhere and eventually everywhere in the body. The muscles atrophy and paralysis follows. It can strike at any age, and it can kill quickly.

Here is where my personal special interest group membership comes into play: The motor neurons in my spinal cord are deteriorating and dying and messages are no longer being sent or received in the muscles in my legs, which are slowly atrophying. I have a form of spinal muscle atrophy called “adult onset” or Type 4, and there are many links between SMA and ALS. They are siblings in the motor neuron disease family.

sma awarenessThe majority of SMA patients are infants and children, so the majority of SMA patients are voiceless. (Here is a great blog written by a passionate activist with SMA: “Living with Spinal Muscular Atrophy.”) SMA is the number one genetic killer of infants. Few of us are adults. Those of us who are adults owe it to the children born with this disease to help find a cure. Any progress made in finding a cure for SMA will most likely be applicable to also finding a cure for ALS, and vice versa. They are that close in their origin and symptoms.

So if and when someone on Facebook or Twitter challenges you to dump a bucket of ice water on your head for charity, and believe me, they will, take up the challenge, mention ALS and SMA in the same breath, include the websites you want to benefit (ALS and SMA), and dump the water. And then donate to one or to both. Don’t be a slacktivist. Chris Mosher, below, used the challenge to bring attention to both diseases: