And Away We Went

Three years ago today I set off in a Toyota Prius with two relative strangers on my very first comedy show. Arming myself with an hour of stories and jokes that happened to rhyme my intent was to see The Between, the bits of country Hollywood elitists like myself usually refer to as the “flyover states”. My parents let me get taller and learn to walk in California and after college I’d gone to New York City to toughen up a bit (it didn’t hold) but my experience of the rest of the nation was limited to the swimming pools of Nevada and Arizona apartment complexes when visiting family and layovers in Denver and Atlanta (depending on who had the best deal on flights).

Thanks in part to the nationwide theatrekidification Lin-Manuel Miranda inspired in late 2016 I spent my last few months living in New York rhyming to myself on the subway whenever my phone died. It was as cringey as it sounds but thankfully I knew better than to try and break in to the Brooklyn hip-hop scene. Instead I contorted a bunch of material I’d been working on for The Last Five Years into patternless rhyme. It was fun and unique enough that I thought it worth showing to some other people.

The other people liked it. So I thought I’d show it to more people. Strange people. Maybe even strange rs. A few dozen hours on Maps and a Calendar app later I’d planned a route. What initially started as a road trip to see the country was becoming a tour. At worst, I could offset the cost of fuel and at best (I thought) HBO might come knocking. I made a list of cities and towns I’d consider living in in each state. Then I searched for comedy clubs, performing arts centers, improv theaters, gay bars, places-that-have-micorphones, looking for any where that would book me on faith. I sent e-mails. I sent more e-mails. I picked up the phone and called real human beings. Like it was the Dark Ages.

Eventually I had enough dates locked in that I could see this actually happening.

But what would be the point if we didn’t have someone to film the thing? I asked an acquaintance of mine, a filmmaker, if he would join me for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure and film the thing along the way. He very politely declined. So I asked his brand new girlfriend to open for me. She was too polite to decline, because she is Canadian. My filmmaker acquaintance/soon-to-be friend agreed to come after all!

For the next three months we were going to be in a sedan together, trying to make people laugh and tell our story. This is that story’s story. The 2019 U.S. THEY Tour.