Day: April 15, 2002

As promised, some pictures, including some from Saturday night’s Python Society show. They’re not that great — I was backstage and otherwise busy for most of our three performances — but they’re what I’ve got. There’s posters, me in a silly hat, a list of the sketches we performed, a riveted audience, and a few other shots of this and that. The shopping cart wasn’t ours and was there when we arrived, but that’s past president Brad Blinkhorn’s popular skit, “The Last Temptation of Gary” taped to the microphone in front of it. I played the part of God. Naked pirates, penis songs, Scottish accents, and impersonating a diety… Is it any wonder I don’t discuss the details of these shows with my parents?

In her latest post, Maggie Berry asks: “What will happen when we have thousands of hours worth of tapes to review? It seems like it would take much longer to break out of grief when tangible reminders of a loved one are so plentiful.”

I cannot help but be reminded of this, where one can sign up to have personal e-mail messages sent to friends and family upon one’s death. A voice from beyond the grave, as it were. As a profitable business, I don’t think it really stands a chance, but it does reveal this impulse we all have to leave lasting memories for those we leave behind. Certainly, I don’t think the grieving process is helped by depriving one of all tangible reminders, but she does raise an interesting question: how much is too much? Can you leave loved ones with too many memories, and does that mean we should record less of our lives?

On Saturday, I performed with members of the Penn State Monty Python Society in a night of original sketch comedy and songs. Eventually, there might be pictures. I think it went about as well as we had expected. We had fun and were allowed to act silly, and that’s really all that matters. Nobody forgot their lines, and nobody in the audience booed. They didn’t always laugh — especially during a difficult second of three shows — but they didn’t boo. And somehow, inexplicably, we seem to have developed a small — very small — following. Between performances, a woman asked me quite politely who had changed the lyrics^* to the penis song, and when we told the audience at the start of the first show that we would not be performing our “Necrophiliac Sketch” (wherein the University president has sex with a dead body), there was genuine disappointment. There’s just no accounting for taste.

* I have never been comfortable, for hopefully obvious reasons, with the last line of the fifth verse. In the original recording, I — or rather the character I am playing — compare my penis to “a long locomotive” and encourage “kids under twelve [to] ride for free.” I changed this to the less pedophilia-friendly “groups after twelve”, which makes me feel better, and which I think gets a bigger, certainly less hesitant laugh.