Ira Glass vs Star Trek

Barbara and I went to a movie event for This American Life last night. I arrived first, saw an enormous line and made a beeline to the ticket window. Darn it. I should have bought tickets online.

Relieved not to see a "sold out" sign, I bought two tickets and started toward the end of the line. "Ma'am....Ma'am," the ticket clerk's speaker croaked. I turned. "You can go right in. That line is for Star Trek." It was 6:30. The Star Trek movie didn't open until midnight.

When Barb arrived, we sailed past people reading on Kindles, a young man knitting with hand-spun yarn, couples and other groups standing together texting or Tweeting distant friends and acquaintances.

By the time TAL started, our theatre was almost two-thirds full. It might seem that a radio show wouldn't translate well to a movie screen, but this is Ira Glass, a consummate storyteller. The theme was returning to the scene of a crime. Each segment was excellent (except for a strange, sad cartoon about a mouse in love with a cat's head) and the segments were arranged like a musical score. Mike Birbiglia told a simple story quite simply. Running from angry to funny to poignant, it still had Barb and me talking an hour after we got home. Starlee Kine did a piece on the Hoffman Institute, my least favorite piece of the night and still quite good. Dan Savage did a piece about Catholicism and his mother's death that left us all laughing through tears. There were other bits—four minutes from the TAL television show, sort of a trailer from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, and that strange cartoon.

Collectively, they made up something well worth $20 and 90 minutes of your life. (Here in MO, it also offered the opportunity to sit in a room with a lot of other Democrats, something that doesn't happen all that often.)

The show will be rebroadcast in theaters on May 7.


On another front: I'm very happy to say that N accepted my invitation to lunch on Mother's Day weekend.