The Old Man and the Pool
I had never heard of Mike Birbiglia. There he is on Netflix in a monologue called The Old Man and The Pool, taped before a packed house at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, at Lincoln Center. He walks on stage. There's nothing there but a sloped backdrop for projections. Mostly the projections are of a swimming pool at the Y.
He does the entire monologue on his feet, moving around a little. He's any beige guy on the bus, just this side of pudgy, and he's brilliant. What he's doing is so difficult, locking in the audience for more than an hour with the quietest of means. We're his almost immediately, and we'll follow him anywhere.
Things are wrong with his body. His body is falling apart, and maybe he can help it, and maybe he can't. He has a young daughter. He has a wife. He's vulnerable almost from the minute he speaks, and the whole thing with male macho that sucks the life out of so many male comedy acts isn't here. He's not that guy.
The tension is between his mastery as a storyteller and the story he tells about swimming for a life he can't save. That tension and his comic timing are things of beauty. After watching this monologue, we streamed several earlier shows of his and a film Birbiglia wrote and directed called Sleepwalk With Me (2012). You can see how much the latest piece has gained from those experiments.
Gone, now, is telling a story chronologically rather than through images and associations. Here, he starts in the middle and fails to arrive anywhere stable. There are no digressions because the narrator stops to think about why he’s telling you what he’s telling you, and what he’s telling you adds to what we can know of how a mind works. We’re watching the engine of great story-telling turn, which is thought-in-action, the great machine set in motion in Shakespeare’s soliloquys, where a character seems to be changing his mind in the moment of talking to you.
The power position in comedy is the place of no power. That’s probably true in every piece of writing you don’t want to end.
Boston
I'm walking down Warren Street, and I want to pass someone I know or overhear a piece of dialogue I can play with in my conversation with Richard, the way a mouse comes into the room.
Writing, you go into yourself, and you have to push yourself back out fast, and it’s annoying. One of the reasons I prefer being awake to being asleep is when I'm awake, I find more happiness and human connection than I do in my memories.
Richard is the opposite. His inner life is the warm family scene that the Frankenstein monster watches through the window with longing and fascination as he shivers outside in the freezing rain. Richard isn’t looking for action on Warren Street. The action of the two of us in the chilly wind blowing up from the river or in the mild summer air, floating around us on the shady side of the street, this is enough for him, and he falls asleep like a ton of bricks.
We went to Boston to visit friends. They made soup with vegetables and pasta. I slept the sleep of a different person. We watched Billy Crudup on a massive TV. There were cats, and I didn't sneeze. The person I became isn't allergic to cats?
The next day, we visited the Institute for Contemporary Art that overlooks the bay. Bright sunlight streamed in. The gallery assistants were all wearing black. It's a thing at this museum for the assistant to talk to visitors, and Richard told them how unusual that is.
We spoke with two young men who were making art, themselves. It was the first day for one of the young men and the other one had worked there for a month. Everyone knows a museum is a good place to talk to strangers, and Richard and I were reminded of our old lives.
It was cold out. As we moved through the galleries, we loved everything we looked at, and we mentioned our bond to one another. Maybe because we had stayed with friends who fit together. We weren’t sure what we meant by this. In our case, it was that the awful things we were capable of doing to each other paled beside the thought of life apart from each other. Then I bought a poster.
Please don’t buy this book for me.
Honestly, I'll be lucky if I make a dime from it. Anyone who has published a book knows this. I'm making some money from the stack, thanks to you, generous readers, and to the universe, that, after deciding who’s going to win this year’s Emmy Awards, is looking out for me.
Please buy this book to support Dottir Press, a feminist press that believes in the great transformative work of feminism—which is to twist the way things are into shapes that bring more freedom and happiness to women.
Dottir Press thinks there is such a thing as literary writing that is feminist in its fiber without having to teach you anything or convince you of anything. Dottir Press thinks comedy and feminism are sisters.
The press has organized a special rate during the holidays for people who read the stack. The link allows you to buy a copy of Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening for $16 (instead of $20) and includes FREE POSTAGE. :
https://www.dottirpress.com/dottir-press-store/streamingsale2023
Streaming was long listed for the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2023. It's kind of a big deal, and the book comes with a sticker proving this!
Here's something Michael Tolkin said about my writing:
"Every new language sounds harsh at first,’ writes Laurie Stone. . . . She knows that in a world crowded with opinions, a thought can’t just be good, it has to be elegant. Her powerful sentences smile at their own precision, they don’t just make a social point but offer a model on how to think, how to think in this time. As she says, ‘What offends you is always going to be my endangered devotion, and vice versa.’ As she says, ‘About the matter of redemption, as far as I am concerned, human beings don’t fall and therefore do not need to be redeemed. We are not on a path, period.’ —Michael Tolkin, author of The Player and cowriter of Escape at Dannemora.
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Happy to hear you discovered Birbiglia! I've followed him for many years. His style -- in the later monologues especially -- is a lot like yours: associative and "leaping" (in the Robert Bly way), connective without mastery (in the Helene Cixous way). So rare.
I too enjoyed Mike Birbiglia's latest. I've watched all of his shows. A funny, clever and humble person who makes me laugh.