Title: Tompkastawayed
WC: 1100
I’m giving myself permission to ramble this week. I’m sort of giving myself permission to ramble. I just spent fifteen minutes trying to search WordPress to see if I have already rambled about something I want to ramble about. WordPress, a supporter of the ramble, it seems, will. not. be. searched.
Some time ago I was watching Chuck as my background show. This is when I’m grading and not really paying attention and I’m out of General Hospital. This is how I watched Mad Men twelve years late. I liked the show well enough—Chuck, that is, not Mad Men, which I found to be (1) most notable for the number of people I recognized from guest spots on Castle and (2) shockingly overrated garbage populated almost entirely with actors who deserved far, far, far better material. But Mad Men is not why I came here to ramble. Chuck is also not really why I came here to ramble, except as a jumping-off point.
I liked Chuck well enough. I was entertained to the point that I got over the fact that Jake 2.0 had executed the concept better. I thought the dynamic between Chuck and his sister and his sister’s doofy boyfriend was something quite sweet and unusual that added a lot to the show. But it was definitely a background show—it never sucked me in until the episode with “Leaving on a Jetplane.”
There’s a band called Jeffster comprising Chuck’s hapless coworkers. Not unlike the a cappella group fronted by Ted on Scrubs, it’s a joke, but one that hinges on the actors’ hidden talents being suddenly deployed in silly, unexpected ways that turn out to be disarming. In this episode, I sincerely cannot recall what is happening, I only remember this version of the song suddenly commanding my entire attention. Even now the memory is hitting my heart forcefully and directly.
So that was weird.
This week—just yesterday, in fact—I had a very similar “out of time” experience. I tend to listen to podcasts when I walk the dog. I’m often trying to work on my song for the week in my head as I’m out and nominally absorbing new events and images, so listening to music is a bit at cross purposes with that. But I’m a persnickety podcast listener and I definitely tend to play it safe by sticking to people I know that I like. Now that I think about it, more or less every podcast I have listened to, liked, and not given up on radiates outward from The Thrilling Adventure Hour.
I listened to Stay F. Homekins from the beginning and only just finished up with that (or caught up to the present, rather, as thankfully they’re still going, just as a monthly now, rather than a weekly) in early January. From there, I landed on the Pod F. Tompkast which hasn’t had a new installment since back in 2013, but PFT is very high up on my guaranteed-to-like list.
And I have very much liked it. It’s rambling and surreal, both by its nature and because hoo boy, is it a trip to listen to the inner workings of the minds of people almost ten years ago. I simply love dipping in and out of PFT’s stream of consciousness to sometimes focus on the music Eban Schletter is improvising behind. I find it genuinely fucking delightful when some move Eban makes utterly wrecks PFT. (The Jazzy Rascal changed my life, friends.) And it’s a total treat to get to hear snippets from the Paul F. Tompkins Show at Largo as well as the always devastatingly funny calls with Jen Kirkman, who is another comic I love.
Twice in some of these later episodes, the Tompkast has pulled a post-credits move. (This was actually alarming because my podcast app gets whimsical at times and plays things out of order, which drives me batty.) In the first instance, it added PFT closing the PFT show with “Danny Boy”—something that I only learned through Stay F. Homekins was a tradition and something I deeply regretted never getting to experience. So that was a genuine treat.
But then—but then—yesterday, the penultimate full episode seemed as if it was also going to end this way, when suddenly there was a final gag, calling back to the excerpt that had been part of the main show. The content of the gag is not especially important, though it was strange and quite funny, and the end-of-show callback was even stranger and funnier. Except—DAMN YOU, TOMPKINS—it lands on PFT and Crissy Guerrero (someone I was not at all familiar with, but who was terrific) doing “Danny’s Song,” and it killed. me. dead.
Now, perhaps you’re thinking you don’t know “Danny’s Song.” You do. It’s the “Even though we ain’t got money” song. Perhaps you’re thinking you didn’t know Kenny Loggins wrote it. I’ll give you that one, because I sure as shit didn’t know that, because we were an Anne Murray household, thank you very much.
“Danny’s Song” is way over the cheese line. It breaks so many rules in gleefully dancing back and forth on both sides of the cheese line. But goddamn if it doesn’t get me all the time. Some of that is nostalgia. We really were an Anne Murray household. We were a “The Absolute Squarest Music Possible, Thank You Very Much” household. But I will go to my grave loving Anne Murray’s voice, and the melody really is beautiful, even if some of the words are a mess. (I think Anne wisely omits the weird Beta Chi verse? Kenny—that Beta Chi verse needed the first two lines rewritten. Badly needed.)
But this version. THIS VERSION. Crissy Guerrero’s voice is just beautiful. And PFT’s voice—WHICH I ALREADY KNEW TO BE VERY GOOD INDEED—was just a dagger to my cynical, judgmental heart from the minute he comes in in the second half of the first verse. The arrangement? Go to hell, arranger (Eban? Of course it’s the Jazzy Rascal), because that arrangement is so over-the-line beautiful, I am offended by it. The way it makes you wait for the harmony and fucking delivers. The way the whole cast comes in at the end. I am dead from it.
There is just something about that kind of totally delightful surprise, about being tackled by people who you don’t think of as Singers just getting utterly lost in the beauty and joy of singing together. There. is. just. something.
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 