I went to the This American Life live show on Saturday and had a fine old time.

Ira loves you. He said so.

Notes:

• Jonathan Goldstein looks startlingly like a slightly smaller, slightly (but only slightly) younger Peter Sagal. Doesn't sound much like him though.
  
• The story illustrated by Chris Ware was absolutely stunning. I feel sorry for all the people who are going to hear it on the radio and not get to see the drawings.
  
• I love Sarah Vowell. I didn't love her skirt. It was made of some peculiar shiny, but not, I think, stretchy material. Sort of like chintz. It was weird.
  
• The band (Jon Langford and friends):
  
  
  • I've never seen a guy wear his instrument as low as that bass player did. He could barely reach down far enough to pluck the strings. Meanwhile, the 2nd guitarist had his instrument way up in his pit, perhaps to balance out the other guy.
    
  • When there's a guy who can play both the theramin and the saw, he's just about got the entire spectrum of musical ability covered.
  
  
• Davy Rothbart's found-item piece was the funniest of the night, but I fear his will be the segment that will be cut from the show (to air next week). He was so genuinely amused by himself and what he was reading, he kept laughing so hard--it was great, even though I almost didn't hear his frantic shout of "It was not gay!" I'd actually read several of the items he read to us, in an article in the Chicago Reader a couple months ago, but Davy's delivery was inimitable.
  
• The Chicago Theatre is not designed for easy egress. There was a horrible crush on the way out, not helped by the mob at the merch table, buying stuff because Ira told us to. (Because he loves us.) I did finally get the squirrel-on-fire t-shirt I wanted; unlike the paint-by-number burning squirrel, whose tail only is on fire, the squirrel on the shirt has a flaming back. I know I shouldn't take pleasure in an image of a squirrel on fire. But it's awfully cute. Anyway, being crammed in this crowd was all the more irritating because of the group of twentysomethings near me who felt obliged to run down--loudly--all the things they had just seen, in order to prove that though they were hip enough to come to the TAL show, they were way too hip actually to enjoy it.
  

Good stuff all around.


So I brought my trusty MD recorder along to capture the experience. Yes, I know it's going to air on the radio, but they cobble together segments from several of the shows on the tour (last time I don't think any of the Chicago segments actually made it onto the air), and besides, there's all that stuff that gets edited out, like (again) Ira telling us that he loves us.

More briefly this time: I didn't take the battery box, figuring since the show was mostly spoken word it wouldn't be that loud, although from my experience last time I knew that the band parts might be pretty loud. And they were, not as loud as a regular concert, but loud enough to make the 10-year-old girl next to me (the one who ended up being in the found 4 page-play [page 3 missing]) cover her ears and attempt to bury her head under her mother's arm. I was afraid the high volume would cause distortion in the recording, but when I took it home and listened to it I was mildly astonished to find that the recording of the music sounded much better than what I heard at the show. Well, I was only about 8 feet from the stack of speakers, but the recording picked up stuff I didn't hear, like Nathan Swanson's violin, which for me was completely drowned out by the guitars.

So I didn't need the battery box to power the mics, but there was a downside to that--if there's no external battery power for the mics, they draw power from the MD recorder's battery instead. So my battery ran out just before Davy Rothbart's piece. You'd think after having had this happen to me when I recorded those TMBG shows back in December, I'd have learned my lesson. But no. It was pretty disappointing not to get that last segment, since it was such fun. But overall I was pretty pleased with the recording.