Is This Even a "Thing"?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 31 July 2014.

The Moth

So could we do something like The Moth, with each of us coming up and sharing stories, conjuring images of these happenings without worrying about any spectacle (costuming, sets, props)? And maybe just talking out loud about story ideas or how it might be approached or what are some of the implications or morals of the story, just like we do in our emails. And then, when we've explained "where we're coming from" (telling not showing), alternate that with songs.

Or even have an interviewer ask us questions about the story (on stage or in a podcast format) as ourselves. I'm not quite grasping what that show would look like, but it seems like it could be hilariously funny and extremely interesting. Or totally boring and dumb. The funny thing is being interviewed as an admitted nobody who has no credentials or reason to be interviewed, except that we are in possession of this amazingly outsized story. And it's totally bathetic in that the reality is so utterly far removed from that grandiose vision.

And then the frame inside of that is it's about Arthur White and Will Witkowski, who are also borderline in terms of credentials.

Essentially, we are being interviewed about the story that we would like to tell. And the irony is that the interview becomes the story. And the story maybe never happens in its full-fledged sense.

Why would that work at all?

I think it's the audacity of basically going up there "naked," with no pretenses whatsoever. And I could play songs on whatever keyboard and you can bring a snare drum or whatever, because we're not pretending that we're from any particular era, we're just trying to conjure up this story from nothing (or perhaps admitting that we won't be able to conjure up the story mimetically, so we're just going to tell you what we were thinking about doing).

And if we did ever get some costuming for one of us, but not for the other, we could just go ahead and have one of these shows and it would be this conspicuous thing where we don't pretend like we're seeing Will Witkowski, but we evaluate the costume and talk about what we were going for, where we fell short, the implications of pretending, etc. And if we want to talk about religion, we can just talk about it. We bring a list of what we'd like to talk about.

I actually love this idea. I'm not sure it would work. We wouldn't really even need an interviewer, we could just talk amongst ourselves. But an interviewer would be cool in that they could go out to the audience bringing the microphone around to people with questions. And even if the conversations are compelling, there's this nagging question: what the hell are we even doing? Is this even "a thing"?

I think a critical determining factor is whether we can find that slightest of motives or frames. With Drunk History, it's the drunk part. How do you create the context for people to understand what is happening? Start with a song? Then have our interviewer come up?

"Wow, that was great, guys. Okay, for the people out there who don't know, who is Arthur White? And who is Will Witkowski?"