Better with Story
An off-hand comment on the Nateland podcast stated that WWE is more popular than regular wrestling because it’s wrestling with storytelling. By that logic, what else would be better with story?
Choir Practice
Marianne slams open both double doors. She’s dressed head to toe in gold sequins. She picks up the microphone connected to the old portable karaoke machine and presses it to her lips.
“My grandmother didn’t pack her entire life into a broken leather suitcase and hop a cross-country train with my mother to get away from my deadbeat grandfather for you all to take away my solo! This land is NOT your land. This land is MY land. Your mothers should have…”
Marianne stops suddenly. The mic isn’t on anymore. She looks over at Sandra, the water girl, who purposely waited for Marianne to look over before extending her arm and dropping the plug.
“Every week I fill up the pitchers. I stop at Walmart to grab paper cups. I set up this stained plastic table. I cut exactly 12 inches of tape for my handmade “water” sign. And for what?! To listen to you complain about the solo you lost SIX months ago? Becky has a better voice AND a better van with fewer miles.”
Marianne walks over and gets right up in Sandra’s grill. Through gritted teeth, she says, “Say that to my face.”
Sandra, unfazed by the fluorescent light glaring off the sequins, obliges.
“Let’s take this outside,” Marianne replies.
. . .
Though I’m a self-proclaimed anti-choir-ite, I would go to this choir practice!
Like Singing Criminals, Like Blooming Onion
I recently started watching a new TV series. Something about it wasn’t sitting quite right. It took me about a season to realize it was how the episodes ended.
When the conflict was resolved, the screen faded to black and the credits rolled. Nothing out of the ordinary, but the last series I watched would resolve the conflict, cut to commercial, and then come back for a quick (usually fun) post scene.
As I sat on the couch watching the credits while eating a post-meal Take 5 candy bar (straight from the fridge), my mind started churning. Meals and stories are the same: appetizer, main course, dessert.
Appetizer
The appetizer, usually an indulgent comfort food, gets you settled and excited for the main course. One of the best examples of an appetizer in story is the sitcom cold open. These short, funny scenes usually have nothing to do with the main storyline of the episode so no one is lost if they haven’t seen the show before. One of the most famous cold opens is the fire drill scene in The Office. Why? It was the cold open that ran immediately after the Super Bowl in 2009. When you have millions of people watching, you hit them with your best and hopefully they stay for dinner.
But the cold open isn’t limited to comedy. Oftentimes cold opens for other kinds of shows will open in the middle of a high stakes part of the story. The movie Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark opens with an entire short story. It pulls you in and shows you everything you need to know about Mr. Jones, and then sends you off on a journey with him the rest of the movie.
Main Course
Pretty self explanatory. This is the meat (or jackfruit, for my vegan friends) of the story.
Dessert
Similar to a cold open, a short closing scene gives you that little something to hold you over until next time. Blockbuster movies really leaned into this with their post-credit scenes that kept the die hards in their seats, forced to read the million names for people like Second Key Grip’s Third Assistant’s Dog Whisperer.
Just like my shows, my meals feel incomplete if I don’t have something sweet to give my brain the signal that it can start the dishwasher because the meal is over. Until then, Larry and Renae are just waiting around the scullery for the final dishes. We can’t do that to them; Lare-Bear and Nae-Nae are good people. I want them to get home to their pine cone collecting and sock organizing or whatever it is they do. Hence the Take 5 on the couch.
As you may have noticed, this is exactly how the newsletter is structured. I’d like to say that was on purpose, so I will. It was definitely on purpose.
Sentence of the Week
A little wisdom to cap off our meal.
Throw out your conceited opinions, for it is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.
—Epictetus, Discourses
Thanks for reading,
Braden