The Bassoon King: Art, Idiocy, and Other Sordid Tales from the Band Room

The very best improvisers have the ability to use silence and understand that less is more.

So why did they stay together until I left for college in 1984? For me? For the “stick-it-out-ive-ness” surrounding marriage that they inherited from their parents’ generation? For their faith, which allows but greatly discourages divorce? For the tiny spark of real love that did exist between them that they hoped, through the fog of denial, would

you can only rely on being buzzed for so long before it starts to wear thin and the troubling noise you’ve been trying to blot out and force down starts echoing up through the cracks.

2. IF YOU THINK YOU’RE BEING FUNNY, YOU’RE NOT BEING FUNNY My least-favorite kind of comedy acting is the kind where the performers know they’re just being hysterical.

This means that half-hour shows that run on the BBC can be literally twenty-eight minutes long. Half-hour television shows in the United States are 21:20 or so. The brilliant idea of “Why don’t they just show the original episodes in the US?” is impossible. You would need to cut more than a quarter out of each episode. And what would need to come o

and this is the most important point of all—and they’re willing to hang out with geeky guys and even go to wrap parties and occasionally make out with them. This sets up drama geeks as the lions of the dork Serengeti.

The bassoon is absurd. They should be banned for being horrible, unnecessary, and adenoidally grating.

When you see a lifeless form, you realize so clearly that we are not our bodies. As I gazed down at her corpse I knew the “Alice-ness” of her had dissipated and gone somewhere else. Evaporated. There was just a pleasant, empty shell that remained in a coffin of wood, devoid of any life or soul or spirit or being. This body I was gazing at had carri

Many of you probably know this, but every year each network develops approximately eighty to one hundred pilot scripts each for what is known as “pilot season.” Of those scripts, twenty or more will “go to pilot” and be shot. Of those, only a small handful will be “picked up to series”