Welcome to Night Vale - The Summer of Night Vale Presents, Part 4

Episode Date: July 27, 2018

Welcome to the fourth and final week of the Summer of Night Vale Presents, a celebration and sampling of some of the shows across our network. This week, hear previews of two upcoming Night Vale Presents shows, and full episodes from The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air) and Good Morning Night Vale. To get updates on our new shows, Adventures in New America and Dreamboy, sign up for the Night Vale Presents newsletter, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter. The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air) is a surreal and funny audio drama about a lonely janitor at the Eiffel Tower who longs to be part of the most popular radio show in the world. Recently, we re-issued the first season in partnership with WNYC. This special edition has brand new behind-the-scenes commentary in every episode and a director’s cut of the season finale, and is the perfect excuse to either re-listen or dive in for the very first time. Good Morning Night Vale is the official Welcome to Night Vale recap show, hosted by cast members Meg Bashwiner, Symphony Sanders, and Hal Lublin. Each week, our hosts do a deep dive into one episode of Welcome to Night Vale, starting with the very first episode from 2012. Tune in for behind-the-scenes stories, interviews with the cast and creators, fan theories, and THROAT SPIDERS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howdy y'all. It is Jeffrey Craneer. I'm not sure which episode of Welcome to Nightville you're listening to, but I am speaking to you from April of 2026. And I'm here to tell you we're going to be in Europe. If you want to see Nightville live and you're going to be in Europe, come check us out at the end of May. We're going to be in Edinburgh on May the 27th. We will be in Manchester on the 28th, London on the 29th, and Amsterdam on May the 30th. Just go to Welcome to Nightville.com slash live to see the show dates and to get your tickets. This is. our newest Nightville live show Murder Night in Blood Forest. It is so much fun. Please come check it out. Also, coming up this month here in April, it is the return of Alice Isn't Dead, brand new episodes of our other crazy hit podcast. This is written by Joseph Fink, produced and with music by disparition and starring Jacique and Nicole. So make sure you are still subscribed to Alice Isn't Dead and go get those on April the 13th as new episodes come out. Finally, speaking of other shows, do you want to hear us talk about other things? things. We have three other really great chat shows. First of all, there's Good Morning Nightvale for all of your Nightvale needs. You can hear Hal, Meg, and Symphony talk about every single episode in order of Welcome to Nightvale. Also, we have Random Horror Number Nine. That is me and Nightville star Cecil Baldwin talking about horror movies one at a time in a random order. And then

Joseph and Meg do best, worst, which is a really fun podcast where they look at hit TV shows and they review the best rated on IMDB, the worst rated on IMDB, and if you're a Patreon member, they will review the middleest rated on IMDB. So check out all of those at nightfieldpresents.com or just wherever you get your podcast. And hey, thanks. Howdy, Jeffrey Craneer here. Welcome to the fourth and final week of the Summer of Nightville Presents, a celebration and sampling of the shows across our network. A quick word of warning, this collection contains some explicit language. Or maybe you didn't need to be warned. Maybe you're excited by that. Either way, strong words coming right at you. So before we do anything else, I want to share with you a sneak

peek of two of Nightville Presents brand new fiction shows. These podcasts are unlike anything else on our network and, well, I'll just let the creators explain their shows themselves. Ever since I got to Cleveland, I've been having this strange recurring dream. It always starts the same. I'm in the water. Hanging, suspect. and it's deep water and it's dark I can't see anything the water is the same temperature as my body it feels pleasant my hair is just gently swaying and then I feel a little bit of cold on my legs and at first I think it feels sort of nice and then a little bit more cold and then slowly I realize that something huge is moving underneath me

I start to freak out and I start to try to get away. But I can't get anywhere. The water isn't moving and I feel the coldness coming up more and more coldness. Like the thing is getting closer and closer. So I start to thrash and I open my mouth the scream, but the icy water rushes in. It hits the back of my throat and zooms down into my stomach. I feel it fill me up. And then it zigzags its way through my intestines like a cold knife.

And just before it gets to the back of my asshole, I wake up and my dick is always hard. Is it time to talk? Hi, everybody. Hi. Is anybody yet listening? You're all in your underwear. Dane, here, let's start again. Ready?

One, two, three, go. Tell me what Dream Boy is about. Is it about a boy? It's not. Not about a boy. I need you to take this cake. To who? You don't know him yet.

It's got drag queens. There's also some creepy little nocturnal Girl Scouts. Good morning. Good. Wait, though. It's just after midnight. Technically morning. There's a murderous zebra.

Zoe. Zoe. The zebra. I was a songwriter first, and then I talk a lot in between songs. So people were like, hey, maybe you're doing theater. And then the theater people were like, it's great. It's definitely theater. We don't want to look at you.

Try a podcast. I went to college for a few years for classical composition, and I tried to write that kind of serious classical music, very atonal classical music, and I just wasn't any good at it. And I think at the end, I got fed up. I sort of rebelled from that, and went all the way in the other direction

and kind of was like, you know, fuck it. Can you say fuck on the internet? You can say, that's where all the fucks live. Yes. Yeah. So I said, fuck it. I'm going to, I'm going to, to like gravitate towards what makes me feel feelings and what I'm just like any other person.

What makes me feel feelings is when, you know, when that spaceship takes off any tea. When they fly over that moon, I have feelings. I don't know about you. And so I started studying screenplay formulas. And I was interested in that structure because it was such a pill that people were used to swallowing that like I figured if I could put other content into that pill, people would swallow it. Like murderous zebras and gay sex in Cleveland.

Dream boy I make a hell of a pasca rickettone and I'm a good kisser listen to my podcast Hello Welcome to Adventures in New America Where each week we bring you new tales From the tragic American after

Coming to you in stereo Well for me Adventures in New America is exciting Because it has a bi-o-a-o-o-o-bishop biracial black guy and a black female in a futuristic. Stop. What? Who are you?

Who am I? I'm Stephen Winter. I'm the co-creator of Adventures in New America. And I was excited about it. I'm still excited about it. What excites me about it is that it's a futuristic Douglas Adams kind of story with black people in it. What will entice people? What will entice people?

What's enticing about it is you rarely see a comedy. Well, you're starting to see comedy. Well, oh my God, I'm so stunned. Come on. Bring in the black nerds who are with the patriarchy. If you are a black nerd and interested in the patriarchy, or a black female nerd who wants to smash the patriarchy, this is the show for you because that's all that the show is about really

the show is Adventures in New America my name is Tristan I'm partially responsible one of the longest running cultural products in American history is a show called Gunsmoke was on television, it was on radio before that it sat around a town called Dodge City and every week a new character would come to Dodge City

or a group of characters and based on the decisions that they made their lives would change, sometimes in the way that they would be dead. But they would change. It's like the city had these rude mechanicals that would help by resolving what was a change moment for these characters. But they would not change themselves. New America is similar to Dodge City in that respect because it doesn't change. And some of the rude mechanicals of that world don't change.

But our protagonists, I.A., who is a man with cancer, and Simon, who is a sociopathic sneak thief, they enter the mill of New America. And after 12 episodes, they end up in a dramatically different place from where they started. But the show itself, I think, works as something to listen to when you're computer gaming or doing your taxes. And then it works on a secondary level when you listen to all the episodes as a whole in the in the way that a pattern is established. So if you're interested in that kind of second messaging, this might be an interesting kind of rubric for you.

The show also has another aspect about it, is that we all have to survive, but we all have the notion of the back of our heads if we could just keep surviving for a little while longer. We might actually thrive at some point. We might actually be able to afford some cheese with our bread. And that's what the story is. It's about two cats who try to go really get some big cheese.

I got a warm of it. It's like watching Superman not fly. Maybe I should be like that and throw away my money. You won't listen to me? Listen to my big noise. This is a stick-up! I'm so excited for you to hear these podcasts. I think you're going to really like them.

I mean, I like them. And as a solipsist, I rest assured that you like them equally. Stay tuned to the Night Vale presents feed, newsletter, and social media for more information about both Adventures in New America and Dreamboy, as well as our entire fall season. Okay. So a few months ago, we told you about a very special co-presentation of the orbiting human circus of the air with WNYC. If you've never listened to the orbiting human circus, it's a surreal and funny audio drama about a lonely janitor at the Eiffel Tower who longs to be part of the most popular radio show in the world. You're not going to find anything like it. Go listen to it. For those who have listened,

our co-presentation also features brand new behind-the-scenes commentary on the making of the podcast. Here's a sample of that. This is episode five of season one with commentary from Julian Koster and John Cameron Mitchell. A co-presentation of WNYC Studios and Nightfail Presents. You are listening to the orbiting human circus of the air. Service announcement was paid for by the joint governments of the world. If children are present, turn your radio off at the sound of the tone. Great recitating platypus really exists. Confirming your children's belief in the existence of the great recitating platypus of the North

will keep them healthy. New international studies show that children who believe in the great recitating platypus of the North have a greater recovery rate from all childhood illnesses than children who don't. the belief that if brave, the platypus will visit while you sleep, recite his many poems, and cause you to wake up healthy, has shown clinically to reduce occurrences of illness later in life. Parents, the day of discovery will come. They, like we, will learn the great recitating platypus of the north does not exist.

But do not hasten the moment. allow them to believe. Give your children the chess to grow healthy and strong. Welcome to episode five of this special edition of the Orbiting Human Circus of the Air, with commentary following each episode and a director's cut of the season finale. Broadcasting from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the orbiting Human Circus of the Air. Behind the red velvet curtains on the wooden stage, beyond two. Who performing donkeys being fed carrots by their trainer to the left of several elderly women readying themselves on stilts,

directly across from ten chefs preparing omelets on Bunsenburners, clutching his mop and looking innocent out in the open where anybody could tackle and remove him is Julian, Geritor at the Eiffel Tower. Shouldn't you be hiding? No, I'm allowed. There's going to be a hypnotist on the show tonight. My great-grandfather was a stage hypnotist.

Really? I never heard you say that, before, not three times every day. Yeah, you know how much I lifted last weekend? A six-pack. Hide, it's Jacques and Pierre. They'll kick you out. Hey, kid, how's it going? Hey, what's up?

When's the hypnotist go on? 20 minutes. Catch it in. He didn't yell at you. I better go get cleaned up. Mr. Cameron said I could use his dressing room. He what? He couldn't have.

Yeah, he's been so nice to me since I found the cricket. I gotta get my good clothing. It's like a holiday. Broadcasting from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the orbiting human... Special. Yes, at this exact moment each night from the Eiffel Tower, one can hear church bells ring out from all Paris. It begins slowly and spreads and spreads.

A sound hour show normally drowns out. But not tonight, ladies and gentlemen. We have placed a microphone on the very top of the tower in order to give you this evening's musical act. Meanwhile, in our host John Cameron's dressing room defying all reasonable explanation, we find our

janitor, changing into what once must have been his Sunday clothes, a rumpled suit, no less of surprising quality. Hey, look what I have on my bag, a feature presentation. The janitor pulls out an old reel of tape, but

why do you have the tape with the feature presentation on it? Who cares? Look, the giant tape out in the hall like right outside the door. If I pull it in here, I can put the tape on and we can listen to it. I don't think you should do that. Oh no, he's opening the door. He's pulling the tape machine inside.

But you're supposed to be mopping the outer latticework. You're so afraid to do anything. And the janitor presses play on the large tape machine, and a remarkable story begins to play. Really, it's quite incredible. But we're not going to let you hear it. Though I'm sure you will hear it eventually, but not now, because at this very moment, there are some sounds out in the hall. Jacques, Pierre.

Yeah. Where's his tape machine, huh? We left it right here. You left her right here, but it's not here now. We're looking right now. Take you look, stage left? I'm going behind stage left right now. It's chief stagehand Letitia with stagehands Jacques and Pierre.

Inside the dressing room, the door is thrown open. What's she doing with the tape machine? Why have you pulled the giant tap machine in this room? Oh, I didn't... Oh, bon die. You have played the feature presentation. You have played the secret reel! Letitia, why are you taking your belt off?

Whoa! I'm going to beat him! Letitia, you can't do that. That's against the law. Okay, but this time I'm going to make him remember. I thought it wasn't... No, you do not think you do not care. But, let's say, please... Okay, quiet.

Jack, take my belt for me so I'm not tempted to use it. Okay. Julien, this is the end for you. After the show, I tell Jean Caman what you have done. No longer will you clean out the cage, of the animal. No longer will you keep our soles in your janitor closet. That's where they came from. And I don't care how long you

have been living here. You cannot use a station shower. It's my only place I can't shower. No. I cannot wait for Jean Cameron. I will throw you out myself. Letitia, the hypnotist is on in 15 seconds. Mr. Cameron said I can watch the hypnotist. He did say remember. It's 10 seconds, Latisha.

Yeah, okay. Because we have 10 seconds, but you just wait till after the show. All right, everybody places. And so narrowly escaping for now, the janitor gingerly approaches the side of the stage to watch. And now, as part of our continuing demonstration series, scientific advancement, ladies and gentlemen, Professor Heimlich, Epifal, and our first brave volunteer. Thank you. Professor, this individual standing here on stage before us is in a hypnotic trance.

That is correct. And they have no idea they're on stage. No idea whatsoever. They believe they are someplace else, in the home, in the car, listening to a radio program. So they're listening. Yes, but they have no idea that they are the subject. And you can prove this. Yeah.

To test the trance, we present this French nobleman. I challenge you to a duel. Without a reaction. With their honor at stake and everything, extraordinary. Try whispering in the subject ear. Testing. Three. Testing. Hello. Without our reaction.

That's amazing. Yeah, that's nothing. We have brought the subject's actual third grade teacher down. Defrook the teacher, placed the naked teacher on a unicycle, and arranged to have this teacher ride circles around our subjects, whistling the saber dance and ride up this ramp into gigantic vats of chocolate custard. Another modern radio miracle, ladies. gentlemen.

And now I will deepen the trance of this subject waiting over here. One hundred. 99. We will return to this extraordinary demonstration in a moment, but first I would like to bring back to the stage someone who is a very special part of our world here. To prove there's a time and place for everything, I give you Julian, janitor at the Eiffel Tower. Julian, come on out. That's right. Come on. You can do it.

do it. Sorry, I didn't know it. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, you know each night, when the show ends and the audience files out the door, we often hear the distant sound of the janitor singing as he moths the halls. Me too?

It's something we've all found strangely comforting at one time or another, and we thought it might be a nice surprise to share this comfort with all of you. Really? You want me to sing? That's right. Now?

I do. Go right ahead, Julian. What would you like to sing? Do you know where evening's dream goes? Ladies and gentlemen, where evening's dream goes, sung by Julian Janitor at the Eiffel Tower. At first nervous, the janitor to find his voice.

He sings on, he grows more and more confident, and before he knows it, the audience rises to its feet as one, showering the janitor with bouquets until he stands buried up to his waist in white flowers. Milky white flowers! Thank you, thank you, thanks, thank you so much. I will now bring you out of your trance.

Thank you. Thank you. Ten. Nine. Thank you. Eight. Seven. Thank you.

Thank you. Three. Thank you. Two. The janitor awakes from a hypnotic trance to find himself dressed only in Leidenhosen and wading in a kiddie pool filled with Bavarian cream. What? It's horrible.

A big hand for our subject, Julie and the janitor. But for you imagining, you seem to do. You seemed to be yelping like a seal and making strange dirations. I... I thought I was singing. The subject has pierced the children's pool and run off! He has gotten barbarian cream all over my shoes. Well, no matter.

We'll continue with this subject here. The janitor runs off the stage... You will picture for me your greatest fantasy. What you truly desire... Off through the wings, backstage, and into the stage hands shower. slamming the door behind him. I hate him, Mr. Camber, I hate him.

He's banging his bare fist against the tile. He's going to break his hand. Stop it. Please, please stop. Please stop. You were singing, weren't you? Yeah, in my head. I like hearing you sing. My singing is stupid.

What song were you singing? Doesn't matter. Come on, tell me. There's a song like a gun. probably used to sing to me to let me to sleep when I was a little boy. Can I hear it? Come on. I want you right now.

Please. Good. Darkness, darkness always comes. That was nice. Sing more. Around surrounding everyone. Darkness, darkness always comes. Wait, your grandfather used to wave his hand around like this when he was

when he would sing it like a drunk orchestra conductor. Around, surrounding everyone, dark. The memory seems to comfort the janitor, and doing an impression of his great-grandfather, he takes up conducting, closes his eyes, and throws himself into the song completely. Meanwhile, outside... And deeper, and deeper, that right, and so much deeper.

What is that horrible sound? A loud knocking sound echoes throughout the theater. We will have to start again from the beginning. Deepa and deeper and deeper. It's the shower. Who is using the station shower? It goes to the pub to knock. It can be held on the air.

And deeper and deeper. What are you doing? We're on the air. Turn off that shower now. Host John Cameron comes running up. My God, what's happening over here? The janitor. He will be the death of the show.

He is in there singing. I've knocked, but he can't hear. We're going and stop him. No, but I can't go in there. He's naked. It would be sexual harassment. You have to. Me, but I have suit on. Oh, it's quite bad. Always with your suit. Terri-space to keep dry.

Go-go! Day! Day! But the janitor, eyes closed and fully entranced by his song, fails to notice John rush in. John presses his back against the door to stay dry. And trying desperately to keep the show G-rated, looking any place but down,

settles his gaze on the janitor's oddly waving arm, and following the sweeping conducting motion back and forth, strangely, forgets what it is he's doing. There is something in the strange irregular sweeping of the arm that seems to lead him to the comfortable conclusion that there's no occupation in the world more engrossing and important than carefully watching the odd irregular motions of the janitor's sweeping arm, an activity so pleasing

he soon forgets that anything exists except the janitor's arm and settling into a pleasant stupor all the stress of the past several months slips away until he feels he never wants to move again the janitor stops his frenzied conducting

opens his eyes and finds our host John Cameron standing in the shower closet with him. Mr. Cameron? But Mr. Cameron does not respond. He stands there perfectly still and frozen like a statue. Oh my God. Wake up. What's wrong with him?

Oh, my God. It was my great-grandfather's song, and I was conducting like he did, and my great-grandfather was a stage hypnotist. John's in a trance. What? He's hypnotized. And I don't know how to wake him up.

Oh, no. John, wake up. Five, four, three, two, one. And you're awake. Oh, God. Mr. Cameron, please wake up. The janitor shakes, host John Cameron like a wax statue. Still nothing.

Panicked, he pushes the door of the shower closet open. I got to find the hypnotist. Julien! Oh, my God, oh my God, oh my God, I'm going to do. Jean. What have you? And deeper, and deeper. And deeper?

Mr. Hypnitist. What is this interruption? Now we must start all over again. Deeper. And deeper? Mr. Hypidst. You may call me, Professor. Mr. Professor, I accidentally hypnotized Mr. Cameron backstage,

and now I can't wake him up. He's frozen. You hypnotized him. You got help. You got help. Calm down, young man. This will make for an interesting demonstration. Bring him out.

And so a gravely concerned, Letitia Saltye, carries our frozen host, stiff as a statue out to the center of the stage. Fascinating! A state of complete catalepsy! By what means did you hypnotize him? I sang in this song that my great-grandfather used to sing to me when he wanted me to go to sleep. A song? Please sing it for me. No? Yes, immediately!

It just goes... Darkness, darkness always comes. Nonsense! This song could do no such thing! I was waving my arm around like this. The whole time I was just waving my arms back and forth And that was all I did Professor, do you Professor?

Oh no Letitia The professor? Leticia? Leticia? Oh, my God. Oh my God. Does anybody in the audience know how to

Oh. The entire audience, too, is frozen in a hypnotic trance. I hypnotized everybody. We're castral. We're not hypnotized. Okay, please play the goodbye music. Thank you. Thank you.

Broadcasting from the top of the Eiffel Tower. This is the janitor saying, I'm so, so sorry. I, the orbiting human circus of the air wishes you a good night. The orbiting human circus of the air is a co-presentation of WNYCCCC. and Nightvale Presents. Welcome to this special commentary for season one of the orbiting human circus. If you are a new listener, we strongly recommend that you listen to the complete narrative season first and then return to these commentaries.

We begin with a conversation with Drew Callender, who also plays the narrator, recalling portraying the president of the perpetual broadcasting corporation in a scene from episode I remember, like, you know, doing this thing. And, you know, so I'm doing this, like, and, you know, so I'm doing this, like, and John Cameron Mitchell is, like, just like looking at me from, you know, first of all, we're like, you know,

just away from each other. Where were you? Because we're at the, the space in in sunset park yeah so anyway and he

and you know he's supposed to be you know we're sort of like talking over each other but I just I kept like you know breaking from his like

the little smirk that was on his face you know because he was like because I'm saying something so absurd you know that we're going to get a polar bear. Yeah, and he's just like, you know, he's got this smile on his face. Like, you know, I'm talking to, I'm working for this person, but he's an idiot. You know, he can't really say anything to me.

And I think it really comes across. The thing that I love so much about John Cameron is when he's trying so hard to control himself, and you can just feel him like when the president of the perpetual broadcasting corporation is talking to him about the polar, bear. Yes. I just love, I, through your voice, I'm able to just see every muscle twitch on John Cameron's face.

You don't usually act that big in life. And somehow you've forced me to bring out the largest. Because it's in you and it wants to come out. I guess it is. I mean, I did grow up with the Goon Show. Yeah. Which maybe you want to tell people what that is. The Ginn Show was a BBC show.

It's wonderful. It was like a precursor to Monty Python. You know, it was surreal. Yeah. It was, and Peter Sellers was the most famous person. It was Harry Seekam. There was Spike. Mulligan, Mulligan, Mulligan.

Yeah, and they did crazy, really crazy characters, and things would move very quickly, and you would jump from thing to thing in a very surreal way, like Monty Python, but crazier. And there'd be catchphrases, and there'd be, but it moved very quickly. And in some ways the fire sign theater, which was... Yeah, they were definitely influenced, I think, by the Goon Shale.

Yeah, the Goon Shale, let's see some of my favorite. They'd have things like, you know, a man would walk into a room and a woman would turn and go, Reginald, you're back! And he'd go, Y, yes, I brought it with me. You know, that's more like that one. Where's Mrs. Gunn? Oh, she went off rather suddenly. He swam for seven miles. The last two were agony. They were overland. They can't. It would do very short gags like that that would just zoom by.

Didn't often wait for the laugh, which is the British way, is just to keep moving. Yeah, that wasn't, yeah, or wait, another one is like, are you Admiral Welsey? No, but I'm often mistaken. for abrol well to see no but I'm often mistaken something like that yeah love it yeah we'll be here all night ladies and gentlemen

well that's one thing we share in common is a delight in the old arts of comedy whether they be Borscht Belt or British or or anything that works but usually

large yeah we know we do end up doing schick together I don't know why like when we get together it ends up. You're Jewish. I want to be Jewish. Maybe that's part of it. It leads to schick. Being gay is part of it. There's interestingly, they talk about different cultures, kinds of humor. You know, say African American humor, Jewish American humor, gay American humor, British humor. They come from the culture and from the economics too. You know, Jewish was running from the Holocaust, new life, change your name sometimes, a little bit.

It was about passing. There was often jokes about, you know, Jewish being a separate culture that could be attacked at any moment. But also there was a little bit of self-loathing because it was like an intensity of oppression, just like in gay culture. But there was also the jokes about surfaces. So, you know, like Mel Brooks, you know, of course is the apotheosis of Borchbel humor. and you took it to the masses. But, you know, a simple joke of his, he actually went to the Brooks Club in London,

which is a fancy aristocratic club. And it was sort of funny. Mel Brooks going to, you know, meet Lord Brooks. And Mel Brooks was like, Lord Brooks, what was your name before Brooks? You know, what was your name before Brooks was the joke? And Lord Brooks didn't understand. But that's the Jewish thing.

You know, everybody in the 40s and 50s changed their name to be less Jewish, so they can get a job. And then gay humor is also a little bit about passing too. It's about hiding surfaces, overdoing things, underdoing things, passing, but also belonging to a secret society, a secret group, you know, that you have to hide in plain sight. African American, obviously, you couldn't hide. So the humor was much more about, you know, being under the thumb of an oppressor, you know, of a white.

person and the Jewish gay one was more about trickster how do you get you know how do you get around it how do you hide it how do you work it you know so it's interesting how humor I love the origins of different kinds of humor you know jokes are passed on certainly are adapted you know the first joke in Hedwig was Beatrice Lilly joke which is oh thank you for your applause I do love a warm hand of my entrance you know which I got by a someone named Julian and Clary, who was kind of a misbegotten child of, you know, Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde. And then, of course, we still have, you know, we have jokes.

We have these jokes that we tell each other. You know, somebody tells you a joke. And I mean, it's always such a great moment at a gathering and, you know, or when people are together, when someone tells a joke, it's like that person becomes a performer. And then you can take it and tell it to someone else and give somebody else that pleasure. and it's been done for you so many times, you know, over the course of a lifetime, and it will be done, and you can do it so many times.

And those jokes pass around, and we all make them our own. You know, we change them every time we touch them. The Orbiting Human Circus is written, created, and co-directed by Julian Costa. It was co-directed by and developed with Ellie Heyman and produced by Christy Gressman, with musical composition and arrangement by Thomas Hughes and songs by The music tapes. And editing by Grant Stewart, sound design by Eric Slider, with recording engineer Vincent Cashione and associate producer Robbie Cucciaro. Episode four featured Julian Costa, Drew Callender, John Cameron Mitchell, Walter Lowry, Susanna Flood, Dan Solomon, Ron Berman, Gavin

Rocha, Vin Rocha, and Dennis Costa. For full credits and to learn more about the Orbiting Human Circus, come visit us at Orbitinghumancircust.com and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And now I will deepen the trance of this subject waiting over here. 100.99. 99. 98. 97. 96. 95. 94. 94. 94. 94. 9. 9. 9. Season 2 of the orbiting human circus, which will be co-produced by W.N.Y.C. is coming in 2019. You can listen to all of Season 2. one, including the behind-the-scenes commentary and a brand-new director's cut of the finale, wherever it is you listen to podcasts. Next up, Good Morning Nightvale. This is the official Welcome to Nightville Recap show hosted by cast members, Meg Bashwinner,

Symphony Sanders, and Hal Lublin. Each week, our hosts have been doing a deep dive into one episode of Welcome to Night Vale, starting with the very first episode from 2012. It's weird listening to a show about a show. show that I make, but holy crap, these three are really charming and addictive. I wish there were already 100 episodes. Good Morning Nightvale features behind-the-scenes stories, fan theories, and interviews. Here's a clip from episode four, Good Morning PTA meeting featuring an interview with me, Jeffrey Kramer, your dad.

The sun has grown so very, very old. How long, cold. Death? How long? Good morning, Night Vale. Hey, everyone. It's us again. My name is Meg Vashwinner. And I'm Symphony Sanders. I'm Hal Lublin. And this is the podcast where we listen to old recordings of the hit popular, weird, bizarre, strange podcast. Welcome to Nightvale, and we chat about it.

Today we are talking about episode number four, PTA meeting. The episode description is, last night's PTA meeting accidentally opens a rift in space time, and Nightvale faces the consequences. Plus, changes about the Nightvale Daily Journal, controversy at Radon Canyon, and our annual high school football preview. And do we have our work cut out for us? And I'm going to do the thing where I remind us to tell the audience, who we are for Welcome to Nightvale just to keep our listeners engaged in who we are. So my name is Meg. I play Deb, A Sentient Patch of Hayes on the show. I also am the emcee of the touring live show, and I am the tour director of Night Vale Presents, and I have lots of opinions about where to eat

in Night Vale. Hi, I'm Symphony Sanders, and I play Tamika Flynn, your local library-killing teenage militia leader. My favorite charter. I'm Hal Lublin and I play Steve Carlsberg, your brother outside the law. All right. So as a rag tag group of Nightvale performers talking about episode four, PTA meeting. So we have lots of interesting things that happen in this episode. I feel like we're introduced to a lot of characters.

We get a lot of characters that have a lot of meaning in the future of the show are kind of just like thrown into the mix here. We get Diane Creighton. We get her son Josh, the high school football coach, Nazer Almujaheed. We also get the football player whose name I'm blanking on right now. Michael Sandero. Michael Sandero. So, yeah, they were teeing up for a lot of Nightville Future in this, just episode number four. So our episode starts out with Cecil announcing that there was a really noisy, glowing,

portal that happened at the PTA meeting and some Tyrannadons came out, but we later find out they are not Tyrannadons. They're teradactyls, which is spelled with a P. Did you know that? So is Tyrannadon. I did. Is it really? I didn't know that.

I did no research. I was reading along in my Welcome to Nifel script book, Volume 1, mostly void partially stars. Oh, I don't. Oh, I do have that. that. If you don't have that symphony, I will send it to you. I have a box of many. As I was about to say, I don't have that. I literally looked up at my bookcase and it is directly in front of me. Who can't read? It's me. Are we allowed to curse on this podcast? I would say that there's a couple of them that you shouldn't say just in life. And those are the ones that you shouldn't say on the show.

Like the F word? No, I think the F word's probably okay. If you say that in life. Okay, good. Meg, you just blew my fucking mind because it didn't even occur to me. I mean, I've been listening to these and I plan on continuing to listen, but I'm like, why not go look at the script? Oh, yeah. I didn't think about it. I have two books sitting in the other room with all the words in it, just in case I'd like need like to remember something. Oh, I'm disgusted with myself. We're smarter than this, how? I actually was in the same book myself until I was reading emails from fans. And one of them was like, I went through my script book. And I was like, the script book. So there's a fan to thank for that. And I could look through our Gmail account and find out your name and give you a really touching shout out right now. But I'm not going to do that.

But you know who you are. Touching shout out. Thank you for directing us to the script books. Seriously. Fan, you know who you are. Yeah, I'm going to do a sales pitch for the script books right now because why not? Do it. two really nice script books that are out.

If you, they're paperback. They're available through Harper Perennial. There's mostly void partially stars and the great glowing coils of the universe, which are episodes, volume one and volume two. I don't know how many episodes it contains, but it's a lot of them.

And it's my first published writing work since I was in the Jewish exponent back in 1994 in Philadelphia. Very exciting. Which is reason enough to own those books. You really? And that newspaper from 94, if you can find it. The literary stylings of Hal Lublin.

Speaking of newspapers, the Nightville Daily Journal. That was a really good segue. Thank you. Yes. That I just wrecked. Thank you. Let me waste that segue by talking about it. Yeah, so are the journal, right?

Like they have the platinum premium ads and why can't I read my notes? All writers. Oh, and all the writers were laid off. Yes, and they have the write your own news story section, which got, like, struck me as very Huffington Post. I was like, oh, they're just throwing a little shade at our friends at the Huffington Post. Just write your own news story, which is, I mean, hey. Isn't that what a doctor just does as well? They have people submit or no. Yeah, there's a lot of the newspapers that, well, they're online now.

There's no such thing as a newspaper where they do submissions. So you can write your own news. Newspaper? What is newspaper? There's so much in this episode about journalism and how money influences journalism and how it's leading to the failing of the press. But Leanne Hart just presses right on. We touched on this a little bit last week about how there are certain parts of this re-listen that make me cringe because they're so relevant. And this is the one as like, oh, the rise of the citizen journalist. And that idea that where we get our news now in the world is just from whoever,

whatever ant posts something first might be where we get it or the idea of like confirmation bias and all the terrible things that come with just sort of the wild west of online media the way it exists right now. And seeing that just reminds me as I listen to the show and especially in this episode, I'm like, this is a, this would be a terrible place to live. You are in constant fear and under constant threat. You don't know where any of the information is coming from or whether it's accurate. And that you're under a watchful eye. Yes.

Yes. And you're constantly being watched. So modern day America? Yeah. Yeah. It's just shining a mirror at us. I talked about the show Bosch near an Amazon fire and now I get Bosch ads whenever I go on Facebook. I'm not even kidding.

Which is scary. I've never watched it. I've looked at, yeah, because it's always that, because that is the commercials that it's always forced on you on Amazon because they're like, please watch this show. After I got married on Facebook, I started to, like it got married in real life, but also on Facebook where you change your relationship status to married. I started getting a lot of ads for baby stuff. And then I was researching a short play that I was writing about locations of abortion clinics, and I stopped getting ads for baby stuff. So the best way to get rid of, if you're getting a lot of baby stuff ads, just start Googling where your nearest abortion clinic is. Also, maybe try Googling grad school, and they will go away if you're trying to get rid of those baby ads.

Pro tip, life hack. Well, and that's just, I mean, that's just a furtherance of the societal, like no one's ever satisfied. Like, once you're dating someone, they're like, when are you getting married? And when you're married, they're like, when are you having a baby? No one's ever like, well, you've done all these things. when are you going to die. Exactly. I'm starting ads for coffins. Right. Estate lawyers, you know. Yeah. I'm seeing ads for that Al Pacino-Cavorkian movie that was on HBO a few years ago. I bet, and this is me hypothesizing over here, that elderly people on Facebook probably get ads to prepay their funerals because that's a thing that people do now.

So there's definitely funeral homes that are like advertising to the elderly on Facebook being like, prepay that funeral. Save your children. that burden. You know, I have seen the ones, oh, I've seen the ones about like funeral insurance. Does that mean they think I'm going to die? I'm not going to die. Well, I am going to die, but not today. I think we all are. I don't think today. You're going to outlive us all. Not me. I'm going to live forever. I'm sorry. That was terrible. I almost said, let's hope. Let's hope. No, I don't hope that for you. I hope that you die in the middle of everyone. What? Surrounded. Surrounded by many, knives. Right? It's like, I don't want you to outlive us all because that'd be sad for you, but you know, you gotta just, I hope that you die somewhere in the middle of all your friends.

Well, let's just say, let's just say I can run pretty fast. So if there's ever a bear attack, you can count on me to try and live. I just have to outrun you people. I'll fool the bear. I'll say that tree's having its period. And then when the bear looks at the tree, I'll be gone. I'll be gone. I know how you were bears. You're not going to get me. You're not going to get me. good plan. You're not going to get me. Sheer trickery. So, uh, some other poignant issues that, uh, Night Vale might, this episode might bring up is the election for the council seats that are up. And how a certain member of your family is going to get kidnapped, um, and take into, uh, the caves, you know, and, uh, I don't know. I mean, it's, that sounds pretty like mobby, you know,

but seeing as though our president is a mobster. Looking at how elections work in Nightvale, I was like, is that even preferable to how our elections work? Just looking for a new system. Yeah. Again, out of the box thinking, we were talking about it in the last episode. I'm willing to try something new. Yeah, because apparently what we got isn't working.

We're not yielding great results. You know, again, I keep listening to this through the ears of Steve. it's hard not to filter things through the character I've been playing on this show for five years. And like, with this episode, I was like, boy, Steve feels a really great responsibility to his family and to do good in the world. If he is the one who really understands what's going on, if that's true. And all of this is happening. Like, that is a huge burden to bear. Like you're in a town where they're going to beat up someone in your family to make sure everybody votes the right way, which is like a fun joke and play on elections and and they're just being kidnapped.

Corruption. Beat up. Well, somebody's getting worked over. I bet you they're getting worked over a little bit. A little light work is being done. But that idea is terrifying. If you don't vote correctly, you'll never see them again. So who knows what that could possibly mean.

Exactly. I just this it's a really like it's such a dark it's so funny how the humor comes from the darkest timeline of any possible part of living in a town how the elections work why in last episode why big Rico's pizza is the only pizza place in town the woman who uh the distribution center where it burned like it burned down and it was totally an accident please call me insurance person please call Yeah, that's, yeah, Leanne Hart. Yeah. Good old Leanne. She'll do anything for her paper, you know. Yeah. So, yeah, we get the football preview, the fall football preview, which is a first shot.

It's one of the first digs at Desert Bluffs. Right. And about how above against all, we have to beat Desert Bluffs because they're the worst. Yes. Yeah. And is this also the first time that you do you think that they said that, It was the Nightvale Scorpion, so we got like a mascot. Yeah.

I don't think we've mentioned them before. You know how people are with their sports. Their sports balls. Yes. So I'm super excited to talk to Jeffrey about this when we get him on the phone. Oh, yes. Because he is our local resident person who knows about sports ball. He knows all about it.

Joseph always says, if you can't tell who's writing it, if it's about sports, It's definitely Jeffrey that's writing it. When we're both on the road in the same city, we'll find time to sit and talk about sports with one another. Because in that context, we're the only ones, we're the only two who care. So we're like, we'll just go have our conversation in private. We don't need to. Well, when you get Aaron McKeown on the road, she'll talk about baseball. Yeah, so she's your third.

Your third. Yeah, but there's not a lot of sports enthusiasm among the night. Veltoring cast, unfortunately. I mean, I like sports just fine, but like, I don't know all the stats, you know? I don't know all the stuff. And most of the plays, I don't know what's going on. I just know that guy ran with that thing over there, and that's good, you know? I like horse racing.

Well, you are of equestrian nobility. Thank you. Can we talk about what just happened? happened in San Diego backstage. What happened, Hal Loveland? We went down a rabbit hole of a couple of us. I think it was like me. Oh, yeah, I forgot about this.

Yeah, you were there. And me and my wife, Jennifer, and I think Mal was there as well. And Meg was looking up, like, she wasn't even like looking for. She was just like, this is how, this is the horse that Hal is. Here's the, like, everybody was a horse. And it was right. But it wasn't even like she had to look it up. She already knew it was like she had them like bookmarked or something.

She was like, this is you. This is you. They were. I think Jennifer's was the best one. Jennifer was like the spirit of your wife, Hal, like just on a horse and a screen. I think Johns was the best. John's was pretty good too. Dispersons horse pick was pretty spot on.

Just look just like his hair. Wait, can we start a segment on this show? called Meg's horse picks, where you share, like, disparition is the Carolina Cotton Tale who exhibits these qualities. Disparition was a Belgian wormblood, first of all. That's right. Burn. I knew you'd have the right name.

Yeah. With a kind of a swoopy, swoopy mane. Swipy side bang main. Because John has a glorious side bang. Yeah. Yes. Yes, he does. Good old disparish.

I don't know. We were talking about sports. That's how I was like, how did we get here to this? How did I ask myself that question a lot? How did we get here? Horses are sports. Horses are sport. It's the sport that I most into, mostly just the Triple Crown.

It's like in the spring. Early in the spring, you could watch some horses on TV. I went to the Belmont Steaks when I was a kid. My uncle took me. What about the Derby? I've never been to the Derby. That's on my bucket list. but we'll see if that ends up happening.

I want to wear a hat. I want to drink a mint julep. I want to yell at a horse and then maybe get to pet it if it wins. I think you could do all of those things individually in a day, but like never all at once, except for at the derby. Yeah. Yeah. Like you could probably yell at a horse and have a mint jolip. I'm pet a horse.

Right. Well, if you yell at it, you have to pet it first. I don't think you can yell at it, then pet it. It's for sure going to bite you. We're yelling for it than at it, you know, cheering for it. I see. It needs to be doing, I can't just, like, go drive by a field of horses and start screaming at them.

I need to be rooting them on. You can do it. Eat that grass. Believe in yourselves. So, I thought it was really funny in regards to the portal that led the Tyrannadons, oh, no, the pterodactals out. When people looked in it, they were playing handball or something. Yeah.

They aged, like, just the part that they looked in, like, so their head and shoulders aged thousands of years. So their body was still normal, but, like, their head was thousands of years old, so would it be, like, dust? Or was it still, like, you know, like, liquid, squishy? Or was, like, a shrunken head, you know what I mean? Like a fossil. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's like Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade. Or, like, beetle juice. Well, that's a shrunken head. That's what I think of. That's my head cannon. Yeah, sure. I think you're not wrong.

That's funny. Head cannon never wrong. Head canon about shrunken heads. Thank you and good night. Is this episode the introduction of throat spiders? Is this the first time anybody's had a case of throat spiders? I love throat spiders as an illness. Not having them.

Another thing I'm excited to talk to Jeffrey about. Jeffrey, known lover of spiders, just a huge fan of spiders, not afraid of them at all. He's not afraid to look at them, or see them, or renew them. That's another thing he and I have in common is our love of spiders, just want to cuddle up to him. And we love that feeling of like, there could be a spider on my back right now. Best, that's the best. Maybe even two. Oh, so great.

I'm so happy about it. I'm generally not afraid of spiders, but if I see a spider in my face, my home, I cannot go to sleep unless it's dead. And that is when I turn it to a murderer. And I know people are going to be out there saying, symphony, they eat the bad bugs. I don't care. You're invading my home. And all interlopers, you know the business. I love spiders. Actually, I love spiders. I'm down with spiders. I appreciate them. I don't kill them when they're in my home. Sometimes they are compassionately relocated to the outdoors, but I'm not a killer of spiders. Most other bugs that are in my house get murdered, though.

My house has many a bug. We're out in the country. We're the only thing for miles out here. So we have black flies a lot. We get ladybugs, which feed on the carcass at the black flies. We get moths and wasps and all sorts of fun things. We've had that. Inside your house, though?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm making a disgusted face. I have a bugzuka. I would like us to be sponsored by Bugzuka. I'm sorry, what is a bugzuka? It's like a, okay, so Bugzuka is a device that is, that you kind of, it's like a gun that you kind of point at a bug and press a button and it sucks the bug into the gun. And it's long.

So you can reach up into the corners and then it sucks the bug into a little container where it can be relocated to the outdoors or you. You can flush it. It just sucks it into like a chamber. It sucks it into a tube. Yeah. It's a bug vacuum, but it doesn't have batteries or anything. It works on suction. Okay.

Because Zuka indicates blowing up, not sucking in. Am I wrong? I mean, am I wrong? No. It's, yeah. But I think it's a branding issue for them. But when they sponsor us, we can help them resolve that branding issue. Yeah, but the way you're describing, it sounds nice.

Yeah. And I was going to say, I think it means. that your DMs are blowing up with all the people going, great job sucking all those bugs out of the room. Joseph's kind of in charge of hunting the bugs. I call him my hunter. Amongst other things. So, do you guys believe in oras? Like, do you feel, like, what do you think your aura looks like? Because they talk about... Hal, you live in Los Angeles.

Oh, yeah. I don't know. I don't know how into that I am. I feel like when I do the moments when I am into it, it feels like I'm not being, like, I'm just sort of like trying to go along. I don't know to what extent I'm on board with that. But I also don't want to, who really knows? I don't want to rain on anybody's parade, I guess. You're so sensitive. That's so nice.

Because like, you're like, get out of here with your fakery. Like, oh, your aura's so golden. in, get out of here. What am I the freaking avatar, the last airbender? Whatever. Yeah, you don't see it. You don't see. But, you know, with that being said, who knows? Who am I? Who knows? Why, you believe at it, right? I believe in the possibility of anything, of the quantum possibilities of anything. So, yeah, maybe there are oras, but like, I don't know. Is it the same thing? It's like when you get really close, when like somebody's really close to you and behind you and you can like feel them? Or is that just like body? I would say that when someone stands close to you and you can feel them, that's just your body using its sensory information.

Like you're using sound and touch and smell to do you're using your senses. Right. Oh. Oh. It's hard to pinpoint down because you're not using just one single one of them. You're using all of a lot of them at once. So it feels like it's magic, but actually it's just your brain. I'm using my synesthesia. Yes, you're using your synesthesia. So Meg, what do you think about oras? I'm going to go with what Hal said.

Okay. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not a woo person, but if you're a woo person, I want you to feel supported by me. Well, because they talk about these unusual oras of things in your home or just around, I guess. It's a really beautiful piece of writing that part. remembering sticking out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty neat. So we are all generally pretty questionable about

oras. However, what do we think about dinosaurs? True or false? True. No flat earthers? Do you want to ask what I think about science? I think that's what you're really asking. What do I think about science? I'm for it. You're for it.

Plus. Check plus. Yeah. I'm all about that prehistory. Cool. So none of us believe that dinosaur bones are just put in the earth to trick us. What about you mention it? I wanted it to be quiet then. I wanted quiet for a second. Let that sink in.

So everybody's like, no. I feel like people, I feel like there are people, and not everybody who would be flat earthers. I think we don't know. And my answer is like, you don't know. there are a lot of people who have known for a very long time. They know you don't have to know, I guess. You don't want to know. Why do you refuse to know?

Why not just know? And then there's that, yeah, the concept of the dinosaur bones being hidden in the earth to trick us. I'm like, it's not about you, friend. Like, you've got to be some serious, selfish, like, object permanence, confused kind of person to think that it is just about you. and tricking you. But that's why I find, like, conspiracy theories and, like, people who think those things so fun, because you're like, wow, you are suspending your disbelief so far, like, so far, to a crazy extent where, like, the logical and not even, like, the easiest explanation for

something, you know, they're like, no, no, no, no way. It's like, okay, so someone just really just dug down in the earth, put those bones there, put all that same earth right on top of it, just to trick you, Gerald G. Bumpkin. Yeah, because it's all about you, Gerald G. Buckkin. It's all about tricking you. As soon as they were done burying those dinosaur buzzer, like, and now we wait. Yeah, it's the longest con. The longest con. It's the 70 million-year-old con. Now I just want to yell Star Trek style, con! That's appropriate.

Whoa, Star Trek jokes. There's no crossover between Nightfell fans and Star Trek fans. Absolutely not. No one would know what I'm talking. Venn diagrams look like headlights. Two separate. Oh, Meg, I thought of you when there was the part about Carlos was like running by and Josie said he smelled like lavender chewing gum because

I thought about me too. Meg loves lavender chewing gum. She likes eating old potpourri, apparently. It's mostly the lavender mint, the violets. It's disgusting. My grandma always had them and they were always in her purse and she always gave one to me and my sister.

My mom had them too. Well, then that's nice. I kind of, I have like a nostalgia for that. I also like the flavor of, also they are are very strong. I think they're like meant for like 1950s husbands who'd come home from work after having one too many at the bar and like have to pretend to be a different person before they came home to their wife and they'd pop one of those in. Because they are strong. It would have to cover up every smell, right? It's such a strong. And the one time I've tried it, I swear to God, it tasted like I was eating old flowers or my grandma's house. Yeah. Well, Stephanie, you,

you know that I like to taste things that are horrible and then make you taste them. Really nasty. Yeah. You love nasty candy and nasty taste. I love nasty candy. We were in Stockholm. We got all this Swedish candy, which is like the taste like ammonia. And I was so excited about it.

I was walking down the street with a bag of candy and I was eating it. And I was like, this tastes horrible. Symphony, try this one. You'd take it and you'd bite it. You're like, we're spitting it out. This is terrible. And we just like kept, we played that on repeat for five blocks while we were walking back to our hotel. Just oh, try this one.

This one really tastes like pee, try it. I really felt like I was being slowly poisoned with this terrible candy. Oh, you were. For sure you were. For sure you were. No question. They're also salty. There's like a brand of candy in Sweden called Salt Scow.

I did not taste the salt at all. All I tasted was a disgusting ammonia taste. And I already don't like black licorice, but when you add other earwax flavors on top of it, you're just going to make it worse, you know? That's my heaven. It really is. Those horrible Swedish candies are my heaven. No offense to Sweden.

The rest of it is lovely. Zero of Sweden. Maybe some offense. Sweden, I love your culture. I enjoy the fish paste. Yeah, the fish paste. The fika. Who doesn't love a fika?

Oh, the fika was so good. What? The fika is their tradition that they have there. We're like around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. They have a coffee and a little snack. And it's called Fika. Oh, I like that. I'm on board.

I was just like, I thought it was attached to the fish, but it's like every day they go out and take fish guts into a bucket, stomp it like it's grapes they're trying to make wine with, and they just stick their heads in there and eat their way out. Like a trough. Yeah. No. That's so insensitive to the Swedish people. You know it's too cold for that. That's true. That's what makes it so hard.

It's frozen. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about the apartment etiquette bit. So I just wrote down, just be considerate. Yes. Yes. So there's lots of important things in there about living in an apartment building, living with another person, living as a citizen of the earth.

Yeah. We're all each other's roommates, right? Yes. On this room called Earth. Well, and as you guys both know, I have an awesome upstairs neighbor that I call Stompy. so I'm very aware of apartment etiquette. Yeah, it definitely feels like one of those things where the writers are something they're really frustrated with. So we'll just put it in there and find like a twist on it.

And I would imagine, having never lived in an apartment in New York, that it is almost impossible to not hear what every neighbor's doing all the time. Yes. Joseph and I would say that our next door neighbors at our first apartment together had a hollering couch where it's the couch that they face just directly at our. our wall so they could just sit down and holler at the wall. And that's just what it sounded like from our apartment. It sounded like there was just four people sitting on a couch screaming at our wall. Joseph called it, oh, they're on their hollering couch. Like, were they, did it sound like, it was directionally, it was all coming from one single section of the home? Well, the apartment was so, our apartments were so small that they probably had in their living room just a sofa and a TV and the TV was mounted on the wall and they would talk and it would

sound like they were shouting at us. This bit kind of has some weird things, and it talks about, where it talks about oozing invisible membranes and strange radiating light. And then it's just like, put the trash in the trash cans. Don't just put the trash in the hallway. Yeah. And then it says, put some clothes on before standing in front of your windows, which is considerate, not something that I have to do unfortunately anymore because I live

surrounded by no one. Yeah, and you want the hawks to see naked. Yeah. Yeah, check it out, Hawks. That's how I charge my aura, is that? I know we're getting close to talking about the weather, but before we get there, the mysterious hooded figure that's been inside the studio all day. And that interview was really fun.

I love that segment. It's my best transition into the weather so far. Yeah, with the statics, and the static just keeps building, and Cedles just keep sounding further and further away. Yeah, I love that. And I don't remember this in the real in real time when I was listening to it. But now, like, when I listened to it, at first, I was like, I was like, oh, shoot. Like, I started checking my connection.

And then he said, don't check your connection. And I was like, oh, good, it's not me. Jeez. But, like, really, you don't get static like that, like, in a streaming thing, right? Right. Yeah. Because I'm like, that's like an old, like, TV thing, right? Yeah, or like tuning and tuning your radio station.

Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just thought that was great. And like I, it actually, the static and stuff, the louder it got, the scarier it made me, like, I felt more scared almost like it was because it was like somehow getting louder to like consume Cecil or something. I was scared. It's been enough time by now that I could say it reminds me of a quiet place, which is real creepy. creepy, creepy moment. So let's get ready to talk to our guest this episode, Night Vale co-writer, Wonderful Human, Jeffrey Kramer. But first, let's discuss the weather.

So this week's weather was closer by The Tiny, and I loved it. I love their voice. And the song, I don't know. It just made me feel like I wanted to, like, dance and be, like, really coquettish somehow. Yeah, it was a really fun piece of music. Like, I liked it. Really good piece of music. Again, you know, we've talked about this, and I'm sure that for the several years that we'll be doing this show, I will still be talking about it, is that it didn't really connect to anything for me. It was just felt like a break, which I'm okay with.

And I liked it. It was a good piece of music. Yeah, it felt like a break without a. I also had that thing, again, in this episode where it's to go from this buzz, buzz, buzz, from the static into this, like, little light piano with strings and this tiny voiced person singing to us. So it's, yeah, that big shift in texture that brings us into the break, which I thought was cool. And yeah, what a fun song. That was our big, deep, in-depth discussion of the weather. So, yeah, we go now.

We like that song. The weather was good weather. It was a good weather. It's a good day. We go down to our discussion with Jeffrey Kraner. Hey, Jeffrey, welcome. Hi, Meg. Hi, Hal.

How's Synth. Hey. Hi. Hello, Daddy. Hello. So, yeah, first of all, Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us. Sure. We have been having so much fun so far talking about the episodes that came out of your mind in 2012.

So what was going on in your world in 2012? What was influencing your mind? Oh, when we were writing, this one would have been probably sometimes. in the spring. Yeah, Gillian and I just bought an apartment at the beginning of 2012 in New York City. So we had just moved to Bay Ridge and we were moving in like March of 2012 of that year. So yeah, we were, I was reading through this script earlier. I was like, oh, I have a comment about contractors in there and how terrible they are and that makes total sense because that's what I would have been coming just off of. was dealing with contractors and the many months it takes to, like, just put up tile in a bathroom. Yeah. This is also just jumping ahead. And also, it feels like it might have influenced the episode Drawbridge a little bit.

Yes. Yeah, I think a lot of that is what I was going through at the time. Definitely. Just the inefficiencies of contracting. But you really like your contractor in Brooklyn, right? I do. I do. For him.

Yeah. Yeah, he's Irish Jeremy Renner. He's super handsome. and he's really nice. He looks like... Does he look like Jeremy Runner? He looks exactly like Jeremy Runner. And he has an Irish accent.

Like, I feel like maybe this is like, Jeremy Renner has a movie about a contractor coming out soon. An Irish contractor. Maybe he's just in character. I don't know. He's just been really method for the past, like, few years. Yeah, I don't know how method Jeremy Renner is, but yeah. Also while doing the Avengers movies.

That's right. And he does really good work. I was really impressed with his work. He just is, I think, fairly... popular and it takes him a long time to get to a job. But once he does it, it's good. I learned a lot doing this podcast. Mostly I'm learning that Jeremy Renner is not Irish. That is the biggest revelation for me. Not that I ever looked at him and tried to figure out, it'd be kind of odd if my thing was, I just try to figure out where people are from.

What's your nationality, dude on the bus? I honestly don't know what nationality Jeremy Renner is. I'm assuming he's American. But that's really weird. I don't know why I would just assume that about people. There's so many like British, I mean, just like British imports in American film that I just don't even realize aren't American. Like the entire cast of Selma, basically. Because they can do our accents better than we can do theirs.

Or like Hugh Lurie, unless they're on the program, Nashville, where they can. cannot do the accents better. I sometimes watch that show and I just scream. They're trying to their southern accents. And I'm just screaming, you're British. You're British. That's like that guy who was Bill in True Blood. He's British, but his southern accent is terrible.

Yeah, it's a bridge too far, I think, sometimes to ask our British actors to go southern. They can... But you know who has... The Tom Brady of Bad American Accents. is Christopher Eccleston from The Leftovers. Did you watch The Leftovers? Yes. No.

He's the fundamentalist brother. Oh. And listen, I say he's the Tom Brady of it of bad accents because he's so amazing. Like, it's hard not to think, wow, I'm watching something really stunning. He has an accent that I've never heard. It is so distinctly American, but I've never heard a human being with this accent before. I was just mesmerized every time he was on screen. It was so good.

I loved it so much. Maybe he's going for something really specific, like a small town in Maine or something. Sure, I hope so. Very specifically regional. Well, speaking of Tom Brady, and for those of you out there who are not aware, Tom Brady is a football player. And speaking of football players, in this episode, we get our football preview. Jeffrey, I'm assuming you wrote that part because it's a sports thing.

Yes. So, you often... are the one who is the sports writer for Welcome to Nightville. Talk about that. Sure. The town I grew up in in Mesquite, Texas, obviously high school football was a really big deal. And the football stadium there was huge. It's like a 10 to 15,000 seat stadium for the Mesquite high schools to play in.

And right at the end of one of the end zones is a giant tower. I don't know specifically how tall it is. But it has to be. it has to be almost 200 feet tall and it's kind of got like an a oops, bump my mic, has like an A shape like Eiffel Tower style. It's enormous

and that is the tower for the community radio station of Mesquite, Texas. It's so huge and so big and basically all that radio station broadcast was like easy listening hits of the 60s and 70s and then on Fridays they ran high school football and then throughout

those like 60s and 70s hits they would have like high school students that were like radio students come on and they would give community calendars. And that was basically it. And there was a ton of high school football updates. So it just seems like if you're going to have a community radio station, like sports is going to be a big part of it. I know Nightvale is probably not in Texas. But yeah, it feels like, I don't know, that was just a big part of me growing up that you can't really have a radio station without having sports news. But it does seem like in Nightvale when they do have a lot of.

lot of school or town pride because, you know, there's always that adversarial sort of relationship with Desert Bluffs and, you know, them winning the football game and stuff like that. And so, I mean, it is a desert community. It could be somewhere near Texas. Who knows, right? Who even knows? Nobody does. Not me. Yeah. And though if you look at the design for the Nightvelle logo, that has a very West Texas vibe with the water tower and the, it looks like, I think even And Rob Wilson, who designed the logo, said that it was inspired by West Texas. He sent us when we did the first novel, the Welcome to Nightville novel for the cover design, he sent over basically, I forget the term he used, but it was like a portfolio of, like,

images that he used as inspiration for the color palette and the graphic design of the logo. And we got to see that. And what was amazing is he has a photo in that of like a purply sunset and like a, phone tower and a water, like a phone pole and a water tower and a little house. And it's just the logo is what it is. And it's like this photo. And it's so amazing. And it says Rawls on the R-A-W-L-S on the water tower, which is the town in West Texas and the panhandle that Rob Wilson grew up in. So it's really amazing to kind of see that that, yeah, the logo literally is West Texas. That's phenomenal. So in this episode, we do talk about the PTA meetings.

Have you ever been to a PTA meeting before? I have. I remember, yeah, like not as a parent as like a student. Obviously. Yeah. For your cat, Simone. I just sometimes just like as a spectator's sport, I go to like the local high school here in town. And I just go to their PTA meetings just to offer my two cents, what I think.

As a taxpayer. Yeah. As a, just as a fan, really. Yeah. You're paying so those kids aren't dumb. You should at least go see where your money goes, right? Yeah. I have a question for you, Jeffrey.

At this point, you're writing the fourth episode of the show. And when you're creating these characters of this, the sports world of Night Vale, and as maybe the only other sports fan involved in the show, I was saying before that you and I will, if we're both at a show on tour, we'll find a place to sit and talk. about sports for a couple of hours is like a release valve. But at this point, do you, how much thought are you giving to the overall sports world? Or is it just, here's something I'm going to throw in. I don't know whether it's going to come back or not. I don't know if there's a grand design for the sports community of Nightvale. Yeah, I just kind of, I think it just initially started

as I want to put sports in here because I think it'd be fun. But I definitely, once I started writing about the quarterback Michael Sandero. I felt like Joseph and I hadn't talked about it to this point yet because we hadn't even put an episode out when we were writing the first five or six of these. But the only thing we had really said was is that we can do whatever we want with the show as long as there's strict continuity. And we both took that to mean as in like things have consequences and people age and life moves forward.

And even if like that life is weird and nonsensical at times. So this idea that you could have like a job. junior quarterback, my thought was it'll be fun next year because I'll get to go into a senior year and talk about that. There's also a thing too where like, you can tell if I wrote a sports thing or if Joseph wrote a sports thing because I always think very carefully, what month is this episode coming out? And so, I'm like, okay, well, you can, in the fall, you can, in the fall, you can have, you know, you can have episodes with, with football or whatever. So this one's a Yeah, not in the spring. You can't have like a February like, oh, there was a big football game last night.

You're like, no fool. That's baseball. That's basketball. Yeah. That's not entirely true, though, because these early episodes, I had no idea when they're coming out. So I think this one came out in like the middle of the summer. But what is our fall preview? Oh, yeah. Oh, that's true. Yeah. But yeah, that was it. I don't know. It just seemed fun to be able to follow this football team, like a normal football team, even if their quarterback has like two heads. Yeah. So other things about this episode. There's the introduction of throat spiders.

Wrote that, yep. Tell us about your relationship with spiders, Jeffrey. Oh, I hate them. No, no, no, I take that back. I like spiders. Spiders are cool. We're cool. I just don't want to see them.

It's weird because I actually am less afraid of actual spiders than I am of photos of spiders. Like if somebody sends me a photo of a spider, like I'll lose my mind. Like, I just, I'm so terrified of that. Joseph wrote a tweet recently on the Nightville account, I think, and it was, I can't remember the term now, and I don't even want to Google it, but it's basically the term for, like, all that fang shit in the spider's face. And I was like, what is that term? And I started typing it into the Chrome search bar. And then I immediately saw the definition pop down. I was like, oh, thank you, Chrome for just giving me the verbal definition.

I was like, oh, Control Q, slam laptop shut. and I threw it out the window. Yeah, I better just to burn that. Now you're just going to get ads for spiders for the next six months. They're just going to filter through your face. You may also like a tarantial on your face while you sleep. Oh, no, I left my Facebook open while we're doing this. I saw that video of the spider that they trained to jump, like a hairy spider jumping.

Why? Why did you do that? Because at a certain point, science has to be stopped just from going in the certain directions. I'm super pro-silence, but that is, come on. You guys, that's just Satanism. Yeah. Yeah, no. Yeah, they shouldn't be allowed to do that.

Like, I feel like we should probably have some regulations on science. Yeah. That's just like you shouldn't have fast zombies. I truly believe that. Can we train them to crush themselves under a shoe? Can we do that? Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah, so throat spiders sounded like the single most horrifying thing ever.

Yeah. as to the throat too. I feel like elbow spiders, not as scary. No. Spiders, terrifying. Yeah, because you can keep an eye on elbow spiders. You know what they're doing, the throat spiders. Also, just the idea of, like, how hard it would be to date somebody if you had throat spiders. Because I just imagine they just, like, come out of your mouth at any point in time and just go all over your face. Oh, no. They run some errands up in your hair, and then they go back. I have no idea.

I always, I've always, that imagery to me always meant like a sack of like spider eggs within your throat and it busted open and then all the spiders came out. So just internally scream about that for a second. Or scream out loud. Whatever's your fancy. Depends on where you're listening to this show. Or it's like the guy who has like a pet tarantula and he's like, look in the trick I talk. bottom and then they like put the tarantula in their mouth and close their mouth and they open the mouth and out comes the spider.

Wait. Why though? I have a headache now. Well, I'll tell you where I saw it because I think I might own, well, I have this tape. I mean, gather around children. Back in the day before the internet, there was tape trading where editors would take excise footage and build compilation tapes and then trade them. back and forth. So I came into possession through my friend Nathan of a collection of rejected

America's Funniest Home Video submissions. And I'm pretty sure one of them is somebody like, look at me, swallow my pret tarantula. Here comes $10,000. Open up the vaults and just dump the cash in for me. Somebody thought that was going to be like that Bob Sagitt was going to narrate that. that just sounds like you're going to like for sure at least get one of those films where somebody gets killed in it. Oh, for sure. You know, what are those called? Snuff. Snuff.

Unintentional snuff film. If you swallow a tarantula, that is a snuff film. Those things are filled with, they're venomous. They're venomous creatures. Are they poisonous? Do they have poison? Yes. Because I know some.

Oh. You can milk them. Oh. I wouldn't know. I don't spend that much time. I'm just like, oh, big fuck off spice. No, thank you. I'll stay away from that.

That's literally what I spent most of Australia doing, avoiding giant spiders. And you came back alive and sound. Did you see big spiders when you're in Australia something? I saw one when I was in a park. I was like standing there looking around. It was, oh my God. Legs crossed on a bench. Very much like that a la beetle juice where that cockroach is like sitting like just like flicking its leg.

Yeah, it was just like that. It was disgusting, and I took a, like, close-up video of it. It's somewhere in my Instagram story, I'm sure. It was horrifying. And I ran away. I was like, enough nature for me. It's terrible. So, yeah.

Jeffrey, did you do a re-listen on this episode to prepare for this show? This is so stupid. No, I did a reread of the episode. I don't know why I did the harder thing. I think I do both. So, yeah, one or the other, when you were going back and taking a look at it, was there anything that popped out to you that really struck you as creating some sort of emotion for you? I mean, Dr. Dukkin tried to define your experience there. Since anything happened to you while you read it, tell us.

I had this thing where, and I can't remember if, do we know what episode Steve Carlsberg first appeared in? It wasn't this one. It's six. Five or six? It's in my notes. Hang on. It's six. Oh, it is sixth.

It's after this one though, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's two after this one. So I had this, I had this thought recently, partially because we had a gag about this in the most recent touring live show All Hail, which is the reference to Susan Wilman, who basically I feel like Cecil also hates Susan Wilman. And then Diane Creighton hates Susan Wilman. Like Susan Wilman seems like she totally sucks. And what's funny is that like Cecil hates Steve Carlsberg, but as we like learn over time, it's like a much more deep-seated personal familial thing that he's having, that Cecil himself is trying to grapple with his own personal issues.

And he's just laying it all on Steve. And then so now we're sort of like as, you know, spoiler alert for people who further along, but his relationship to Steve Carlsberg kind of changes and grows. But I feel like Susan Willman is still in that state of like, oh my, I fucking hate her. And it's all the way back in episode four in 2012 and in 2018, Cecil is still like, get it together, Susan. Now more the hatred can focus on her. It can get more intense. That's right. Thank God.

Well, she like fat shamed Diane's son. She sounds like kind of a piece of shit. Oh, right. Yeah. made me hate her. Yeah. So, yeah, I am glad that there is that continuity. Doing this relisten, we have found a lot of things in just these first couple episodes

that are in the show right now that are like coming, coming to a big head. Just like little tiny pieces that have been scattered in the first couple episodes have played huge plot points now in the show. And then, you know, for over the past six years of the show, things kind of sneak back up. And you don't necessarily realize that they were. there from the beginning. I like that. It seems very intentional. Like we're super geniuses that had it planned all along.

That's my favorite thing. Yeah, I mean, I figured when you guys wrote episode one and two and three and four, you were really like, well, this arc is 400 episodes. Yeah. Yeah, I made a big thing. I'm like, Joseph, if I don't bring up Joel Eisenberg in episode four, it's going to delay the arc we have in episodes 98 through 115. I'm going to have to redo the whole 500 episodes.

episode outline that we drafted. Wouldn't that be great? For our first 25 years. For the first 25 years of Welcome to Tonight, Phil. Yeah. Wouldn't that be great? It's a lot of words. It's a lot of words.

It's a lot of words so far. The last three words of episode 500 are end volume one. Please let that be true. Please let me get to episode 500. That would be amazing. Right. Yeah. Keep drinking water.

getting those vitamins. Oh, water. Oh, start drinking water. Start drinking water. Apparently, according to Joseph went to the doctor today for his physical, and the doctor was like, you know, the biggest key to longevity is stress management, and Joseph was like, oh, well. So I guess that's our health tip is stress management.

Sure. Great. That sounds easy. If you can find a way to have stress management that somehow doesn't also deter. future longevity. It's like, oh, yeah, I managed to stress great. I smoke a pack a day. Or like, I managed stress great. You know, I'd

do as much cocaine as I can get my hands on. So, this is hypothetical audience. I don't do drugs. I do. I do hugs. Wow. Hugs and stuff. Sure. Yeah. But yeah, I guess that's the thing with stress management.

It's like, it's going to kill you if you don't, but you got to find a way to do it that doesn't also kill you. And so you can write 500 episodes of welcome tonight. Great. I will need a lot of cocaine to do that. You'll get it done in like two weeks. Just one quick bender.

Perfect. Yeah, I'm sure the product will be great. Yeah, nothing relieves stress more than having to constantly write to a deadline. That's just, that is floating down a lazy river on an inner tube while you're getting a massage. Yeah. Oh, nothing brings on the amazing dreams. Like having several things on deadline at once. You now have multiple shows.

Let's do that plug. Let's do that plug. Yeah. No, I'm working on, we're about a little over halfway done with writing season three of Within the Wires, which is the show I co-write with Janina Matheson. And yeah, I'm excited. It's going to be a lot of fun.

It's going to be, yeah, I told each season we have a completely different. narrator that tells stories that on some type of pre-recorded audio. So season one was relaxation tapes that sort of tell the story of an escape from a medical prison. And season two was sort of a mystery of a missing person told over the course of a decade from museum audio guides. So, yeah, so we're working on season three now. And it's fun. Yay. Yeah, it's definitely fun to listen to.

Awesome. Yeah, I've enjoyed both seasons. And I like people like it. After listening to season one, it's like, well, what's next? And then season two is just like a totally different situation. And that's really cool. It is awesome. It was also fun because we worked with like a super professional actor who lives in New Zealand, which was great.

Because Rima Tawiyata, who's the actor, is awesome. She's so good. You should see Hunt for the Wilder people if you have not. It's an amazing movie. It was great. So good. But she is, yeah, she's like Uber professional. And so it was really.

But we, you know, we live literally like 12 hours time zone, 12 time zones away from each other. So, like, communication was always strange. And then she would record this stuff. And it was very funny because, like, in season one, Janina co-wrote it and then recorded all of it. So any, like, weird typos we had. And this is like at Nightvale, too, like, if we have weird typos, Cecil, he'll just figure it out. And if he can't, he'll just email and do something. But Rima would read through this stuff.

And it was really amazing. she would get to something where we'd be like missing an Anne or a the or something and she'd stumble over it and she'd just start laughing and she'd be like, what the fuck is this supposed to mean? And it was amazing. This is so great to listen to all of that. People were like, do you have bloopers? I'm like, no, when you record by yourself, you don't have bloopers. And I'm like, oh, I just had a whole season full of them.

They were amazing. So, yeah. So cool, cool, cool. Is there anything that you would like to leave us with regarding this episode or regarding the early episodes of Welcome to Nightfall, Jeffer? One of the things that I remembered about this episode, this was pretty early on when we were starting to get an audience to this. And a lot of people would start, they would get on Tumblr or Twitter and start listening and then like live blogging it or live tweeting. They're listening. And anyway, somebody tweeted at me one evening.

And this is kind of, I just started Nightville and I love it. And I was like, and I replied, awesome. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks so much. And then she messaged back like later that day, like later. like later in the evening on Twitter and she was like, I love your show,

but Tyrannadons are not dinosaurs. And I'm like, just keep listening to the episode. She's like, but they're not dinosaurs. And I'm like, just listen to the episode. And then she never wrote me back. I'm like, I hope you finish the episode. No, that's where we lost her.

Spoiler alert. We corrected it. Anyways, that was all. I just remembered that argument. I was like, I love your show. later like I'll never listen again. Tranadons are not dinosaurs.

That's so funny. It's amazing. I love fans. They're the best. Right. It's like, how about listen to the whole thing before? Oh, no, you just want to listen to the first like six sentences? Great. Cool. Thanks, bro. So that's the lesson as always is I love fans and I love Twitter.

That's, I mean, that's really why you started. making Nightville is so that you could interact with fans and Twitter more. Yeah. Well, we started making Nightbill because it was something fun to do. I had no idea anybody would listen to it. Honestly, I really didn't. But I'm glad that people showed up. I say that and I don't really mean that sarcastically.

Like, even that interaction with the Tyrannidon person, like, I really love that. It makes me really excited that, like, somebody I don't know cares that much about something we wrote is really exciting. Like that's a crazy thing I have Meg, you and I have done theater for fewer than 15 people in a room before And that's, it's disheartening When you look out and you just see a bunch of blank faces

And most of them are people that you know personally That you had all of your friends fill the house And then you look out and you're like, wow, this is really hard And then when you do a podcast, it's really amazing That suddenly you just get a bunch of people you don't know Suddenly like, I care so much about this It's really fucking cool It is, it is really cool

It's really cool to have people have some buy-in into what we're working on. Yeah, agreed. Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us on Good Morning Nightbale. We really appreciate having you with us. What a delight. It was so nice to see you all again, and I hope to see you again very soon. Likewise. Yay.

Thanks, Dad. Thank you to everybody who has been listening and sending us emails and calls. We really appreciate it. Thank you for joining. I hope you're re-listening with us. and joining us on this journey. Next week is the shape in Grove Park. And we will hear from more of you about your theories.

We'll answer some of your questions. And we'll comment on some of your comments. So we want to hear from you. Get in touch with us. For Symphony and Meg, I'm Hal Lovlin saying, Good Morning Night Vale. Good Morning Night Vale is a Nightvale presents production. It is hosted by Symphony Sanders, Hal Lublin, and Meg Bashwinner.

It is edited by Grant Stort. It is mixed by Vincent Cashione. It is produced by Meg Bashwinner. Theme music by Disparition. Special thanks to our guest this week, Jeffrey Craneer. Leave us a voicemail at 929-277-2050. Or email us at info at good morning nightfail.com to share your theories and ask questions or to tell us which host you would want to be in a buddy cop story with.

For more information on this show, go to good morning nightvail.com and follow us on Facebook and Twitter at Nightvale chat. Special thanks to Christy Gressman, Jeffrey Kraner, Joseph Fink, and Adam Cecil. Today's adverb, literally, as in I literally have used the word literally so many times when I meant figuratively that the word has lost all meaning. And my life has lost all meaning. And meaning has lost all meaning. There is nothing left for us here. Run. for tuning in to the summer of Nightvale Presents. We were so happy to share some of the amazing art that's happening on our network.

Check out Nightvale Presents.com to learn more about all of our shows and to sign up for our newsletter where you can learn about our upcoming projects. Welcome to Nightvale is back with regular episodes on August 1st. I'll see you then. I mean, I won't see you. It's figurative, but you, I think you got it. I'm sure I didn't need to explain. I tend to over-explain things.

I'm not only sure people. Hi, we're Meg Bashwinner. And Joseph Fink. Of welcome to Night Vale. And on our new show, The Best Worst, we explore the Golden Age of Television. To do that, we're watching the IMDB viewer-rated best and worst episodes of classic TV shows.

The episode of Star Trek, where Beverly Crusher has sex with a ghost, the episode of The X-Files, where Skelly gets attacked by a vicious housecat. And also, the really good episodes, too. What can we learn from the best and worst of great television? Like, for example, is it really a bad episode or do people just hate women? The best worst.

Available wherever you get your podcasts.