Director's Notes – Episode 119 (Patreon)

I am a fan of outtakes, first drafts and ideas that were floated but went nowhere (I gasp when thinking of Billy Wilder's 1961 plan to direct “At the UN” starring the Marx Brothers).  But in listening to the Night Vale eGemony episodes I recently helped write, they sound so seamless to me that I don't want to suggest anything other than that they dropped from the sky, fully formed, like Roc hatchlings. In fact, that's exactly what happened, but please do not discuss this in front of the Roc hatchlings, as they are sensitive and vindictive. Roc hatchlings are the tech billionaires of cryptozoology.  

Unexpectedly, these episodes turned out to be a salute to my father. He used to make me read Playboy when I was a child. Wait. I mean sort of. He had a subscription and when I was about nine, he caught me nosing around in one issue. He said that was fine as long as I read it cover to cover. He quizzed me. Playboys in 1973 were cultural documents containing much that was confounding about that era. For instance: those Canadian Club advertisements. They really did provide in their Madison Avenue corporate way a sense of mystery and adventure. Part of me wanted to go find one of the hidden cases and the rest of me knew the mere smell of alcohol on an adult's breath made me gag. In other words, it was the journey and the puzzle itself that caught me, not the usefulness of the treasure I might find, and if we're not careful that could lead dangerously to this being a metaphor about the writing life, but let's just pretend I did that and we all nodded and then moved onto this:

My father loved collecting unusual things because he liked the stories behind them. He also loved radio comedy, and technology, and, to some extent, me, oh, and Playboy, but mostly he loved money, by his own admission. So he made a bunch of it, enough so that when I was a kid our Sunday afternoons were about listening to comedy albums on his state of the art stereo – Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, George Carlin (live at the Playboy club, when he was still doing clean material), Stan Freberg, even a few bootleg Friars Club roasts. Also, he had recorded hours of Bob and Ray off the radio, and sometimes we listened to his reel-to-reel recordings for hours. They later disintegrated, and apparently his tapes were the only record of those late 1950s programs, so they're now lost.  

When we weren't listening to comedy, we were collecting. What did we collect together? Money. We had a pretty good collection of American numismatic oddities, but could never quite afford some of the flashier ones (Please, don't get me started about the 1955 Lincoln double die). In my early 20s I had to sell that stuff to pay for school and rent, which means that of the childhood pastimes I shared with dad, the peak comedy and peak coins are gone.

Wikipedia will present the humdrum history of how the Canadian Club contest actually worked (don't look – did you look? Are you disappointed? As a certain episode told you, that's a pretty real feeling, isn't it?) but nothing will take away the childlike wonder I felt as a, uh, child, reading Playboy for the details. The interviews and the architectural essays and whatever James Baldwin, Jean Shepherd and Truman Capote had to say. I remember my mother pointing at one of the photos of a naked woman and saying “You know she's not real, right?” I did. I was looking not for the prurient stuff but for the wider puzzle of what it meant to be an adult. When I was nine and dad 42, we were the sort of men who read Playboy for the mysteries.  

– Glen David Gold
December 1, 2017