Subscribe in a reader

Thursday, March 11, 2010

After the End

I've taken down the Next in the Series website and am packing in the whole notion of trying to pursue audio theater podcasting. I participated in a thread on an agent's blog a couple of years ago in which he asked the question, "How long do you go on before you give up?" Apparently, in my case, it takes a while.

I first became interested in audio theater when I was 15 or so. I had seen Jack Benny on "The Dinah Shore Show" reminiscing about Fred Allen and had then stumbled across a copy of Fred's first book, Treadmill to Oblivion, in the library in downtown Pawtucket, Rhode Island. As a result of reading the excerpts from the scripts of his various radio shows, I took a flyer at writing an audio sketch. It wasn't any good, but it was a start.

My friend Arthur got me hooked on The Firesign Theatre a few years later, and he and I ended up putting together a script about a guy who ran a fleabag in Maine. We gave him, as a pet, a lobster who had one peg leg. You can do those kinds of things with audio. I think I still have the script somewhere, but truly, nothing ever became of it.

A few years later, a friend and an acquaintance started playing around with recording some things on a four-track recorder the acquaintance had come into possession of. I was asked to join in, and we came to form an audio comedy team. We went for a two-or-so-year-long bumpy ride that had a couple of triumphs, an assortment of good times, various frustrations and disagreements, and a couple of disasters. After the group broke up, I, quite innocently and quite wrongly, tried to get everyone to make peace and reform. I saw potential in that grouping and that material. They did not. And, in retrospect, when one member of a trio consistently tries to undercut an enterprise, that enterprise has no future. In my initial enthusiasm, I think that I pushed someone to join in when he didn't want to, so he acted out in all sorts of, essentially, childish ways. I was wrong to push him and to assume that his idea of success was similar to mine.

Eight or so years ago, feeling the way a cartoon character looks after having tried to smoke a stick of dynamite, I decided to proceed on my own. Having gotten permission from my former writing partner (not the guy I had pushed when we were a trio) to use some of our old material, I plunged forward with adapting some things, rewriting others, and creating new scripts from scratch. Meanwhile, I tried to pitch the show to public radio and to satellite radio with no success. Eventually, I saw that it might work best, in the long run, as a podcast.

In the end, I found that I would be unable to put together a program of the quality that I wanted without money. I was wearing too many hats, trying to do too much myself, and not doing anything as well as I ought to have. I was also, at the same time, discovering my abilities as a novelist and short story writer and felt that I would be better served, overall, if I invested 100% of myself in those endeavors than to slow myself down with continued attention to something that it was unlikely I would ever pull off.

But that's life.

At the end of the day, I can be satisfied that I gave it a decent shot and that it just wasn't in the cards. Maybe someday I will be in a position to do some radio show or podcast, but until that day materializes, I will just hang up my spurs.

How long do you go on before you give up? Until you've run dry.

THE END