Drew'll Do It!

This episode has truly gone through the ringer before getting to you. From me figuring which of the (surprisingly numerous) specific 17 Agains to watch, quarantine and COVID, and then my audio becoming possessed. But with all of that behind us, I am so happy to release this episode of "Good Taste", where Liz & I talk about a film we feel never got the discussion that it deserved. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Hey there, everyone! This one took a while; going through a depressive episode can do that to you. Fortunately this one also serves to remind me of the good things in my life, namely great friends and thought-provoking conversation. Hot off of what can only be described as a tear through One Piece, this week Kenny posed a discussion revolving around storytelling, characters, and media. Some spoilers for One Piece, Game of Thrones, and some various other shows & movies.

Paul and I have been friends and, I think, positive creative influences on one another for several years at this point. He & I met, as many comedy partners do, at a Best Buy. His desire to get into stand-up comedy got me to try it out for myself, and I then reciprocated this with inviting him into the improv troupe I was performing with at the time. Since then, Paul and I regularly keep in contact with our own creative pursuits - having both signed up for improv classes and founded our own improv troupes. If I were a better word-sayer I'd have more to say on this and probably tie it up real nicely with some kind of moral about how support and determination can lead to success in creative pursuits, but that's dumb. Paul is my friend and we're both here trying our best to do this comedy thing the best that we know how, and it's a real good time.

This episode was a great one. Paul and I really worked over how to take the initial idea of how music documentaries work and turn it into it's own improv structure, and I think we landed somewhere really fun. In my opinion, anyone looking for a new way to approach improv as a form would do really well to look at it through the lens of trying to do something that you enjoy in a scripted/constructed sense (plays/movies/documentaries, etc) and seeing if you could figure out how to mechanically recreate something like that on the fly. "This is Gonna Be Big" is our attempt at that for a music documentary/biopic, with our first episode being for the music video/short film that accompanied Michael Jackson's "Bad", and I really hope you enjoy it!

I caught up with Paige from the first episode ever of Drew'll Do It: Pretty Catchy. With this first in what I hope will be a series of interviews with previous guests, Paige and I discuss the behind the scenes elements & process that went it to her episode, from the original pitch to now.

Alexis is someone I wish I got to perform with more often. I remember being pleasantly surprised when he pitched me a history-focused show; as a history major myself (from what college I did attend) it's a broad subject that I really enjoy discussing, but always find there to be no real opportunities to do so.  

The show's namesake, 'Great Man Theory', isn't a historical view that I personally find to hold much water, but I hope that it served as a strong basis to inform and entertain you, while also informing you and helping you to look at historical figures in a new light. 

As with every episode, please let us know what you thought about this one! Any changes you'd like to see to it? Would you like to see it again? Got your own show idea? Let us know! 

Check us out at @drewwillpodcast on Twitter, @drewwillpod on Instagram and Facebook, or by emailing us at [email protected].

Also be sure to check out Alexis's friend Remalis on Twitch for high level Mario Kaizo gameplay, and tell them we sent ya! https://www.twitch.tv/remalis

So the description of this one is going to be short, because I'm trying to get it out before I get too self-conscious and delete it. This episode is a bit meandering, but if any of the following things interest you, then maybe you'll like it:

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. See you next week.

In "Places We Didn't Go", Kayla & I go over various posts on the Craigslist Missed Connections board, trying to gleam enough information from them to determine if we think the poster and the subject of the post really ever had a chance.

This episode really came together in a weird way.  Originally, we were going to do a show with the same title just sorta....idly talking about various places we hadn't gone to together. After sitting on the title for a bit, it struck me as sort of poetic. The idea of two people having met at some point in their lives imagining all the different places that their lives hadn't taken them. I'd had a thought in a similar vein during one of my other creative pursuits.

Separate from my time podcasting, I'm also an improv performer & director. In an effort to create a new game for my troupe to play (and also help transition the new players into more long-form performing), I had come up with a game I called 'Missed Connections'; based on the well-known Craigslist message board. The improv game would consist of us reading a post made on the Missed Connections board (generally found from either 'best-of' listicles online or by an audience suggestion of a US city and then the host having to scrub through the various horny posts to find something more conducive to scene work) which the actors would then recreate with as many details as possible, finishing with an invented reasoning for why the two didn't simply exchange phone numbers/contact information. I mean, the internet and phones exist, people.

At this point I want to admit to feeling a bit conflicted about the source material here. Behind each of the posts that inspire the scenes I've done on stage or what we created in this podcast is, at least I assume, a real person. Not counting the purposefully...let's say particularly odd posts that seem written for the sole purpose of landing on a BuzzFeed page. It's not my goal here to make light of that, or more specifically those real people genuinely trying to find someone, but in fact use that as a jumping-off point to self-reflect on my audience's and my own interactions with strangers in a space where we can say the wrong thing and not beat ourselves up over it. At the end of the day the main difference between the people posting here and anyone else is just whether or not you post on the Craigslist Missed Connections board.

With Places We Didn't Go my hope is that Kayla and I were able to present you with a light hearted take on these posts, and maybe help you in your own missed connections moments realize that not all things were meant to be, being physically attracted to someone doesn't mean they're your sole mate, and that if you bought a 34-pack of value condoms and a loaf of whole grain bread, you should DM me.

This week's episode was pitched to me by a long time friend of mine, Kevin. It's really funny to me how this show idea was presented to me, since it was a show about pitches that had to be pitched to me. I think shows that rely on audience submissions are tricky in this format; it's difficult to cash in on that "ooh, they said my thing on the show" feeling that drives submission-based shows when you're doing a literal pilot. Luckily for this show, Kevin & I have a lot of creative history together, and we're able to approach things with a sort of...practical silliness that I think gives our projects this fun but grounded feeling to them.

Paige pitched this episode as a casual discussion about how people interact with music. In this episode we discuss whether I was raised in a Beatles house or a Beach Boys house (spoiler alert: it was neither), why I quit my job at Cold Stone Creamery, and how we decide what music we play for other people.