I Like To Watch | Enter the Mollusk (2019)
From 2012 to 2017, I was the regular host of The Moth Chicago StorySlam. At the beginning, it was fun and felt like being part of a Grand Movement. The idea of people coming up on a stage and sharing stories was egalitarian, empowering, and entertaining.
As the Chicago storytelling scene began to take hold and the word community started being thrown in with the regular lexicon to describe the scene, the intros that spoke of the essential importance and moral clarity of inviting strangers to share their stories began to feel more like rhetoric. The competitive elements began to shape this community into a social experiment that resembled high school.
I’d been there before. The improv scene in the 1990s felt the same way. As more and more people joined in, took classes, and suddenly money was involved, the camaraderie of getting up onstage and making people laugh at random and goofy make-em-ups got catty. Rivalries cropped up. More and more improvisers were doing it to become famous (or at least important in the tiny slice of people comprising the scene) and the fight for prominence got ugly. Petty. Cynical.
There was a genuine sense, as the more prominent institutions thrived, that either you join them or die. A perpetual and intentional outsider, a non-follower, a gadfly, I didn’t want to see either as an option.
The theater company I founded back in 1992, WNEP, started as an improv and sketch comedy company. As the taint of high school politics began infecting everything related to that experience, we moved to writing original works, and when we did produce an improv show, it was decidedly outside of the norm of comedy. Eventually, we all got busy with lives and jobs and babies, scandals and divorces, and the company dissolved after almost twenty years of perching off to the side artistically.
By 2014, the storytelling dynasties were beginning to form and, as the host of the Big Kahuna in Chicago, I was seen as a figurehead. I saw the Lydia Lucios of the scene gain status by winning the competition and then turning on it to promote herself above the rest. I saw the Nestor Gomezs codify a specific narrative in order to consistently win to build credibility and notoriety. More and more stories became about cancer, rape, cancer scares, racism, relatives with cancer, depression, pet cancer, grief, and victimhood than anything else because those stories won. Oh, also cancer.
By 2015, at the beginnings of The Great Awokening of the ten percent or so of the Left (which included most of the Chicago Arts community), lines were being drawn. The stories had to be about marginalization and therapy by telling or they were considered fluff. The Moth went in a few short years from mostly funny anecdotes to mostly a parade of people harmed by life exposing their pain.
By 2017, the Woke and Marginalized had taken over and it was time for me to go. When Lydia and her tiny horde decided to label me as a racist misogynist abuser for unfriending her on Facebook and The Moth organization wanted me to take a break from hosting until all the noise died down, I refused. I walked away.
This was my experience from the top of that particular heap.
When I watched Vincent Truman and David Himmel’s Enter the Mollusk, I laughed… hard. It’s both very funny and very on point as all good parody should be. The characters are all very recognizable for someone with my personal connection and yet are universal to someone unfamiliar. Sending up all the pretense and pompous posturing of the entire Chicago storytelling community with a laser-like focus on The Moth in specific.
When I first met Peter Kremidas, who plays Annal LeKaj, and cast him as Quack Quack Quimby in The Nairobi Project, I knew he was one of the funniest motherfuckers in Chicago. His performance in Enter the Mollusk underscores that with a double dose of fall down funny. You don’t expect a lot of comic subtly in a performance of a broad spoof but Kremidas brings it in every breath, every stammer, every glance of his eyes.
The film is only thirty-minutes long but manages to fully skewer all of it and looks far better than the micro-budget would allow. I’ll admit it made me laugh, made me miss that specific community a bit, and absolutely made me happy to no longer be in Chicago all at the same time.
I’m pretty sure most of the people most aggressively mocked will not head over to Amazon Prime and watch this.
They should.
