#119. People Whose Partners Take Bad Pictures and You

17 February 2025 at 14:45

Hi everyone,

Happy(?) Presidents’ Day? Is this supposed to be a happy holiday? And if it is, are we supposed to be happy about presidents this year?

Things (in general) remain bad, but at the same time things (specific) can be pretty nice nice. Maris and I celebrated Valentine’s Day a night late because I was in Buffalo for standup on the 14th. (Maris preferred the restaurant’s normal menu over their Valentine-specific tasting menu, so maybe not being in town for the holiday was simply my way of being a good husband.) We hit a huge relationship milestone on Saturday; we ordered only stuff we wanted to split (non-tapas division). Maris is historically reluctant to go 50/50 on to entrees so this felt like eleven years in, our relationship is still growing. I am not being even a little sarcastic.

Helium Comedy Club in Buffalo was great! I hadn’t been to the club since I opened for Judah Friedlander there in 2014, and I was very happy to return. Thanks to everyone who came out, to Clayton Williams and Katie June for being so funny opening the shows, and to the warm and capable staff!

Katie, me, and, Clayton on stage at Helium Comedy Club. We are framed by a cardboard Kissing Booth and surrounded by the club's excellent staff. — In retrospect this was less sanitary than running a standard merch table. (Kidding! It was just there for photos!)

I’ve been working on building a new hour of jokes (the previous hour I recorded will be coming out soon as a special and an album soon I swear!!!), and I hadn’t performed a full headline set in quite a while. I’m only about halfway (or a little less even?) to having the new hour figured out, so the 50-ish minutes I did was cobbled together and filled in with some old stuff and a little more riffing than I usually do. But I felt immense relief that the new stuff stood up okay alongside the old tried-and-true bits.

I don’t know if people who work in other disciplines feel this way, but I love the generative period when new ideas start to click with audiences, but the wording and structure isn’t quite settled yet. I imagine it’s what it feels like to get a shade of paint mixed just right or to have a specific section of a lesson plan you want to communicate to students. What I love the most is the comfort of a strong set of foundational elements, and the freedom to reconfigure or expand on them in new ways while everything feels fresh and full of potential.

Maybe you’ve heard of the idea of a “heat check” before. If you haven’t, it’s an expression that people use to describe a shot that a basketball player takes when they’re on a roll and went to test the boundaries of how dialed in they are. A heat check could be a shot taken from especially far away, or while off-balance. But the premise is: Things are going well, so let’s see just how well they can go. The crowd can usually feel it too. There’s a tension in the air when a player who is, in the parlance of NBA Jam “on fire” attempts an escalatingly audacious maneuver.

Live comedy at its best has some of that heat check feel. Sometimes it’s about pushing improvisation past a sensible limit. Other times it’s reworking prepared material to bring the crowd farther down whatever path you’ve decided to take them on. Or even just trying something that’s more vulnerable or obscure or bracing than you have before. To me, that’s the most fun part, the experimenting and growing and (very light) risk-taking. I’m very glad to be there for the moment at least!

In other news, the first episode from the Symphony Hall Boston Circle Round recordings is out now! It’s called “The Well of Honor” and I play a hungry donkey. Oh, and I did a little interview about record collecting for my internet pal Michele’s blog! And I recorded an episode of On The Bleachers with Sarah Enni and Zan Romanoff who are both excellent talkers!

TONIGHT! I’m co-hosting Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall in Brooklyn!
Plus on the 27th I’m going to be in Philadelphia for Kelsey McKinney’s book launch!
And then also on the 28th I’m taping an episode of the very fun show Abolish Everything at Caveat in Manhattan!

ONE OTHER THING

The group Rabbis for Ceasefire put together a full-page ad in the New York Times in opposition to Donald Trump’s suggestion that all Palestinians should leave Gaza and that the United States should be in charge. I was honored to be asked to sign on to this message (I swear my name is on there) and devastated that this is still something that needs to be said.

rabbis4ceasefire

A post shared by @rabbis4ceasefire

AND ONE LAST OTHER THING

Somewhat relatedly to the above, I’m considering moving my newsletter to another platform for political-ish reasons. This is a little more in the weeds than usual, but: Moving That’s Marvelous somewhere else would probably end up costing a few bucks to maintain an email list of this size. As happy as I’ve been for the newsletter to be free, I would consider adding a paid tier to keep things running.

PEP TALK FOR PEOPLE WHOSE PARTNERS TAKE BAD PICTURES

Photo of a hummus plate that I ate in San Francisco with my friend Alison Leiby before a show at Cobb's Comedy Club. It looks like a happy face, with olives and radishes for eyes and pickled onions for lips. — “No, honey! I think you look great!”

Let me start by saying: I don’t mean people whose partners do not have a natural picture smile. I mean people who are dating or married to someone who is incapable of wielding a camera effectively. Someone who somehow, despite our near-infinite capacity for photo taking and storage, captures you exclusively in moments in which you are wincing or slouching. Someone who freezes you in time while you are making an expression you didn’t even know the muscles in your face could muster.

That is not a failure of love! It is a symptom of an affection that overrides the principles of lighting and composition. It is the result of a heart that feels so deeply it does not care in what direction you are looking or how open your mouth is. One way of showing someone you care is knowing how they think of themselves at their best, and reflecting their image back at them in that way like a gift. Another way is to adore someone so thoroughly that they always look perfect to you. It’s not ideal for the Instagram grid, but it is philosophically beautiful, in my opinion.

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There are lots of memes that imply boyfriends are the worst at taking pictures. But if you want to be real, forget about boyfriends. Let’s talk about parents over sixty-five. They don’t care that you’re backlit or that your shirt is bunched up all weird. They’re just happy you came to visit. And that’s sweet. (No offense to my parents who read this newsletter but rarely take family pictures, which is in itself an act of love as well.)

PEP TALK FOR TWO READERS

I got two pep talk requests that feel very similar in spirit, so I’m going to reply to both!

I feel guilty for barely engaging with the news of the collapse of our nation, but it is so overwhelming that it ruins my life when I do. I know that mutual aid empowers me in these times, but I have limited time and energy right now. I’m scared, I guess.
- Despair Parts
Can we get a pep talk for every person with a shred of decency and empathy still left in this country? Speaking for the millions of Americans feeling hopeless right now.
- Civically Enraged

It’s almost impossible to pick the worst news from the last week or two. Is it that transgender people are being erased from government communications, like a J.K. Rowling fever dream? Or that a bunch of wealthy racists are moonwalking the country backwards towards re-segregation a 100 mph? Or the fact that the people in charge of maintaining the U.S.’s nuclear weapons (which, why do we still have so many of those???) were fired and maybe can’t be re-hired because nobody has their phone numbers? Or that the new head of the department of Health and Human Services has a medieval-era understanding of the human body? Honestly, dealer’s choice!

Every day brings a Dave Matthews Band’s Bus On A Bridge In Chicago-level torrent of feces, in terms of the news. However, unlike bus dumps, there’s some amount of information that we probably should allow to land with a splat on our heads. Certainly we can’t watch the news all day. Even if there were a 24-hour news network that played important and relevant information without taking breaks from accuracy for hours at a time to let bad faith actors make disingenuous arguments, that would be too much news. You wouldn’t get anything else done if you watched it all. On the other end of the spectrum, if you spent one minute a day catching up on the news (skimming twelve headlines and then hitting the streets) and then twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes Doing Things, you probably wouldn’t know enough to be especially helpful, and you’d certainly die of exhaustion within the week. My friend Dan reads a newspaper in the morning and then goes news-free for the rest of the day, which is almost comically healthy and sensible compared to basically everyone else I know.

There might not be a universally perfect ratio of News:Doing Stuff:Not Doing Much At All. But probably by playing with those dials a little bit in your own life, you can find the best combination of Surfing The Internet In Mumbling Horror:Volunteering:Watching Traitors or Listening To A Political Podcast While Imagining Tipping Over a Parked Cybertruck:Making Donations To Mutual Aid Groups:Actually Going To The Gym As Long As You’re Paying For The Membership Anyway.

I don’t know if it’s possible, or useful, to feel Consistently Terrific these days unless you are a historic monster or have a bunch of soap suds where your brain should be. But it’s possible to be doing As Well As You Can, All Things Considered by balancing the humours (tempers, to Severance-heads) of Taking Care Of Yourself, Taking Care of Other People, and Figuring Out What The Hell Is Going On.

I am going to re-post this doc by writer/educator/activist Mariame Kaba that’s full of specific and general places to funnel any efforts and resources that you have. I know I shared it a couple of weeks ago, but it feels, let’s say, still relevant. And 5 Calls is a tool for contacting your representatives that makes things smooth and easy if that is your type of thing! There are lots of ways to feel a little less bad by doing a little more good. (And there are plenty of ways to have a nice hour or two without engaging with the nastiest shower clogs of humanity, but I don’t have to remind you of those I bet.)

I’m not sure how much people even want to read about this stuff (meaning, I guess, the world), and even here, I’m trying to balance what is helpful to people and what is wallowing and what is not doing or saying enough! Thanks for sticking with me as we feel it all out together!

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: PUP - “Hallways”

Okay now THIS song by PUP is still a little harrowing (as they tend to be) but it rocks very much, and the video is so fun and good! Plus, PUP has new album coming out on 5/2 called Who Will Care For the Dogs? (heartbreaking!!!) and I’m so excited to hear it. But also it’s worth a click-through just to see the album art.

Also, The Ophelias have a very good new song. It’s also not exactly cheerful, but it does also sound great and have a great video!