It’s always Now. You’ve heard me say that many times. Here’s further proof.
Today’s Now has me writing Now as each finger hits the desired key in front of me. The subject begins with something that happened when it was Now “yesterday.”
I had sent the above video to Davy Rothbart, a creative soul who is producing a story for a new TV show he’s creating based on his podcast, Found. This particular story features my video called Rent-a-Friend. Rent-a-Friend was made by me in 1986. Amazing. (Yes, it was Now way back in 1988 too. Ha! It’s never not Now. That’s right. Okay, try this out. Try to think of a time in your life when it wasn’t now. What’d you come up with?)
This Substack video post captures a Now that happened in calendar time in the fall of 2013.
The guys from Found Footage Festival (not connected with Davy Rothbart’s Found) were in town doing their fabulous show, sharing oddball VHS videos from the 80s to packed houses of folks, many of whom may not have even been born before 1986. (Yeah, these kinds of funny things can stack up once you start geeking out on this Now concept/reality. I’ll try to stick to the immediate story at hand.)
Perhaps what’s most important here is that this video is something you’re not going to see anywhere else. It documents a moment when I was invited to come up on stage to take a bow and talk a little bit about Rent-a-Friend at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, directly following the screening of an edited version of the video’s highlights. Big thanks to Nick and Joe of the Found Footage Festival for inviting me up.
What stands out for me is the pleasure and fun I had hearing the laughs and ovation. Working in TV, I don’t hear or get to witness the audience as they view my work in real time. Same for the producing of Rent-a-Friend. We shot that in a little northwest suburban sound studio, no audience. Then we released it into the world on VHS tape. Again, I couldn’t be present to the video’s debut in your, or anyone else’s, living room.
But here, in the Music Box Theatre? What a thrill. And get this – it was one of the greatest ovations I’d ever received, from an audience who mostly had never even heard of Wild Chicago. I believe their warm appreciation was truly based on the 4 minutes of video they’d just seen, featuring me, some young-looking guy in his 30s (on the screen from 1986) who’s sitting in an easy chair, talking to them as if I were their very best friend. What a riot.
Meanwhile, a guy in California, right bleedin’ Now, is crafting a story to tell a 2025 audience about me and a video I made nearly 39 years ago. What a gifted term I’ve been given here on this strange and wonderful place we call Earth.
So…I’ve cobbled together some words here to try to tell a bit of this story. But you see it, don’t you? That when it comes right down to it, to what the hell is going on here, there really are no words.
We just do our best. We love and we laugh and we hope to do it another day. Thanks for being here.
Love, Ben
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