The Artist Formerly Known as sweetafton23

This video surfaced a few weeks ago, when various people in Australia alerted me of its presence. It’s from the Australian TV newsmagazine Lateline, excerpted from an extended interview with Stephen Fry.

I’ve been putting off blogging because I feel like the Harvard event is this big elephant in the room, and I felt like it would be in poor taste to chatter about other things without acknowledging it, especially since my Twitter followers and blog readers played a huge part in making it happen. It’s been 9 months since the event, and while I haven’t been carrying Stephen Fry’s baby during that time, my thoughts on the whole experience have finally come to full term. Awww.

On February 16th I got an email from Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University. He said that the bad news was that they didn’t have the funds to fly me to Harvard, but the good news was that if I could get myself out there they could put me up on campus and I could sing my Stephen Fry song to a sold out room of 1,000 people – and also to Stephen Fry. The Harvard Secular Society was presenting him with a lifetime achievement award, and he was going to be there to accept it in person.

It all happened so fast and I packed in such a hurry that I actually forgot to pack a ukulele. So when I went into Seattle the night before my flight to go to Jonathan Coulton’s show, I frantically texted Kristen Shirts that I needed to borrow a ukulele. I met her on her front step and she pointed out the silver Sharpie she conveniently included in the front pocket for when I have Stephen sign it.

It was the most overwhelming two days of my life. I flew from Seattle to Chicago, and from there to Boston, a total of 9.5 hours in the air. I don’t remember much about the chain of flights, but I do remember being angry at the people in Chicago because all of them stood still on the moving sidewalks. I landed at Logan Airport after dark. Greg Epstein had told me how to get to the Red line and into Cambridge, and I huddled awkwardly in the subway with my garment bag between my knees and Kristen’s ukulele on my lap. As soon as I resurfaced from the subway station, I tucked into the first eatery I saw, a Qdoba, and ordered a quesadilla just to warm my numb fingertips.

I checked into Harvard Square on Foursquare. I’m not normally one to use Foursquare, but I’d been on the ground for almost an hour after coming from so far away, and I didn’t feel like I was really there. I wanted something to make me feel like my presence had been marked, like my trip was of consequence. Checking in made me feel like I had planted a very tiny flag.

I walked back and forth in the dark for a while, trying to follow Google directions on my phone to the dorm block I was supposed to be staying in. It was so cold that there was a fine frost all over everything; it concentrated in all the nooks and crannies of the old brick buildings so that it looked almost like flour, except for the way it caught and scattered light. I retraced steps, circled some blocks a few times, eventually choosing a cab ride over the alternative (freezing to death). I met Meredith, an undergrad in the HSS who had volunteered an extra bed in her suite for my use, and I crawled into this bed very quickly. I slung my iPad over the headboard, and set Tom Lehrer’s “Harvard Fight Song” to wake me up in the morning.

The next morning Greg Epstein and I went into the chapel and worked through my staging. I nervously conferred with him about how, specifically, to angle myself.
Do I want to play it to the crowd?—
Well, no, because he’s right there, and it is a song addressed to him—
Well, but then do I make eye contact with him? Do I maintain—
No, that would be awkward. Is that awkward? Is that too forward?—
I mean, I am singing a song about having his babies, so I guess the question of “too forward” isn’t really on point—
Still, I probably shouldn’t ask for “his seed” necessarily, because that’s super rude when he’s standing right there—
Oh my god, he’s going to be standing right there, isn’t he?…

Greg opened up the room that the Harvard Uni Choir meets in, so that I could practice and work out my set.

SMASH CUT TO:
INT – Harvard Memorial Chapel – Night

When I was sent out for my opening set, the crowd seemed unresponsive, and any laughter during my songs was hushed and brief. I interpreted this as them not being amused by my presence, or not understanding my relevance to the event, but my friend Tom explained to me later that they just couldn’t hear my vocals through the lapel mic I’d been outfitted with, and so the reason the room went super quiet whenever I made musical sounds was because everybody was straining to listen. I hope he wasn’t just saying that to make me feel better.

I debated singing Tom Lehrer’s “Harvard Fight Song,” but I was interpreting the crowd’s attentive silence as polite tolerance, and so I figured tongue-in-cheek satirical fight song might be wasting their time. I later asked Meredith if skipping it was the right move; she said, “Oh, it would have been totally fine. You know we’re a school full of nerds when we have an ironic fight song.”

The first time I actually saw him was when he came out to deliver his acceptance speech. He took the lectern to a standing ovation, and myself and the HSS members around said to each other over the din of applause, “Oh my god he’s actually here! That’s actually him!”
The Harvard Humanist YouTube channel has his speech in its entirety, divided into chapters, and you really should set aside the hour and a half and watch/listen to it sometime because it’s really something else.

After his speech, a few members of the Secular Society went onstage one a time with some prepared questions. I was the last in the line of student questions, and as soon as I stood up from the crowd, Mr. Fry knew what was afoot. In the Secular Society’s footage you can hear direct-from-the-board audio of him saying, “Oouh… Molly!”

Even after all this time when I watch or even listen to footage of me singing the actual song, my heart jumps. If it weren’t for the muscle memory of singing it at so many W00tstocks, my racing pulse and shaky hands would have sabotaged the whole thing. Once I started, it just kind of spilled out of me. After Greg adjusted my mic (as you can see in the video), everyone could hear me, and the polite, quiet crowd I opened for burst out with wonderful warmth and noise and energy. Mr. Fry flushed red, and tried to keep eye contact with me from across the stage, frequently breaking to dab his brow or bury his face in his palm. I was glad that he’d heard the song before, because he (I hope) had an idea of where and what all the punchlines were; at times I thought I could see him bracing himself at the appropriate moments.

(My omission of the the phrase “send along your seed” until the last chorus was not really a premeditated choice: it was me not having the nerve to say it at the top of the song, and gaining momentum and confidence by the end.)

When I finished, Stephen stepped back from the podium and walked towards me. I walked towards him, not sure if he was going to hug me, or shake my hand, or give me a stern pat on the head and a No. He said “Thank you so much,” and kissed me on the forehead. I reached out to him as he turned back towards the lectern, and he took my hand. “Obviously, the question is rhetorical,” I said. He laughed and returned to the lectern, and I returned to my seat.

Since then, when I’ve been asked about it, my first response is always “It was amazing— He smells so good!” And it’s not an elaboration: he did smell very nice. And I think it sits so sharply in my memory because Kristen Shirts direct-messaged me on Twitter “You have to tell me what Fry smells like. Just @ me like ‘vanilla and leather and old books’ and I’ll know what you’re talking about.” So when I finished the song and he met me at center stage, I got a light waft of it and took mental note. He smelled like roses and cologne, sweet but masculine.

Afterwards I asked Stephen to sign both Kristen’s ukulele and my iPad. He was in a cloud of event organizers who were arranging to walk him out of the building, and I edged into the circle and said “Stephen, could I bother you to write your name on some of my things?” He said as he turned around, “Not at all—Oh, Molly!” and pecked my forehead again. I explained that the iPad was mine but the ukulele wasn’t, and he obligingly signed and personalized them both.

Afterwards Greg and the event organizers walked Stephen to a post-show mixer, in their offices a short walk off campus. Many of the other students I talked to were geeking out just as much as I was about being there. A great big semicircle, maybe 3 people thick all around, formed around Stephen, and he regaled them with stories about taping A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and Blackadder, and Last Chance to See. They asked him if there were any plans to work with Hugh Laurie in the future, and he said he was based in London and that Hugh was very busy shooting House in LA, and he was happy to see Hugh finding such success.
“He doesn’t have someone singing about carrying his children though,” someone chimed in.
“No,” Stephen said, “I’m very lucky in that regard,” and he raised his glass to me with a nod.

And I’m very lucky too.

Thank you Greg Epstein and the Harvard Secular Society for the most unique and incredible opportunity.
Thank you to Meredith for letting me crash in your dorm suite for a few nights, Hilary & Mr. Hilary for showing me around a bit the day of, and Secret Brother Tom for showing me around a lot the day after (and lending me warmer clothes!)

Thank you everyone who donated or ordered a thing, for investing in the chance of a lifetime and enabling me to physically get there. I feel like there will never be enough that I can do to express my gratitude.

Most of all, thank you Stephen, for being such a good sport and indulging my silly ode.

You’re probably wondering why I was scrambling for a plane ticket to Boston. You’re probably wondering what this top-secret gig of excellence is. Allow me to explain.

On Wednesday I was contacted by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University for a really super opportunity to perform at a unique event. The organizers were cautious to commit to any details immediately because they’ve been planning this event very carefully for months, and my potential inclusion was something very last-minute and had to get the OK from all the different organizing bodies involved. As such, I had to be sort of vague about it in the event that I was excluded.

I got another email from the HCH this morning, and now I can tell you what I’ve been waiting to tell you since Wednesday:

Stephen Fry is being honored by the Harvard Secular Society this Tuesday, and I’m completely ecstatic out of my skull to report that I have been invited to perform my song to him in the course of the event.

_OMIGOD^{OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD}

The event is sold out, unfortunately. However, I’m told that some of it will be filmed and posted online, so I will make a big ruckus when that happens.

I posted the song to my YouTube channel about a week ago, and now these wheels are in motion. The internet is a strange and wonderful place.

tl;dr:
GUYS I’M FLYING TO HARVARD
GUYS I GET TO SING MY SONG TO STEPHEN FRY
GUYS
GUUUUUYS

Last February, I was in a van going up to Vancouver with JoCo and Paul & Storm. We were all getting in the last of our smartphone usage before we went into roaming in Canada. We decided to broadcast on Ustream very quickly before we crossed the border, so Paul alerted Twitter, while Storm drove and Jonathan and I sat in the bucket seats in the back with assorted instruments and boxes of t-shirts behind and between our chairs. Everybody was quiet for a while, as Paul twittered and fielded questions. Jonathan turned to me,
“Hey Molly. Want to go on a cruise?”
“Sure.”
“Alright, awesome.”

I’ve had a hard time explaining it to people who weren’t there, how it was different and better than W00tstock or PAX, because while it has the same ‘geek homecoming’ sort of feel, we’re all always in the same place, eating at the same times, going on day trips to the same places.

At a normal convention, you might travel with a pack of 2 or 3 friends, but there are so many panels going on concurrently that you’ll never sit with the same crowd twice. But in the context of a cruise ship, we were all programmed for a few events a day, with little to no overlap, and so we all traveled about the ship in a big geeky pack. Everyone sat in on everything worth sitting in on. In-jokes from the concert on night 1 could carry into the concert night 4, and everyone was in on it.

At a PAX or a W00tstock, some people have to break off from the gathering early (they’re in another hotel, or they’re crashing someone’s couch and don’t want to get in too late, or they’re local); some people can’t stay up late to drink and goof off (they have to drive, or they have work in the morning, or they only bought a 1-day pass so they have to leave early tomorrow). At a normal convention, would it be plausible to stay up until 4:30 in the morning playing tabletop games? Probably not.

But on JCCC, one of us was as busy as any of us. In the wee hours of the morning we could say “We’re at sea tomorrow!” and it was determined that we all had nowhere to be the next morning and could play tabletop games for as long as we wanted – or we would say “Well, there is the Q&A tomorrow morning” and everybody retired to bed accordingly. And this confinement on the ship combined with the openness of the JCCC schedule gave way to such a unique kind of freedom that I’ve never experienced at any convention ever. It made way for iPhone handbell choirs and Pirate Fluxx tournaments. The cruise was about the roaming pack of nerds as much as it was about JoCo and his Superfriends.

When David Rees ran into the Crow’s Nest Lounge late in the evening and said “There’s a faction of nerds in the Harbor Lights Disco. Let’s go!” we went. And why not? If we don’t go dancing with David Rees, what else do we do?

Nothing. We had no excuse not to.
And that’s what was so freeing.

I feel like I’m still at this weird transitional point where I’m onstage with a bunch of these ridiculously talented people, but I’m also still a huge fan of them to the point that I feel out of place sharing a stage with them. I’m not sure how well I downplay my constant, overwhelming giddiness, but if the guys notice it they’re kind enough not to acknowledge it.

I have to mention how grateful I am to Paul, Storm, Liz, Armand, and Jonathan for inviting me onto this magical mystery tour and trusting me with their audience, and I have to thank the Sea Monkeys for being such great company and not poisoning my food.

(Aside: Peter Sagal, I’m sorry I said that Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me is my mom’s favorite NPR show – I mean, it still is, but I realize that it made me sound like a turd and that you hear it all the time from turds like me. John Roderick, you are no longer dead to me. Nolan, I haven’t forgotten that I owe you $3.)

It was a wholly wonderful and bizarre experience.
It was bizarre to feel tipsy all the time. It was bizarre to be tipsy for only maybe a quarter of that time. It was bizarre to have ladies in maroon double-breasted coats bringing whatever drinks I wanted, whenever I wanted them. It was bizarre not to handle actual currency for an entire trip. It was bizarre to be completely out of touch with my family for a week. It was bizarre to wake up to different scenery at my window every morning. It was bizarre to be invited into the company of all these guys I’ve admired and modeled my work after for years. It was bizarre to be recognized by strangers for my music. It was bizarre to stand in a crowd of hundreds, all dressed to the nines, and all wearing self-adhesive mustaches. It was such a drastic departure from my real life. From anybody’s real life, I think.

A lot of people from the cruise have been twittering recently that they still feel like the ground beneath them is pitching and swaying, after a week of living and sleeping in a cruise ship. Sometimes when I’m sitting still, I can still feel it in my back, like the entire chair is filled with water. Like right now, for example.

Paul’s daughter Shawn said that it might be because the entire cruise is only happening in someone’s dream, and we’re all trying to perform inception on that person, and that person was sleeping on a water bed. So, here’s hoping that the vague sense of swaying means the dream isn’t over yet.

So since the last time I posted a blog, I played at two midwestern W00tstocks, went to VidCon, refereed a rather successful game of Calvinball, got invited to a cruise, did another W00tstock, and went to ComicCon.

Those things are awesome, but the closing of Star Tours sucks, so I’m going to talk about the closing of Star Tours first.

Tonight, the Star Tours ride at Disneyland is taking its last flight to the moon of Endor. For the uninitiated, on Star Tours you board a flight for the Endor Moon, but the bumbling droid pilot Captain Rex is on his first flight and ends up taking an accidental detour through a comet’s tail, into a tractor beam, and ultimately gets taken in by a fleet of X-Wing fighters mid-combat, who then blow up the Death Star and jump to lightspeed. The robot is voiced by Paul Reubens pre-Pee Wee, and the special effects from 1987 still hold up today. I know the entire thing verbatim. Back when I had an annual pass, my family would go to Disneyland once a week, and we would always hit Star Tours first because the line was always so scenic and short. It’s simple and perfect, and it’s closing.

Since I’ve found out about Star Tours’s closing, I’ve probably ridden it more than 20 times. Most of the time, I can keep my cool. Sometimes I sort of sing along as loud as I can, other times I try to take in as much of the ride as possible, and other times I listen to the other people reacting. I filmed it on my phone from every angle, pressing it to my forehead to stabilize it. This one time I paid particular attention to the little boy next to me, who was maybe 4 or 5. He was completely in awe of the whole thing, the combat, going into lightspeed; I thought about how I used to ride Star Tours when I was his age, and thought about how cool it was, and how much better the ride was when I didn’t understand how the simulation worked at all. Then I got something in my eye.

I’ve nearly come to terms with the idea that all the things I love are transitory and impermanent. Living things will die, goods will be discontinued, businesses will close, TV shows will be canceled. The city of Long Beach closed Acres of Books, one of my favorite establishments in the world, in favor of developing luxury condos in the downtown. Sarah’s Smash Shack went out of business before I could even get to it. There used to be a $2 second-run movie theater, a bowling alley, and a candy shop within a block of my house, and before I was old enough to use any of them on my own, they were knocked down and replaced by a wine tasting bar and a spa. It’s the march of progress.

Disney tends to function in the way that Apple and Facebook do by which I mean that they will decide to change things that absolutely did not need changing, and you’re only left to assume that it’s for your own good. They have a limited amount of real estate and I understand this, but they took out Circlevision and replaced it with a Buzz Lightyear ride. They took out Country Bear Jamboree and replaced it with some Winnie The Pooh thing. Combine this with George Lucas’s knack for gratuitous revisions and you’ve got yourself a dangerous concoction.

My summer pass allows for three visits to the parks this summer, and I used my third visit a couple weeks ago with a big group of friends from VidCon. The first time we went on Star Tours I pressed my phone to my forehead and took video of the screen to the best of my ability. We came back in the evening and rode it again; I held Chris’s hand, and recited all the words along with it, aloud, from takeoff to landing. My friend James was on the other side of me, and he leaned in closer to me as the ride went on, listening to every word. My inflection was pitch perfect. My timing was right on the nose. When the ride was over, James shook my hand and congratulated me. I took my sweet time collecting my things from under my seat, and got something in my eye.

The new ride will feature the annoyingly CGI planet of Coruscant and the desert planet of Tattooine, and it will (as I had feared) be in 3D. But the most maddening thing about the new Star Tours is that it will center around a lengthy podracing sequence. I mean, in the original Star Tours, your shuttle gets sidetracked and you end up blowing up the freaking Death Star in the Battle of Yavin. The Death Star embodies everything that is sinister and evil about the Dark Side. It represents the complete corruption of the Republic, and Anakin’s God complex. You get to share a victory with the Rebel Alliance against this hugely sinister weapon of mass destruction; apart from it being a monumental win for the underdog, it’s also a huge and satisfying explosion, and you get to be there, and that’s awesome. Podracing, on the other hand, is a gambling outlet on the slummy desert world of Tattooine, a planet that harbors criminals and slaveowners; podracing is the illegal street racing of the Star Wars universe no matter how you slice it. I understand that in The Phantom Menace Anakin wins his own freedom in a podrace, but I can’t imagine how we’re going to pick up that level of individual narrative from inside the cabin of a Starspeeder. It’ll just be the standard Lucasfilm CGI drivel, which will be so dense with mindless action and movement that it’ll all blur together and become background noise.

I normally wouldn’t care, but Star Tours means a lot to me. I appreciate the multimedia engineering that goes into this new ride, and I understand that adding high definition 3D movie to simulator rides may open a whole new world of possibility for these kinds of rides. I just wish they hadn’t started with Star Tours.

I went back yesterday with my friends Jonathan and Malia, who graciously offered Chris and I free passes for the day. After Jonathan and Malia left in the evening, Chris and I resolved to ride Star Tours at least once more before the park closed. We watched all the other pilgrims in line taking pictures of everything, and I talked to Chris about how I wish I could be like The Giver in the Lois Lowry book, and just pass the experience of Star Tours to my children. We were sorted into the first two spots in the front row, right in front of Captain Rex. The ride operator checked all of our seatbelts, and said “Well, folks, this is one of the last flights to the Endor moon, and specifically it will be my last flight to the Endor moon.” Everyone in the ship hooted and applauded. He saluted us as the cabin doors closed and said “May the Force be with you.” I held Chris’s hand, and sang along to the whole ride. I turned to Chris as we were landing and said, “That was the last time we’ll ever experience light speed!” I was holding my composure as best as I could, until the very end of the ride when we have landed safely at port and Captain Rex says, “Sorry, folks! I’m sure to do better next time! It was my first flight and I’m still getting used to my programming!” I thought about how there wouldn’t be a next time, and then I got something in my eye.