Me. Ow.

It was fun to see Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Seth Meyers talk on his show yesterday about both being in the annual "Mee-Ow Show" at Northwestern University -- since I had written for the show in its first year of existence.

"The Mee-Ow Show" was created as a sort of alternative student production to offset the far-more famous and substantial, student-produced Waa-Mu Show.  ("Waa-Mu" stands for Women's Athletic Association and Men's Union.)  The Waa-Mu Show has been going on for 89 years now, and began life as a collection of events around one theme and has evolved into a full-blown musical.  The Mee-Ow Show (not only named as a play on words, of course, but comes from Northwestern being the Wildcats) began as a sketch revue show and itself has evolved into an improv show.

I wrote two songs that were accepted for that initial show -- music and lyrics.  Though the end result was somewhat different.  A few days before opening night, I went to a rehearsal.  One of the songs was done very well.  The other song, though, was odd -- they had cut out the middle verse, and so the song made little sense and seemed a bit stupid.  I went to the producer to ask him what in the world was going on.  (He was a guy from my dorm, and knew pretty well.  When I was president of the dorm, he was the treasurer, and my quip was that he would either end up being a big, successful producer or an embezzler.  I heard a few years later after I had graduated that I was closer to being right about the latter.  Though I don't know the full details of the "scandal," only that it was related to a subsequent production of the show.)

What he said was that the production was running long, by about 20 minutes, so things had to be cut.  I replied that seemed an odd decision, since by cutting the verse they saved about 40 seconds.  Meanwhile, the sketch that preceded it ran about 12 minutes -- which is an eternity for a sketch, most of which run about 3-5 minutes.  I suggested that if they really wanted to save time, that was a far-better place to start.  It was the correct argument, but not a winning one.  He gave me two options:  leave the song as is, or cut the song completely.  I chose the latter.  I'm sure the performers were disappointed, but then so was the composer-lyricist, more so by the mangling than pulling it.  But I was sorry for that, as well.

In the end, the program shows one song by me.  But I've always stood by the larger reality that I had two songs accepted in the show and only by personal choice did it end up halved..

Alas, I don't have footage of that initial production, though I do have Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Seth Meyers' show last night, having a good time and talking about the Mee-Ow Show, which is almost the next best thing!  (It comes along about the 3:30 mark, though the whole interview is fun.)  

By the way, fun too is that her son Charlie Hall is there, and they chat with him a bit in the wings, largely about him just finishing a small role on the final season if Veep, and then Seth Meyers even brings him out on stage.  Readers of these pages with good memories will recall that I wrote about a very funny video of Charlie over a year ago.  He's also at Northwestern, and on the basketball team, and did a series of videos in the locker room interviewing other players that all are a hoot.  So, it's not a stretch that he apparently did well on his mother's show, even if not trained in acting.  If you're interested, you can see one of those locker room videos here.