Cold Read.

Kyle Olson:
Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute, there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them already, known them all, have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. I know the voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music from a farther room.

These words come from T. S. Eliot’s poem entitled The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and it highlights one of mankind’s greatest inventions: The Spoon. Humankind has been using spoons for over 3,000 years. It permeates our culture, from the battle cry of Ben Edlund’s superhero The Tick, to a rock band for the late 90s, to lying in the embrace of someone you love. For those who struggle with mental workloads, they talk about it as not having enough spoons.

We’re grateful you’ve given a teaspoon of your day to listen to Craft & Chaos, the podcast where we talk about the wild world of being a creative type in a world dominated by spreadsheets. I’m Kyle Olson, joined by Ryan Dalton, Mandy Fabian, and Pete Wright. And yes, the spoon thing will be coming back later in the episode. Before we dig into our first topic, anyone have any favorite spoons they want to mention?

Pete Wright:
Favorite spoons? It would be slotted.

Mandy Fabian:
Well, I was gonna say the one that jumped over the moon.

Kyle Olson:
That is not actually the first thing we’re talking about, but I just want to make sure.

Mandy Fabian:
Oh good.

Kyle Olson:
Okay.

Ryan Dalton:
Is a spork a spoon?

Kyle Olson:
No, a spork is the same thing.

Ryan Dalton:
Oh, because I love that the spork exists. That is, yeah.

Kyle Olson:
I have a titanium spork that I have used for many years. I carry it with me from place to place. So yes, I’m a big fan of the spork.

Pete Wright:
Seems like you do feel strongly about the spork.

Ryan Dalton:
A spoon was—

Pete Wright:
I would have said a spoon. A spork is a spoon variant.

Kyle Olson:
Oh, now we’re getting close into the “is a hot dog a sandwich” thing, and that’s not where we want to end our—

Pete Wright:
Oh, I think we’re firmly there, Kyle. We’re not even close. We’re treading on hallowed ground.

Ryan Dalton:
The real question is, is a taco a sandwich?

Kyle Olson:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
That’s a different show. That is finally a different show. My favorite spoon is an ice cream spoon.

Kyle Olson:
Nice.

Ryan Dalton:
No comments on that at all.

Pete Wright:
You’re right.

Ryan Dalton:
We’re just like, okay, moving on.

Kyle Olson:
If I could come up with a spoonerism right there, I would have done it, but I’m not that fast.

So a couple weeks ago I had a chance to see a play that I had never heard of before, and going to it had filled me with dread. For those who know me, my dislike of The Crucible is well known. I think it is highly overrated, I think it is overdone, and especially — why is it something that you think teenagers should be doing?

Regardless, the synopsis of this play, which is not The Crucible, seemed to be very much of the same thing. It was a take on a 16th century story of the devil coming to a small town — you know, medieval England kind of thing — and it offers to take their soul in exchange for something. A very Needful Things sort of vibe of “what will I do for you if you give me your soul?”

So I was expecting another one of these sort of overwrought, overwritten, impermeable shows, and I sort of steeled myself for it. And instead I saw one of the best plays I’ve ever seen. So this is called Witch by Jen Silverman. And it was phenomenal for a couple reasons.

I mentioned a couple of them as we were leaving the theater, because my wife was nice enough to go with me. And to both of them she just said, “Well, yeah.” So I’m gonna bring this to you, because you as people who are in the creative arts will take these things a little bit differently.

The story essentially is the devil comes, but it’s all written in contemporary language. So everything she wrote is set for now. Everything is very much modern language, modern thing. And thus very accessible. Everyone can understand exactly what’s going on in every scene. It’s five characters — the interrelationships and things too. But also in the writing of it, the way that Jen Silverman has formatted stuff, I’ve never seen that.

So when we left, I said two things. I said I finally saw a play, a modern play, where someone wrote like me. And I’m not saying that as an egotistical thing, that I’m on the same level, but it’s like — this is what I’m doing. And I have not seen anything else that’s like, oh, this is what I’m doing. I’ve felt so by myself that I’m the only one who’s doing this thing. All the language choices, all the — I was like, oh, that’s what I would have done. Oh, I would have done that too. Every single move, I was absolutely rapt. Yes, yes, yes, all those things, yes.

And then the other thing I said is, I didn’t know you were allowed to do that. And my wife was like, “Well, yeah, you can write whatever you want to a play.” I’m like, no, there’s this internal thing of like, this is how they work. And then someone comes along who’s a true artist and goes, you don’t have to follow it. In the words of The Matrix, there is no spoon.

So I got the play and actually read it, and realized that the format of the play is entirely different. Jen Silverman has done this thing — and it actually has a big explanation for it in the front — that says, here are the things that characters say, like regular dialogue. Here are the things that they say to the side, like to themselves, in parentheses. And then here are the things they don’t say. I was like, what? There are brackets in here — these are the things they think but don’t say out loud.

Pete Wright:
Wow.

Kyle Olson:
I was like, oh, what a fun way of back and forth between the writer and the actors and the audience.

Mandy Fabian:
So she gives the author the subtext?

Kyle Olson:
Yes. Actually writes it out.

Mandy Fabian:
Wow.

Ryan Dalton:
Clever.

Kyle Olson:
Instead of doing a lot of times what I do, which is use ellipses — “well, I was hoping we could…” and then in brackets put what that word would be. It’s phenomenal. I now want to read everything that Jen Silverman has done. It was one of those remarkable things where I was like, the walls are not there. They’re only there in your mind, and only there because of what people know. And then someone comes along and says, you can do it a completely different way.

Pete Wright:
I wonder what it’s like to be an actor on a show like that, though. Because isn’t that the craft? Here’s what I say, and then I get to manufacture what I don’t say, because that’s my job.

Kyle Olson:
Sure. Mandy has the most acting experience of the rest of us. How would you take that as an actor if you saw it?

Mandy Fabian:
I get that question a lot from actors on scripts that I’ve written. They’re like, what would they have said at the end of this sentence? I think it actually helps them to know the writer’s intention, because their job really is to fill it and make it their own and justify it.

So I actually think when you have those ellipses, that can actually be frustrating to an actor. It’s just — I think they actually prefer finished sentences so that they can just play the words and the intention of the words, and not have to also do the writing of it. I think it actually makes it cleaner for them.

So I would say from an actor’s perspective, since they’re not writers — unless the goal is improv or something where they get to create their own thing, or unless they’re one of those actors that really likes to put things into their mouth the way they would say them — I think it’s great. I get a lot of clarification questions, things that I think are super obvious, especially with those ellipses. The end of the sentence is obvious, but they’re not to everybody. So actually I think that’s a really smart move. I like that.

Ryan Dalton:
It is interesting hearing from different directors what it’s like guiding different actors to the performance they want. Some actors are more precious and don’t want to be told anything about how they’re saying things. Other actors are like, just give me the line reading. Just tell me how you want me to say it and I’ll be happy to.

There’s an interesting one — there’s a movie called St. Vincent with Bill Murray. The director of that went through a crazy process just to get him cast in the movie at all. But he talked about a scene where he felt Murray was delivering the line too comedically. But rather than say that, he just said, “Okay, here’s three or four points reminding you of the situation you’re in in this scene.” And Murray just went, “Okay.” And the next scene he came back and did it perfectly.

Mandy Fabian:
Amazing.

Pete Wright:
Oh, don’t sleep on Bill Murray. That guy’s got chops.

Ryan Dalton:
Yeah.

Kyle Olson:
So I put this out as a broader topic, but I was curious what would fit into this category for y’all, that you’ve seen. It doesn’t have to be specifically in the medium you work in, but something where you went, oh, you can do a whole lot more than I had ever imagined you could.

Mandy Fabian:
I think it was when I saw the movie Humpday by Lynn Shelton. Right, Pete?

Pete Wright:
Lynn Shelton. My God, what a loss.

Mandy Fabian:
Oh, she’s a master, and made these incredible films that felt very real. Humpday is specifically a really amazing story that is so simple. It is one obstacle. It’s these two friends that reunite. They’re totally different. One has gotten married and settled down, and the other guy is kind of this — you know, he’s the guy who kind of gets on a bus and meets these guys at the station and then ends up making art with them in their backyard. He’s just super flying by the seat of his pants and super out there.

And the married guy really is threatened and also still wants to be more like that guy. Anyway, they come up with the idea that they’re gonna make a sort of homemade porn movie about two straight guys who end up having sex together, because nobody’s done that — as a piece of art, just as something that’s fresh and new. And they’re gonna do it in this home porn festival that happens in Seattle. They’re psyched about this idea. It’s all about art and creativity.

So that’s the setup, which is kind of crazy and funny and ridiculous. But they play it so not for comedy. It is so about who they are as people — if they’re brave enough to do this thing that they said they were gonna do. It’s almost like a bluff. The whole movie is watching them move toward this, like, yeah, of course we’re gonna do this. It’s just tense. It’s all about them talking and experiencing things.

And there are these long bits where it’s just them thinking and looking at each other, and I can’t get enough of it. And it breaks all the rules of what I thought — that everything had to be so plot-forward, and you have to have bigger movies with big trailer moments and all that. I was like, I want to watch these two guys who back themselves into a corner think and freak out for an hour and a half, and I’m riveted.

That was one of the first experiences of watching these smaller, intense, character-driven movies with this one simple plot device — will they, won’t they, this one thing. And I loved it. So that would be my example.

Pete Wright:
That’s a great example. Her mumblecore imprimatur is so vivid. Yeah, that movie is fantastic.

Mandy Fabian:
It still holds up. I just watched it again a couple weeks ago. Brilliant. Still brilliant.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kyle Olson:
What do you got, Pete?

Pete Wright:
I think I’m gonna go a little bit more mainstream than Lynn Shelton. I’m gonna go with The Lego Movie.

Kyle Olson:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
So The Lego Movie — I went to see it with my kid. It came out when he was of the age where that was all he wanted to do. I’ve seen innovative animated films before. I’ve seen animated films that do things with animation that I’ve never seen before, and I’m amazed and I walk away changed a little bit.

This movie does something as its twist at the end that answers that question: I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t know you could take the unraveling of what’s going on in the animated universe and tie it so ably to what’s going on in this kid’s basement and in his relationship with his own real-world father.

And I was gobsmacked. I was sitting there in the theater thinking, this movie has just changed my life. Not only because it’s such a glorious expression of that relationship, that father-son relationship, but that it has changed mediums in a way that I did not see coming. It was the best “Pete goes into a movie unspoiled” twist in filmmaking that I think I have ever seen. It is absolutely transcendent.

Kyle Olson:
And what you wouldn’t expect from something called The Lego Movie as well.

Ryan Dalton:
Yeah, it could easily have been a fun bit of fluff. And I don’t think anyone would have complained had it been that. Yet they decided to go the not-fluff direction and did not put it in any of the marketing either. They just let you come in and stumble into it and experience it.

There was a point in the movie where I was like, do I like that they did this? Because I was so enjoying the fantasy of it. But then by the end of it, I was like, nah, that was the bolder thing to do, for sure.

Pete Wright:
It was bold. It was really bold. And yeah, that cemented my parasocial relationship with Lord and Miller as creators.

Kyle Olson:
You could do this exact same thing about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as well, because of all the rules they broke in that as well.

Pete Wright:
Oh god, a hundred percent.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Ryan Dalton:
I think after Project Hail Mary, they could probably do whatever they want.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah.

Ryan Dalton:
Probably just pick whatever.

Kyle Olson:
And let them. Yeah.

Ryan Dalton:
And I just heard recently another thing they did that I—

Kyle Olson:
That’s Star Wars. But other than that, they can do whatever they want.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, other than that, Star Wars off limits.

Ryan Dalton:
Right, yeah. I love that — again, they did a thing in Project Hail Mary that, these days, people would probably say, okay, any other time you’d do Rocky as a practical effect, making him a puppet, as opposed to what would probably be a lot easier, which is just making him CGI.

But then doing that led to another thing they did that you wouldn’t have had happen otherwise, in that one of the puppeteers was doing the stand-in lines and voice for Rocky. And he was so good at it that by the end of it they couldn’t picture anyone else doing it. So they cast him in the movie doing the lines. And he’s this guy who nobody knows. He came out of nowhere, and suddenly he’s voicing arguably the most popular character in movies of the year right now. That would never have happened if they had done something more expected or traditional.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Out of nowhere.

Kyle Olson:
I wanted to say — I made a mistake earlier. Jen Silverman’s pronouns are actually they/them, and I said the wrong thing, so I apologize. That was not my intention. I forgot that I had done the research and then did not look at my notes. So that was just me being an idiot.

Pete Wright:
If you want to say “they/them” in a couple of different tones, a couple of different readings, and I’ll just cut them in word by word.

Kyle Olson:
They/them. They/them. They/them.

Pete Wright:
Beautiful.

Kyle Olson:
There you go.

Pete Wright:
This is craft.

Kyle Olson:
Go ahead, put it all on.

Mandy Fabian:
This is how you do it.

Kyle Olson:
So, as we’ve talked about shaking things up and doing things differently, we’re about to debut a brand new segment. So Pete, roll the intro.

A couple weeks back, as we talked about a little bit on the show, I got a chance to do a 24-hour play project. The structure of it is: at 6 p.m. on Friday, I get a prompt that has a certain number of things that have to be incorporated into a 10 to 15 page script, which is due at 6 a.m. Saturday morning. The actors then get it, and at 7 p.m. Saturday night, that show goes up — whether they’re ready or not.

It is immensely fun. It is a great way to bring community together, because everyone knows this is ridiculous. This is not how you do things. It can’t work. And a lot of times it doesn’t. But that room is always so packed with all the people who are there just to love and support something absolutely bonkers, that it’s such a fantastic experience for everyone. Even when things go wrong — and the last one, a lot of things went wrong — but whenever people who are not actively in one of the shows, they’ll come and sit in the audience too. So everyone is part of this whole thing. Even the minor jokes get big laughs. It’s always a good time.

So I wanted to sort of share a little bit of this out. So today, what we’re gonna do is — Pete has taken up the challenge of doing this, and so I have sent him my prompts. So we’re going to do a cold reading of his thing that he came up with using these, and then we will do a reading of mine. And then we will talk about all the decisions we made and how things went.

The prompts that were given were: the number of actors had to be three, because that’s how many of us are here, and then one person to either be the writer or the narrator. The dialogue prompt has to be included in the play, verbatim: “How can you face the music if you never push play?” And then the prop that has to be used in a meaningful way is a kitchen spoon or ladle. I told you the spoon thing would be important. And the theme of the play is redemption or vindication.

So at Midnight Oil, essentially, it was like six plays and I think four short films. They had done the short films the weekend before — they had a 48 hours because, you know, editing takes a lot of time. So they would do a couple of short films and then a bunch of the plays, and a couple of short films and a bunch of the plays, and then we all sort of celebrate the madness.

So today we’re going to do a little bit of that for y’all. Pete, do you want to intro anything about your thing, or should we just dive into it?

Pete Wright:
Well, the intro, I guess, is — I took it as a dare to do this, though I haven’t — I think it’s fair to say I haven’t written a serious piece of stage work in 33 years. I’ve done a lot of little sketches and stuff for this, but it’s been since college, when I was actually attempting to study this stuff, that I really committed to a bit. So bear with me. Let’s see what happens.

What’s the rule? Do you set up the play?

Kyle Olson:
That’s up to you.

Pete Wright:
Do you just read it?

Kyle Olson:
Usually when — and I’ve looked at the past — no one has any idea what’s happening. You don’t get anything. Basically you get maybe the name of the play and the writer and actors, and that’s it. Even the audience is coming in cold.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Kyle Olson:
They have no idea what they’re about to see.

Pete Wright:
Completely cold. So I can stick to that bit.

Kyle Olson:
Not even genre.

Pete Wright:
So I am going to read then appropriate stage directions and introductory material, right? And you guys are characters.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
That’s the deal.

Kyle Olson:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
All right.

Kyle Olson:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
So the play is called Tail. It is a family play. And it has three characters, as what I was instructed to create.

The first character is Kyle — because he’s responsible for this, I actually named him Kyle. He is 16 years old. He is unhurried. At no point does he appear to find anything remarkable. Think of him as the smartest guy in the room. Confident. Much more comfortable with anything that is happening in the world than anyone else on stage.

Second, Diane — Mandy will be playing Diane, 45. Kyle’s mother. Has a system for everything. The system is not working.

And Martin, 47, Kyle’s father. Tries several approaches. None of them are the right approach.

We begin. Lights up on the living room of a perfectly ordinary house in a perfectly ordinary suburb. Couch, armchair, coffee table, television. A Thursday morning in February. Valentine’s Day was two days ago. Presidents’ Day is not for another week. There is nothing going on.

Kyle sits on the couch in a full furry gray squirrel costume — padded bodysuit, plush tail draped over the armrest, hood with two rounded ears. He is eating cereal and scrolling his phone with the serenity of someone who has nowhere to be and nothing to answer for.

Diane enters from the kitchen, holding a wooden ladle. She stops. She stares. She looks at Kyle. She looks at her ladle. She looks at Kyle again.

Mandy Fabian:
Kyle. What do you wear?

Kyle Olson:
What do you mean?

Mandy Fabian:
On your body. What is currently on your body?

Kyle Olson:
Oh, my squirrel suit.

Mandy Fabian:
Your squirrel suit.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
He returns to his phone. Diane stands very still, searching her mind for a cultural event, a school function, a holiday, anything, and finding nothing. She taps the ladle against her palm once. It is a Thursday in February. There is nothing. Martin enters from the hallway, dressed for work, keys already in hand.

Ryan Dalton:
Morning. Have you seen my — why is Kyle wearing the squirrel suit?

Pete Wright:
He sees Kyle. His keys stop swinging.

Mandy Fabian:
I’m working on it.

Ryan Dalton:
Is there a something school? Spirit?

Mandy Fabian:
No.

Ryan Dalton:
Drama?

Mandy Fabian:
Nobody has a squirrel in Hamlet.

Pete Wright:
Martin sets his keys on the table with the careful placement of a man who has decided he’s not leaving yet.

Ryan Dalton:
Hey, bud. What you got going on today?

Kyle Olson:
Chemistry test. Robotics. Top five.

Ryan Dalton:
Big day.

Kyle Olson:
Pretty normal day.

Ryan Dalton:
And you’re going like that?

Kyle Olson:
Like what?

Pete Wright:
Martin gestures at the costume. Kyle looks down at himself and back at Martin, waiting for the rest of the question.

Ryan Dalton:
In the suit.

Kyle Olson:
Oh, it’s not a suit.

Ryan Dalton:
The—

Kyle Olson:
It’s just what I’m wearing.

Pete Wright:
A silence. Kyle finishes his cereal, tilts the bowl to get the last of the milk. The tail shifts with him, luxuriously. Diane taps the ladle against her thigh.

Mandy Fabian:
Kyle, can I ask how long you’ve been wearing it?

Kyle Olson:
Since around December, I think.

Mandy Fabian:
December.

Kyle Olson:
Maybe a little before. It’s hard to say exactly.

Mandy Fabian:
How is it hard to say exactly?

Kyle Olson:
When something is just part of your routine, it’s hard to remember when it started. Like you don’t remember the first morning you put on that blue cardigan.

Mandy Fabian:
That’s not the same thing.

Kyle Olson:
It’s kind of the same thing.

Pete Wright:
Diane looks at her cardigan. She is going to think about this for days. She points the ladle at him.

Ryan Dalton:
Okay, so practically speaking — does it have pockets?

Mandy Fabian:
Martin, that’s not—

Ryan Dalton:
I’m just gathering information.

Pete Wright:
He drags a chair from the dining table and sits across from Kyle with the posture of a man attempting a tone he would describe as non-threatening.

Ryan Dalton:
Kyle, can I be straight with you?

Kyle Olson:
Sure.

Ryan Dalton:
Man to man?

Kyle Olson:
Okay.

Ryan Dalton:
When your son has been wearing a squirrel suit in February, a father wants to understand it.

Kyle Olson:
What part is confusing, Dad?

Ryan Dalton:
All of it is confusing.

Kyle Olson:
I guess I don’t see what’s confusing about it.

Ryan Dalton:
You don’t — Kyle. You’re wearing a squirrel suit to school.

Kyle Olson:
I know where I’m going.

Ryan Dalton:
And you don’t—

Kyle Olson:
It just doesn’t feel confusing from where I am.

Pete Wright:
Martin looks at Diane. Diane sits on the arm of the couch, her ladle cradled in her lap like a small, useless scepter.

Mandy Fabian:
Kyle. Are you okay? Are you inside?

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I’m great.

Mandy Fabian:
Sometimes when people are going through something—

Kyle Olson:
I’m not going through anything.

Mandy Fabian:
You sure?

Kyle Olson:
I feel completely fine.

Mandy Fabian:
Is the suit the — I’m sorry, what do you want me to call it?

Kyle Olson:
It’s not a suit. My thing?

Mandy Fabian:
Your thing.

Kyle Olson:
Or just what I’m wearing. Either one.

Mandy Fabian:
Kyle?

Kyle Olson:
I know you’re worried. You don’t have to be.

Mandy Fabian:
I am, though.

Kyle Olson:
I know. But I’m okay.

Pete Wright:
He puts the bowl on the coffee table and leans back. The tail arranges itself elegantly. He is 16 years old and completely at home in his body and his living room and his fur. Martin and Diane look at him. A long pause.

Ryan Dalton:
What does Ethan think?

Kyle Olson:
He wants to borrow the tail for D&D.

Ryan Dalton:
What about you wearing it every day?

Kyle Olson:
He said it was cool.

Ryan Dalton:
He said it was cool.

Kyle Olson:
He said it took courage.

Ryan Dalton:
Ethan said it takes courage.

Mandy Fabian:
Ethan also microwaved a snow globe.

Ryan Dalton:
That’s a fair point.

Kyle Olson:
That was one time.

Mandy Fabian:
What about your other friends? What do they say?

Kyle Olson:
People know my name. That’s pretty much all I want from high school.

Mandy Fabian:
People know your name because you’re wearing a squirrel suit.

Kyle Olson:
People know my name because I’m me. The suit is just my thing.

Mandy Fabian:
You just said the suit.

Kyle Olson:
It’s growing on me as a word.

Pete Wright:
Martin stands up. He paces once. He has a new idea. This is visible on his face.

Ryan Dalton:
Okay. Different question. Where did you get it?

Kyle Olson:
Amazon. $47.

Ryan Dalton:
How much? I’ll give you 75 to take it off. Final offer. I want this settled.

Kyle Olson:
I don’t want money, Dad.

Ryan Dalton:
What do you want?

Kyle Olson:
Nothing. I’m good.

Ryan Dalton:
Everyone wants something.

Kyle Olson:
I’ve got robotics. I’ve got my thing. I’ve got chemistry. I’m pretty set.

Pete Wright:
Martin sits back down. $75 is still on the table, and nobody is taking it. He is at a loss.

Mandy Fabian:
Kid, could I ask you something weird?

Kyle Olson:
Sure.

Mandy Fabian:
When you put it on in the morning, what goes through your mind?

Kyle Olson:
Not much, really. I pick it out, I put it on.

Mandy Fabian:
You pick it out — as in, there are other options?

Kyle Olson:
Well, yeah.

Mandy Fabian:
What are the other options?

Kyle Olson:
There’s a brown one.

Ryan Dalton:
There’s a brown one.

Kyle Olson:
It’s a beaver. The proportions are a little off. I don’t wear it as much.

Pete Wright:
Martin and Diane look at each other with the eyes of two people standing on the ledge they did not see coming.

Ryan Dalton:
How many are there?

Kyle Olson:
Just the two. I’m not a collector.

Pete Wright:
He says this as though being a two-animal costume person is a perfectly defensible position, which in his taxonomy, it is.

Mandy Fabian:
Kyle, when you walk into school in the morning and people look at you — but at first?

Kyle Olson:
They don’t really anymore. It’s been a while. Oh, at first they looked.

Mandy Fabian:
And they got used to it.

Kyle Olson:
They got used to it. Miss Holmberg asked if she could take my picture for the yearbook.

Ryan Dalton:
The yearbook teacher.

Kyle Olson:
She said the tail adds depth.

Pete Wright:
Martin stares at the middle distance for a moment.

Ryan Dalton:
Compositionally, she probably means. Right.

Mandy Fabian:
I know what she means, Martin. Kyle, I’m gonna try something, and I want you to stay with me.

Kyle Olson:
Okay.

Mandy Fabian:
I understand the suit. I do.

Kyle Olson:
Okay.

Mandy Fabian:
You found something that makes you feel like yourself. That’s important. That matters.

Kyle Olson:
Sure.

Mandy Fabian:
And I am 100% supportive of you feeling like yourself.

Kyle Olson:
Thanks.

Mandy Fabian:
But here’s the thing. Feeling like yourself, and expressing that feeling — they can be two separate things. Right? Like, your father feels like himself on Saturdays and he wears a flannel shirt, and that’s his thing. But the flannel is an expression of a feeling. The feeling exists independently of the — I’m just saying the feeling is what’s important. Okay?

Kyle Olson:
Mom.

Mandy Fabian:
Not the — just hear me out.

Kyle Olson:
Mom, I don’t have a feeling about it. I just wear it.

Mandy Fabian:
There has to be—

Pete Wright:
Diane opens her mouth, closes it. The question is actually hard to answer.

Ryan Dalton:
You know what? I respect it.

Pete Wright:
Diane looks at him.

Ryan Dalton:
I’m serious. It’s bold. I respect the boldness.

Kyle Olson:
Thanks.

Ryan Dalton:
Not everyone could have pulled that off. Wearing whatever they want, not caring what anyone thinks — that’s a skill.

Kyle Olson:
I don’t know if it’s a skill.

Ryan Dalton:
It is. It absolutely is. And I want you to know this house supports that. We’re a supportive house.

Mandy Fabian:
What are you doing?

Ryan Dalton:
Supporting him.

Mandy Fabian:
You’re not.

Ryan Dalton:
The thing is, Kyle, when I was your age, I was so worried about what other people thought every single day. And I wish I’d had that freedom. The thing that you have. And now I’ve said all that.

Kyle Olson:
I’m not going to take it off, if that’s where this is going.

Ryan Dalton:
That is where it is going. Yes.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. I know. You built up to it. I appreciate that.

Pete Wright:
Martin slumps slightly. He looks at Diane. Diane looks back. They have been married for 21 years, and they are out of moves. A long beat. And then Martin straightens. He has one left.

Ryan Dalton:
How can you face the music if you never push—

Pete Wright:
A pause. Kyle considers with genuine attention.

Kyle Olson:
I feel like I’ve pushed play.

Ryan Dalton:
But—

Kyle Olson:
I feel like play is pretty much all I’ve pushed.

Pete Wright:
Martin has no follow-up. The line has come back to him, and it doesn’t fit anymore.

Mandy Fabian:
What about Priya?

Pete Wright:
That small shift. Not much. Barely anything. But there.

Kyle Olson:
What about her?

Mandy Fabian:
What does she think?

Kyle Olson:
She said I was the most interesting person in her English class.

Pete Wright:
He stands, stretches. The tail arcs magnificently. He picks up his backpack — an acorn keychain on the zipper — and puts his bowl in the kitchen. He comes back and checks his bag with the thoroughness of someone who has a system. He has everything. Then, without fanfare, he reaches over and takes the ladle from Diane’s hand. Matter of fact. He’ll need it tonight.

Kyle Olson:
I’ve got to get going. I’ll be home by six. I’m making that pasta thing.

Ryan Dalton:
The one with—

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I need to use up the spinach.

Pete Wright:
He moves to the door.

Mandy Fabian:
Kyle, just put it in your bag, okay? The suit. Take it with you. And if you change your mind on the way — you don’t know that.

Kyle Olson:
I’m not going to change my mind. I do, though.

Pete Wright:
He says it in the way you say something true. No drama, no defiance, just the quiet shape of a fact.

Kyle Olson:
You guys are going to be okay.

Pete Wright:
He opens the door. February light. He walks out. The door closes with a perfectly ordinary click. Diane stands with empty hands. The ladle is gone. Martin looks at the door. The coat hook holds a small tuft of gray fur where the tail brushed past. A very long silence.

Ryan Dalton:
He took the ladle.

Mandy Fabian:
He’s making pasta with the spinach.

Ryan Dalton:
Right. Making pasta tonight. He’s a pretty well-adjusted kid.

Mandy Fabian:
I know.

Ryan Dalton:
By almost any measure.

Mandy Fabian:
I know, Martin.

Pete Wright:
She sits. Not defeated. Something more complicated than that. The look of a person setting down something heavy and finding their arms are fine.

Mandy Fabian:
He said we’re gonna be okay.

Ryan Dalton:
He was reassuring us.

Mandy Fabian:
I know.

Ryan Dalton:
Our 16-year-old, in a squirrel suit, reassured us that we would be okay.

Mandy Fabian:
And the thing is, I believe him, too.

Ryan Dalton:
I believe him.

Pete Wright:
Martin sits beside her.

Ryan Dalton:
We could call Warshack.

Mandy Fabian:
She’ll just say some kids just do things.

Ryan Dalton:
And then they stop.

Mandy Fabian:
What if he doesn’t stop?

Pete Wright:
The question sits between them. The real one. The one underneath all the others.

Ryan Dalton:
Then we have a son who wears a squirrel suit.

Mandy Fabian:
He gets a job in a squirrel suit.

Ryan Dalton:
He makes somebody in February.

Mandy Fabian:
Priya said he was the most interesting person in English class. For no reason.

Ryan Dalton:
For no reason at all.

Pete Wright:
Outside, wind through bare trees. February doing what February does.

Ryan Dalton:
Maybe that’s the thing, though. Maybe when something is just completely who you are, it stops feeling like a thing at all. It’s just you.

Mandy Fabian:
When did you get smart?

Ryan Dalton:
I’ve always been smart.

Mandy Fabian:
You’ve never been smart.

Ryan Dalton:
I have occasionally been smart.

Pete Wright:
She leans into him. He puts his arm around her.

Mandy Fabian:
There’s a brown one.

Ryan Dalton:
I know.

Mandy Fabian:
A beaver.

Ryan Dalton:
He said the proportions were off.

Mandy Fabian:
He’s not a collector.

Pete Wright:
And there it is. That sound. Not quite a laugh, not quite a cry. The sound of two people simultaneously surrendering and meaning it.

Ryan Dalton:
He pushed play a long time ago, didn’t he?

Mandy Fabian:
Way before we were ready.

Ryan Dalton:
He’s gonna be fine.

Mandy Fabian:
He was already fine. That’s the whole thing.

Pete Wright:
The house settles. The coat hook holds its small tuft of gray fur. Neither of them will notice it until next week. Neither of them will throw it away. Lights fade.

Ryan Dalton:
Pete, that was gripping from page one, man.

Kyle Olson:
That was really good.

Pete Wright:
Oh, you guys are too kind.

Mandy Fabian:
Oh my god. Oh god.

Kyle Olson:
I have now seen like eight variations on these prompts. So I can tell you yours is really well done. Some people took some really wild swings and they didn’t all land, as is in the case of art. But yeah, I would say I have seen professional one-acts that are not this good.

Pete Wright:
Oh god, man, that’s so kind.

Mandy Fabian:
Well done, Pete. Well done. I teared up.

Pete Wright:
Thank you very much.

Mandy Fabian:
I got emotional.

Pete Wright:
That’s good.

Kyle Olson:
Honestly — 100%, those are real people. They absolutely felt like real human beings that would talk exactly like this.

Pete Wright:
I’m relieved. I am deeply relieved.

Ryan Dalton:
That was a good time.

Pete Wright:
Thank you guys so much.

Ryan Dalton:
Very good time.

Pete Wright:
I’m not gonna lie, I did it and then I made my wife, Kira, read it with me. And we were both weeping at the end.

Ryan Dalton:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Does it come from real life? I don’t know. You tell me.

Kyle Olson:
I say that one of the main problems I see with a lot of these is that people don’t know how to land the plane. A lot of people do something and they go up and they just kinda go, uh, uh, lights down, and that’s it. But you had your thing, you went took us all the way through it, and then you had that nice ellipsis at the end. A nice closure. That’s a pro move.

Pete Wright:
That’s very kind. I really appreciate that, you guys. Able cold read. That was awesome.

Kyle Olson:
I would not cast me, but I would cast the two of them.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kyle Olson:
You would need to find a different Kyle, because I don’t know—

Mandy Fabian:
Yeah, we go September, is that right?

Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s right.

Mandy Fabian:
A squirrel costume is a job.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ryan Dalton:
My agent will be sending over my list of demands.

Mandy Fabian:
Yes. He always does.

Pete Wright:
That was a real joy.

Ryan Dalton:
She’s a bulldog. Look out.

Kyle Olson:
So if we move on — take us a little bit through your thought process. You see the prompts, you see “redemption or vindication,” you see “ladle,” which you went to — where I went for spoon, but you went for ladle. You see the “push play.” At what point does the squirrel suit become a thing? Take us through a little bit of how you went through the mental Rolodex before you went, “this is what I need to do.”

Mandy Fabian:
Steel laundry.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. Honestly.

Mandy Fabian:
Taking out a squirrel suit and going, “Hey, wait a minute.”

Kyle Olson:
Hey, wait.

Ryan Dalton:
This is all I have left to wear for the week.

Pete Wright:
Well, I kinda knew — I saw the prompts, I did not know what I was gonna do with the prompts. Honestly, I had no idea. I did not start with the prompts. I kind of started with the idea, and I knew the very first thing, when I heard “it needs to be three people,” it immediately came to me that it was gonna be parents and a son trying to navigate a complicated set of emotions.

We have — I’m in Portland, and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we sort of hold the brand standard for how to protest politically.

Kyle Olson:
No.

Pete Wright:
And you go to one of these major protests, and everybody’s wearing costumes of animals, whether it’s dragons or whatever. And one of them that comes up on the news is a squirrel. And I thought, this could be funny. What if it was just a thing?

That it’s this kid who — as the stand-in for any set of identity complications that kids are going through today — the kid has to educate his parents, or more complicatedly, has to lead his parents through educating themselves. And that was the lift that I was just hoping would come out of it: that by interrogating him, they would be interrogating each other and eventually come to center.

So that’s kind of where it came out. The ladle was easy because they’re in a kitchen. And I liked the idea of Diane wielding it like a wand — like she’s using it to both conduct the conversation and to talk with it, and to use it to try and create magic with it. It just became this extension of her arm.

I love the idea that Kyle, as the supreme sort of intellect in this situation, is actually making a pasta dish with spinach that seems as crazy as wearing the squirrel suit. I just kind of needed that in there. I don’t know why he took the ladle to school. I don’t have an answer for some of those things.

But the “push play” came back as one of the dad’s sort of opportunistic approaches to try and turn the conversation. And it just bounced right off of him. I thought that ended up being at least a fun way to shoehorn it in there.

I will say, I had the opportunity to have some other people read this right after I wrote it, in public at a little mini neighborhood talent show. And I told them the premise but didn’t tell them the line. And not a single person guessed the line. So I took that as a huge win — that it felt kind of natural. I don’t know. Does that answer questions?

Kyle Olson:
It does. Anything else from the thing that surprised you while you were writing it?

Pete Wright:
Yeah, that it ended.

Kyle Olson:
Oh, okay.

Pete Wright:
I mean, no — at the end, it was actually the “we could call the psychiatrist”—

Kyle Olson:
You just wanted to stay with this family for longer? You wanted to—

Pete Wright:
Or call the therapist and see what the therapist said. That was the idea that helped, to use your words, land the plane. I didn’t know how to get out. Originally there was a whole exchange on “what if we call the therapist,” but that sounded like a threat when Kyle was still in the room, and to have them use it against one another and the event felt more natural. And it was an easy way out, because they got to use the therapist to convince each other that everything is actually fine. And just because they don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not understandable. So that’s the idea.

Mandy Fabian:
I really like how you used something that’s a very primal, common thing. It’s an emotional transition that most parents go through. All parents go through, really — if they’re lucky. That’s watching their kids kind of become adults. The thing where you go, “Oh wow, I’m not really responsible for them. They are autonomous beings and they get to wear a dang squirrel suit if it’s their thing, and I’m not really here to judge that. I can’t protect them. They gotta be themselves.”

So I think in such a short piece, to be able to address something that’s so real and resonant was really cool too.

Pete Wright:
Awesome. It is non-coincident that yesterday was my son’s birthday, and I no longer have teenagers.

Mandy Fabian:
Wow.

Kyle Olson:
Oh.

Pete Wright:
I know, right?

Kyle Olson:
Let’s shift tones then, because I went a different direction for mine. You had the benefit of — well, you knew who we are. So you had an idea in your head of who would be reading all the stuff. I didn’t know who I would get. They sent me a really one-line thing about the actors — sort of like, not even age or whatever, but kind of like approximately like stuff they like to do. I would say maybe it’s like, “Oh, I can juggle and I know how to knit” — that kind of stuff.

I’m like, I don’t know what to do with that. Like at one of these 24-hour things, somebody says, “I know how to roller skate.” I’m like, I’m not writing roller skating into a one-night-and-done thing. So I kind of had to just go by the description.

I sort of added that on as an additional thing — of writing to these people as much as I could. It’s nice when you get to meet actors beforehand. You don’t always.

So when I sat down, this is what I came up with. For our little show: Ryan, I would like to have you doing the narration and also playing Quinn. There are four characters in this. Quinn is the smallest of the roles, so you won’t have to do too much back-and-forth-ing. Mandy will be playing Vicky, Pete will be playing Cheryl, and I will be playing Chef Massey.

So whenever we’re ready, Dalton, kick us off. Oh, I’m sorry, this is — Leave Room for Dessert.

Ryan Dalton:
A single spotlight downstage right flickers on, revealing Vicky. She speaks to someone in the darkness we don’t see or hear.

Mandy Fabian:
Am I supposed to look at you, or the camera? Understood.

Ryan Dalton:
She listens for a moment, nodding.

Mandy Fabian:
Well, to be honest, I’ve always loved cooking. I baked with my grandmother and my mother. My dad used to say some babies were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but you came out with one in your hand, ready to stir. Yeah. The kitchen is where I felt the most me.

Ryan Dalton:
The light on her goes out as one downstage left reveals Cheryl.

Pete Wright:
My partner said I could find a way to burn water. So no, I was never a natural. The science is what drew me in. Why does smoke make meat taste better? What is the ideal liquidity for the perfect martini? What started out as experiments in the kitchen became fun. I got to play.

Ryan Dalton:
Lights back up on Vicky. Now both illuminated, but not looking at each other.

Mandy Fabian:
For some reason, people believed in me. I wanted to cook, and they started buying my food, which paid my way through culinary school. And then some crazy fools decided to build a restaurant and asked me to be in charge of the kitchen.

Pete Wright:
Absolutely not. No clue. The very idea that people would watch a video of me experimenting with food — I thought maybe I could get a few friends to watch. But then it was a hundred, and then a thousand. The number kept going up. I had an audience. That’s when they asked me to write a book.

Mandy Fabian:
Yeah, that was a tough time. After I lost on the show — after what he said — the restaurant wasn’t overbooked anymore, and then we stopped needing to take reservations. I understand why they made the decision they did, but suddenly I wasn’t allowed to do the only thing I knew how to do. Without that, I don’t know who I am.

Pete Wright:
After the season finale aired, my phone stopped ringing. Then my emails stopped coming in, and then I couldn’t log into the website. I didn’t need the scientific method to test my hypothesis. I knew.

Mandy Fabian:
Of course that’s why we’re all here. Why we’ve been here for so many weeks. I need to look him in the eyes.

Pete Wright:
I will show him he’s wrong. And that he’s been wrong this whole time. You’ll see.

Ryan Dalton:
Their lights go out, and center stage, a spotlight finds Quinn.

Chefs, bakers, cooks, and even one molecular gastronomist. All considered the best of the best, and yet they all failed under the glare of the studio lights. But this special, one-of-a-kind season was a chance for redemption. Week by week they’ve fallen away. Now there are only two contestants left, and they’ll face off live right here tonight. Who will Chef Massey pick? And who will be forced back into obscurity? Let’s find out right now on the season finale of your favorite cooking show. This is Best Served Cold.

Kyle Olson:
Yes. Served cold.

Ryan Dalton:
Cheery music plays. Colored lights swirl, and we see a simple table with two covered dishes on top. Vicky and Cheryl cross behind the table and each one takes their place behind one.

Good evening, everyone. And a special shout-out to our live audience. Can we get a shot of these beautiful people? Lovely. Just lovely. I am your also humble host, Quinn. You’ve been watching for the last six weeks as these former washouts try to prove they are worthy of their aprons. Now only two remain. Are you ready to meet your finalists?

Mandy Fabian:
No, no, no.

Ryan Dalton:
Let’s hope the audience picks up their cues and cheers at this moment. And they did. First up — bacon is in her blood, but luck was not on her side. Give it up for Vicky! And her competition, with a blood type of F for failure — let’s hear it for Cheryl.

Both of them wave when their names are called and give each other a friendly handshake.

I’d like to think you were all here to see me, but I know better. His name is on the building and at the bottom of my paycheck. There’s only one of him, thank goodness. It’s Chef Massey.

Dramatic music plays as a well-dressed man comes out, caring little if they cheer or boo. This is Chef Massey.

Kyle Olson:
I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong. At least, I assume I would be. It hasn’t happened yet. But maybe tonight is the night. We’ve reached the grand finale, which, as longtime viewers will know, is the dessert round. I hope you both made something delicious. I want to remind everyone that my final decision is just that — final. If I don’t think either dish is worthy, then no one wins, and you both go back to overcooking spaghetti for your ugly families.

Quinn!

Ryan Dalton:
Quinn runs over to him. Yes, Chef?

Kyle Olson:
Are you still here? I thought you’d have quit long ago.

Ryan Dalton:
I tried, but you had a non-compete clause added to my last contract that said if I left, I wouldn’t be allowed to host anything larger than a bingo game for 10 years.

Kyle Olson:
Oh yeah, I forgot I did that. Well, since you’re here for the duration, do your job. Go and fetch the spoon.

Ryan Dalton:
Dun, dun — dramatic music plays as Quinn picks up a box and opens it, revealing a shiny serving spoon. Massey picks it up.

Kyle Olson:
There she is. Uncuillère. See how she shines. One of a kind.

Ryan Dalton:
I’d like to remind our fans who are watching the livestream, if you click the link below, you can get an official Uncuillère replica for 20% off in our online store. Use coupon code SPATULA.

Kyle Olson:
Enough of your prattling. I either get to eat something delicious, or show the world how right I am. Win-win for me. Let’s go.

Ryan Dalton:
Massey walks over to Cheryl.

Kyle Olson:
Well, well, if it isn’t the Copernicus of Cupcakes. Welcome back, Cheryl.

Pete Wright:
Hello again, Chef. And I never called myself that. You did.

Kyle Olson:
And you’re welcome. People work in this business for years to earn a catchy moniker, and I gave you one for free. Quinn, chit-chat with her.

Ryan Dalton:
Cheryl! It’s nice to have you back. Catch us up on how your life has been going.

Pete Wright:
Well, since Chef Massey eviscerated not only me, but my whole field of study, on national television, my book deal was negated, my web series was ratioed, and my accounts were shadowbanned.

Kyle Olson:
I don’t know what any of that means.

Ryan Dalton:
What have you been doing with your time?

Pete Wright:
Currently I’m working at the community center, teaching boomers how to avoid getting scammed online.

Ryan Dalton:
Then this return to the kitchen must have been a relief.

Kyle Olson:
Enough with the yapping. Time for the eating. What have you made for me?

Ryan Dalton:
Cheryl removes the lid to reveal a small bowl with popcorn.

Pete Wright:
I call it the Pop Quiz. It’s liquid nitrogen ice cream with sweet caramelized popcorn on top. I started with the ice cream base and then—

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, save it for the TikTok, Doc. Let’s see how it tastes.

Ryan Dalton:
Massey takes his fancy spoon, dips in, and takes a taste.

Kyle Olson:
Quinn, try some of this.

Ryan Dalton:
Quinn reaches for the spoon, but Massey yanks it away in anger.

Kyle Olson:
No, you twit. You don’t get to touch the spoon. Ever. Use your paws.

Ryan Dalton:
Quinn takes a small taste.

Kyle Olson:
What do you think?

Ryan Dalton:
It’s—

Pete Wright:
Massey moves over to Vicky.

Kyle Olson:
I don’t care. I’ll say this, Cheryl. I don’t hate it. But you’ll have to stand there and wait to hear my final thoughts. Ah, Vicky.

Mandy Fabian:
Chef. Quinn. Nice to see you again.

Ryan Dalton:
If memory serves, you are from a long line of celebrated cooks.

Mandy Fabian:
That’s true. From my great-great-grandmother all the way down.

Kyle Olson:
I suppose every family dynasty has to come to a tragic end. You have a tale of woe for me as well. Go on. Let’s hear it.

Mandy Fabian:
I didn’t even want to come on this show. That’s what haunts me. My sous chef convinced me it would be fun. “Meet some fellow cooks. Swap recipes. Get the restaurant some attention,” she said. “How can you face the music if you never push play?” So I did. I thought I’d be there for a week, and then go back to my life.

Kyle Olson:
But then you just kept failing upwards.

Mandy Fabian:
It wasn’t that you humiliated me, ridiculed me, called me names. I’m a big girl. I’ve heard my share. But you took away the thing I loved. The thing I was good at. For what? For ratings? Another line of crappy knives with your name on them?

Kyle Olson:
If someone like me could take that away from you, did you ever really have it? But look around. Here we are again. Think you’ll change my mind?

Mandy Fabian:
Let’s find out.

Ryan Dalton:
Vicky lifts the lid to reveal four brownies.

Mandy Fabian:
My own recipe. My special brownies. They’re called Death by Chocolate. I know you don’t care how I made them, so just dig in. Bon appétit.

Ryan Dalton:
Massey reaches in with his spoon, but stops himself.

Kyle Olson:
Did you say Death by Chocolate?

Mandy Fabian:
I did. What’s the matter, Chef? You worried about food allergies?

Ryan Dalton:
Massey and Vicky lock eyes, frozen in a standoff.

Chef, I want to remind you that we are live. Millions of people watching us right now.

Mandy Fabian:
Tell you what I’ll do. One thing I love about food is how it brings people together. Knowing that, I made one for each of us. Chef Massey, feel free to pick which brownie each one of us gets.

Ryan Dalton:
Massey points to each brownie and each person. They pick them up. Vicky immediately takes a bite, followed by Cheryl and Quinn.

Oh my god!

Kyle Olson:
My gosh.

Ryan Dalton:
It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted.

Pete Wright:
It’s unbelievable.

Mandy Fabian:
Yeah, they turned out pretty well.

Ryan Dalton:
Massey takes a bite. His body betrays how much he loves it before he pulls himself together.

Kyle Olson:
That’s not bad.

Mandy Fabian:
That is the best brownie you’ve ever had in your life, and you know it.

Kyle Olson:
It’s time for me to make my ruling.

Ryan Dalton:
Contestants, please take your positions.

The lights change as Vicky and Cheryl come around the table and stand side by side. Cheryl reaches over and takes Vicky’s hand.

Pete Wright:
Good luck.

Mandy Fabian:
You too.

Kyle Olson:
History has already been made tonight. This is the first time we’ve ever allowed former losers to come back on the show. When they pitched this idea to me, I couldn’t imagine it. Who would want to see a parade of failures?

Pete Wright:
We aren’t—

Mandy Fabian:
Let him have his moment.

Kyle Olson:
I was wrong about that. And I was wrong about you. Wrong about you both. What you both showed me tonight is that what you needed was tough love. Without me—

Ryan Dalton:
Massey’s words start to slur. Chef, are you all right?

Kyle Olson:
Without me push-push-pushing you—

Ryan Dalton:
Massey starts to sway and then collapses onto the floor.

Mandy Fabian:
Quinn! Cheryl! Go get help.

Ryan Dalton:
Quinn and Cheryl run off. Vicky gets down onto the floor and pulls Massey up so they’re sitting facing the audience. Massey’s eyes are rolling wildly. The light closes in tighter onto them. Only we get to hear this.

Mandy Fabian:
Shh. It’s all right, Chef. Won’t be long now.

Kyle Olson:
But how? You ate the brownie too. Are you dying? Are they dying? Did I choose the wrong one?

Mandy Fabian:
You think I’d poison my food? Never. Foolish man. The poison was on the spoon.

Ryan Dalton:
Massey looks down and sees he’s still holding Uncuillère.

Kyle Olson:
Why?

Mandy Fabian:
We’re long past that. Your days of crushing dreams are over. The main course is over. Now it’s time for just desserts.

Ryan Dalton:
Massey takes one last shuddering breath and slumps over, dead. Vicky lays him down, gets to her feet, and brushes herself off. Quinn comes rushing back in, sees Massey dead, looks at Vicky in confusion.

Mandy Fabian:
Quinn, I want you to listen to me very closely.

Ryan Dalton:
Quinn nods, unable to speak.

Mandy Fabian:
I heard there’s a job opening.

Ryan Dalton:
Blackout. The end. Fun stuff.

Pete Wright:
That’s awesome.

Kyle Olson:
In that last line, the actress made the exact same choice as you. “Go get help.”

Pete Wright:
Go run. Get help.

Kyle Olson:
She didn’t have a flat — absolutely flat.

Pete Wright:
When did you know you were going to murder the chef?

Kyle Olson:
Very early on. I went through the same thing. I looked at stuff, and what I usually like to do is give myself sort of the hour, from when — I know, because I can’t stay up all night. I just don’t have the stamina anymore for it. So I was like, okay, at 7 p.m. I have to start writing, because I have to stay ahead of my fatigue to get this done before I absolutely crash. So I gave myself the hour.

Then I usually started thinking about, like, kind of what you were like. I’m like, okay, it’s a spoon, so it’s in the kitchen. And then I was like, is it — the spoon is like, the kids are putting stuff, clanging out their thread, because mom has died. Now they’re going through their stuff. I’m like, eh, maybe. And then I was like, what if the spoon, whoever gets it, is possessed by the spirit of their mom, and they start acting like it? I’m like, oh, that’s interesting.

I can’t land that plane in 10 minutes. For your thing, for 20 minutes, I could dig in, because then you can learn everybody. But with 10 minutes — they just shortened it, I think, to make the night short. It used to be 15, but they did 10. So I was like, okay, what can I do in 10?

And that’s when I remembered that I had just had a terrible experience at the dentist. And during that process, in their lobby, they had a cooking show that was about barbecue. And they were doing the whole thing. That’s when I said, “Oh, a cooking reality show,” with the thing of vindication, redemption — and I was like, oh yeah. Yeah, this guy’s gonna die.

The gag — I will admit I fully stole from Batman. That’s a thing in Batman: The Audio Adventures that the Joker does something very similar, where he makes these guys think that he’s popping balloons when they come to kill him.

Pete Wright:
It’s on the spoon.

Kyle Olson:
And he’s like, “Oh yeah, those are filled with poisonous gas. I’m immune to it, but you’re gonna be dead in like 10 minutes. I only have enough cure for one of you, so let’s draw cards.” And they draw the cards, and they both die, because the cards were poisoned. There was never any poison gas. I was like, that’s such a good gag. I have to use that.

Pete Wright:
It’s a good gag, yeah.

Kyle Olson:
I got lucky in that I got five aces. I had four phenomenal actors and then a director who I had already been a big fan of, but never really done much stuff with her. She actually did a voice on Swashbucklers at one point. She doesn’t do a lot of directing, but she absolutely got what I was going for and made the dark comedy so much darker and funnier. She has this really extreme sense of humor.

In my script, it’s a box and you open it up and it goes, “Oh,” and you see the spoon. She decided, with like only reading this thing probably at 6 a.m., she made an eagle puppet. And then she herself flew out with the eagle puppet and they played the screeching, “Ah!” And it had a box on it, and then the box flew open, and then he reached in and got it. I was like, “Yes.”

Mandy Fabian:
Oh.

Ryan Dalton:
That’s awesome.

Pete Wright:
That’s great.

Kyle Olson:
That’s exactly right.

Ryan Dalton:
Love that.

Pete Wright:
Oh my god.

Kyle Olson:
Everything they did, they played up. The one who played the role that Mandy played — I see her like a Paula Deen. So she did the whole thing of, like, “Well, when Chef Massey did—” And I was like, oh, that really works. And the other one had, like — she was very buttoned up, and so she had the glasses on and stuff. She was like, “Um, yeah, when I first started my YouTube—” like that. So everyone was playing.

And then the guy did Quinn more like a Caesar Flickerman, is what I would say — from Hunger Games. “I don’t want to be here, but I guess if I have to.”

And then I had sort of thought of, like, a Gordon Ramsay for the guy. But when the guy came in, he was very Austin Butler. He had the same build and the same thing. So he came in with like a pink thing, and just had this like, “All right, so what do you have for me today?” I was like, oh, I never thought of it that way, but it worked because he had — he was real macho about the whole thing, as opposed to what I had, which was like this overbearing—

Ryan Dalton:
Interesting. Very interesting.

Kyle Olson:
—thing. But it absolutely worked. We were near the end — we were second to last — and just blew the roof off the place. The audience was just, after trying to figure out, “Oh, is this a drama?” because they’d seen a bunch of dramas. Almost every — of the eight of us, six people chose to do dramas.

Pete Wright:
Wow. That is so counter to my instinct.

Ryan Dalton:
I’m blown away by that. You can do anything, and you do—

Kyle Olson:
Yes.

Ryan Dalton:
I don’t know.

Kyle Olson:
Okay. I was all right. That’s what you want.

So they were — I talked to them afterwards about how they scheduled it, and they’re like, “Yeah, we decided to put all those at the top. Put them all together, so everybody’s in that same frame of mind.” Then ours was the first coming out of the act break. So there was that big swell of energy after the intermission, and then we had a thing.

So let me see if I can do this just for you guys. Above my desk — trying to get the angle right.

Pete Wright:
What happened?

Kyle Olson:
Ah, can’t.

Pete Wright:
Oh dear, things have changed dramatically.

Kyle Olson:
We’ll edit this part out.

Pete Wright:
Best Served Cold.

Kyle Olson:
You see that?

Ryan Dalton:
Nice.

Kyle Olson:
They made that sign for the show, so I took it at the end.

Pete Wright:
Oh, that’s awesome. That’s perfect.

Kyle Olson:
So it’s sitting right above me.

Pete Wright:
That was really fun.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
I — of course, I don’t watch a lot of cooking shows, so I immediately think you just murdered Paul Hollywood.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, me neither.

Pete Wright:
That’s like the only one I watch.

Kyle Olson:
I don’t watch any of them, so I had to just go by the vibe and not by any particular reference.

Pete Wright:
It was perfect. It nails the vibe.

Ryan Dalton:
Yeah, that was good.

Pete Wright:
That was really great.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
That was fun.

Kyle Olson:
The one that closed the show was written by my friend John Perovic, and he decided to do a parody. His was called The Hand That Holds the Ladle.

Ryan Dalton:
Nice.

Kyle Olson:
And it was The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, but basically — it’s a 30s couple who’s just tired of cooking, so they hire a girl who just happens to show up outside their door to come in and be their chef, and then it starts to turn into this whole—

Ryan Dalton:
That’s amazing.

Mandy Fabian:
Fantastic.

Kyle Olson:
He played out all the beats of that story in like 10 minutes, which I was like—

Ryan Dalton:
Amazing.

Kyle Olson:
Bravo.

Pete Wright:
It’s perfect.

Kyle Olson:
He said to me, “I hope Kyle’s not doing the same thing.”

Pete Wright:
It is perfect.

Ryan Dalton:
That’s really cool.

Kyle Olson:
That made me feel really good. I’m like, he’s thinking about what I’m writing. That was like — oh wow, that’s really cool.

Pete Wright:
So you’re saying I’m living in your psyche?

Ryan Dalton:
I wish I’d had one to contribute. But I was — in this window, I was powering through. I was finishing my thriller.

Kyle Olson:
Nice.

Pete Wright:
Finishing?

Ryan Dalton:
Yeah. First draft, anyway.

Pete Wright:
Mm.

Ryan Dalton:
So first draft’s done.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Ryan Dalton:
I’m into draft two. All of my mental energy was going to that. I could feel the end approach, and I’m like a freight train when that happens. I just can’t stop until I cross the finish line. But it was great sitting back and watching you guys. That was awesome.

Pete Wright:
Can’t stop, won’t stop.

Mandy Fabian:
Also, I was kind of running, jumping on another project. It’s been very pressing. But maybe after.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah.

Ryan Dalton:
Yeah.

Kyle Olson:
We understand, when there are other people involved.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Dependencies are what they are.

Kyle Olson:
You have people on the other side who are waiting for the stuff. Essentially, for me, this is done. It doesn’t go anywhere.

Mandy Fabian:
That’s great.

Kyle Olson:
It’s the end.

Mandy Fabian:
Yeah.

Kyle Olson:
So we totally understand that. We don’t want to keep any creative projects stopped just for our madness.

Pete Wright:
“I’m sorry, I have to write a one-act for a podcast” is not a great excuse.

Kyle Olson:
Right. Exactly. Like, deadlines be damned.

All right, I guess that then — let’s bring the second to a close. So Pete, if you wouldn’t mind playing our outro—

Ryan Dalton:
“Not as bad as you imagined” would be a great tagline for a lot of things.

Kyle Olson:
There we go.

Pete Wright:
It may be our new show tagline. Craft & Chaos.

Ryan Dalton:
Not as bad as you imagined.

Pete Wright:
Not as bad as you imagined.

Kyle Olson:
Well, we’re running a little bit long, just because we had fun with our stuff. So I was gonna do a couple list of questions. I think I’m just gonna do one. It does actually tie back into what we sort of started the show with, which is kind of neat.

Someone wrote in to us and said: “Pete, you said something about the difference between being vulnerable and being performatively vulnerable.”

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Kyle Olson:
“Can you say more about that? Because I think I do the bad one. I share a lot about my creative struggles online. I talk about my failures. I’m pretty open about my process. But sometimes I finish posting something and feel kind of gross. Like I said something true, but for the wrong reasons. Is that what you mean?”

So I’ll let you take that on first, and then if anybody else has any thoughts, they can weigh in after.

Pete Wright:
I don’t know is the first answer. I mean, this probably came in a while ago, and I was probably in a space of writing that line. I can get there pretty quickly.

It’s the whole idea that — and maybe because I spend all day recording some portion of my identity into a microphone.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
And with some of the shows that I do, there is a performative part of the vulnerability, which generally looks like me kind of reflecting somebody that I was when I was actually learning lessons about myself that were valuable.

Which is — we talk about the ADHD show all the time, Taking Control. We’ve been doing that show for 15 years. I’ve been diagnosed for 27. Many of the things we talk about on that show are things that I feel like I have come to terms with. But the act of going through them as if I’m sort of learning them contemporaneously is part of the teaching. It’s part of being kind of authentic. It’s authentic to this guy that I was five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. It’s still very real. But am I that guy anymore? Maybe not quite.

So put that into this other context. Like, just the act of me writing this novella and putting it out in the world is so jarring to me. That’s like contemporaneous vulnerability. And I get sick of myself about how I present it.

I keep — I’m legitimately channeling Ryan, trying to think, you know, “I wrote a thing. You like it or you don’t, let’s just — I’m proud of it. I want you to read it. And you don’t have to love it. And frankly, you don’t even have to read it. But the joy is the act of creation.”

And when I do that, I just don’t know. I’m not good at that in this part of my life. That’s the part that feels super performative. And in an effort to correct, I overcorrect, and I end up coming off as, you know, wealthy.

Does any of that make any sense? Is any of that relatable to anybody?

Kyle Olson:
No, I have that too. We talk on this, and it sounds like I’m entirely put together and all that. But I can tell you that whenever I love being asked a question, I love answering the question — I can tell you that, even on this show, I will be midway through an answer, in a long thing, and my inner editor, or my inner voice, is like, “What are you talking about? Stop. Just bail. What are you doing?”

In the midst of putting together a thought, I’m already having it, just like, “Stop. Just bail out. Nobody cares about this. You’ve lost the point long ago. Get out.” So that is my internal self-talk that I have to try and be like, “No, no, it’ll cut together. If it’s really bad, people cut it out.”

So I trust in the process. My only thought is, because the internet is so large and there are so many different things, it’s very difficult to find stuff. So I’m a big believer in putting out all the stuff for the process, because the algorithm isn’t serving me to anyone. If you want to find out the stuff, you have to sort of dig in and do it.

It doesn’t feel like showing all the parts of the work and the ups and downs of it — you kind of have to go to it. You have to go to Substack. You have to go to the websites to find out about these things.

From there, I feel like people can choose how much they want to share and how much they don’t. There are creators I follow who post a lot, and I wish they wouldn’t. And there are creators who post seldom, and I wish they would do more. It’s that push-pull of how much you want to reveal about what you’re doing and how you feel about it, versus keeping your process internal. It has to be by your individual comfort level.

Ryan Dalton:
When I was first getting into this whole game, it occurred to me — and I remember the moment that it did — that, oh, I’m gonna have to choose, draw my own lines in what I say and what I share, how transparent I am about certain things. And it has since grown to me having to consider that in a number of arenas.

But the first time I can remember is — this was back when everybody was on Twitter, before the fragmentation and everybody going to different places. There was an author that I had admired, who was on there, and, you know, always liked her work and everything. And then there was a day where she just kind of went off on this rant about day-job woes.

And I sat there thinking, I don’t like to think about authors that I like having day jobs. I like to envision them sitting and writing, and I don’t care if it’s true. That’s part of what I like to think about.

So during the whole time, especially when I had full-time corporate jobs and any of that stuff, I never said a word about any of that. If I’m doing stuff online, it’s almost assuredly going to be in this arena of being a writer. So I’m gonna talk about that. I’m also going to try to be enthusiastic about it, and share the things I enjoy, and talk about that stuff.

Day-to-day frustrations — everybody’s whining about stuff online. I don’t want to be that. So I’m just gonna focus on what I’m enjoying, about other people’s work, and about the process that I’m in.

I also came to realize — it hit me at one point when I almost commented on something — I don’t publicly criticize the work of living authors.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Dalton:
I just feel like it’s professional courtesy. As an offshoot of that, if there’s another bit of media that’s come out, whether it’s TV, movies, games, or whatever, that I think is horrendous, and I’m personally offended by how terrible it is and what a failure and a missed opportunity it is, I don’t post about that either.

For a much more practical reason: because a lot of the companies that put that stuff out also have publishing arms. And before you get book deals, they will look at the things that you post. And if you spent a day just completely eviscerating the thing that another one of their company’s arms put out, they may be less inclined to hire you for work.

So that’s a practical reason. But because I have those long-established boundaries and lines that I’ve drawn — it’s habit now just to stay within what I’ve given myself. That also makes it easier to be sincere in the things I know I’m gonna be open and honest about. Because I know, this is what I talk about. This is the stuff that I’ll be playful and open with. And there’s a whole other variety of stuff that I don’t talk about at all. So I don’t have to worry about whether I’m authentic or not, because the stuff I’ve already decided to talk about, I can be authentic about. So that’s how I go about it.

Mandy Fabian:
Yeah, I can chime in. I think that it takes all the energy I have, all the energy and focus, along with being a mom and a wife and a friend and a person in the world, to do this creative stuff as a job. It takes everything I have to do the best work I can do.

So in terms of sharing it, that was always something afterwards I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know if I have anything left.” And I’ve never, ever wanted people to get to know me as a brand. I’ve only ever wanted them to know my work. But these days those are a little intermingled.

I’m with you, Ryan. I don’t like to express opinions publicly on stuff, because, first of all, I flip-flop. One day I’m like, “I hated it.” And I’ll watch it again and be like, “It wasn’t bad.”

Kyle Olson:
Uh-huh.

Mandy Fabian:
I don’t want to go on record saying something is garbage, and then just change my mind two weeks later when I see someone else’s opinion on it. It’s not my place. I’m not a critic. That’s not my job.

But in terms of what to share, I do think it’s important to balance being able to share who you are and share your authentic voice. If you’re doing something creative and you’re channeling something through the creative work, I really do think that, like, let your creativity do its thing. Because it’s actually not even you. It’s something that’s coming through you, and it’s meant for someone out there. So put it out there. Do your best to try to get it to the person. But also, I think that gets helped. If you send it to a few people, the idea is that it will ripple.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, that’s right. You’ll find your own squirrel suit, or you’ll murder your own chefs.

Mandy Fabian:
And I think the tragedy is focusing so much on trying to get it to enough people, that I’m missing the boat on whether or not I’m working on my next thing — on what that voice really is. I can really actually deplete the satisfaction of having completed something, and the feeling of that, by focusing too much on something that I’m actually pretty bad at. I prefer to focus on the thing I’m actually good at, which is, oh, I like to make things.

Ryan Dalton:
We all need, like, a professional hype man to follow us everywhere we go and be like, “You’re not gonna believe the thing they wrote. It’s the best.”

Kyle Olson:
Yeah, honestly.

Pete Wright:
Truly.

Kyle Olson:
If there’s one idea I would take, it’s the Man of Action. Because the Man of Action were four different writers from comic books who teamed up to be like, “Hey, how about we just all mutually support each other, and we’ll work together, and we’ll do all this stuff?” From that has come a ton of content, including Ben 10 and all this amazing work. Because if you go there, it’s four different people. You only have to go to one place for these four different creatives, and they’re all working together. I was like, oh, that’s what I want. It’s kind of what we have here, but we just need to, like—

Pete Wright:
Creative commune.

Kyle Olson:
100%. We need to have, you know, whatever the — like Pixar, except that I’m not making everybody do the stuff. It’s just, we’re all in this under the same umbrella.

Mandy Fabian:
Well, that’s what I’m gonna write my 10-minute play about. Creative Commune.

Kyle Olson:
Okay.

Mandy Fabian:
Who gets the spoon?

Kyle Olson:
I love it. That’s right. So it will have to bring my back.

Ryan Dalton:
It would be like the conch shell in Lord of the Flies. “I’m holding the spoon, you have to listen to me.”

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kyle Olson:
Right.

Pete Wright:
Yeesh. But it doesn’t end quite so darkly.

Ryan Dalton:
Right.

Pete Wright:
How about that?

Kyle Olson:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
We all agree — Bunny, not a problematic character at all.

Ryan Dalton:
Yeah.

Kyle Olson:
So, bunnies and squirrels and spoons, oh my. What a time we’ve had here on this episode of Craft & Chaos. Pete, thank you for sharing your brand new work, which no one had ever heard before except for the small people in that group.

Pete Wright:
They were normal-sized people, Kyle.

Kyle Olson:
I would put out to our listeners: hey, say nice things to Pete. Tell him what you liked about the thing. Because we creatives kind of need that, as well as the critiquing part of it. So send stuff up, I’m fine. But send all that stuff to Pete. And where can they do that, Pete?

Pete Wright:
Just go to craftandchaos.fun. It’ll take you to the website for the show. There’s ways to find — we’re all online. We’re all people who live in some way, shape, or form online. craftandchaos.fun is a good place to find us.

Ryan Dalton:
I’d be curious to hear what listeners like. What do they want to hear from creative people that they follow and enjoy? Is less more, kind of what we’re doing? Is that what they like? Or do they want all access? I mean, I’m not going to give you all access, but I’m curious if that’s what you want.

Kyle Olson:
Yeah. That sounds like a good topic for a future episode. So stay subscribed, good people, and we will see you further on. Doing craft. Making chaos.