This Week's Guest: Guy Branum
Why is "gay" the word that the world seems to have picked to describe us? My guest Guy Branum has some thoughts on the topic, and on many more. You can see Guy as the host of "Talk Show the Game Show," debuting April 5 on TruTV, where celebrities compete to be the best guest on a talk show. There could be no better environment for Guy, a brilliantly funny comedian with a superpower for first breaking rules, and then reassembling them into something far more fascinating.
This Week's Recommendation: Talk Show the Game Show & My Fair Lady
Please do not commit the crime of missing the debut of Talk Show the Game Show on TruTV, April 5. I've seen it when it was a live show, and words cannot describe how fortunate the world is that you no longer have to fly to Los Angeles to see it -- though it woudl be entirely reasonable to do so. It's that good.
Guy mentioned his love of Pygmalion stories, and so of course my recommendation this week is for the musical My Fair Lady. It's the story of a poor rag-tag young woman who dreams of finding someplace better, and is then plucked from the street by a man of high society who wishes to trains her be a cultivated lady for his own amusement.
As she struggles to move from grimy streets to wealth and excess, Eliza quickly becomes a person of overwhelming contrasts. She's torn between the place that she's from, the person who she is, and the world that she's entered. She finds her feet planted in two very different realms, and as they slide further and further apart she begins to lose her footing in each.
I often wonder what my life would be life if I were born in different circumstances. How much of me is me, and how much it is the house where I grew up and the city I moved to as an adult? We're all made up, to varying extents, of pieces of everywhere we've been and everyone we've met. It can be hard to fit those pieces together -- say, combining the streets of London with an ornate ballroom, or a dusty farm town with a flamboyant TV game show -- but ultimately, those pieces don't define us nearly as much as the unique connective tissue that we grow to attach them to each other.
Clips of Stuff We Talked About
Music
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/