There are times when I take a moment to reflect back on just how many years that I have been podcasting with my friends Bill and Stephen. I also reflect on people that I have met because of the show who I could now call friends. There are many. Sure, there are times that I get bummed. There's some kind of strange longing for more listeners, more numbers. More feedback. I mean what is it that I want? Do I want a hundred people telling me how much they love the show? I don't think so. I have thought long and hard about this and I think what I crave is laughter. I want to hear the laughter. I love hearing the laughter.
Now, I'm not a Stand-Up Comedian and I don't plan on being one. Perhaps I chose the wrong medium to express myself as podcasts don't seem to get the attention that I want or at least the one I do does not. We have gotten feedback on the show, we have people that have sent us great voicemails and I eat it up. I love when people tell me what made them laugh on the show. I cherish it like a warm bowl of soup filling up my hungry tummy. What? C'mon Jason can't you do better symbolism than that? Not at the moment. Just keep rollin'.
There are times when I get really nostalgic for the old days of the show, I listen to how much freaking energy I had. I did clip shows, where we on the show encountered Aliens and Zombies and even Zombie Snakes on a Train. We even encountered the Cloverfield Monster. There's a history there and I look back on the body of work that we have accumulated and I am proud. Look at that archive. It does make me a proud papa. I have no idea if people are listening to those old episodes but they are there and I admit that every once in awhile I will go back and look at all of the episodes in one place and think about all of those hours and all of those laughs that we had during those shows.
When the show first started my Sister Vanessa did the show with us and then much later my Sister Laura joined us on the show for a short time. I wanted Vanessa on the show so badly at first to relive childhood memories of times we would hit record on our old cassette recorder and improv some silly show like Angus Scrimm hosting Star Search or a radio call-in show where I would pretend to be different people calling in to annoy the radio host Vanessa. We had a lot of fun times doing that but I soon realized that the only people that thought those recordings were funny were Jason and Vanessa. When we started the podcast it was hard to achieve that same magic again. There were times when we did and I'm grateful for it but there were also times where it became a lot of work so it was better to move on. There's a reason people say you should never work with family. Someone says that right? They should if they don't. I kid I kid. I love my sister but I don't think that we were ever on the same page of the show I wanted and what She wanted.
I dubbed Stephen 'The Pop Culture Zealot' and he has always been there for the show whenever I have asked him unless there was a Skinny Puppy concert in town. Stephen has always been a great friend and he's also been my longest running friend in my life. He's just a genuinely good person who is honest and can make me laugh. I have known Stephen since I was 19 years old. He was the Frame Shop Manager when I walked in. I was just out of High school and I had no professional demeanor in any way. I was a young punk who needed money for fast food and video games. I had no knowledge of how to save money or how to pay my bills. I was an idiot jack ass that lived in a protective shell. I was very introverted when I met Stephen. It took some time but over the few months that I worked there I started to open up and realized that Stephen and I shared similar silly senses of humor. We made a game of making each other laugh and created some fun ways to get through the days in that frame shop. Good times.
When my Wife and I finally bought our first house my dream was to create my own Home Theater. I had that dream for a long time and it's something that I have never achieved. I do have a cool Plasma TV though. One thing that I must have learned long ago as a child was how to window shop. I used to collect catalogs and stare at the toy sections. I would save pictures of whatever toys I wanted and that became pictures of Home Theaters when I was older. Things that I wanted. One place where I would look at those things was the Home Theater Forum. I would peruse the threads of people who had way more money than I, purchasing high end toys that I could never own. It was there that I found a thread about a new MMO game. A Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game called Star Wars Galaxies. I became fascinated with the thread on the HTF where members of the forum described their adventures. Now at the time my wife had just shelled out a lot of money for our first bonafide Dell computer. The PC we had before I had purchased from Stephen's neighbor for $50. It was a POS starter computer, we're talking days of AOL here people and dial-up. But with our new home Heather wanted a new PC so we got one with a fancy flat LCD screen and it had a whopping 100gb harddrive with 512mb of Ram!!! Wow, now that's a monster computer right there, so naturally I wanted a game to play on this new rig and Star Wars Galaxies was the perfect game to try out.
I bought the game one day and started playing, there was a steep learning curve but I quickly learned in those types of games the best thing to do is quickly make friends that can help you out, tell you how to play the game, where the best places are etc. I joined the Home Theater Forum group in the game, joined their same server and met Grady. Grady would eventually be Mulberry Bill. We had a great time in the game, killing Gungans and Tusken Raiders. We soon began talking movies and tv shows while we played and realized that we shared mutual loves of the same things. Eventually we got on a program called Team-speak where you can talk in-game with headsets to your friends and soon Bill and I were talking everyday. If we would have recorded these early conversations we could have created a podcast. We talked about current films and tv shows and had a great time making fun of stuff. We became fast friends. It's hard to get the timeline exactly right buy I know that my wife became pregnant not long after this and I knew I had Nine Months of goofing off to do. I had to get my shit together, my life was going to change very soon. After my daughter was born I played less and less but I still talked to Bill on MSN Chat, remember that? It doesn't exist anymore. When you are a stay at home Dad you find different things to entertain you while you do other things, mostly I found things to listen to. This is when I discovered my first podcast.
Leo Laporte and the Screen Savers crew had all moved on to other things when G4 bought Tech Tv. Leo started up this new thing called a Podcast. It was like a radio show that you could subscribe to and download. You could subscribe on iTunes and it would downloaded right to your iPod. Wow, how nifty. I knew as soon as I heard the first episode of This Week in Tech that I had to create my own podcast. One thing that I failed to mention before was that in my years at the Frame Shop, long after Stephen had left, I found a Sports Radio Station called 1310 The Ticket. I brought my own portable Radio to work and had The Ticket on every moment I was there. Now, I had listened to Howard Stern a lot years earlier. I loved waking up early and listening when he was played on local radio and then I would fall back to sleep. I loved the idea of a radio show. I knew that I wanted to do a radio show. Just like Howard -- meaning I wanted to do a long form talk show. The Ticket played lots of Drops just like Fred did on Howard -- drops were sound clips that they would play usually for comedic effect. I knew that I wanted my own drops, I had to play lots of drops.
When I told Bill that I wanted to do a podcast, would he like to do one? he said sure but how long should it be? I said I don't know, 1 or 2 hours? He laughed, wondering how in the world we could find anything to talk about for that long. What I had envisioned was a Drive Time Radio Show that would play locally in a Small Town, the Town of Mulberry. Mulberry was the fictional town in a screenplay I had written when I was 19 years old called Laughing Boy. This was one of those Anytown USA types of places with the old storefronts on main street and had festivals and parades. We would be doing the show from an imaginary tiny radio station right there in the heart of town.
When we started the show, this idea quickly fell by the wayside but before I get to that I want to talk about the name. Nowhere in Mulberry was the name of the podcast. I knew I wanted the show to be titled something about the town of Mulberry but in hindsight I honestly should have called the show TV Talk or something really lame. I would scan the different podcast names on Podcast Alley which was an early podcasting site. It was a place where people could share their Rules of Podcasting and what equipment they used. As I would see all of the different names like Geekcast, Bookcast, Dorkcast, CastCast and JediCast. I knew that I didn't want to call the show anything 'Cast'. Screw that, It's totally lame. So I decided I didn't care if the name was catchy I wanted it to be something different. So after talking names with Bill. I said 'Something Mulberry' and he said 'Nowhere in Mulberry?' and I was like 'YEAH!'
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