Broadway Bowls!

The story about Broadway actors and stagehands in their Thursday night beer league will finally run,I think, this Saturday on Only a Game. Locally, the show starts at 7a.m., on WBUR (90.9 FM), but the story will probably run in the final segment, starting around 7:45. Luckily, there's a podcast, too, usually posted a day or so after the show airs.

It should run, unless some unforeseen sports-related emergency develops between now and then. Among those quoted in the story are two actors from the Seafarer, Ciaran Hinds (what a lovely man he is) and Sean Mahon (tall, cute, mentioned Bulgaria at least once). Would have loved to quote Conleth Hill (left, more on him later) but he hates microphones. No, seriously. Famous stage actor. Brilliant. Nice guy. Decent bowler. Won't talk about himself. What can you do? At the very end of the night, at 2:30 a.m., when it was time for them to go home and for me to make the trek through Times Square back to my hotel room, Hill said, "I'm sorry. Put a microphone in front of me and I look like a dog that's been told to take a bath."

Searching for Mr. Mahon

Number of minutes spent interviewing Mr. Mahon for the NPR bowling story: 2

Number of minutes spent logging the tape from this interview: 14

Percentage of interesting, bowling-related remarks made by him that are unusable because I stepped all over them, perhaps because the interview took place 3 hours past my bedtime, perhaps because I'd been awake for 36 hours straight, perhaps because I was still flustered from recent encounter with hunky Mr. Flapjack Tits: 33

Minutes spent waffling over the viability of two remaining, unsullied quotes: 10

Differing places the selected quote occupied in the story before a producer looked at it: 7

Number of Irishmen in the entire bowling alley, amongst a field of 120 bowlers: 4

Percentage of Irishmen present who were interviewed, with great interest, by me: 75

Number of times I considered that perhaps the Irish were in danger of being a tad over-represented in the story: 0 

Number of times my husband questioned my pronunciation of Mr. Mahon's last name after the long-buried, genetic, Boston-Irish link to the motherland roused itself inside him, yet again: 1

Times I said to Larry, "He's not going to hear it, anyway:" 3

Times Larry shook his head in response and said, "I'm just saying you'd better check:" 3

Minutes spent frantically scrolling through digital tracks, in vain, to find the interview in a hope against hope that I had, in fact, asked Mr. Mahon to say his name on tape, as any professional would do, if she had half a brain, even if she had just previously spent several minutes in the presence of hunky Mr. Flapjack Tits: 22

Number of times I cursed myself using unprintable language: 11

Frantic emails sent to co-commissioner of bowling league asking if there is any way she might know this guy and/or how to say his name:2

Times I checked email in the two hours before morning edit with producer: 17

Times I checked email after the morning edit while waiting to voice the story: 15

Elapsed time, in minutes, spent mining the electronic landfill known as the Internet collecting irrelevant scraps of information about Mr. Mahon, including his age (41), and his day job (personal trainer) in an effort to discover the correct pronunciation of his name: 123

Mr. Mahon's IMDB listings: 12

Number of his appearances on ER, voice-overs for dragons, and roles in a Sci-Fi channel movies of the week: 1

Appearances on Line of Fire, which I had never heard of: 4

Number of acting coaches who use Mr. Mahon's head shot and enthusiastic endorsement in online brochure copy: 1

Number of gay men's websites that speak of him with lust and admiration: 5 (and counting)

Percent chance that he is, in fact, gay: 35

Number of nude or explicit photos of him on the internet: 0

Minutes spent mentally composing Google searches likely to yield such photos: 3

Time, in minutes, spent wondering how to find any nude photos of any attractive men in order to alleviate anxious boredom: 7

Amount, in dollars, of money personally raised by Mr. Mahon in 2004 to fight Leukemia: 60,456

Elapsed time, in seconds, of self-imposed guilt trip over having hoped, however casually, to glimpse the dinky of a great humanitarian: 52

Percentage of the five-man cast of the Seafarer interviewed by reporters representing various broadcast media, including podcast, during which the reporters stated their names clearly and correctly: 80

Number of times Mr. Mahon was interviewed by said reporters, who might even inadvertently have pronounced his name correctly: 0

Number of times I watched Mr. Mahon's acting demo reel on YouTube, even after I knew it would not teach me how to say his name: 4

Additional minutes spent wondering what sort of parts he would be good for: 12

Time spent setting up a YouTube account so that I could send an email to whoever posted the demo reel, in hopes of getting the pronunciation right:40

Number of attempts to send email: 3

Number of responses: 0

Times I entertained the irrational notion that the person who posted that reel is, in fact, a crazed fan: 17

Times I feared that I was becoming a crazed fan: 3

Number of attempts to convince the show's producer that we could cut this quote and any reference to Mr. Mahon without losing substance: 2

Minutes prior to voicing tracks that I checked email one final time to find a response from bowling league contact that contained the correct pronunciation: 1

Amount of time spent considering that I made a day-long obsession out of a single syllable word, and over the life and career of a total stranger: as little as possible

THE EXERCISE: Make a list. The items on it and the order in which they are listed should tell a story. With any luck, the resulting story is shorter and tighter than the one above (and displays less overt craziness on the part of the writer).

Reading the Cut File

The thing about reporting is that not everything that gets observed or written down makes it into the story. In many cases, what gets left out is more of a real story than what goes in.

I remember covering a football team years ago. I covered them for a whole season and I remember that the coach would always cry during his pre-game speeches. I tried putting that in the story several times, and it always got cut. Once, I included some of the sound of the speech itself, and you could sort of tell, but I was never allowed to say it in the story.

Anyway, as I log bowling tape, I remember this exchange between the security guard who was watching the door at the beginning of the night, and the manager of the bowling alley. I have some of it on tape. You have to imagine three of us standing outside a bowling alley in the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 35th and 8th (I think). Disco music in the background along with the sound of falling pins. The manager asks the guard if he knew that they caught a couple having sex in the bathrooms. Twice. The manager kicked the couple out of the bowling alley and then a bit later came back in and they were back at it. 

The guard's response was, "What did she look like?" Then, "Were they Indian?" 

The manager said, "I don't know." 

The guard was busy remembering. "Yeah, but like, she was lighter than him, right?" 

Made me wonder if the guard caught them, too, although he didn't admit that. Then the guard turned to me. "It's always the men's room," he says. "Because women, they'll scream. But guys, they'll just watch. Get out the camera phone. It's true."

I'm sure it is. There is no way that this is going in the story or anywhere near it, but it made me laugh.