Starting Standup in Maine with David Walton

#22- Boarding School

• David Walton

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Speaker 1:

Hey, welcome to Starting Stand-Up. My name is David Walton. I'm so, so happy that you've found me. This podcast, if you've just stumbled on it, is an audio chronicle of my quest to learn and master from scratch the most terrifying, exciting art form on earth stand-up comedy. I've been doing it for a few months and it's going. It's going and in this episode I continue to try to make some progress. This time I'm I'm gonna begin to milk my high school experience for comedy. Please enjoy. Oh man, that's rubbish. That's rubbish.

Speaker 1:

I'm reading a book called care of the soul by thomas moore, highly recommended. Sort of the paradigm is that we all try to take care of our bodies and our minds. We try to get things done, but no one's really paying attention to their soul. What's good for your soul? Is it good for your soul to throw in a dip and have a vod? Maybe it is. Is it good for your soul to go to a full moon party in Koh Samui, thailand, and make love to a lady boy? Maybe Everyone has their own soul's path. The reason I bring that up is I just heard that an older friend who always seemed like a kind of guy who would like lady boys, I just found out was in Thailand and for like six weeks traveling solo, and I was like T-Jar, that's just about right. Anyway, we got a great show.

Speaker 1:

It's a different one. I'm going to keep it on the short side because I really I'm going up tomorrow and I've been working hard on putting it together and I thought about teasing the show tonight, but I'm not going to because I want to keep that powder keg dry. Is that even a saying? I'm not sure it is. We're losing our minds on the sugar diet here, but I am happy to say I'm down to 225 because I've cut out all starch in the last four days. No potatoes or rice. They could have been the culprit for my terrifying weight gain. I hit 229.7. And I said if I hit 230, that's a red alert. For those that don't know me, I spent my entire adult life at 195. And so, yeah, we're almost 35 pounds of weight gain in the last couple years.

Speaker 1:

And there's something weird and fun about weight gain. Like when I hunch over, it almost feels like there's a bug on me and it's just because my breast fat is like creating a crease. And when I hunch over, like my gut has so much more fat now that it's almost like I can rest on my gut. I've also noticed that I'm very jittery but I move around a lot. Weirdly, ever since I got much more fat, I can just sit still. I can eat a meal and just not move for 50 minutes. There's something nice about that eat a meal and just like not move for 50 minutes. And there's something nice about that. No one talks about the fact that kind of getting some meat, some some middle-aged meat is, is kind of weirdly enjoyable. I don't know. I don't know what it is. I think I'm losing my mind. But um, I'll keep you updated on the on the on the weight. I think that'll be a really fun thing to track. So today we. So today we're transitioning, we're going to take a little time travel.

Speaker 1:

I did, I did some fact writing. Again, I'm not going to do a lot of fact writing For those who are thinking about stand-ups. Weirdly, the simplest advice I've gotten has been kind of the most promising, where you just list facts about a topic. You just list them out and if you have a topic, let's say, you wanted to talk about on stage, or even if you're giving a wedding speech or you're giving any kind of or you're writing. Sometimes, just the brain dump of incomplete sentences, of just words, gets the brain cooking and gets the memories going, and so I'm going to share with you today my fact list of boarding school.

Speaker 1:

I went to boarding school. I don't think I'm going to name the boarding school, I'm sure it could be found out, but, yeah, this is. You'll see why I don't name it, and I think there's material there. It's hard to, it's gonna be hard to. I worry that I can't make this relatable, but I'm sure there's a way to do it. It's just going to take some time, but I haven't seen you know, I haven't seen a lot of standup about boarding school, so I think that's something that I can offer. So this is the beginning. You're at the first inning, the embryonic stage. Please enjoy my fact list of boarding school.

Speaker 1:

Before we get to it, though, we got a new segment that I'm going to keep going Gary Goldman's 366 tips, which I put a link up in the last episode. There's just so much good stuff in here that I'm going to do another three tip share. This was Gary's tip number 16. Be the comedian you wanted to see. Be the comedian you wanted to see. Think about the things that you wish someone made jokes about when you sat in the audience. Make a list of topics and ideas that you'd be excited to see someone discuss. Become that comedian. You've got 30 years. I like that. Tip number 37.

Speaker 1:

My favorite writer, kurt Vonnegut, said he wrote for an audience of one, his sister Alice. I write for a 21 year old me Today. Think about your ideal audience member. This should help you narrow your writing focus and help you find your voice. I realize I have not been writing for a specific person and I'm going to try that and see what happens. Maybe it will help me find my voice. And then, finally, you will hardly ever feel like writing Frequently. You'll be glad you're writing shortly after you start. You will always feel better after you've written and I have to say that is so true. I felt a whole lot better after I wrote down all this boarding school stuff which you're about to hear right now. Please enjoy.

Speaker 1:

I went to boarding school and I went from age 14 to 18. It was co-ed. It was this gorgeous 2000 acre campus. You could visit girls rooms with the doors closed from 7 to 10 pm every night, but if you got busted having sex you were in big trouble, like suspended, sometimes kicked out. One time I got busted with a girl in bed knock on the door and we stayed silent and got away with it. I got busted ripping extension bong hits. After winning the dorm play competition I had to get hair follicle testing. For the last five months of my time there, or last five months of junior year, there was, you know, always things happening, like a tour guide walking in on you know some kid getting fellatio in the tuck shop, which is like the cafeteria. I would say everyone was really smart, for the most part, like really impressive kids. Many kids had rich parents, but there were many kids on financial aid and you didn't really know everyone's financial status, although sometimes they were like obvious, like an heir to the Kawasaki fortune, like this is Ming Kawasaki and you know you'd be like oh, yeah, uh.

Speaker 1:

Every religion was welcome, celebrated, but we went to chapel four times a week in the morning for meetings but sang a hymn and said christian prayer. So it was. It was an episcopalian essence. It was formal coat and tie, seated meals four times a week with rotating students as servers and a faculty or two at the table. So it's very much like harry potter, but without the magic and with way more drunkenness. Actually, you basically just learn how to keep your shit together when drunk at a very young age, like you would. There was nights where you would rip four to five warm vodka shots at like six mouthwash visine and then you just hold it together and coat and tie at the table pretending you were fine. Very fascinating skill set to develop. But it looking back it feels very weird. But it was so normal when you were there and you had 1500 acres of woods where there were decade-old forts where students from the 70s would engrave stuff and like you'd be smoking a cigarette in the same fort that, like some senator had date raped a girl. Um, that's probably not true, because girls didn't even weren't even admitted until, like the, I believe, the late 60s. Um, I mean honestly, it's a nicer campus than, I would say, 99% of all colleges. The endowment of the high school is over a billion dollars, cost about $75,000 to go. Now when I went it was, I think, like $25,000.

Speaker 1:

A normal day would be to do all your extracurriculars and homework and then like at maybe 10.30, play chess with like a little dip in and then at 11 or so when the dorm faculty house master light went out, you'd meet in a friend's room and you'd pack a bong and you'd rip the tube, you'd place a. It was a very it was a very labor intensive, high stakes thing. You basically have this, you know, 12 to 18 inch bong. You couldn't let the smoke out. So what you would do is you'd have a pillow with generally a dryer sheet on the pillow and so, and then you'd have this athletic sock that had been rolled up and duct taped, that was lived at the top of the tube so that the bong water wouldn't start to smell up the room.

Speaker 1:

But that would. It was you had two uses for it, because you would take it out and when you were smoking you'd obviously light the bowl. And then the moment of truth was when you pull the bowl out. Well before that, when you stop pulling you know if you've ever had a bong hit the smoke from the bowl as soon as you stop pulling will go into the room. So what you do is you'd cut off the oxygen to that bowl by taking the duct tape portion of the sock and you'd sort of press it pretty hard down on the bowl and that would prevent the smoke from escaping the bowl. You'd then pull the slide, you'd clear the tube, then you would place the bowl back in the tube, stash the tube all the while the smoke is in your lungs barking.

Speaker 1:

If you'd taken a big one, you were right on the edge and this was the really joy. It was just finding that edge and you would hold it, hold it, hold it, and then you would get the pillow and you would place the dryer sheet right in on the pillow and you would blow through the dryer sheet into the pillow and you would have a hit mark. There would be black tar in the pillow. That would signify, you know often, how big a hit you'd taken. We had one friend, legend, who I won't say his name, but he had an extraordinary skill. Where he could take, he could clear, you know, a giant tube like I'm talking, no lie like a 60 second hit. He would pull it out, he would hold in his lungs and when he would blow into the pillow there would be no mark. And we were like, finally, we were just like you have to show us what's going on. And and he, he would blow out no smoke, he absorbed all the smoke. What a legend. You know who you are anyway.

Speaker 1:

So if you executed it properly, there was very little smell. All the smoke had been entered into a pillow and let's see, and the bong was stashed and so often you would have a closet and you would be rotating into the closet and sometimes, if you were particularly cocky, there was no locks on the doors. You would just be doing this out in the open if it was late enough at night and you were sure that the parents I mean the teacher wasn't going to come in. Another thing that was done to ensure that you didn't get quote unquote busted was you would have what's called a delay, and a delay is basically an absurd maze in your room where the teacher opens the door suddenly and what they're looking at is just like a eight foot tall bookcase and they have to sort of weave through to this little area. We're talking a small room. I mean it's like a 10 by 10 foot room and they would have to walk like 20 feet through a maze of furniture to get to the hangout area. So by the time he had eyes on you, that delay had given you the 10 to 15 seconds to either stash the bong or put away the vodka, etc. So it was very intricate and it was incredibly. There was so much skill.

Speaker 1:

And so, anyway, I was sort of reminiscing about this this is in the 90s, 25, over almost 30 years ago and I was reminiscing about this like what is what, what? What did I really learn at boarding school? And of course I learned a lot, but it it struck me that maybe boarding school was just just training to basically become like a well-dressed criminal and everyone's kind of doing that in high school. It's not like we were doing anything that other high school kids don't do, but it was. It's fun to break the rules. Of course the stakes were very high, because if you got busted it was really humiliating. They would announce your name in in in the school assembly which was in a chapel. Sometimes, if you got busted, you'd have to give, like, a speech about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and so it was. And if, if it was your second strike, you were generally gone Uh, in the nineties, when I was Uh, legend had told of a looser time in the eighties and early nineties where where, guys, if, if the headmaster called the rector if he liked you, you could go five, six bus, you know, and still be there.

Speaker 1:

But that was no longer the case. It had gotten stricter and I believe it's not like that at all anymore. Uh, these schools have gotten a lot more, I guess, safer for your children Didn't feel unsafe, it just felt really fun. But I can't stress enough how much the danger was a value add, because you go to college and it's like everyone's like smoking and drinking and just everyone's acting like idiots and weirdly. When you go to college after going to four years of boarding school and you've kind of been in the high danger situation doing that same thing, it's almost like a letdown. It's almost like, oh, it's. It's sort of like how like pod is now. It was always fun to buy drugs, you know and know that it was illegal, but now it's like, oh, I'm just going into a shop, it's taken them, it's taken some of the joy away.

Speaker 1:

I think that's a little intricacy of boarding schools and this isn't just my boarding school, I mean this one was, I would say, relative to all the boarding schools in New England, was particularly psychedelic, focused. It was one of the top boarding schools and attracted the smartest kids and very prestigious the top boarding schools and attracted the smartest kids and very prestigious, but for whatever reason, in the 90s there was more acid probably being in mushrooms and mescaline being done than at any other boarding school, certainly of the top tier, and so it had an interesting culture and I think again that's changed. But, like I remember a kid, a legend, who, who, wake and baked every day, and it was confirmed that he for all four years of his or maybe let's call it three years of his career, um, was ripping 14 bongs a day. And then I remember he graduated, and he graduated summa cum laude, which is, like you know, latin for smart, one of the smartest people in the school, basically straight A's, 14 bongs a day. And it was a hard school. This is not because it was easy, he's just. It was that kind of people. And, oh yeah, grateful Dead was worshipped Deadlegs back.

Speaker 1:

This is before, obviously, digital music, but they were traded. All the tapes, the deadlegs were traded. There was a tradition where you'd listen to the deadleg of the Fox Theater and Smoke All Night and that deadleg was passed down to a junior each year by the Fox, who would anoint a lover of the dead and drug use in the class below, and they would carry on that tradition and the Fox tradition was in place for over three decades. When I was there, so it you had accumulated all these objects and rituals, artifacts. When you were anointed the fox, it came with like four boxes full of you know, a lizard and some. I hope I'm not giving anything away. It's not like anyone's listening to this. I hope I'm not giving anything away. It's not like anyone's listening to this.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, yeah, and like the theater where I started acting, like acting for the first time, had these place called the catacombs and you could, like you know, sort of crawl through all these pipes. And then there was this room that had, just, you know, people had writing from the 70s and 80s and you're just ripping butts and pretending, pretending you were rehearsing, but it was extremely fun. It's just that adrenaline filled rule breaking, that, uh. And then just the fact that you're living with your best friends and the fact that if you have a crush, she's available to speak with every night. You know, not that that was going down, but like if you were in love, like you could just be boning all over the campus all day just finding little nooks. Well, I mean the way I'm saying it. I mean what's not to it's not to like.

Speaker 1:

The irony is just by explaining this, pretty much guaranteeing that none of my children are going to be admitted. So I do apologize, but look, anything, this is, this is the sacrifice you make for art. You torch your kid's future for just a 10 minute rant on a podcast. That's how I roll. That's where my priorities are, anyway. So I that's sort of my list of facts about this world that I've been getting feedback is like maybe you know you don't necessarily hear a ton about boarding school on stage from standups. Okay, well, that's our show.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to go weigh in, see if I can drop down to. I think we're going to aim for 215. I thank you for being along on this journey. I will end by saying that we've got a little tickle. We've got some additional nerves coming in. There's some reluctance, but we jumped off the cliff and I responded to an outreach from the Portland Press Herald, who caught wind of this project I'm doing. I did an interview and it seems like I will be featured in a future Sunday entertainment section about this podcast and about this quest of mine with photos. They're going to come to a show. So for those who have been here from the beginning. Things are getting much more real. Once you're in a newspaper and there's an article that your mom can clip out and put in her little folder that says this is my son, then you know you've made it. That's it. I most likely will quit after I get the newspaper article. You know that's all I'm going for anyway. All right, I wish all of you love and peace, adventure, connection, safety and skin-on-skin contact.