It's Molly Lewis' birthday: check out her musical!
Our friend Molly Lewis plays the ukulele and writes songs. And it’s her birthday today! Here are some things you should know about Molly, and her new musical, and how great she is.
We became friends with Molly because Paul & Storm decided we should be friends. It worked out. We met in real life for the first time at the first GeekGirlCon, right before playing a concert together. (I had seen Molly play with Jonathan Coulton while wearing a pirate hat several years prior, but that doesn't really count.) The GeekGirlCon show was fun, and we were all good and awkward, and I barely freaked out at all when she told me she'd been listening to our music earlier and liked it. The next day, her romantic counterpart took us out to brunch and I ate the best risotto I’ve ever had. I’ve been chasing that high (risotto-wise) ever since.
Molly and we have done some really fun things together over the years, and gone through the highs of the well-shined well-oiled well-performed concert, and we’ve done the nightmarish and/or stressful and/or poorly planned and/or sparsely attended ones together, too. I really like Molly for a lot of reasons, but the professional ones are these: Everything Molly does is amazing. Every one of her songs makes me laugh and gasp and go absolutely nuts with songwriter jealousy. When she releases something into the world, it is the best goddamn thing: whether it’s a song about flying vaginas or the world's shortest ukulele tutorial.
When I see a show which is poorly organized, I think "they shouldn't have been so ambitious" and think of how to make the project more realistic. Molly thinks of ways that ambitious project could be done better, cause she believes in big, great things. She’s the best. And I know this.
But when Molly told me she wanted to write a holiday musical for all of her friends and was going to perform it for a live audience at the Triple Door in Seattle, I thought something like this:
“Oh, what a wonderful idea. That is impossible.”
Writing a musical, for starters, was a big giant black box of mystery. I assumed you needed training and experience and many failures and some sort of choreographer to do this correctly. You need stage hands and props and weeks of rehearsal and some sort of in-house therapist. Certainly, you can’t just write your first full-length musical, cast a bunch of professional performers in it, and do it in front of a giant audience. That’s impossible. It’s unrealistic. It can’t be done, no matter how much of A Creative Organized Genius Of A Person you are.
Then Molly set a date for the musical, and I went “oh.”
And she pitched us our song, and I went “oh man."
And then, ladies and others, Molly Lewis wrote a goddamn musical’s worth of songs. And, with the help of writer Josh A Cagan, director/polisher Joseph Scrimshaw and stage manager Sarah Scrimshaw… she pulled it off!
When I thought it couldn’t be done, I was wrong. Because I am a weak and flawed human being with a strong negative inner voice. (I have many strengths and I love myself, don't worry about me.) Because I couldn’t picture myself taking on this amazing, terrifying, creatively challenging and conceptually enormous project, I assumed Molly couldn’t do it either. But Molly isn’t me. And thank GOD for that.
Molly’s musical “Thanksgiving versus Christmas" is hilarious. Genuinely funny. Not in a cliched “holiday special” way… in a Rifftrax/better-than-TV/surprising and fantastic way. After the first runthough with the cast, I was flabbergasted. I KNOW these people. These people who wrote this amazing thing, and I KNOW them. I am SO LUCKY.
The night of the show went so smoothly. It was up there with the best-run shows we’ve ever been in: w00tstock/Tabletop/JoCoCruiseCrazy/Thrilling Adventure-level organization. (You'll note that half of those things have Sarah Scrimshaw in common, and the others are run by professional TV people.)
My friends, it was a miracle.
And OF COURSE it worked, because it’s Molly Lewis. Everything she sets her mind to is amazing. What a fool I was to ever doubt.
Bonus for everyone: the show was recorded!
The album is going to be great: I have heard some of the recordings and they are of amazing quality—it will be the next best thing to being there, and perhaps even better, because you can listen again and again and get those jokes you missed the first time.
Plus, Aubrey and I have an AMAZING song.
Gods bless you, Molly Lewis. Thank you for being fearless and ambitious and just so f*&$ing inspirational. Happy birthday.
PRE-ORDER MOLLY LEWIS’ THANKSGIVING VERSUS CHRISTMAS ON BANDCAMP NOW.
It will be released on (OR BEFORE) October 20 of next year.