Gareth from Liverpool, England asks,
“Are there any plans for you to tour the UK again as a humourist or other talks in the near future?”
and Mel Chandler from Brighton, England asks,
“I had front row tickets for myself and my son (a Lagavulin lover!) in Brighton. I wanted to know if you are planning to come over and do the shows?”
Gareth and Mel, thank you very kindly for your questions, which I will attempt to answer satisfactorily, despite the immediate melancholy into which they throw me. But never mind that bollocks, let’s press on.
When the pandemic landed on the planet in early 2020, I was about to embark upon a tour of some majestic English cities, including Sheffield, Nottingham, Brighton (where my bride, Megan, and I once got into some light-to-medium petting astride a golden steed with baby blue trim on one of the finest seaside carousels I’ve ever seen), and another big, smoky burg called London.
Then Megan was going to accompany me as we kept the slow-talking party rolling around Europe, to places like Stockholm, Antwerp, Oslo, and that lush bed of history and hijinks: Amsterdam, where we hoped to sample our first hashish of the new year. Then on to Reykjavik and its many wonders, including the monumental Imagine Peace Tower, created by Yoko Ono. Which I imagine to be both a hugely inspiring, artistic edifice of sculptural light and color and another great spot for spousal frottage.
But alas, these delights were bound for the bin, along with the hopes and plans of so much of the world once the lockdowns began. I was especially disappointed because these European shows would have marked the first time that I inflicted my Donkey Thoughts upon audiences for whom English was not their first language. This thrilled me and terrified me, as I had little idea what to expect in terms of a response to my material. I relished the prospect of making people laugh by “cleverly” referencing a few local idioms or slang terms, like “bollocks”, “hashish”, or “Boris can eat my ass”.
Planning such a tour is quite a persnickety chore within my particular circus, because I often have acting work lined up six months to a year in advance, and booking the venues for my humorist pageant needs to happen about a year ahead of time as well in order to secure the good theatres before that son of a bitch Billy Eilish, whoever that guy is, hogs them all up again.
SO, to at long last answer your questions, I absolutely plan to come back in the next two or three years and play my clumsy songs for the teeming dozens of you misguided Europeans who give a damn, and yes, I’m still calling you Brits “Europeans” because I’m not a nationalist dipshit, and also Boris can eat my ass.
I’ll have the fish & chips with mushy peas, please and thank you, with a Scotch Egg for dessert.
Carla Cook of Austin, Texas asks,
“Hello sir, I have a question about Scotch. In the last year I have discovered the Grangestone line of single malt scotches, which are delightfully smooth. My question for you concerns their scotches aged in casks of other alcohols—bourbon, rum, and sherry casks to be exact. Is it a travesty to do this? Do I need to turn in my Scotch card? Or do you need to try them and agree with me?”
Carla, thank you very kindly for these excellent questions.
I’ll start off my answer by reminding or newly informing you Muleteers that I have a fiduciary/love relationship some six or seven years old now with Lagavulin single malt scotch, in which the love came first, sixteen years earlier. One of the main creators of Parks and Recreation (the television show in which I portrayed Ron Swanson), a benevolent genius named Michael Schur, adored this particular elixir of the gods from the tiny Scottish island of Islay (spelled I-S-L-A-Y). Lagavulin, particularly the 16-year-old version, was coincidentally my favorite scotch as well, ever since my dear friend Scott King had purchased me my first glass of the stuff (neat) at the Chicago Film Festival in 1999 at a nearby bar while our film Treasure Island played for a lucky audience in those theatres at Water Tower Place.
This magnificent giggle-juice became the frequently relied-upon libation of my character Ron Swanson, so much so that the show eventually traveled all the way to England and then on up to Scotland, to Islay, and to the distillery itself. A magical, wizened creature there named Iain McArthur gave us his expert tour of the buildings and the works, situated on a picturesque little bay off the North Atlantic. He shook my hand and plied me with a couple drams of venerated, unfiltered liquid, pulled straight from a basement barrel fifty years old if it was a day, and here was where my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree saved my very life.
Had it been me, Nick Offerman, the mortal actor and mountebank who had slugged down some sips of that gorgeous whisky, it would sure have lain me straight into my eco-friendly grave. Thank Providence, then, or I guess Dionysus, god of both the stage and inebriation, that I was cloaked in the enchanted garb of Ron Swanson, a man from Indiana who, thanks to his fictional nature, is able to withstand super-human quantities of Scotch whisky, sure, but also bacon, steak, and (raising my palms and eyes to the heavens in grateful supplication) eggs. Ron can eat so many eggs, it would make George Kennedy and Cool Hand Luke sit and cry into their grits.
Naturally, we struck a bargain there and then that they would award me a regular stipend of Lagavulin and lucre and in exchange, I would use my humor, my creativity, my great beauty and my golden, warbling singing voice to promote their whisky to the world (the latter two were quickly scrapped). Over the last seven years or so, I have made 35 commercials for them that are utterly unsurpassable in glorious stupidity. These spots have been produced by Dean Holland and Morgan Sackett, two more of the greatest brains behind Parks and Recreation, and lots of other TV you have likely loved.
I should add, at the behest of no legal counsel (this time), that the amount of whisky I consumed in the preceding anecdote actually brought me just to the very brink of, but just missing, an immoderate sousing. All kidding aside, I have learned the hard way that one should always pace oneself in all pleasurable avenues of consumption, be it Lagavulin or a large basket of pasture-raised eggs.
Now that I’ve gotten my brief introduction out of the way, let’s see to your questions.
Q: Is it a travesty to finish the aging of whisky batches in rum, bourbon, or sherry barrels?
A: Hell no. Finishing spirits in casks that previously held other wines, beers or spirits is simply a way to play with slight alterations or enhancements to the complex flavors in the whisky. It’s not dissimilar from messing around with new, unique spices in your stew or goulash.
This is an incredible time to be alive, if you like things like whisky, beer, wine, gin, tequila, mezcal, grass-raised beef, acorn-finished pork, artisanal cheeses, hell, artisanal anything. While I feel that many of nature’s candies require no tinkering whatsoever, like bacon, for example—there is absolutely no need to “zhuzh up” Nick Offerman and Ron Swanson’s #1 favorite food—but I have been handed different varieties of candied and smoked bacon as an hors d’oeuvre, and you can bet your sweet bippy that porky shizz was delicious. So, I say while our delicious drinks and comestibles might not require improvement, it would be dumb to be such a purist as to condemn playing with flavors and experimenting with improvements.
I don’t like an ice cube in my Lagavulin. Some folks do. Any sense of right or wrong applied to such preferences is, I feel, misplaced, and likely due more to insecurity on the part of the self-appointed adjudicator.
My dear friend John Hodgman, author, actor, and bon vivant, has for years promoted a wonderful stance on this kind of argument on his hilarious and empathetic podcast, Judge John Hodgman. The idea is simply this: people must be allowed to like what they like. It’s that easy. Your roommate loves to listen to some vapid “new country” artist? That is their prerogative, I’m afraid. Certainly the rules of equitable playing times and agreed-upon volumes and such must be respected, but I think that if we hope to treat all of our neighbors on Mother Earth with equal fairness, then we have to leave people’s tastes alone, no matter how illogical they may seem to us.
That said, if you come over to my place for a grilled ribeye and you ask for ketchup, you will be berated. There is equity and then there is morality. I am but a mortal man, and god damn my eyes, I’m doing my level best here.
George Saunders from Santa Cruz, California asks,
“Is it true that actors have to train themselves not to blink?”
Thank you for this question, George.
In a word, yes. Some thespians are born with the ability to stare, maniacally or non-plussed, at their surroundings, at the person operating the focus knob on the movie camera, or their fellow humans with whom they happen to be sharing a scene. These gifted mimics are especially keen at staring for many minutes at their own reflections in a mirror.
For the rest of us, we spend torturous years in training our eyelids to remain in the “up” position, without triggering our tear ducts. This particular facial feat becomes even more complicated in the scenes during which one is required to squeeze out a few tears.
I didn’t really get my big break as an actor until I was 38 years old, largely because of my inability to keep from blinking, thanks in part to the enormous expanse of eyeball I wield. The acreage of sclera (as in “don’t fire until you see the bastards’ sclera”—William H. Prescott) gifted to me by my Anglo-Saxon forebears is a simply ridiculous amount of area when it comes to evaporation vectors and subsequent irrigation efficiency (or lack thereof).
To this day, George, I still rely on tricks to get by without suffering the crippling mortification of ruining a take of a film scene by blinking. I slip the effects department a flow of twenties to surreptitiously humidify the rooms in which we shoot, or when outside, to loiter upwind and steadily fire a super-soaker in my direction, set to “mist”.
If I need to shed some tears while not blinking, I have two techniques that have never failed me: if it’s not out of character, I keep a small quantity of freshly diced onion in a handkerchief, which I then blot beneath my eye until the waterworks begin to gush. If the kerchief doesn’t fly, then I just have someone off camera but in my eye-line stand in the middle distance and litter.
It’s a nightmare. But that’s why we get the big bucks, I suppose.
Love,
My fellow (or prospective) Muleteers, thank you for tuning in by whatever method you prefer. If you want to ask me a question, please leave it in the comments and I’ll do my best to get to it. Soon the paywall will start, which will mean you have to be a paid subscriber to get the perks like audio versions and the ability to ask questions, and see my string art, if I at some point take a swing at that venerable form.
Text version will always remain free.
Hashish