Episode 4
”Vesti La Giubba (Put On The Costume)”
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How many different people are you? Are you one kind of person at work, another at home, another on a call, another on Instagram? The characters in “Vesti La Giubba (Put On The Costume)” live multiple lives simultaneously, crafting their personalities and backstories to conform to whichever room they’re in. And then when the alert comes in, they’re forced to decide who they want to spend those few precious minutes with, and which one of their Selves they choose to be… last.
Those of us old enough to remember the CB Radio craze may remember that it was thought of as oddball behavior at the time, but in hindsight it was kind of a proto-internet, a way to connect with strangers that was mostly anonymous. The lingo briefly penetrated the public consciousness too - surely there’s some old Carson clip where Carnac lands a punchline about “a Smokey on my tail”. The jumping off point for this script may have been “what if you wanted to spend the end of your life with someone you’d never actually met.”
The actors in this episode did a spectacular and heartbreaking job. J. Nicole Brooks as Meredith is so perfectly calibrated - her exasperation with Oscar, her longing for Steele. Joe Miñoso is just the perfect Oscar, a little boyish, a little defensive, a little cunning. And James Vincent Meredith and Janet Ulrich Brooks brought such incredible life to their characters; Steele and Mrs. Martino are really avatars of the idealized love that Meredith and Oscar are missing, but they created funny and sweet and heartbreaking people out of the words on the page. Wendy Mateo as Oscar’s mom had maybe the hardest job of all - turning Oscar’s narcissistic mother into a person we all recognize from real life.
The episode’s title and the music in the final scene come from the great Enrico Caruso as the title character in Ruggero Leoncavallo’s immortal “Pagliacci”. Thank you, public domain! And Janet singing along was a bit of inspired improvisation on her part that gives me actual goosebumps.
**Spoilery stuff below**
Astute listeners will notice that we never actually find out if it was a false alarm or if a missile landed right on these poor folks. I know what I think, but I’m not telling.
This incredible cast is a feather in the cap of our Casting Director (and Producer and Co-Star and Do Everything Pal) Marika Mashburn. Here’s what she has to say:
“Working on Vesti La Giubba was the dreamiest of dreams. Casting almost always comes with compromise and heartbreak – the director has someone else in mind, a first choice isn’t available, somebody bails, there isn’t enough money, you name it. You put out fires and deal with four emergencies at once. It’s insanity, the most maddening and my favorite high.
This episode is maybe the second time ever I secured all my first choices -- the people I heard in my head, full-throttle Chicago Theatre legends. You don’t get more professional, ready-to-play, raw, no-bullshit actors than ones who come up in this city, and I have long admired each of these artists, up close and from afar. Joe Miñoso, whom I did not know personally but whose voice I heard when reading this fantastic script from David Singer and Chris Pahlow, was kind enough to respond to my DM (thank you, Instagram) with an enthusiastic yes. You’ll also hear Chicago multi-hyphenate and one of my favorite humans of all time, J. Nicole Brooks; my birthday twin and powerhouse James Vincent Meredith; and, just for extra bragging rights, THEE Janet Ulrich Brooks and THEE Wendy Mateo, each of whom makes any project 10x cooler. I knew on first read, these were the actors I wanted and I can’t describe the delicious feeling of getting away with something when they all arrived to record – bringing, as I knew they would, that Chicago Theatre way of “saying it to their faces” mixed with a tremendous amount of fun. I am grateful and proud.
David likes to say “everything happens for no reason,” and overall, I subscribe to that.We became friends in 2015 because I gave him a rock.
I gave him that rock because he was making his first feature, I was hired by a mutual friend to assist with auditions and, somehow or another during a break, David learned I had recently spent a year in Antarctica, returned to Chicago and fallen into casting. You know how when people get their hearts broken, they cut their hair and get a dog? It was like that, except I moved to Antarctica to be an Ice Road Trucker. And I may or may not have brought back some cool rocks which may or may not be frowned upon by several government agencies, and David and I got along famously, so I gave him an Antarctican rock. Allegedly. And suddenly we were friends, and then he asked me to come to set to say the first line in that first feature, and over the past decade, we’ve gotten to work together on a few weird, cool projects and we call each other when we’re having bad or good days and when we have bad or weird artistic ideas that just might work. So, when he called me to say, “Hey, I have this maybe terrible idea to make a podcast and I have no funding and neither of us knows how to do that, but the scripts are good, maybe we figure it out together and work with fun people we like?”
I did not hesitate. Oh yeah, and that guy who broke my heart? He was on set that day too. I don’t think I ever told David that.
Everything happens for no reason, but I’m glad I gave him that rock. Allegedly.