But yeah, hi, thanks so much for coming on.
Of course.
I mean, we very much enjoy having other people to talk to you about our nerdy shit.
So yeah, like, oh yeah, you know us too.
Yeah, it's good.
But yeah, I'm very excited to talk about this particular kind of nerdy ship.
I mean, well, the thing is that it's like particularly wild in my but you know, how on earth can something be quite so dull and insane at the same time. You don't know, you don't know the magic of medieval history, baby, but.
Yeah, nice, Okay, I am. I am rolling luckily on my end now. So that's that's that's the going.
Okay, I am.
Too, got my local going.
You're I simply love to have backup.
It's good to have back up.
Oh yeah, that's why I keep a version of myself in painting form behind me.
You know, absolutely absolutely.
That is not me, but it does really look like me.
I love that for you.
You had a lot of hair back then.
That was yeah, I know, that was that was the seventies were a different time.
Oh man, there we go.
That's the sound. That's the sound. It's the sound of the police.
Wow, not again, Christ I mean, like, I mean I'm just trying at the moment, you know, as a as a gentle lady who is not used to being in America. I'm like getting used once again to like just seeing like all these heavily arm coups all the time. I'm like, what the fuck is going on?
It's like they're keeping you safe, That's what's going on.
Yeah, really safe.
You don't like your police state, I know, book.
And it's remarkable because so many more armed police here in Tacoma, and yet so much more Matthews. So it's it's crazy how those things don't actually correlate and anyway share just like well they might correlate, just you know, in the other direction. God, I swear to like my brother was shouting to him like the other day and he's like, yeah, you know, like last time I saw a gun discharged and I was like, yeah, So, like I think about my life in London is I don't have any stories.
Like it's the same thing is when you go to your required longbow training every Sundays, the same thing is. You know, it's just a little louder over you. You know, we we like a little a little pizzazz, you know, you Brits are you know, stiff upper lipping on you and keeps it spicy. You're as American as I am.
I mean, you know, signs point to yes. I'm just kind of like an American who's going.
I meant that. I meant that as a you know, a point of common and I can understand how it might have been heard as either an insult or a threat.
I think being called an American these days is an insult.
Yeah, man, isn't that great? Where are you guys gonna go when this soul collapse?
Well, my roommate is has dual citizenship with Canada, and so I was going to say, probably Canada, but then that will probably just become a fifty first state.
So oh that's never ha. I know, I know, I'm just making sure, like I'm like, all right now, we gotta be.
Like the valiant Canadian troops are actually going to make sure that they do not become the fifty first state.
If anything, Yeah, marching under the orders of Imperator fucking dug Ford become like the great like anti American.
That's the thing. Like, if anything, New England is going to get an next into Quebec and then New England will become Francophone and it'll be wild.
A bunch of amure having to learn new language.
Bostonians. Yeah, we got the reverse Irish French connection.
Let's go, let's absolutely go.
Oh all right, well, unfortunately, not unfortunately, but I do have a time limit because.
I actually I guess that we're gonna have to do this podcast.
All right, well cool, let's do this. Uh well, I'm really you know, I'm really bad at uh at like segues and transitions. I'm like, how should I do this? And then I realized I've been thinking about how I need to do the segue or transition. Well, I should have just said, all right, anyway, let's talk about the.
Yeah, let's talk about some mystery place.
I love being I love being neurotic. It's great. Yeah, you know here we are all right, here we go. Hello, and welcome back to We're Not So Different, a podcast about how we've always been idiots. My name is Luke Waters, and I am an amateur medievalist, and as always I'm joined by doctor Eleanor Yannige, who is anything but today, folks, we got an interview. We don't have a question today
because of that interview. But we're gonna start doing like an episode of a mailbag episode a month or something until we can because yeah, we we got to do that. But anyway, you guys know the deal. If you want to subscribe to the Patreon and give us questions, you know, the patreon dot comst w nist pot. I'm not doing the whole spiel. We got people here, we got things.
To do ourselves in front of the guests you got.
We don't want to We don't want to embarrass ourselves in front of in front of royalty.
What oh god, see when did that happen?
Oh I'm I wondered why my head was so much heavier to it was.
All those hollow crowns you have back here, hal the solid ones light.
Oh man, hollow.
Snake was definitely my favorite character, I think in Middle Gear.
Oh man, all right, it's gone good.
Hollow Snake. Oh, folks, we're here today to talk about mystery plays. What the hell are they am?
I right?
Oh yeah, that's the kind of thing you're listening to the show to find out. Well, if you don't know the name, mystery play might evoke ideas of dramatic stories that involve someone solving crimes being acted out before an audience. And if that's what you're expecting, well then I've got one piece of advice. Prepare to be disappointed. If, however, we're imagining a series of living tableau depicting scenes from the Bible that were often incorporated into religious ceremonies like
the Mass, well then you're in the right place. But I hear you ask what mysteries about the Bible are being solved in these mystery plays. To that, I must reply, you got a lot of fucking nerve power serious mystery. I love doing these because I get to talk to myself. It's fun. But seriously, the mystery as it's used here refers to the higher mysteries of the spiritual variety, the
miraculous works of God, things of that nature. Now you might think that sounds pretty boring, like one of those outdoor Nativity scenes that churches in America do around Christmas.
And my church did that. I did for many years.
As did you get to play Baby Jesus.
No, I was.
I was the child shepherd and I was standing out there while the live sheep that we had was strangling itself on its own leash.
Was it just was it just a sheep or were there other animals as well? I'm not sure. I remember you talking about that.
We had three sheep and the church also owned a donkey. I will never forget the day that the pastor opened his sermon with just some news everyone, the first Baptist Church of Gallup, New Mexico's donkey went to be home with the Lord on Wednesday after Yes.
Yes, look, I I was vers I was. I was raised in evangelical Christianity. Let's go, and I've been. I've been an atheist for a long while. But I will be honest. If your version of heaven doesn't include animals, I don't want to fucking hear about it. If you if you can't take a dog or a cat, or a beloved donkey up to heaven with you, then what the fuck is even the point?
Donkey?
Yeah, I had a donkey growing up. And also just a huge segue to talk about uh, you know, growing up in Takoa, we had this donkey whose name was Edgar Rice Burrough.
He was always of course you did.
He was always breaking out and like a Tibetan, mastiffs would always break out with him because they were like, I need to shepherd by donkey.
And once the.
Donkey kicked lights out of a bus that honked at him because he was standing in the middle of the road. And we've got this giant Tibetan master who's.
Like a fucking touch my donkey.
Oh yeah, to.
Do it anyway, Like my parents copped a misdemeanor on that one. Anyway. WHOA. I was chatting about this last night to my homeboy, who teaches high school history here in Tacoba, and he also teaches the thing about urban animals, and he's like, well, it's illegal to have donkeys in Tacoba and I was like, well, we were living in Lakewood at the time, and he goes, it's also illegal to have donkeys liquids.
Shut up, shut up.
Apparently my family is probably the reason why you're not allowed to have a donkey.
Oh there you go.
I call it.
The people cannot be trusted, and I want to be so real with you. We cannot.
Oh my god, let me let me finish this. I can introduce him. Oh my god. Yeah, no, no, you're good. I yeah, you know. I must admit that there are several million other things I could think of that I'd rather do than doing a mystery play. But as we've noted many times on the show, preaching and religious activities were popular culture for medieval Europeans. Ough Man, what what
a bereft time? Now, I'm just kidding. These mystery plays allowed them to experience the biblical stories they heard in mass and sermons through a different visual medium, and they were a hit, especially in Spain and England. Over time, they developed entire cycles or series of plays focusing on certain topics or characters. But they also became more secularized after the pope pulled a medieval footloose and forbade the clergy from doing any more acting on stage. Can you
imagine not letting those queens act? Good God. This moved the mystery plays from the churches to town guilds, who began producing and putting them on, even moving into fully secular stories. But we're not here to talk about mystery plays alone. We've got guests Brian Alford, Josh Borman, and AJ Ditty from the Worst of All Possible Worlds podcas Caids. Hello, I wanted to come on this show to talk about this topic, specifically, Brian, Josh and Aj thank you so
much for being here. How the hell are you?
Hey? Thank you for having us. I guess we'll each introduce ourselves. You won't be able to tell us a part listener, even people who listen to our show, and we have listened to our show for like the almost two hundred episodes we've been going now still can't tell us apart. But I'm Josh. You can sort of differentiate me because I swear more and I say I do that more often.
And Josh also, Josh also has a Michigan accent. Yeah, Brian, by the way, I have a new Mexican accent.
I don't know, Yeah, And I'm a j and I have a San Diego accent, which means about as much as a New Mexico accent.
I feel, you know, as someone from the Puget Sound area.
Word apparently, I say you's weird. I say the you and bullet weird. That's sort of do you say no?
I don't say boo, but yeah, no, sweetish ship.
Sounds more Nordic to me.
You know, I don't know. Look, I barely. If I get too riled up, you'll start to hear me sound, you know, start to sound a little bit like foghorn leghorns, you know, from the great State of Gelgia.
Well, thank you so much for having us on though, where We're really excited because we all sort of have our own experiences with the mystery plays. Like Eleanor reached out to me not too long ago, and at first I was like, well, you know, we I could just come on and riff. But then I realized, oh, ship, there's like one thing about medieval history that we all sort of know about and have direct personal experience with. So I'm very excited to talk about it.
Okay, Yeah, So I want to start you guys there, because how the fuck do you have trug? Oh?
Oh, Hellen, I need.
Allow me to allow me to elaborate on a little thing called the Mysteries, which was a play that was done at the Flea Theater, a theater we can mention because this is not our podcast, right, we will our show, but we can name it wherever else. And this was a modern adaptation of the York Mystery Cycle. Commissioned fifty one play rights, which was whittled down to forty eight because three of the plays were really bad.
And I'm considering the things that did make.
The Yeah, there was one that involved a potato witch. That was the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life, but was also probably the worst.
And so witches wait, sorry, thank you, thank you was the witch of potato. No, no, she just kept throwing potatoes at people.
Oh I know, I'm so fat and I love Burger so much potato, which like a potatoes.
Yes, that was up. But yeah.
So basically, each one of these playwrights took one of the episodes of the mysteries, like like in the way that you know in in actual mystery plays, like guilds would take on like one of the stories, and then they would write their version of it.
And ours was a very queer, very modern, very.
Secular version of the story, or it tried to like it's best to be uh it was.
It was.
It was queer in the sense that like a lot of people got their tits out and like sometimes and sometimes you have dudes making out and sometimes you'd have girls making out.
But like literally every picture online, any article that's written about the Mysteries, there's just a picture of Colin Waite.
Yes you sexy jesus, Yeah, just.
Like looking absolutely fantastic.
All of that one just doing crunches.
So did the three of you do this together?
So I did, Yeah, Josh Josh AJ worked on it.
I was still in college, but I was a theater major and study history and and so my my way into like medieval mystery plays is mostly through like every Man or the Second Shepherd's Play or the Brome Abraham and Isaac, and I think the Second Shepherds is part.
Of the Wakefield cycle, so not the York cycle.
Yeah.
The fact that I mean, but I'll be honest with the fact that you'll know any of that is no. And I'm and I'm being completely serious here. It's it's really cool because like this is something that I like, I mean, when I started the show, I didn't know a ton about medieval history, and yeah, and I've learned some much from Eleanor, but this is even something where I was like, I have to remind myself what this is because we've mentioned it a you know, a handful
of times, we haven't really done it. So the fact that all three of you have a knowledge either working knowledge or you know, background academic knowledge of it is really cool.
I mean, it is. It is literally how Aj and I met was doing that.
Yeah.
AJJ acted in it and I was the wardrobe manager.
Yes, which with a cast of I think it was fifty four actors, a lot of costumes, all unpaid, six hours very we got very sweaty in them, and it was gross.
It was a gross, gross time.
So I've got a question. So you're doing in theory, you know, fifty one, but that didn't happen. So you did forty eight plays as a part of the cycle. So was that like once a week or no? No, how was this happening? I don't know.
Along for the most part, they were all about ten minutes some of actually they got it down to I think most of them were around five to eight at a certain point, because it had to fit into a six hour time frame, otherwise it was violating ordinances in the city. If we went past midnight, the upstairs neighbors would call, you know, four one one on us, basically.
Three one one three one one, thank you. I would like information on them.
So and so we were there, uh, basically we also in between.
There were three acts to it.
The first act was the entire Old Testament, which kind of felt like rushing through a lot of that, and then Act two was Jesus' birth to ministry, and then Act three was the Crucifixion through revelation, and uh, it was very sort of Jesus heavy in Jesus forward as the mystery plays themselves in the Mystery sycle obviously were and there was also food, right like you guys, they
were served food. Yeah, there were two intermissions, so the first intermission was a half hour break to eat dinner, and then the second intermission was a half hour break to have dessert, and both of those were served by the actors again unpaid. Sweaty to the hottest we've ever been, I will say, but we were sexy in a way that, like, you know, a way I think that may have like tipped some of the reviews honestly.
But yeah, that's how.
We That's that's how I met most of my artistic collaborators that I still work with today.
And it's also how I met my spouse.
So, you know, kind of I wish we would have gotten paid and that it wasn't just a cult basically that.
We were a part of for a brief period of time.
But yeah, I mean, look, Josh and I met out of it, and that's obviously led to some really wonderful stuff. And all it took was Josh washing my horribly horribly sweaty scarves.
That that's right the show.
And you guys, you guys simultaneously riffed on a joke together and you looked at each other and you're like, no way, no way, We're going to start a podcast. And you know.
It wasn't not that.
Yeah, that was basically like we didn't actually start the podcast until more recently, Like with this mysteries was like a decade plus ago at this point.
Four Yeah. Nice, Oh wow, eleven years.
How dare you point out that twenty fourteen was eleven years?
Right?
All right, now, I don't appreciate that, but I.
Do have remember remember Obama who remembers the the time he wore Khakis that the.
Only the only problem he ever had.
Totally.
Yeah, anyway, I do have one of the questions, So this was commissioned by a living human being and not a time traveler?
It was? It was? In fact, yeah, it was.
It was sort of the brainchild of Edis Kandar, who was the director slash cult leader in charge of that particular production and also the Flea Theater itself, I think put out a commission for it. Basically they wanted big, grandiose things because that director had done a thing called These Seven Sicknesses, which was an adaptation of like a whole Oedipus cycle I think, and which was also six hours.
And then that was a really big hit for the theater a few years earlier.
And then they did Rescom, which was a restoration comedy. I know, there was like a six hour play, a mashup of all kinds of restoration comedies, which are also not very good.
I mean, I mean, I make the joke, but it's cool that like they let you guys just go in there and do a queer and alternative retaillings of the Bible and know them was like, hey, man, what the fuck you know? I mean it was in New York, but.
I mean the people who own the rights to the Beatles soundtrack got very upset with us and sent us a season assist.
So how long that we sing?
Was it was that for the scene where you ended up singing the killers?
Yes, yeah, And then they sent a season desists three days.
We got away with it.
It was in every review, but we got away with what songs.
All these things that I've done. That is after the best.
Song, the best fuck out anyway.
Yeah, yeah, it was after Pentecost.
But what was the Beatles song that Hey Jude, we did hate Jude.
That so much. Yeah, and you know who's I that thing was?
That was my buddy Matt Cox was the one who suggested that, and then he went on to write Puffs. So he has like very good sort of storytelling instincts. Where it came to it, but it was it ended up being a very collaborative process because again, the players would come in and bring in these plays and sometimes they were just terrible, and so there was a lot of rewriting happening in the room, which was another thing.
And also from what I understand, uh, something that was true of the original mystery plays as well, that there was a lot of sort of localizing of a lot of like the stories too, to the particular guilds who are putting these stories up.
Yeah.
There's a really funny example in the Dream of Pilot's Wife, they refer to the devil as mahoon, which is a medieval term for the devil that comes from the name mohammet.
Oh.
It's like here are these guys in you know, thirty three ad referring to Mahoon. There's also like in the Second Shepherd's Play, there's a lot of characters who use like turns of phrase that involve Jesus Christ in some way, even though he doesn't get born until the end.
Of the day.
It was like, you know, it's like some Roman back in you know, forty forty BCE and they're like, what does BCE mean? Like, I don't fucking know anything.
Just write it down, man.
Yeah, well, I guess before we go on anymore, let me turn to eleanor real quick, eleanor you know, can you just give us a little bit more of a background on like how medieval people saw these and you know what, what you find interesting about them?
Yeah? So, I mean the first one to kind of say here is that, you know how I'm always going on and on about how people love sermons, and they'd be like, fuck, yeah, there's a new preacher in town. We're all going like, I mean, mystery plays are that but times ten? Right?
Did you get to see it? I'm not kidding.
Yeah.
It kind of starts off sort of as a like youth past or ass kind of thing where they're like, you know, what I'll really get to the people is if we if we act out these plays, and it does start out as a very particularized thing that is happening in churches, so it might happen as a part of the mass, or it would be sort of like optional extra credit. The priests would be like, hey, everybody, we're doing a play tonight, and everyone would be hype because you know, there's a play on and that's cool.
As you mentioned, Luke and the introduction, this eventually gets out of hand and like the priests are beefing the monks are because like monks will do this too, and then like people will go over to the monastery and everybody wants different parts. There is rather a lot of you know, dressing up as women that happens because only men are involved in the plays.
Their hands shoot up, Oh I have to get kissed in this one.
It's getting sexy. It's getting a little bit too at each other's throats. And then the church is like, okay, that is it. Priests, no more of this, and uh, there's some backlash that the priests are not happy.
I want to keep kissing that guy.
No, we're I have to, I can't. It kills me every time, every time. It doesn't matter, does it matter what it's about, It just gets.
So basically, the church has this big clamp down, but the cat's already out of the bag, right, And everybody loves mystery plays. So that's where the guilds come in. And the guilds are like, well, this is awesome because we also wish to beef with each other and dress
up like women. So like, the usually is that it gets taken on by local guilds, and that's certainly how we know, for example, about the York mystery plays are one of the cycles that we have tons of info on, and basically varying guilds would say, okay, we want to do this one, we want to do this one, and as we say, it's a cycle. So the liturgical year
kind of mirrors this. And the idea is that like every January, you would kind of like start from the beginning so you know whether or not you're going to do Old Testament plays or in some cases people would just start with, you know, kind of the birth of Jesus at Christmas, which is like close enough or whatever, and then they go through the year, and then by the time you get to advent, you're doing apocalypse stuff.
So it's like it all makes sense and it's all kind of like in harmony with the year, and you know, there's lots of opportunities to do mystery plays because there's a fucking feast like every other week, so it's just like you just throw it up like whenever you've got like a Saints Day or something like that, and everybody goes. There is also a tendant thing where because this is like the form of media, there is also created like parody mystery plays. So yeah, yeah, there's like.
A famous joy.
Oh aj, I've got great news for you. And there is a play that is called Unguentarius in Latin or Mustichka in Czech, and it is like a body retelling kind of of like the Abraham and Isaac story, but also with like a quack doctor who is like selling medicine that can like revive you from the dead, and there's a lot of farting. Yeah, I'm just like so it's just like farting every like five seconds and then pretending you're dead and then farting in someone's face and
all this stuff. But we have that one, right, So and it's very like scary movie where it's like, oh, you so, we all know what mystery plays are supposed to be, and this is kind of like an inversion of that. So enough people are involved that you can also have like a whole parody thing going on. Now, the parodies are probably gonna more likely be put on by professional troops of actors and that sort of thing.
But this is how embedded it is in medieval life, is that you just kind of assume these things are going to be taking place as a part of the liturgical year and as like the festive season. You have to have these or everyone is gonna be pissed.
Right.
They want their little play. They want to see a dude who doesn't have a beard dress up like a girl and then you know a question mark. You know, that's what they want, right, And.
Where it goes from there, who's you know.
But it's interesting even in the non parody plays, like how much is allowed to go on. They have actors playing God the Father, they have actors playing the devil.
You know, there's I mean, there's like not really that fear of.
The devil that we have in a lot of modern culture now where people freak out at SNL sketches because they say lamash to or whatever. But like and even the in the Wakefield cycle, the Second Shepherd's Play is itself a farce where a guy is like, he hexes two shepherds and then like steals one of their sheep and puts it in a cradle, and he talks to his wife. He's like, we're just gonna pretend that that's a baby and that you're giving birth to its twin right now. So just like moan and shout a lot.
And then when they uncover it all, they just put the guy in a big pillowcase and throw him against the wall a few times, and then an angel shows up and he's like, hey, a kid was just born.
It's God. You should go check it out. They're like, okay, cool, and then happens.
The version of the Second Shepherd's Play that was in the show that AJ and I did was actually, I think one of the strongest plays in the entire thing, maybe the strongest, because unlike a lot of the other ones, it really just kind of did a contemporary version of the play that sought to sort of preserve the structure and the mood of the thing, whereas a lot of the other plays in that thing were just like what if they what if it was what if? They said,
fuck a lot? What if what if Satan got naked.
Afraid to ask the big question?
Yeah, I got for real. That was a big hurdle we had to overcome.
At one point, it did not happen.
Did not happen, but the playwright was very insistent that it that it would and again unpaid actors. Yeah, And the only way he was talked out of it was because the director was like.
Then it's going to smell like pee for the rest of the plays, and that's not fair to the other playwrights. Meanwhile, are like, we would actually not like to be Pete.
On the other Uh, the transfiguration was it. It was like it was Jesus making out with the angel Gabriel making out with Satan. They were having a three way.
Songs by Billy Porter, who wrote three original songs for that show, Joke.
Downtown I Am Downtown New York City Theater.
Carly Ray Jepson came to performance of it and he did black out drunk.
At one point and like knocking over wine.
It was like my uh, my college the theater professor came to one of the performances and pretended not to know me. That was funny.
Oh oh oh.
But the thing about the Shepherd's Play, Josh, that you brought up and and I think one of the reasons why it was the best and why I think maybe Brian you were attracted to that one, is because there's a lot of time where the shepherds are just kind of waiting for the signal to happen, and that allows a lot of creative freedom for the writer to like be like, well, what were they talking about? And you know, if it's a contemporary one, you can just make it
about like make it a little playlet. And then all of a sudden, there's a star in the sky and it's like, oh, look there's a star. And then because you know, if I recall correctly, it was they were just like it was because it was alex And and Lindsley where the two main the two.
Made Justin and Justin Perdue.
Justin was there right, and they were just like shitty like teenagers who were just like not looked after very well by their parents and sort of just became buds.
And then yeah, seeing the star gave them like a thing to focus on and go do, and it was very it was very touching, and you can see why in situations where they do the adaptation in a way that makes sense, you can see what it is about these narratives and themes that remain universal and resonant, because, of course, people who are as you were saying, a waiting for something to happen, they just need to find something to fill that time with, and sometimes that lets
us know who people really are as well as what is it they really want, and what is that they really want can then be fulfilled by the arrival of the Christ.
And sometimes what they really want is to hex your shepherd friends and steal their sheep.
Yeah sometimes maybe yeah, yeah, sometimes.
That sheep develops a very hardcore suicidal impulse and then your dad, playing the shepherd standing in front of you, has to go rescue in the middle of the tableau.
No. I think that's actually a really important point, Brian, because we still sort of do this, and I definitely remember it from growing up in the Seattle area. There was there was like one, i think, big evangelical church where they would have these ads. Ever, of course they'd be like, we have this huge living nativity, and you know, basically they're like, we've got camels, it's got a cast of hundreds or whatever.
They like billboards up or something like that.
They would throw at billboards and I think like also have like uh like commercials on local television. And you know, obviously I never went because I was raised right, like it was definitely one of these things that was in there, so that we still have this impulse. It's just that in terms of how the modern and very particularly the American imagination works, it's like there's one there's one religious holiday year and it's Christmas. For some reason, like we
got to ignore Easter. Like I've got like my European friends and Australian friends are always laughing because like we get tons of time off for Easter in Europe and Australia You've got like a four day weekend, and they're like mystified by the fact that Americans don't, because they're like, you're the only ones who believe in this shit. Yeah you get any time off.
You're right, we do believe in the Easter. Bunny, he's really important.
Yeah, you you misunderstand the belief here is not in Jesus or Christ or anything like that. It's in the power of commercialism. God, we're gonna sell you chocolate. And also, I think the reason people here don't do it is because it moves around and they're like, I'm not keeping track of that ship. Yes, I'm not kidding.
I really I own her cycle. Bullshit. I mean, come on.
My kid asked me. My kid asked me like a couple of years ago. She's like, when is Easter? And she was like four or five at the time. And I was like, I really don't know, dear, and she goes she did not believe me. She was I was like, I was picking bran. Yeah. She ran and like, you know, you could play. You can play that little game with the kid for a minute. But they then they're like stop and you're like, oh, you know, okay, I was just kidding, but I was like, no, baby, I really
don't know what it is. And she got home she was mad at me. She runs and tells my wife. She's like, Daddy told me the Easter moves every year, is it? And I was like and I looked at my wife and I and I just struck my shoulders She's like it, dear, it does move every year. And she was like fine. You know, it's like one.
Of the big things that people are really into in the Middle Ages is calculating Easter. It's like as a hobby. Yeah, it's like we'll have all these manuscripts and they're like, and this how you calculate it? All right, and they're really into that.
But I really understand Easter on a much deeper level than.
You, like, like, that's what's going down.
And this is what autistic people did before they discovered anime.
Yeah and trains.
Yeah, being a weed for Easter, it's a it's one, you know.
Easter boo. Is this anything?
Okay? All right, now I'm listening. Okay, Fine. So I saw like a I need mystery play the other day because for work, I like mad I made a TV show about the Apocalypse that should be out next month, and so there's a bunch of people in Oxford who hang out and do mystery plays because Oxford is known for its nerds, right yeah, And they put on a little Apocalypse mystery play for me, and it was like fun if you relate to it like medieval people did right where I was like you know, I was like,
I'm taking it upon myself to behave like a medieval person, and like whenever the bad person who's like gonna go to Hell is like getting yelled at by Jesus, You're like.
Jesus, yeah, right, you.
Know, and like that's really fun because there's like and there was like lots of proud participation and right, and you know, it was kind of like the traditional like oh, hey, you're going to heaven with me. Oh you're going to hell a y oh, because you were like hype to other people and you are mean to them, bah blah. But apparently they do I'm gonna go. I think this year, like next it's next month. I think it's like April twenty seventh. They like put on a bunch of the
mystery plays. And last year they got in trouble because they were doing like the Massacre of the Innocence as like one of the mystery plays or whatever, ye like in a normal way and like some narcass student like is like trying to study like a loser for their or something, and they're like and they hear all this noise because they're like doing they're doing the mystery play in the churchyard and they look out the window and there's like these people waving around like babies on spikes, and.
Then like yeah, hell yeah, and.
They like made a complaint about the massacre of the Innocence Play, which I was like, okay, you're in. I cannot stress what a loser that kid is. But like they're absolutely still kind of going for it in Oxford. And obviously this is like a niche ass special interest for you know, nerds and the autistic people that we love, you know, so like that's great, but I do think that there is kind of like that aspect to it, right.
It's like, on the one hand, they could just be like super super boring, but for medieval people, they it's kind of like a pantomime. Sure, you know, it's like you're supposed to be kind of like throwing things and yelling and like he's behind you, Jesus, you know, and like all of that.
I know, I am exactly, you know.
It's like, you know, I was just gonna say, it's like when you have to watch a show with your kids and it's like where's the ball and the kid's supposed to be like right there, Jesus is like where's the Devil? And they're like, he's behind another guy who looks like Jesus pops up. He's like, I already knew.
We are looking for a god's clues. We are, We're looking for a god's cuse so we don't go to hell.
Hey, the Explorers is walking by El Diablo.
Diablo no damning.
Which one was the torture of the Innocence or whatever? Which one was that in the Mysteries, that.
Was the Border agents who were also assassins, I think, and they were talking about whether or not they were going to go through with killing the kids.
I would oh god, I don't even remember that one.
I would like to point.
Out that I looked up your Mystery play and that specific one gets a ride up in here about you know, being transgressive and uh you know, uh, Mary and Joseph trying to go to the inn and ice or you know whatever whatever it was called at the time, agents harassing them and giving them ship for it.
You know, Yeah, yeah, that was that. That one was that one that was really that was really acted. I mean most of Act one I spent downstairs because I was I played the doctor who told Mary that she was pregnant was that was one of my roles, and then the other one was doubting Thomas. So a lot of my stuff happened in X two and three.
You acted your face off as doubting Thomas. I will say that was.
A big scarf. The scarf did most of the word no, no.
I'm not gonna be it.
No no, yeah.
No.
It was really fun because originally in the workshop production of that, it was I had a very different play for Doubting Thomas that made absolutely.
No sense, with like eighteen minutes of.
A monologue that began with the line there's noise all around, but I can't see any of it and kind of just went from there like it was high poetical, but it was also like I genuinely have no idea what's happening, like beat for beating this monologue, and then it got rewritten because that writer had a nervous breakdown and was replaced by there was sort of like an overarching group of playwrights called Collaboration Town that with like write like
stuff that would happen during like the intermissions and stuff.
Yeah, they basically made the whole thing make some semblance of sense if it wasn't for them, the thing would have been straight nonsense.
And also Jill Rafson also really helped out with that.
Who's a current name and director of Classic theater shake Their company sorry, their.
Name was was Collaboration Town.
Yeah, yeah, population them.
We're gonna we're gonna get together and we're gonna collaborate what should we call our group?
Collaboration Town?
Great, got it one, but that that that one was always really fun because I wanted to do a lot of audience interaction with it.
So during the intermissions I would go up and like, audience, I'm just.
Like, hey, would it be okay if I like headbutted you during the section? And they would either say yes you can or no you can't, and I would be like great, fine, but then uh.
It really endeared.
I think I had to kind of I really stack the deck in my favor by going up and talking to them during the intermissions and just hey, this is the choreography.
You comfortable with this?
And then they would usually they would usually were very enthusiastic. If they were sitting in the front row, they kind of wanted to be involved because.
There was like no room.
Also, the floors were made of slatted wood that were very sharp, and we had to do the whole show barefoot. So the amount of just like blood that was on that stage from all of our like toes falling in between gaps and things. Uh, I mean, look, here's the thing. The original mystery plays also pretty dangerous because.
You know, you have to put a guy in a giant pillow case and slamming have special effects. They just actually did it.
They just did it.
We were just going for authenticity, you know, we were downtown theater artists.
Well, there was one guy who enthusiastically volunteered for that, and you're like really, and he's like, yeah, just beat the ship out of it. Just locked me in something. And you guys, you could throw me in like a safe if you want, you know, push me down the stairs. They're like, what the hell are you talking about, Bob?
What the fuck is her actor who played Jesus.
Actually, there was a lot of negotiation around what the crucifixion would look like, and eventually just ended up standing on a box and putting his hands up right and then like tied to the thing. But originally he was just going to be suspended from the cross and it took him saying, I think you're actually just trying to crucify.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is that is what the usual crucifixion was. Yeah yeah, well yeah, And I mean but it is true like video people, I mean, it's got to be like one of the highest incidents of CTEs participating in mystery plans or like whatever. But because they're doing all kinds of stuff, like you know, they're they're they've got like rigging and the angels are coming down from heaven or like you know, Jesus is being is
like ascending. You know, you've got uh, they're building like really elaborate hell.
Mouths that they know, so they got like these huge sets, which was again like part of the church objection because they were like, could not be like spending all this money on a hell mouth, and they're like.
What if we do though, you know, and then things like this where it's just like it's getting too elaborate and you know, there's no idea of help and safety. You know, people are falling off stage, breaking legs right and left. You know, it's a it's a good family day out. It's what I'm trying to say.
The violations.
So stands for Oxford Safety.
Well once this is in the hands of like all these different guilds, right, this is what like Shakespeare is riffing on a little bit and much ado about nothing, but like each guild has its own specialty. So it's like, yeah, if you're a tanner, you might as well do some stuff that involves leather. If you do rigging, like of course you're gonna make somebody fly. And now I'm just realizing what the tanners too. If you want to if you want to do a player where you're pissing on people, those guys.
Are well prepared for it. They have a handle to make the leather. Oh yeah, yeah, I kiss all day.
He didn't even he didn't even smell it anymore. He's like, they're like, what about the smell for the others and the and the the Tanner's like, I'm good man, I can't smell.
Smell twenty years.
Yeah yeah, Like I mean the fishlongers. They're like really into like the feasts of gloves and fishes obviously.
Oh yeah, yeah, Oh too bad.
We didn't all go to John's fish shack before we came or you know, like.
Yeah, that's right. I just I think, uh I do think it's fascinating. You know that uh uh adding the visual aspect to it, You know that that does a lot for people. It gets people rolled up a lot. And you know, it's uh, kind of like going to the movie. Now you go, You're sitting in a nice theater and you're like, you know, even if the movie's
not great, get a snack, you get to chill. It's not the exact same for them, but you know, you finally get to see someone acting out the Bible instead of just a guy talking about it.
But you know, that's also something that has always been attention in Protestant Christianity specifically, is this idea of like how much should you represent physically? The idea that like it becomes at some point idolatrous if you put forth something that is so clearly concrete that then it takes away from God breathing the inspiration in or whatever.
Like.
That's why traditional Protestants tend to be really against religious icons and that sort of thing, because it's depicting almost that which ought not be depicted, If that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, well, and yeah, the Puritan tradition that arises this is why in the more Protestant countries will have like these big gaps, Like in England, people stop doing mystery and then they pick them up hundreds of years later, as you know, these these historical finds in someone's collection and records and everything, and they go, oh, yeah, we
should start putting them on again. Whereas in Spain there are some towns in Spain where it's basically an unbroken lineage since you know, the thirteen hundreds or something like that, and.
It's the sort of thing too where it carries through in a strange way to to contemporary Christianity, even on the Protestant side. Like just as an example, Brian and I, the school that we went to is a Dutch Protestant.
College named after John Calvin.
That's right, our boy, the man himself, and it has had a theater program. But the sort of politics around it are a little weird because, particularly in like the mid twentieth century, early to mid twentieth century, a lot of the people coming out of that tradition were still very opposed to the idea of doing anything that was too elevated or theatrical, and so they sort of had to, like, for instance, the theater in which the stuff is presented
is not called the theater. It's called an auditorium. And that was like the compromise that they had to do in order to get the capital sponsorship. Before this new theater, they couldn't actually call it a theor So there's this weird tension throughout the history of Protestantism where there is this understanding that if you represent something dramatically, it can really compel people in a way that you can't by
just you know, reading from the Bible or whatever. But if you go a little too hard, then the ideas you might be blaspheming or like getting in the way of what our Lord and Savior is trying to tell you directly through the word, because at the end of the day, it's the word, the actual text on the page, that is the bedrock of Protestant Christianity.
I think, yeah, I think that the thing that that people who earnestly believe this would say is that you know, just look at anything, any representation of a thing, and you if you take that in your mind like you will see it like that, and that becomes the way that you play with it, and you don't see and so your vision of God or your vision of Jesus or whatever or the afterlife is replaced by like, you know, the buff guy with the crown of thorns and you know, the Jesus.
Our good friend Colin.
Wait, it's replaced with that. And so you're focused on a man made picture instead of your internal, positive, numinous
feelings about God. But you know, it's one of those things that like, I mean just a lot, I mean, not just Protestantism and Evangelical Christianity have these problems, but it just the weight of all these contradictions just like keeps piling up and keeps piling up, and keeps piling up, because now we're all so mediated that it's really hard to make that like stick in the real world now because people are like, of course I've seen a representation
of the Garden of Eden. Of course I've seen a representation of Moses, like because I've seen a picture because you know, the Charlton Heston Tink Commandments movie was on TV when I was a kid, you know, like, you know, and so it just it collapses under that. And now, as far as I know, they don't they don't really focus on that as much anymore. But you know, yeah, and go ahead.
In an American Evangelicalism, American Christianity in general, but especially evangelicals, is like kitch has really taken.
Over, right, Yes, yes, you know people know, of course.
Yeah.
Charlton Heston also doing Ben Her. Before that, Ben Hur was a.
Big Broadway play in the late nineteenth century that had actual horses on stage doing a chariot race on a giant treadmill. And huh, now we have things like Josh and I were briefly obsessed with this Hamilton inspired rap musical about Jesus that was produced by the Duck Dynasty.
Guys.
Oh yeah, what is story the musical that was written by a homeschooled seventeen years.
And it sounds like it they in a way. This is actually kind of an interesting contemporary reflection of the mystery plays. Because this was a musical. They set up a tent just outside of Dallas.
They built a gigantic theater and shopping complex for this one.
They were thinking it was going to run for years. I think it ran for nine months.
Yeah, like we were Jesus.
And I'm here to say it's not not that, it's more like it thrown away my miracle.
You also have like mega churches of course, like like Righteous Gemstones is always riffing on this mega churches that will do these giant pageants at Easter and Christmas with like a lot of flying, a lot of you know, drum lines and whatever they have. There's the Sitan Sound Theaters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Branson, Missouri that do these enormous Bible musicals with like you do Jonah, And there's a gigantic whale puppet that flies over the audience.
Also in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennis.
Yeah, yeah, and and and it kind of has some of those same especially the ones that are at megachurches, has this sort of same roots. It's like, oh, we're going to get the local business leaders together, they're going to build this. There's that infamous Jenny Nicholson covered that that church in Canada that does like Avengers themed passion plays.
Yeah, every every year. It's a passion play that rips off of a different Disney ip.
Basically, it's like it's like Iron Man and then they sing free Bird when he dies.
Ian King one was my favorite personally. They crucify Simba. It's amazing.
Yeah.
Yes, Okay, okay, So here's my thing. Right, Like obviously, the like the human impulse to act out a Bible story has always been there, but I think this is one of the this is one of these instances where in okay, we're keeping certain things, the acting out of the Biblical story, we're keeping the using like local businesses in order to like prop this up kind of like your name out there. But how come we're so much more cringe.
Because because they meant it. Then they meant it. They meant every fucking word of that they and they meant it deep in their marrow. And so like when you look at it, even if we even if we were able to see one that they put on and we were like, oh, okay, you know, here's another one about you know, Jesus is going to do this or whatever, hooray, Like they don't have that, so it doesn't enter into that for them. But like this stuff now is like
that's fucking that. That's worse than like, that's worse than just turning on Disney Plus for the congregation, Like you're just like yeah, you like you've like melded all this stuff and we're beyond like perverting the gospel. We're beyond like uh blaspheming. This is like instead of Jesus kicking the money changers out of the temple, inviting them all in and you know, we're gonna have a banquet, We're gonna put on a play about how much we love
the the Roman Empire. Like you know, it's like and I mean that it's it's not I mean, you know, money and religion being a problem is not new. You know, is not new. It's not a Protestant thing. But this like uh like just a based nature of it is. Yeah, it's just I like, again I'm an atheist, but I'm like, you guys, don't even take that seriously. This is just an affectation for you, like I would.
Yeah, yeah, it's like a thing.
I feel like it's like an earnest thing. Like for the seventeen year old, it feels incredibly earnest, right, I feel like that just because they've been raised. It's sort of the gumbo. Yeah, yeah, no, there is something to like like the people who are full grown adults who are doing this, who are like co signing onto this, that that to me, I think plays into your point of just like the like you know what, there is no real difference between the money lenders and the fucking priests anymore.
But I this is something that we This sort of thing is something that we talk about a fair bit on our show when we're talking about things that are within sort of the evangelical bubble. How you get these meta narratives that people just receive and absorb.
Yeah. Uh.
And in the case of something like yeah, those ridiculous church passion plays where Tony Stark gets cruise, it's it's it's like, you don't you you don't really understand anymore what the point of the story is, Whereas I feel like with the original mystery plays, if you talk about that, it's more didactic in a way, but it's also more participatory, where it's like you are really wanting to understand this narrative, not just as a piece of this is something we
all know, but as something that you want to actively participate in. You want to understand how you connect to this story. And I think that's really meaningful. And that's a meaningful difference because Yeah, you go and watch one of these spectacles and you're just sitting there and being entertained, and I feel like that's very different from what you get when you look at those old mystery plays.
I suppose there is also something here too, where to an extent, the fact that the church is like, not, no, you need to you need to fucking knock it off, like this is clearly God beyond right. It's not for the clergy to be doing that. Almost, I guess gives it.
It's like it nots to the thing that we're talking about, right, because clearly what they're worried about is that it's going to turn into like the megachurch thing right right where they're like, this is not fucking appropriate, and they know it's not appropriate, right, Whereas yo, if like the if the Fishmonger's Guild wants to put it on go for
your life. We're not saying don't have religious plays. We're saying that they don't have a place within actual churches during mass, right, And I guess that's that's like a reasonable objection that I can kind of like, you know, I'm coming down on the side of the medieval church with seems legit.
I mean, no, they are right about it, and I mean this is the like we are circling around the genesis of the like the problem that our earnest early Protestants had with icons, with these things, because the church is also saying, all right, guys, you are making like we of our icons now, but you got like, you know, this is this is beyond stained glass or anything. This is you know, this is pure spectacle. You know, this is taking the place of God in the imagination or whatever.
And you know, and when you don't have that lever at the top to pull and be like, hey, guys, maybe we should pull it back, then the human imagination just goes to its extent and you know, here we are. Sometimes that's good, you know, And then sometimes you end up with the little mermaid being crucified or whatever. For the love of God, no speak. She can't speak because Ursula slash Satan has taken ability to say, eloi, eloi? What the fuck is how?
I don't know what fish? I mean?
Yeah?
Why is Eric here? And he's shirtless and just hanging like, what is going on?
Why is that priest making out with Eric? Wait, there's so much piss.
It's everywhere everywhere, got all over my potatoes.
That's good, that's at the beginning.
Well, I think there there is one of the things that some churches do that I do think is sincere and it's still in its own like cracked bizarre way.
Is hell houses?
Oh yeah sure, And I say I make immersive theater, or I have made immersive theater. I haven't done anything in a little while, but like, yeah, I know they need to get into escape rooms, is what I'm saying. But these Back in the seventies, Jerry Folwell was like,
you know, everything's getting too secular. What if we come up with the most insane idea in the world, which is just take people in a haunted house tour where they see the consequences of like getting an abortion and you know, doing weed so much that you become anti war. And that has evolved into there's a great documentary from like twenty five years ago now called just called hell House.
Yes, that's about these.
I think the Pentecostals are really the only people developing like a modern Christian aesthetic that is a really interesting one, and it's a really scary one. It's one that acknowledges demons, and it's not demons in the medieval way of like, well, look at Satan, We're going to get one over on him. He's a big dumb dumb It's like everything is coming after you. That headache you got yesterday, that migraine, that was a demon, and he could come back and he
could be stronger the next day. And that is a it's a very theatrical thing and it's very cheesy, but I do think that they're the best hell houses are the ones that are extremely earnest, that are so they feel that same sort of like urgency and they're like, you need to stop getting abortions all the time because then you're gonna die in a car accident. And what the car accident has to do with the abortion is unclear.
But this room that's just full of demons that just keeps shouting abortion at the car.
The car accident was on the way home from the abortion.
I love my monthly abortion. The girls and I get together.
Have mimosas afterwards, smoked, smoke too much, weedy to California, babys in with no I think I think we've hit the nail on the head here, which is that you can do like the theatrical ship, but you just have to live. You have to believe in a literal, actual hell. I don't want to hear about your pluralist heaven or anything like that. I want to know that you feel the hot brimstone breath of Satan on your neck every day and you are literally worried about the the the
location of your eternal soul, then you can do it. Otherwise, Yeah, we're just doing We're just doing musical theater.
Yeah, that was That was a big part of I think why the show that AJ and I worked on failed, Like, when it failed, it was because of that lack of respect, I guess is one way putting it. But like the idea that this story really truly does have broader implications, right, and it might not necessarily have to be to do
with literal heaven and literal hell. Yeah, but you have to at least believe that things matter, that like we are as a species, let's say, barreling down towards some sort of absolute existential crisis such as climate change for instance, which, by the way, the play, the play that was about Noah's flood that was also about climate change, didn't really work, but it could have worked. It was close to working because of that exact thing.
Yeah, it consisted solely of one line, which is Noah, please please I'm sorry, I fucked up.
Just let me on the boat. Just let me on the boat.
And then it was like more and more people just ran on and kept screaming it, and then they all got flashed away in the flood. But I think, like what the ones that were successful, and I think the mystery plays even back in the day that were successful, are just like very good adaptations of the original story.
They got at the core idea behind it.
Like in our version, Pentecost happened and you read about all the apostles all of a sudden, like you know, incense, Peppermint's color of time, eyes just like opening up and they see the time knife and they understand they have to go out on their mission or whatever, right, And so you have to instill in the audience what the apostles felt in that moment in order to make it
an effective adaptation. And there's something about an entire room of actors singing all these things that I've done and encouraging you to sing too.
And stopping so hard that you literally feel the building shake.
Like a whole building shake around you. But that's where three one one calls. That's also like.
The killers are playing a show downstairs.
Someone should tell the killers.
But yeah, no, that the feeling that it it like evokes, I you know, having read the original York mystery plays, like a lot of them are it's a little bit harder to translate into like a modern thing. But the ones that hit me the most, like even the Doubting Thomas one, it was like it told the whole story and it made me feel the way Thomas did, which
was just extremely unsure of everything. And tell my best friend who I watched, you know who died, like comes back and tells me everything's gonna be okay.
And then you feel the relief of that.
Like that, that, to me is what makes an effective mystery play, is getting at the truth underneath all the biblical stuff.
Yeah, or maybe it's just maybe it's just a firm like actual belief in like God in a guy that you can conceptualize and understand. I mean, because so much of religion now, like it doesn't matter who it is, it doesn't matter what religion it is. So much of it now is just like a shirt, like a jersey, a team jersey that people wear because they because it's a cultural thing and it's a thing. And if that people can interact with religion however they want. It's not
my business. But like when you try to do art about that or you try to make a story and an adaptation of that, people can tell if you either like just don't really care about God, or maybe you believed in God at one point and lost your faith. There's interesting stuff there, and they could tell if you seriously believe, you know, this is God. God dwells in me, you know, in whatever form, And you could tell that when somebody's
doing it. You could tell when somebody struggle with it and when they just think it's a joke, yeah.
Or when they're just kind of trying to shock people in a really empty way.
Right.
There's a lot of that too, And it's like, are you trying to even even when you shock people, are you trying to do it from a place of authenticity?
Right?
Like are you wanting to wake them up to something meaningful or you're trying to just make them be like, oh my god, you know that those.
Are very Jesus is gay? Jesus gay?
Yeah.
I means it's the difference between come out jump scare and you know, like something that actually is is genuinely like thoughtfully frightening, right, Like, it's two things, you know.
Yeah, that's why I'll never drive a car after my monthly abortion again, exactly, it's on something primal, right.
Yeah, exactly.
I always walk, you know, all the mimosas. You can't just go for.
A vigorous after minute cities. You know, I could gets everything within fifteen minutes. But you know my abortion provider brunch place.
Yeah, how's life in the gulag eleanor how's.
It treating you?
Yeah, yeah, you don't. You don't have freedom like we do here, No good, good old fashioned freedom. He could smell it in the air. He's definitely not gonna kill us all tomorrow.
Yeah, I'm getting rid of all those e p A protections, thank thank god.
Yeah.
Yeah, piss is back. It's back, folks can but they're saying it. The pisses back. They've been asking me for years. They're asking they want to piss, They want to They have no where that they can piss. They have to go to the toilet. All that piss is going to waste. It's going down the pipes, and it's all pipes.
We all watch that show Seinfeld show, Jerry Seinfeld he's a stand up community.
He had a neighbor.
Neighbor folks, you love him, you love it. Welcome to the stage, mister Michael Richards. It was famous routine from the Last Factor, and Michael Richards just comes out there and even he's like, Okay, I can't do this.
Comedians and cars getting coffee.
Where's Jerry? Where is he? Good luck?
Good luck? That's awesome? Oh my god, Ellen, eleanor what have we what have we missed on on the mystery plays? That? Uh, that that maybe we should hit before we go.
No, I mean, like that's pretty much it. And the point of it is that it is an art form that the community takes part of, but you can only really have it if you have a really interconnected community that also really deeply understands and believes in the material in question. And it's kind of a form of religious literacy that we kind of lack now, which is sort
of universal and it's way. It's just one of the neat things about the medieval period actually is that they're all weird little guys doing these weird little things, and it's what I really love about them. So I appreciate you guys coming on and trauma dumping.
Yeah, for all of our collective issues with Christianity. That's right, folks, we got problems with Jesus and you're gonna hear and you've actually just heard about them. You can't unhear it now. We did it. No, I'm just kidding. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm sure a lot of our listeners will definitely have heard of it, but if not, please tell us about the Worst of All Possible worlds.
Sure, yeah, so well, thank you both Luke and Ellen for having us on. This is really good. We had a good time finally getting those stories out that we have never been able to tell on our own show. So let's go.
Yeah. No, we do a show.
It's called The Worst of All Possible Worlds. Every week we talk about a different piece of media. We talk about the narratives within that piece of media, both the explicit ones and the implicit ones, and we talk about the way that those narratives shape the world that we live in. Our tagline is case studies in the pop culture of a dying Empire. The vast majority of the time, that empire is the American Empire. Every once in a while,
it's the Japanese Empire. We've talked about some. It's mostly and sometimes the British Empire as well, but mostly the US because that is our wheelhouse and we have a particular fascination, as you have just heard, with the intersection of narratives and evangelical Christianity. That is not our exclusive focus. We talk about all sorts of stuff, you know, video games, TV shows, movies, whatever, but we also are very interested in the reactionary right and the way that they are
advancing their project through media. So feel free to go check us out. Our website is worst possible dot world and we also have a very affordably priced Patreon five dollars a month Patreon dot com ash worst of all. So we hope to see you there.
Well yeah, uh, thank you all for coming it. It sounds great And you know, can I can I interest you in in a series on on the greatest work on nine to eleven in the War on Terror? And I'm of course talking about Revenge of the Sith.
Uh it only it's more relevant it it does.
It's just you bring me on and it's just me going. He was right, I don't understand it either, but he was right. It was to me about I take I take no pleasure in reporting this, But he was fucking right again.
It was over he had the high ground.
He did.
I couldn't. You can't, folks, folks he had that. Yeah, sorry, I can't. China. China has the high ground, folks. Yeah. Anyway, Elean or what what's going on with you?
Oh? Mate? I'm in the to Vic Northwest and mostly very stoned at the moment, but you can all check out my blog Going Hypenmedieval dot com. I am on the social media's at going Medieval more, particularly Blue Sky, uh you know where I bother Josh and things like that. I was recently interviewed for a Rolling Stone article about historians talking about how all of this is something that
we're used to seeing. So you could check that out if you've got a Rolling Stone subscription, And I actually do really recommend, if you're wanting some actual good reporting at the moment, having a Rolling Stone subscription, because there's someone doing some of the only investigative journalism at the time.
Yeah.
Isn't Miles Clear writing for them as well?
Yeah? Exactly, Yes, Yeah, Miles is the one who tapped me for that, which I appreciate, so check that out. And otherwise, like you know what my fucking problem is, Like you're you're already listening to this show.
It's fine, there you go, folks. Yeah, my name is Luca is amazing on the various social media's, I post on the one that's annoying me the least at the moment. And uh yeah, so whichever one that is, folks will see you follow both and you get the same bullshit either way. Uh yeah, you can find my old show, uh People's History of the Old Republic if you want to hear me yap about Star Wars. But anyway, thank y'all so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Bye.