Welcome to Night Vale: It’s Alive!

As a lifelong oddball, I’ve always been drawn to all things quirky and surreal. I love it when I’m shown a completely different way to look at things. It makes me think. It broadens my perspective. I genuinely believe that the broader the perspective, the more likely that perspective will contain a kernel of accuracy. Or at the very least, that wide-ranging perspective will allow you to eliminate certain absurdities.

That’s why I love the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, and why I have blogged about it before. It tends to take all the truths I take for granted and turn them upside down. Between the floating cats and the three-headed dragons and the constantly disappearing radio interns, it certainly makes one start to question one’s long-held beliefs.

January 19^th was a special day for me, because Dear Husband and I went to the Neptune Theatre in Seattle to see Welcome to Night Vale live! This would be my first live Night Vale experience, and I’m hoping it won’t be the last. It was also historic, because it was the 10 year anniversary of the Night Vale live shows. Guess where they did their first live show? Right in this very theatre, in this very city. I thought that was pretty cool.

The show opened with Danny Schmidt, an Indie Folk musician that I had never heard of before, but genuinely enjoyed. He also did “the weather” mid-show. (For those who have never visited Night Vale, the radio announcer always says, “And now for the weather”, and then you hear a musical interlude with an unusual musician that you’re probably unfamiliar with. I do love the weather in that quirky little town.)

But the music that always shows up at the beginning and end of the podcast, and provides eerie mood music in the middle, is and has always been done by Disparition. And there he was, right there on stage, working his magic the whole time. Silly me, I always assumed Disparition was a band. No. Disparition is a dude. An extremely talented and mysterious dude. I sometimes lost track of what was going on on the rest of the stage because I kept staring at him, wondering what makes him tick.

Aside from those two talented musicians, we also had Cecil Baldwin, who plays Cecil Palmer, the DJ, and the very hub of the Night Vale wheel; Meg Bashwiner, who plays Deb, a disembodied patch of haze; and Symphony Sanders, who plays Tamika Flynn, the leader of the resistance movement. Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink, the podcast’s writers and cocreators also play major roles. (Jeffrey in particular, gives a rousing cheerleading demo.)

I strongly urge you to listen to the podcast, of course, but if a live performance ever comes to your town, I highly recommend that you check it out. The live stories are stand alone kind of dealies, so even those who aren’t well versed in the podcasts won’t feel left out. It will give you just a slight taste of what the podcasts provide in abundance: a heaping helping of exceedingly strange.

If you look at nothing else, check out the podcast’s proverbs here. You’ll find one of the proverbs in this post’s subtitle, and I’ll leave you with one of my favorites, along with some photos that Dear Husband took during the show below that.

“Eating meat is a difficult moral decision, because it’s stolen, that meat. You should apologize.”

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