An Evening with Molly Shannon – Chicago Humanities Festival – Harris Theater – April 13, 2022

As with Bob Odenkirk’s book-promoting appearance at the festival, Tim Meadows played the role of interviewer, unfortunately, as I would have liked more of Shannon, and less of Meadows asking the audience if anyone had any marijuana they could give him.

On the positive side, compared to the Odenkirk interview, there was a lot less profanity, a better venue, and a readable book as part of the package.

One similarity between the programs was the guest saying that it was really hard to write the book. Shannon said it about ten times., which was nothing compared to how many times she said “yeah” in response to Meadows.

Appropriately, given the requests for marijuana, I haven’t heard someone say “yeah” as much since I walked into the wrong party senior year of college, where every other sentence was “yeah man.”

Shannon’s other most frequent responses to Meadows, when she could get a word in edgewise, were “that’s funny” (even if it wasn’t), that’s great (even if it wasn’t), and I don’t know (even if she did?).

Then, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, when Meadows said they were out of time, Shannon stood up and started riffing, taking over the stage and disregarding the fact that they had to clear the space for the next presentation.

If only Meadows had told her time was up an hour earlier, and then sat back and enjoyed her energy with the rest of us.