So Last Friday…

…Jan, eldest son Luke and wife Tasha, second son Matthew, friend J Mac, Jan and I went to the Neptune Theater in the University District in Seattle to go hear Stephen Tobolowsky, character actor extraordinaire and fantastic storyteller, regale us with some of his wonderful tales. You’ve undoubtedly seen him because he’s been in jillion movies and TV shows, but he’s always playing some odd character part like Buttcrack Plumber, or Officer #2, or (most famously) Ned Ryerson in “Groundhog Day”:

Anyway, Tobolowsky (“Tobo”) was discovered by my kids a few years ago as a phenomenal storyteller in a little cult classic called “Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party” where he just spends a couple hours telling his amazing true stories from his extremely interesting life. They then found a podcast called “The Tobolowsky Files” in which he continues to regale us with still more wonderful, funny, moving yarns, all true. The podcast then evolved into a radio show on NPR (which is produced, I believe, here in Seattle).

Tobo did a show here in Seattle, so we bought tix for the the guys and us and went last Friday night. We thought the show was at 7:00 so we got there at 6:30, only to find out it was at 8:00. Upside, we were like fifth in line and got fantastic seats. But particularly cool was that my chip off block nerdly sons actually recognized the producer of the “Tobolowsky Files” (David Chen) when he walked past and called out to him, so he came over and did an interview with us all and put it up on the web as a podcast. Behold the Shea clan gabbin’ with The Chen:

Here, by the way, is Luke’s CGI image of Tobolowsky:

Attention, world: you need to hire this very gifted animator and designer ASAP.