Where the Deer and the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman

Author:Nick Offerman [Offerman, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

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Let’s take the tour back to Madison. I want to establish for you the heroic qualities of this groovy, Midwestern center of learning. When I first began touring, I had a pretty simple rider for my backstage needs. A little meat, a little cheese, and two beers for after the show, because after rocking the worlds of a couple thousand college kids with some slow-paced talk of smoked pork shoulders and chisel-sharpening etiquette, I’d usually be so juiced on adrenaline that a couple of beers would just bring me back to equilibrium so that I could get to sleep and travel the next day and do it all over again. This system worked fine at regular, hard-ticket theatres, but I was quickly dismayed to learn that colleges could not legally procure alcohol for me, since some of the students working the venues were not yet twenty-one. What could be more counterintuitive than a college saying, “Um, that’s a no-go on the beer”? This was really a bummer, because it kind of took the wind out of the sails of the whole “college show” feeling. There was no place I wanted a beer more after a show than a college, out of a powerful nostalgia for my own hedonistic youth. Nonetheless, I just learned to deal with it and find a couple beers usually once I arrived at my hotel for the night, which wasn’t nearly as romantic.

This is not to say that the occasional university didn’t step up to that plate and deliver, like the time that Iowa State students tailgated in the parking lot to prepare for my show, and the smell of their grills drew me from the backstage door, floating along a trail of scent like a cartoon wolf, to a redoubtable group of fans serving amazing cheddar burgers, who may or may not have slipped me a couple of local brews for my postgame reverie. To this day, I cannot drive through Ames, Iowa, without taking a knee and offering my devout thanks to her citizenry.

Several years past, I was invited to perform my show American Ham at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and I was thrilled. They have a gorgeous and stately auditorium directly connected to the German beer hall and restaurant called Der Rathskeller at the student union. Outside the beer hall is a terrace upon which one can recline with one’s beer and bask in the breezy pleasures of Lake Mendota. Had I attended that estimable school, I fear that I would have seen fit to extend my education to twelve or perhaps thirty years so that I might continue sitting upon that glorious terrace with a schnitzel and a Patrick O’Brian novel.

My parents drove up from Minooka to see the show, which made it even more momentous, and the crowd was damn boisterous, and generous with their tolerance of my clumsy stylings. Sometimes I would engage the audience in a Q & A after my ninety-minute show had ended, if it seemed like everybody was game to keep the fun happening.

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