Dylan Bolin

*This is dedicated to the hygienist and Dr. Taito, DDS who were worried that I might use this experience in one of my “bits.”  I am.

First, some exposition:  For over a month I’ve had a wicked pain on the left side of my head.  Various doctors have prescribed antibiotics and pain killers to temporary results, but the pain always returned.  Then I thought the source of the pain might be an un-erupted wisdom tooth that, by laying low, avoided the fate of the other three which, after they were pulled, I turned into buttons for a rather Gothic cardigan. 

That suspicion took me to my wife’s dentist.  In a matter of moments he diagnosed the pain that had plagued me for weeks.  “Well, I don’t think it’s the wisdom tooth,” he said, “I think the problem is that you have an enormous cavity in that tooth right there.”  He pointed to the X-ray and a convex area of black among my mouth’s ghostly white, picket fence.  It was tooth #19; the “Robin Yount Tooth.”  He knelt down beside the chair.  “I think this is going to require a root canal.” 

My first cavity ever, and it required a root canal.

Now if you’re anything like me, just the term “root canal” is enough to make you break into a cold sweat.  I know it does me, despite the fact that I’ve never had one.  I considered asking if for another option like perhaps two .38 slugs to the back of the head, but the doctor assured me that he knew a great Endodontist (root canal specialist).

Two days later and one day before the most celebrated mouth holiday there is, I was to receive a root canal.

Here’s what it would look like if my mouth was a cartoon:

Anyway, on the day of the big procedure, I shaved my body smooth, and anointed it with goat’s milk and Lavender.  Then, I kissed my wife goodbye and drove to Dr. Taito’s office singing I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith.

When I arrived at the office, I checked in at reception.  I gave them my name and the staff became very furtive, like they were trying to get a look at me without looking like they were looking.  I felt a bit like Harry Potter when he first arrived at Hogwarts. 

Later, talking to the hygienist, I learned that some of the staff knew my name from WKLH and wondered if I was the same guy.  This is actually pretty common when people put a face to a radio voice.  (The strangest comment I ever received was:  “I thought you would be blond.”  How do you sound blond?)

When Dr. Taito came in, he informed me that he had done a Google search on me, and he seemed impressed by my prolific on-line presence.  Now, you’d think this would be a good thing, being recognized and all, but I immediately thought:  “Crap.  Now I can’t be a wuss.”

I mean, who wants to later be a character in the doctor’s story:

“So get this.  You know that Dylan guy from WKLH?”

“Yeah?”

“Total wimp.  Cried like a kitten.  We ran out of Novocaine; had to borrow more from another office.”

So every time they asked me if I was okay, I tried to wink like John Wayne…despite the fact that it would cause a single tear to roll into my ear.

Anyway, turns out that Dr. Taito and Advanced Dental Specialists are pretty incredible.  His chair-side manner was a lot like I imagine Oprah’s Dr. Oz.

So I’m finally on the mend.  For the first time in weeks, and on Thanksgiving Eve, I couldn’t be more thankful that I’m now pain-free.  Of course that could be because of the meds.  But I prefer to think that it’s because I’m spooning a unicorn in a chocolate hammock.

Did you know unicorns could purr?  Me neither.

-Dylan

It was a lovely evening to be sure.  Mr. Sedaris was absent when the evening, for my wife and I, began at Kiku, a new sushi restaurant in downtown Milwaukee.  This was my meal:

If you’re into sushi, the fish was very fresh and the portions were ample.  If you’re not into sushi, thanks for reading the last sentence anyway.

The rest of the evening was more David Sedaris-centric.

If you’re not familiar, David Sedaris is a writer that has been described many ways:  Essayist, Memoirist, but most notably, Humorist.  Being a comedian myself, that last moniker is what I love most about him.  And ever since I read “humorist” as it pertains to David Sedaris, I’ve noticed that it is never casually replaced with “comedian” as it pertains to, say, me.  It wasn’t until I began to enjoy David Sedaris that the difference became clear. 

If, in a group of people, you refer to yourself as a “comedian,” people generally assume that a) You’re zany, b) You have a joke ready if they require further credentials and c) Despite (a) and (b), you’re probably unemployed.  On the other hand, if you refer to yourself as a “humorist,” people are intrigued; like when Indiana Jones calls himself an “archaeologist.”  You just know whatever he’s hiding is much sexier.

Not that David Sedaris is calling himself a humorist (his pubicist and publisher did that), but David Sedaris’ writing is a cut above.  Telling a joke is one thing, but writing a joke is something else.  It requires a personal rhythm and deeper intimacy for words on the page to make you laugh out loud, and that’s what his essays do for me. 

I was curious as to how they would translate when he read them live.

The crowd was very N.P.R., and I don’t say that as a pejorative.  For a moment, picture the people that you know that listen to Public Radio.  You probably know at least one or two.  They’re your friend(s) who consistently have good wine, aren’t up on the local sports team and always have a GREAT garden.  Now imagine a couple thousand of them packed into Milwaukee’s Riverside Theater.  

Listening to N.P.R. is generally a solitary activity; they rarely pipe it into your local mall.  So when many N.P.R. listeners are dropped into the middle of a crowd of other N.P.R. listeners, the collective intellectual enlightenment combined with claustrophobia can be paralyzing.  Typical concert etiquette, like that of the theater bars, bathrooms and Rock Show Enthusiasm, is often completely lost on them.  Thankfully, it wasn’t that kind of concert.

Sedaris’ readings were all new, and often, as the audience reacted, he would reach into the breast pocket of his shirt, retrieve a pen and mark his manuscript.  While noticeable, at no point was it ever distracting.  Later he mentioned that, after a show, he would make re-writes.

As the show concluded, he announced that he would have a book signing in the lobby of the theater which was good because, frankly, I’d been counting on it.  Waiting in line with two books tucked under my arm, I was a kid again, waiting outside of County Stadium for a glimpse of a ball player and, if I was lucky, maybe get an autograph somewhere on my cap.  When it was my turn, I placed the books on the table while every question and comment and every review of every essay I had read became:  “Hello, Mr. Sedaris.”  

As he signed both books and I was too terrified to make chit-chat, suddenly the act of requesting an autograph became profoundly absurd.  Here I was, asking this man to write his name, in his own hand, on my book because…

I didn’t know.  For the life of me, I couldn’t remember why an autograph is valuable. 

I’ve signed a few autographs myself; perhaps after a ComedySportz matinee for a kid who thought that someday I would be really famous and he could say he knew me when because I scrawled my name on a blank piece of paper that would have been just as well served by his own childish doodlings.  I’ve done CD signings for WKLH where I’m one in a row of much better-known local celebrities.  Once, after signing my name, a woman picked up the CD case, looked at me and said with seemingly genuine curiosity:  “Who are you?”  That’s when I starting signing “Burt Reynolds.”

I guess it comes down to proof.  Proof that David Sedaris and I briefly shared a space, a word, a moment in time.  It meant that while others (many, MANY others) have read his words, he had taken the time to add a couple more to the books in my possession.  He gave me this:

Honestly, I could have done this myself and you would be equally impressed if you were impressed at all.  But I didn’t; he did.  And it was pretty cool.  And then my wife and I went home…after an Evening With David Sedaris.

-Dylan

It looks like we’ve finally turned the corner.  Spring has sprung and the men are sprouting antlers (as if they needed something to make them even less attractive to their quarry).

Fellas, if you plan on going out on the town and Tom Cattin’ anytime soon, you’d do well to do so sporting my brand new fragrance called Desperation!  It’s guaranteed!

Here’s the audio commercial:  Desperation!

Thanks to Stacey Meyer and Matt Tremmel for their assistance and, of course, WKLH Dave and Carole Morning Show Producer Marcus Allen for his production prowess.

Happy Hunting!

-Dylan

Here’s a commercial for The First Bank of Flatbush

Thanks to Marcus Allen of 96.5/WKLH Milwaukee for the production and the Dave and Carole morning show for the medium.

-Dylan

I know that you all have been hearing about it constantly, but allow me to be the next to say Happy V.D.  Of course, I’m referring to Valentine’s Day not the other thing.  However, feel free to walk around all day Saturday saying:  “Hello.  How’s your V.D?” and watch people’s faces.

But Valentine’s Day is a holiday unique unto itself.  The anticipation of Valentine’s Day is very gender-specific, by which I mean Valentine’s Day for men is very different than it is for women.  For men, Valentine’s Day is the day of a very important test; like the S.A.T.’s.  And the Valentine’s Day test is unique; it’s a test with no standard questions, only answers and men are just expected to know them.  A man’s score on this test will determine whether he gets into the Harvard of romance, or ends up flipping burgers at McThoughtless.  And who administers this test?  The women, of course.  Screw up fellas, and you’ll find yourself on an endless, Groundhog Day loop of trouble. 

But, never, and I mean never, is it the other way around.  Not once has one of my guy friends ever come up to me, mopey and forlorn and said:  “Valentine’s Day was horrible; Patrice didn’t even get me a card.”

For singles, Valentine’s Day is either empowering or depressing, and for some married couples, Valentine’s Day has an even greater meaning.  And as one half of one such couple, I count myself among them.  You see, for my wife and I, Valentine’s Day is our two-year anniversary (the “Cotton” anniversary).  Two years ago, my then fiancée, Amy and I flew to Mexico as part of WKLH’s Fiesta of Love and were married in a chapel on the beach in Playa del Carmen.

The day was perfect.  As per tradition, that morning, Amy and I woke up and went our separate ways.  While my soon to be brother-in-law Matt and I went into downtown Cancun, Amy and her sister-in-law Erika prepared for the big event.  Now, when we were planning the wedding with our planner Raphaela, Amy decided that she wanted to get her hair and make-up done, too.  To hear my wife tell it, the women of Mexico have a very different approach to make-up than American women and, afterwards, she and Erika spent a full half hour stripping away the generously-applied mascara with their fingernails and removing the top seven layers of eyeliner and lipstick with a wet nap.  After all, she was supposed to be a blushing bride, not a Batman villain. 

She and Erika were then whisked away to the wedding site in the comfort of an Escalade.  Meanwhile, I got into my suit, which immediately clung to my sweaty body like toilet paper.  My transportation was a charter bus along with 40 of my closest friends whom I had never met before.  If you tuned in, you know what happened next.  If you didn’t, that’s okay because everything was in Spanish, so if you had tuned in you probably tuned right out again thinking you had the wrong station. 

During the ceremony, Amy and I were frankly a little lost ourselves.  In fact, one of our wedding photos is a priceless picture of Amy and I staring at the magistrate with the same look on our faces that said in no uncertain terms:  “Huh?”  I can tell you that the stress of getting married is doubled when you don’t know what else is happening.  It got to the point where whenever there was a pause, Amy and I quickly said:  “I do” just in case.

As it turns out, thanks to our broken to non-existent Spanish, not only did we get married, but we also joined the Mexican army and ordered a Chicken enchilada with beans and rice.  And because we were married in Mexico, this is not only our two-year anniversary here in the United States, but, thanks to a generous exchange rate, in Peso Years, it is our tenth anniversary (the “Tin or Aluminum anniversary) in Mexico.

-Dylan

How to Rob a Bank by Willy Porter

For those of you who are curious as to the cause of our current banking crisis and/or still have the stomach to hear more, Willy Porter explains it all in this podcast from the Dave and Carole morning show on 96.5/WKLH Milwaukee.  Thanks, Willy.

-Dylan