Next Chapter of Podcasts I want you to close your eyes and picture something ...
It's a hot summer night in the San Fernando Valley.
We open on a classic suburban home, complete with two cars in the driveway and a smiling neighbor cutting his grass who stops to wave at the cheerful male man. You can almost hear a brief stinger of cheesy theme music signaling the return from a commercial break. 90s kids, you'll know what I'm talking about. We cut to the living room and sitting on the floor in the dull glow of our big boxy tube TV
is me. I'm Holly by the way, Holly Brown. I'm a Santa comedian who shares far too much on stage,
“but you don't know that about me yet. Right now you're seeing me at 17 and the only thing you can”
so far is something that's still true to this day. I love sitcoms. As I flip through the channels though, hoping to catch one of my favorite reruns, you can tell from the look in my eye that I'm desperately searching for something more than just a distraction from my homework. Maybe at this point you're thinking, okay Holly, dialed on the mellow drama. This is giving after school special. And that's fair, okay? But before you
write me off as another millennial clinging to nostalgic fantasies, let me tell you about what happens when we add in a healthy dose of reality. In walks my dad and there's no explosive cheer of a live studio audience as he shuffles into the room barely able to stand on his own
to feet. A shell of the vibrant larger than life guy my family's always known him to be. He opens his
mouth to say something important. Right as Steve Erkel is asking, "Did I do that yet?" And instantly, static floods my brain like muscle memory.
“His dying, I think to myself, he's dying. He's dying, he's dying. He's dying.”
This isn't what happens on TV. No goofy montage during the opening credits, no tidy resolution, and no maybe we hug it out at the end. My life never once got the sitcom treatment. But even so, up until this moment, nothing could stop me from desperately wanting to believe it could. After all we kind of looked apart with all the tried and true archetypes, the wild child younger brother. The smarty pants older sister. Technically, in Dante's inferno, the deepest
circle of hell is a frozen wasteland. The quiet collected mom. Holly, would you please take that blowtorch away from your brother? And then there was me. The middle child trying to hold everything together with jokes as some pretty aggressive problem solving. Are we trading top ramen for tossed solid and scrambled eggs? But the sitcom similarities didn't stop there. Stuff from our actual lives would show up on TV. Our dining room table would appear in a late night
rerun. My favorite coffee cup would end up in the hands of the biggest radio therapist in the country. That's because my real life dad was actually working on some of the biggest shows of the era. The thing is, he wasn't just making these shows. My dad seemed like he belonged in one. He was extraordinary. He could sing, he could dance, he could charm the pants off literally anyone.
“I think everyone sort of idolized your dad because he had such a strong personality.”
The more two hour blocks of TGIF I consumed, the more I convinced myself. Maybe my life was cooked up by network executives, which means maybe there was still time for a rewrite. But we weren't the winzles, the tanners, or the Matthews. Behind our glassy facade, behind the smiling TV guide cover-failing people wanted to see. There was something darker lurking just off camera. It didn't start that day, we thought my dad was telling us his cancer is reaching the home
stretch. It started long before that. But in that moment, when he actually revealed something that knocked the wind out of me, something knew that changed my life forever, I wanted to scream for someone to cue a laugh track, because this couldn't really be happening. Not again.
Not always the craziest thing. Abuse, addiction, affairs, self-harm, sexual assault,
secret children, these aren't the kind of things they cram into half her comedies about starkey teenagers and their petty high school dramas. I am a little shocked that my brother would
Allow this to happen.
but me, from companion arts and next chapter podcasts, I'm finally ready to uncover the truth.
“I'm ready to investigate the secrets I inherited from my parents the only way I know how.”
Through dark comedy, oversharing, and peeling back the layers on the kind of stories we tell
ourselves to survive. And occasionally, willing, my extremely fucked up life to act like the
sitcom I always wished it could be. So, not dying then.
“Oh, I'm dying, all right. Dying of thirst, what does a guy have to do to get a beer around here?”
Dad, you can't have a beer. You have cancer. Next chapter podcasts.
