On the Road, a Poet of Lost and Found
NEW HAVEN — Davy Rothbart had misplaced his usual
hype music, so Rage Against the Machine would have to do. Mr. Rothbart, a
writer and a creator of Found Magazine, the repository for forgotten notes and photos,
normally listened to Metallica’s "One" to get himself
pumped for a show. But on Monday evening he popped a CD with "Bombtrack" into the player
in his rented Dodge minivan and began fist-pumping along.
He was amping himself up for a library stop on the
tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of Found, at which he would also read
from “My Heart Is an Idiot,” his unfiltered new memoir. Outside the parked car,
he changed from one basketball jersey to another, deodorizing himself with a
spray of body mist — a road shower, he called it — before sitting in the driver’s
seat and swigging from a bottle of rye whiskey. He opened a thrift-store
briefcase to go through an assemblage of discarded to-do lists, receipts and
love letters that he would read at the show, like this one: “Dear Ron, I love
you, but things have not been the same since we found out we were related.”
This was the least weird part of Mr. Rothbart’s
day.
In his role as an editor of Found, Mr. Rothbart,
37, has long been a beacon for voyeurism, whimsy and wistfulness, exposing
missives not intended for public consumption in a way that prefigured Web sites
like To-Do List and Passiveaggressivenotes.com. In the decade since he and a few friends started
the magazine (which has spawned three popular book anthologies), he has
traversed the country eight times, racking up thousands of miles to read in
offbeat places, like a Roman Catholic girls’ school in New Hampshire and a
bodybuilding gym in Sacramento, most often with his brother Peter, a musician
who writes songs based on their finds. They’re at it again, in the midst of a 75-city tour; on Thursday they will appear at the UCB East Theater in Manhattan.
Davy Rothbart
Mr. Rothbart wrote the new book, released this
month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, during a three-and-a-half-year break from
touring, but it is full of tales of lost love, sexual misfires and the many
oddball characters he encountered on the road. The essays are often
humiliatingly comical, but not without pathos.
“I’ve been publishing people’s most private
thoughts in Found magazine for the last 10 years,” he said. “So I feel like
it’s only fair to put myself on the line.”
Mr. Rothbart and his magazine are also the subject
of a new musical, “Found,” created by Hunter Bell (a Tony nominee for "[title of show]") and the composer Eli
Bolin (“Sesame Street”), which is being given a trial run in the Berkshires this weekend. A few hours before they pulled up to
the august Institute Library in New Haven,
the Rothbart brothers stopped at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, Mass., to
see a rehearsal.
They had not read a script and so did not know what
to expect. This would turn out to be the weirdest part of their day.
It was early afternoon. Davy Rothbart, in wide
Elmo-red pants and his usual houndstooth cap, and his brother, in shorts and
hiking boots, sat in the sixth row and took notes as, onstage, they watched
their professional origin story. The show inventively uses Found items as the
basis for songs delivered by a motley Greek chorus, but at the show’s heart is
the character modeled after, and named for, Davy. Peter Rothbart and a few
others are mashed up in another character; the musical’s creators, who call it
an “auto-bio-fiction-ography,” did lengthy interviews with the original Found
team.
In the ornate theater Davy Rothbart cracked open a
warm Pabst Blue Ribbon. If he felt any discomfort at the musical’s many
references to his drinking habit, it didn’t show. At a line about crashing on a
cat-urine-soaked coach, he looked over at his brother. “You tell them about
that?” Peter whispered, and Davy nodded, laughing.
Afterward, the cast gathered, eager to know how
surreal it felt to watch your life unfold theatrically. “Really surreal,” Davy
said. “I like it. I feel like I’m ’shrooming again.”
Returning to the van, jammed with copies of the
book and magazines and Peter’s new album, “You Are What You Dream,” was less
psychedelic. There was a parking ticket on the window, then an errand to
retrieve a favorite sweatshirt, left behind two nights before at a decent after-party.
Driving to New Haven, they talked about the history and future of their oeuvre.
Between 5 and 20 physical finds are sent in daily
to their parents’ home in Ann Arbor, Mich. (with more coming in online), Davy
said; his mom opens some of them. As tour veterans, the brothers are symbiotic:
Davy, who now lives in Los Angeles, is more apt to pick up girls and go
train-hopping. Peter, 32, is better at keeping pace with his home life back in
Seattle.
Davy Rothbart
In performance, Peter’s folk songs add wistfulness,
and some silliness, to the mix.
“In truth, he’s half the show,” Davy said.
Peter, with mock indignation: “Half?!”
Davy: “I’ll give you 8/13. No more than that.”
Despite his affinity for other people’s diaries,
Davy doesn’t keep a journal, and wrote “My Heart Is an Idiot,” which covers a
decade of his life, largely from memory. He shared some of the stories with the
people in them before publication, and took some creative license. Names, dates
and other identifying details have been changed, though in the tradition of
memoirs now, it was legally vetted.
But most of the embarrassing stuff happens to him,
anyway. In New Haven he read “What Are You Wearing?” — a mistaken-identity
phone sex romance that first appeared in GQ — out loud for the first time. The
audience members were into it: as usual, they lingered over beers afterward,
asking for autographs and offering wildly personal stories. His capacity for
serendipity and overshare is infectious, even if the particulars are distinctly
Davy.
“Who among us,” his brother deadpanned, “hasn’t had
a four-month relationship with a woman who turned out to be a dude?”
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