A few months later, one of those weird thoughts popped into my head. I was doing an outside voiceover thing, and I was waiting in the waiting room. I was looking at this chair and thought, “What if Pierre was comfortably seated, but getting mad while he was comfortable?”
Bernard: A few months after the State Quarters bit, Brian Stack called me one Monday morning and started asking me about my weekend, which was very unusual — nobody cared about anyone’s weekend. He was asking me if I did anything special and what I was doing and if anything was bothering me. I told him that Apple had just released the iPod, and I bought this device called an iMic to try to convert my LP albums to MP3 files. But the software wasn’t compatible. This really annoyed me because the iMic was $35, and I’d have to spend more than $100 to upgrade my computer.
I’m explaining this to Brian, and he interrupts me and says, “Pierre, do me a favor, write all this down and email it to me.” It was crazy. I mean, he called me, then told me he didn’t have time to talk and then told me to write this all out and send it to him. Still, I wrote what he wanted and sent it to him.
Later that day, I got a call from the stage manager, asking me to show up for blocking. I had no idea what this was for, but I was being used sporadically in different things so I figured it was just another weird thing. No one said a word about what it was, they just did the blocking and told me, “We’ll call you when we need you.”
It wasn’t until about a half hour before the show began that someone called me down. Brian was there, and he told me, “Hey, Pierre, you know that message you sent me earlier? We’re going to have you read that message on air tonight. We’ll have cue cards for you.” Then he pointed to a chair and said, “We’re going to have you sit in that recliner, if that’s okay.”