The Bassoon King: A Book Review
On September 20th, 2005, my life changed forever. I discovered The Office. It was on after My Name is Earl on NBC. I tuned in to watch My Name is Earl. I stayed to watch The Office. Season 2 premiere. Michael Scott was hosting the Dundee awards.
At the NBC Store in New York, 2007.
In this episode, Dwight learned that somebody was scrawling lewd jokes about Michael Scott in the women's restroom. Dwight Schrute, assistant to the regional manager, soberly asked Michael if he should take any and every measure to find out what it says.
So he waited until he thought everyone was out of the women's bathroom. And then he barged in... on Phyllis. She was furious.
From that point on, I was working my Tuesdays around watching The Office. When it moved to Thursdays, I shifted things around accordingly.
The next time I got to watch an episode was when Jan Levinson came in from New York to seal a contract with Lackawanna County, with the help of Michael. They made out, he went back to the Radisson, and Dwight fell asleep at the Dunder Mifflin offices. He wonders why Jan gets a cab back to her car the next day, and when Michael gets back to the office all smiles, a disheveled Dwight asks Michael, "did you do her?"
For me, that set the tone for Dwight. The sycophant, the kiss-butt, the dweeb, the socially inept office adversary of Jim. But how methodical that actor was who was playing him!
That man was Rainn Wilson. And I just had the pleasure of reading his autobiographical book, The Bassoon King.
The son of Patricia (Shay) Whitman and Robert (Bob) Wilson, Rainn Wilson had an upbringing where he wanted for plenty. He was born in the Seattle area, where he would spend much of his childhood.
His mom, Shay, was out of the picture shortly after his birth in 1966. She fell in love with a director. There's a palpable sadness to Rainn being raised without the love of his biological mom.
His father remarried and moved the family to Nicaraugua. Dwight... I mean Rainn's father was actively Baha'i, and went down to Nicaragua to work in a community as a spiritual leader. Dwight's stepmother, Kristin, was a hurry-up rebound. I think that she loved Robert at first. In the book, as a point of fact, it should be noted that Kristin was portrayed as a very loving stepmother towards...wait a minute, did I say Dwight again? Yeah I did. I mean, Rainn's stepmother, Kristin, was very loving towards him... but apparently her marriage to Bob was unhappy. They ultimately divorce by the time Rainn gets to college.
The Nicaragua section of the story is interesting. Rainn did not get the sanitized tourist resort experience. He full-on lived in a hut on the Mosquito Coast. He had all kinds of exotic animals as pets, including but not limited to a dog named Heironymus Bosch, and a sloth named Andrew. The bullet points on pg. 17 reveal how ecclectic the people of Nicaragua were, and its telling that as he approached 50, he still remembered how they got his stepmom out of quicksand, the man coming out of the ocean covered in jellyfish, or the "Devil Day," the Nicaraguan Halloween where men dressed as devils carrying sparklers would grab children and scream in their faces.
Yes, he got sick while he was down there. Rainn suffered from amoebic dyssentery in Nicaragua, but he did love to watch them play baseball with a giant grapefruit.
Even so, I'd like to travel to Nicaragua after reading his account.
He eventaully returned to Seattle, around age 5, and went to public school.
In the suburb of Lake Forest Park, he lived in a concreteblo-ck, two-bedroom rental house between a Pizza Hut and a 7-11.
He got teased for being named Rainn. He got bullied and shoved into lockers for loving fantasy books. He is very proud of his father for publishing a book of fantasy circa 1980.
He loved playing Dungeons and Dragons with his best friend, John Valadez, he was on chess team, and as the title of the book tells us, he loved playing bassoon.
He loved watching the sitcoms of the 1970's. The chapter titled Compendium of Comedic Sidekicks is a hugely entertaining sidebar. He talks about his favorite comic sidekick characters from various shows, including Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Laverne and Shirley. I was pleased with his meditation on Radar O'Reilly from M*A*S*H. He wondered what Radar's dreams and goals were. Radar was a person who worked hard to read other people's thoughts and meet their daily needs. I'd go so far as to say that Dwight Schrute in his neediness for approval and moments of naivete very well was somewhat informed by Corporal O'Reilly.
"The Greatest Albums of the Early 1980's (in no particular order)" was another dealmaker in my reading this book through to its conclusion. It's not linear. It jumps around. It isn't even narrative for chapters at a time. Rainn Wilson loves going off on tangents about TV, stage, living in Alphabet City in Greenwich Village in New York, Girls (he loved girls, that informed many if not all of his major life decisions), and music. He goes through a New Wave stage. He moves to the Chicago suburbs junior year of high school and attends New Trier High School (often used for John Hughes movies, including Ferris Bueller's Day Off.)
Rainn had been an irreconcilable geek at his school in suburban Seattle. But he spoke of his acting class at New Trier. For an acting exercise, he pretended to be at home in his bedroom. He puts on an Elvis Costello and the Attractions. And he managed to completely reinvent himself.
"One great thing about moving as a teenager is that you can reinvent yourself. When the privileged prepsters of New Trier met the new kid named Rainn with ripped up Levi's, rectangular sunglasses, and a skinny piano tie, they had an entirely different perception of who I was from the folks I'd left behind in Seattle. I was like geeky Anthony Michael Hall with just a dash of dashing Andrew McCarthy."
Rainn faces enormous joys and heartaches as he pursues a collegiate career in theatre. First he goes to a university in Massachusetts. He reunites with his birth mother, Shay. Notably, he only ever refers to her as Shay, not mom or mother. But it sounds like he has reconciled many of his abandonment issues. Rainn speaks of having a conversation with her in a cemetery, and how he finally asks her about if she felt like she missed out by walking out of his life. Next, he returns home to attend the University of Washington. He talks at length about his great faculty there. And it's there that he meets Holiday Reinhorn, who is every bit his component complement like Angela was to Dwight, or Pam to Jim.
I particularly enjoyed his chapter "Volcano Love." He had been banging around in travelling theatre when he found himself back in Washington with a traveling Shakespeare company. He called her up, went over to her house for a date, and I am transfixed by Rainn's soul-baring description of just what it means to fall in love with the one.
"When I walked into Holiday's house, an eclectic abode filled with rabbits and cats and that gorgeous white pit bull, Edison, and I saw her in a beautiful vintage 1950's dress, a red cardigan, lumberjack boots, and sporting a Day of the Dead arm tattoo, I was gobsmacked. I don't believe in love at first sight- it simply doesn't make any sense- but that's what happened to me on that night."
They married in 1995, near Mt. St. Helen's.
Yes, Rainn had his fair share of personal demons. He went to graduate school at NYU. There was a day when he had an audition for agents with other students of NYU, Yale, and Juilliard.
Parts weren't in abundancy after his audition. And he spent a substantial chunk of 1988-1990 as an honest to god junkie. He had a reaction to drugs and had to beg roommate John Valadez to call a paramedic. He wound up not going to the hospital, but claims he saw the face of god..."More of a presence than a face, really.. It expanded infinitely in gorgeous colors across a horizon like a Mark Rothko painting. Mighty, awe-inspiring, beautiful, ancient, and terrifying."
After that reaction, he kicked his habit. And he started getting stable employment on stage.
What turned out to be the most harrowing part of the book, however, was the birth of his son. His wife had an uneventful pregnancy throughout most of 2004, but then hemorrhaged leading up to delivery. Rainn has to keep himself together enough to keep her conscious in the bathtub (his experiences keeping himself awake at a party in the late '80's when he overdosed actually came back around to help him when his wife was on the verge of losing consciousness due to blood loss), call the paramedics, and stay with her at the hospital in the San Fernando Valley until a decent OB-GYN arrives.
Rainn names his son Walter. This makes me think of a few people who could be the namesake. Walter O'Reilly? The song "Magnet and Steel" by Walter Egan, while never mentioned in the book, does describe Rainn's attraction to Holiday. The delivery is a roller coaster of emotions. And it completely upstaged the chapters that were the reason I bought the book, the ones about The Office.
The content on The Office was to my satisfaction. He describes reading for Michael, bombing, and then reading for Dwight, and doing so well he took for assumed he had the part. It was many weeks before he got called back, however. And it was hardly a surefire hit after its first season. It happened that the head of GE, which owned NBC in 2004-2005, had a teenage son who loved The Office. So he went over Jeff Zucker's head and got it renewed.
Slowly but surely, it became a hit in Season 2. It won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series for Season 2, a couple other Emmys for directing and writing, and a Golden Globe for Steve Carell.
Reading Rainn Wilson's account of the development of the series is to relive its uncertainty. Of course we all know now it became a nine-season classic. Still watched today and newly discovered by new youngsters. But Rainn had a wife and an infant son to provide for when he went to work on Season 1. And he wanted to know that he would have steady employment. The urgency of making a quality product shows through in those first two seasons. Season 2 had an immediacy, an accessibility to it, that I think all the other seasons, while great, only approached.
But I loved the part of the book when Rainn Wilson, Jenna Fischer, John Krasinski, and Steve Carell, relative unknowns in early 2004, went out to a sandwich shop after finding out they had gotten the jobs. They reflected on how if this show took off, it would change their careers forever.
Bassoon King is a great book. And I was not ready to be done with it when I finished.
Four Stars.
Currently 65 pages into BJ Novak's compilation of short stories.
At the NBC Store in New York, 2007.
In this episode, Dwight learned that somebody was scrawling lewd jokes about Michael Scott in the women's restroom. Dwight Schrute, assistant to the regional manager, soberly asked Michael if he should take any and every measure to find out what it says.
So he waited until he thought everyone was out of the women's bathroom. And then he barged in... on Phyllis. She was furious.
From that point on, I was working my Tuesdays around watching The Office. When it moved to Thursdays, I shifted things around accordingly.
The next time I got to watch an episode was when Jan Levinson came in from New York to seal a contract with Lackawanna County, with the help of Michael. They made out, he went back to the Radisson, and Dwight fell asleep at the Dunder Mifflin offices. He wonders why Jan gets a cab back to her car the next day, and when Michael gets back to the office all smiles, a disheveled Dwight asks Michael, "did you do her?"
For me, that set the tone for Dwight. The sycophant, the kiss-butt, the dweeb, the socially inept office adversary of Jim. But how methodical that actor was who was playing him!
That man was Rainn Wilson. And I just had the pleasure of reading his autobiographical book, The Bassoon King.
The son of Patricia (Shay) Whitman and Robert (Bob) Wilson, Rainn Wilson had an upbringing where he wanted for plenty. He was born in the Seattle area, where he would spend much of his childhood.
His mom, Shay, was out of the picture shortly after his birth in 1966. She fell in love with a director. There's a palpable sadness to Rainn being raised without the love of his biological mom.
His father remarried and moved the family to Nicaraugua. Dwight... I mean Rainn's father was actively Baha'i, and went down to Nicaragua to work in a community as a spiritual leader. Dwight's stepmother, Kristin, was a hurry-up rebound. I think that she loved Robert at first. In the book, as a point of fact, it should be noted that Kristin was portrayed as a very loving stepmother towards...wait a minute, did I say Dwight again? Yeah I did. I mean, Rainn's stepmother, Kristin, was very loving towards him... but apparently her marriage to Bob was unhappy. They ultimately divorce by the time Rainn gets to college.
The Nicaragua section of the story is interesting. Rainn did not get the sanitized tourist resort experience. He full-on lived in a hut on the Mosquito Coast. He had all kinds of exotic animals as pets, including but not limited to a dog named Heironymus Bosch, and a sloth named Andrew. The bullet points on pg. 17 reveal how ecclectic the people of Nicaragua were, and its telling that as he approached 50, he still remembered how they got his stepmom out of quicksand, the man coming out of the ocean covered in jellyfish, or the "Devil Day," the Nicaraguan Halloween where men dressed as devils carrying sparklers would grab children and scream in their faces.
Yes, he got sick while he was down there. Rainn suffered from amoebic dyssentery in Nicaragua, but he did love to watch them play baseball with a giant grapefruit.
Even so, I'd like to travel to Nicaragua after reading his account.
He eventaully returned to Seattle, around age 5, and went to public school.
In the suburb of Lake Forest Park, he lived in a concreteblo-ck, two-bedroom rental house between a Pizza Hut and a 7-11.
He got teased for being named Rainn. He got bullied and shoved into lockers for loving fantasy books. He is very proud of his father for publishing a book of fantasy circa 1980.
He loved playing Dungeons and Dragons with his best friend, John Valadez, he was on chess team, and as the title of the book tells us, he loved playing bassoon.
He loved watching the sitcoms of the 1970's. The chapter titled Compendium of Comedic Sidekicks is a hugely entertaining sidebar. He talks about his favorite comic sidekick characters from various shows, including Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Laverne and Shirley. I was pleased with his meditation on Radar O'Reilly from M*A*S*H. He wondered what Radar's dreams and goals were. Radar was a person who worked hard to read other people's thoughts and meet their daily needs. I'd go so far as to say that Dwight Schrute in his neediness for approval and moments of naivete very well was somewhat informed by Corporal O'Reilly.
"The Greatest Albums of the Early 1980's (in no particular order)" was another dealmaker in my reading this book through to its conclusion. It's not linear. It jumps around. It isn't even narrative for chapters at a time. Rainn Wilson loves going off on tangents about TV, stage, living in Alphabet City in Greenwich Village in New York, Girls (he loved girls, that informed many if not all of his major life decisions), and music. He goes through a New Wave stage. He moves to the Chicago suburbs junior year of high school and attends New Trier High School (often used for John Hughes movies, including Ferris Bueller's Day Off.)
Rainn had been an irreconcilable geek at his school in suburban Seattle. But he spoke of his acting class at New Trier. For an acting exercise, he pretended to be at home in his bedroom. He puts on an Elvis Costello and the Attractions. And he managed to completely reinvent himself.
"One great thing about moving as a teenager is that you can reinvent yourself. When the privileged prepsters of New Trier met the new kid named Rainn with ripped up Levi's, rectangular sunglasses, and a skinny piano tie, they had an entirely different perception of who I was from the folks I'd left behind in Seattle. I was like geeky Anthony Michael Hall with just a dash of dashing Andrew McCarthy."
Rainn faces enormous joys and heartaches as he pursues a collegiate career in theatre. First he goes to a university in Massachusetts. He reunites with his birth mother, Shay. Notably, he only ever refers to her as Shay, not mom or mother. But it sounds like he has reconciled many of his abandonment issues. Rainn speaks of having a conversation with her in a cemetery, and how he finally asks her about if she felt like she missed out by walking out of his life. Next, he returns home to attend the University of Washington. He talks at length about his great faculty there. And it's there that he meets Holiday Reinhorn, who is every bit his component complement like Angela was to Dwight, or Pam to Jim.
I particularly enjoyed his chapter "Volcano Love." He had been banging around in travelling theatre when he found himself back in Washington with a traveling Shakespeare company. He called her up, went over to her house for a date, and I am transfixed by Rainn's soul-baring description of just what it means to fall in love with the one.
"When I walked into Holiday's house, an eclectic abode filled with rabbits and cats and that gorgeous white pit bull, Edison, and I saw her in a beautiful vintage 1950's dress, a red cardigan, lumberjack boots, and sporting a Day of the Dead arm tattoo, I was gobsmacked. I don't believe in love at first sight- it simply doesn't make any sense- but that's what happened to me on that night."
They married in 1995, near Mt. St. Helen's.
Yes, Rainn had his fair share of personal demons. He went to graduate school at NYU. There was a day when he had an audition for agents with other students of NYU, Yale, and Juilliard.
Parts weren't in abundancy after his audition. And he spent a substantial chunk of 1988-1990 as an honest to god junkie. He had a reaction to drugs and had to beg roommate John Valadez to call a paramedic. He wound up not going to the hospital, but claims he saw the face of god..."More of a presence than a face, really.. It expanded infinitely in gorgeous colors across a horizon like a Mark Rothko painting. Mighty, awe-inspiring, beautiful, ancient, and terrifying."
After that reaction, he kicked his habit. And he started getting stable employment on stage.
What turned out to be the most harrowing part of the book, however, was the birth of his son. His wife had an uneventful pregnancy throughout most of 2004, but then hemorrhaged leading up to delivery. Rainn has to keep himself together enough to keep her conscious in the bathtub (his experiences keeping himself awake at a party in the late '80's when he overdosed actually came back around to help him when his wife was on the verge of losing consciousness due to blood loss), call the paramedics, and stay with her at the hospital in the San Fernando Valley until a decent OB-GYN arrives.
Rainn names his son Walter. This makes me think of a few people who could be the namesake. Walter O'Reilly? The song "Magnet and Steel" by Walter Egan, while never mentioned in the book, does describe Rainn's attraction to Holiday. The delivery is a roller coaster of emotions. And it completely upstaged the chapters that were the reason I bought the book, the ones about The Office.
The content on The Office was to my satisfaction. He describes reading for Michael, bombing, and then reading for Dwight, and doing so well he took for assumed he had the part. It was many weeks before he got called back, however. And it was hardly a surefire hit after its first season. It happened that the head of GE, which owned NBC in 2004-2005, had a teenage son who loved The Office. So he went over Jeff Zucker's head and got it renewed.
Slowly but surely, it became a hit in Season 2. It won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series for Season 2, a couple other Emmys for directing and writing, and a Golden Globe for Steve Carell.
Reading Rainn Wilson's account of the development of the series is to relive its uncertainty. Of course we all know now it became a nine-season classic. Still watched today and newly discovered by new youngsters. But Rainn had a wife and an infant son to provide for when he went to work on Season 1. And he wanted to know that he would have steady employment. The urgency of making a quality product shows through in those first two seasons. Season 2 had an immediacy, an accessibility to it, that I think all the other seasons, while great, only approached.
But I loved the part of the book when Rainn Wilson, Jenna Fischer, John Krasinski, and Steve Carell, relative unknowns in early 2004, went out to a sandwich shop after finding out they had gotten the jobs. They reflected on how if this show took off, it would change their careers forever.
Bassoon King is a great book. And I was not ready to be done with it when I finished.
Four Stars.
Currently 65 pages into BJ Novak's compilation of short stories.