MIKE DAISEY is Back (at Berkeley Rep)

Last night I went to see Mike Daisey's new monologue "The Ugly American" at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. He first made a name for himself in the world of monologists with his brilliant tale of dot-com woe called "21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com." I worked on the same small "Biz Dev" team with Mr. Daisey at Amazon back in the days when their stock price still soared (up and down) on the NASDAQ like a Hot Wheels track, so he's been kind enough to give me complimentary tickets to his shows ever since. "The Ugly American" is a fun show with plenty of laughs and absolutely no message whatsoever except something akin to that line in "It's A Wonderful Life" where the old man on the porch says to Jimmy Stewart's character: "Ah, youth is wasted on the wrong people." I highly recommend it for anybody living in the Bay Area. The show is about his college term abroad in London where he studied acting and fell rather blindly into a relationship with a fellow thespian who also turned out to be, well, a prostitute. These things happen when we're young, right?

He also has an entertaining blog (http://www.mikedaisey.com) and apparently he appears regularly on NPR. My favorite moment was his appearance on David Letterman's show a few years ago. I was channel surfing late one night and stopped on Letterman long enough to hear Dave cut to commercial with the announcement (roughly), "Mike Daisey will be out after these messages." I thought, did I hear him right? Could that be the Mike Daisey that I know? And it was, and he looked pretty nervous when he came out, but Mike did a great job, got a few laughs from Dave and the audience, and some kind of TV history was made.

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