Following a thread about falling into things, Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open welcomes a surprise third guest, who also happens to be the grandson of the podcast’s first guest, and Aaron's first cousin once removed.Jesse Schumann  stops by the virtual podcast studio with a tale to tell about the last six weeks. Since taking a temporary break from college for some self-discovery and recalibration, Jesse has practiced mindful self-compassion on a Canadian meditation retreat, launched a rap career in collaboration with his Venezualen barber in Argentina, and started gathering material for a novel about his grandfather and himself covering, in part, these last six weeks.Additional topics along the “corridors of self-revelation” include the role of mushrooms in the development of human consciousness, pop songs named after famous people, the family trees of Jewish Mormons, and perceptions of the most intimate of human interactions in popular culture.Find Jesse and his music on the internet:SpotifyApple MusicYouTube (music video)Jesse's Instagram @jeschumMusic:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

For only the second time in its short history, Jiggle It A Little It’ll Open welcomes a guest. Melissa Lorraine, Artistic Director of Chicago’s Theatre Y, discusses her company’s journey from its founding as a venue for the work of Romanian playwright András Visky to its recent move from the neighborhood of Lincoln Square, where it was one of over 250 theatre companies dotting Chicago’s North Side, to North Lawndale on the city’s West Side. Melissa talks about what it means for a historically white arts organization to move to a predominantly black, under-resourced neighborhood with the aim of driving revitalization without triggering gentrification, and the inevitable mistakes they are making along the way. She shares their experiences creating youth programming for the first time, learning to listen to her critics in new ways, and addressing needs beyond a theatre company’s usual purview, such as providing much-needed public space during the day and piloting a geothermal home heating project to reduce utility costs and help keep their neighbors in their homes. Plus, as befits a tale with this many twists and turns, there will also be a labyrinth.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

The world is full of unmarked doors that some people know how to find and how to get through, and some people - by design or otherwise - do not. Aaron and Ira are thinking about ways that controlled access can both exclude and protect. When we offer each other access, what are we offering? And what are we giving up? Nascent online communities, clandestine cocktail bars, and city neighborhoods all maintain barriers to entry of one sort or another, until they don’t. And we can rarely control what happens then. But, as always, it seems to matter who gets and grants access, and who benefits from denying or providing it. Just remember, if you miss the Mega Mall, you can always hit the small Target.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

Immersion is all around us, and perhaps it always has been. But we keep discovering it anew every time an experience is unique enough that we notice we are having it. From Greek tragedies and Medieval passion plays to 1960s happenings and environmental theatre to installation art, live action game play, and pricey Instagram-ready themed “experiences,” immersion as aesthetic approach and marketing ploy always offers irresistible novelty amidst the ordinary. Immersive theatre and art over the last few decades in particular has walked a line between deliberate obscurity and globally marketed phenomenon, sometimes, as in the cases of companies like Punchdrunk and Meow Wolf, with little space between. Aaron and Ira discuss the relative value of the hard-to-find experience that rewards pursuit, but of necessity must exclude, and discuss the need for some critical distance, and the impossibility of maintaining that distance while on mushrooms. But is putting it all on Gossip Girl the only democratizing alternative? Some things to consider over a few bites of the World’s Largest Sandwich. ¿Conoces la mayonesa?Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

The hour or so spent in this episode on the concept of process orientation both illustrates something about the topic, and demonstrates how slippery it can be. Ever gravitating to theatre no matter what the topic, Aaron and Ira weave a network of connections between resisting perfection, eschewing deliberate meaning, and valuing participation, hoping to find process orientation cocooned someplace within.The clouds start to part a bit around the parallels that become evident between holistic models of verisimilitude and the rejection of authorial intention in favor of pure chance, when viewed through a process lens. Robert DeNiro, psychotherapy, Oklahoma!, Jerzy Grotowski, improv, the Wooster Group, and Sacred Harp singing all put in appearances as your hosts consider what theatre might be good for if not primarily for putting on a show. This is perhaps particularly relevant in light of an insight offered to Aaron by one of his most objectively successful friends just before heading onstage to meet a roomful of screaming fans, that in the third decade of the 21st century “only theatre people like theatre.”Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

The idea of the collective suggests a set of possibilities that do not rely upon personal vision or independent will. It can expand upon, enable, and obscure individual contribution – sometimes all at once – and, at its best, it surprises everyone. But the collective also requires a certain level of individual sacrifice to larger organizing principles – be they theatre, yoga, or architecture. It can be easy to confuse the collective impulse with a desire for what may actually be its opposite: absolute individual autonomy. All too often that becomes the only opening that those who value neither need in order to exploit others and do harm. Aaron and Ira begin by thinking about the ephemeral processes of collective theatre-making. They end up discussing two very concrete prototype habitats, each built by an unusually collected group of people in the Arizona desert. One of these projects counterintuitively turns out to also have its roots in collective theatre-making, though it is remembered and evaluated as a scientific laboratory. The other is intentionally and explicitly a laboratory, a specifically urban one, in the form of an incipient model city that may or may not still be in progress.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

Either Aaron and Ira have become mature adults, or they’re rationalizing their own failure, but either way, ambition no longer seems to hold the same power for them that it once did. As Ira puts it, “We do not want to live our lives as sacrifices to what might happen in the future.” So is ambition by definition a young person’s game? And is letting go of it a sign of maturity, or resignation? Gradually abdicating long-held and largely unexamined ambitions, a couple of middle aged guys might start to notice something that can feel like a kind of success, uncoupled from rubrics of notoriety, power, or wealth. At the same time, ambition will always to some extent be shaped by the historical and technological moment – whether that is Restoration England, 1920s Hollywood, or post-COVID America and Europe – and by the particular identities and inheritances with which everyone has to grapple. Still, it might be nice if a few people knew who you were when you died. Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

As Aaron observes early in this episode, the relationship between art and life is something that has been considered by everyone from Stanislavsky to Ani DiFranco, but JIALIO decides to give it a whirl anyway. The discussion of art and life quickly becomes a meditation on how to live a life in art, and what is required to do so. It seems that money, scale, yoga, and happiness each may help, or get in the way, depending on which way one is heading. The words of a surprisingly insecure AI language model, working in both song lyrics and dramatic prose, offer little clarifying perspective, only something between empty platitudes and rote sincerity. Reminded of a remarkable phone call he once overheard Aaron’s end of, Ira is shocked to learn that Aaron has somehow retained no memory of what might be the most unusual Craigslist roommate inquiry quite possibly in all of history. Then the Angels sing.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

Aaron and Ira return to the podcast studio for a new batch of episodes after a 6-month hiatus from recording. The thread they choose to pull from the previous episode, and the whole first season, is comedy. Comedy may actually be one of the key threads running through their friendship, which was cemented in part over Aaron’s concept for a still-as-yet-unrealized, obscurely comic short film. What makes something funny, anyway? Who gets to be funny? Should Aaron try stand-up? Is US Senate Minority Leader Micth McConnel really who he says he is? Things get more personal in a discussion of Aaron’s liberal use of accents, and how that might have figured into his expatriation. In the end, Aaron and Ira once again acknowledge that they are not drive-time DJs in the 1980s Minneapolis/St. Paul commercial radio market, and never will be. The ghost of Leonard Cohen closes things out with a surprisingly suggestive take on “I Have a Little Dreidel.”Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

Inaugurating JIALIO’s new format, your hosts choose the topic of work, specifically the value produced by labor, as a thread they want to pick up from the previous episode. They begin with jokes that deliberately do not work as jokes. This leads to a discussion of French humor and the tendency of French comic artists – from Moliere to Jacques Tati – to appropriate, in the name of refinement and elevation, comedic aesthetics originally found elsewhere in the world. Finally getting around to a conversation specifically about work, they find themselves focusing on vacation and debt, comparing (as they so often do) attitudes and practices in France with those in the U.S. Ira struggles to articulate his experience of the relationship between professional and personal identities in the U.S. context and, thanks to Aaron’s time in Lithuania, learns the term “Free-Air Director,” a euphemism for unemployment he can put on his business cards. If he doesn’t hit it big as a Jeopardy! champion first, that is.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

This is what we call a shorty. After the duration and weight of the previous episode, Aaron and Ira spend significantly less time covering a greater variety of topics than usual, beginning with Aaron’s plans for the estival solstice, and moving on to a meaningful recent conversation with their mutual friend and collaborator, the weird internal logic of the song “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giants, and an invented experimental Chinese restaurant. This leads to some discussion of the strange ways that time moves now (“now” being either the post-pandemic era or middle age, or both), the economic impact and non-impact of the pandemic shutdown, and its salutary culinary ripple effects in Chicago and Paris. Marking their milestone 9th episode, which statistically most podcasts never get beyond, they propose a new device to thread episodes together, without sacrificing the podcast’s signature indeterminacy. Before this shorty concludes, some awkward attempts to lure sponsorship deals are made, and both Aaron and Ira somehow manage to draw a blank on the word “proliferation”.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

JIALIO is not a current events podcast, but Aaron and Ira exist in real time, and this episode constitutes something of a time capsule. Recording back in May 2022, shortly after the US Supreme Court’s majority draft opinion overruling Roe v. Wade was leaked, Aaron and Ira respond at length to the news from their positions as Americans who were born after Roe was decided in 1973, as people who cannot themselves get pregnant, and as individuals living, respectively, in Paris, France and Chicago, Illinois, USA specifically. As in episode 3, on the war in Ukraine, they find themselves grappling with how to make sense of an occurrence that had previously seemed unimaginable, and what might come after. It would be dishonest to say things do not get bleak.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

After hosting JIALIO's first guest on the previous episode, Aaron and Ira hash out how that decision was made back in episode 5, and how it might impact the direction of the podcast going forward. At issue, in part, is the value of centralizing difference and conflict versus prioritizing solutions, a tension which has characterized much of the collaboration between Aaron and Ira over the years. Their conversation veers between the metaphysical and the pragmatic, touching on the eschatalogical hypotheses of Architect Paolo Soleri and Jesuit/Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, before concluding with the seductive, but empty, pleasures of The Amazing Race.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

JIALIO welcomes the first guest in its history, attorney, critic, author, patron of the arts, and Aaron’s maternal uncle, Joel Henning. Joel appears courtesy of the process established in the previous episode by which Aaron asks someone who has known him for a long time (in this case his brother Jason) who he should invite onto the podcast. The wide-ranging conversation covers arts clubs, societies, and councils; moving to Florida in a post-Trump, post-COVID world; and the Chicago neighborhood of Logan Square, where Ira lives, Aaron once lived, and Joel and Aaron’s mother grew up. Joel’s recollections include legendary Chicago columnist Irv Kupcinet and the special guest room he kept for Sammy Davis, Jr., the intricacies of liar’s poker, a surprise appearance by actor Eli Wallach, and a T-shirt with an important message.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

To mark the 5th episode of Jiggle It a Little It’ll Open, Aaron and Ira invite an existential crisis by briefly looking back at what has happened so far on the podcast, and asking, “Where do we go from here?” Eventually, they agree upon an experiment that will finish playing out as a kind of trilogy over the course of episodes 6 & 7. Along the way, they encounter yet another cultural divide between Europe and America involving Venmo and sending aid to refugees, and clarify that David Brooks is NOT one half of Brooks & Dunn.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

Aaron and Ira unspool some tiny corner of the cultural response to COVID during the early days, and uncover some differences between American and  European discourses. The changes and deprivations of the COVID era trigger a more expansive reflection on anticipating loss and absence when approaching great change, and the inner continuity that can sometimes be found on the other side. Evaluating the episode while still making it (never a good idea!), Aaron yearns for the energy of the morning drive time DJs of his youth, and he and Ira both agree that something (though probably not this podcast episode) should be titled Half Jimmy Carter, Half Jimmy Stewart: The Last Three Generations of American Thought. The actual title of this episode is a quote from Leonard Cohen. The episode concludes with a recitation of the poem that is at least partially responsible for Aaron and Ira’s friendship.I shaved yesterday, but I'm still a man.I have a smooth upper lip now.I held the witch hazel in my handready to apply topically when Jesus spoke to me.He said, "Aaron, son of Sheldon, brother of Jason,do not use the tainted astringent."I promptly checked the expiration date.It had expired six months before.Whew! That was close.— Aaron Kahn (circa 1992)Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

As an American who has lived the better part of the last 15 years in Europe, including Eastern Europe in recent years, Aaron reacts to the onset of the war in Ukraine. Wrestling with the enormity of what is happening, he describes his own thoughts during the first days of the attack and his surprise at the responses of many of the people around him to what, only a short time before, had seemed unimaginable. Ira asks questions from his perspective as an American in hopes of better understanding, and possibly helping to give some shape to Aaron‘s thinking.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

Aaron and Ira contemplate the implications of a rather bureaucratic messianic revelation before turning to the purpose of theatre and, with a h/t to scholar Sara Jane Bailes, the uses of theatrical failure. Several important names in experimental theatre are dropped and one of the best plays you have probably never heard of is discussed at some length. In the end, they succeed in their goal to start funny and become gradually more ponderous and obscure as the episode continues.Music:“Open Up Your Heart” by Roger Miller (a song which features the show’s namesake lyric). arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)

Aaron and Ira embark on the project of finding out just what their new podcast, Jiggle It A Little It’ll Open (JIALIO), is or might be. (SPOILER ALERT: They come to no conclusions and have no plans to do so, but will return to the topic often.) Along the way they reveal the origins of the title, consider the benefits of embracing irrelevance, and brainstorm a needlessly complicated promotional fundraising gift as complicated and impractical as JIALIO itself.  Music:JIALIO presents the debut our brand new theme music! A cover of Roger Miller’s “Open Up Your Heart,” which features the show’s namesake lyric. This version was arranged and recorded especially for JIALIO by 80 Foots, Chicago’s only End Times Vocal Trio.“Open Up Your Heart” by Buddy Killen + Roger MillerArranged and recorded by: 80 Foots (https://www.facebook.com/80FPM)