danagould: Two years ago, I was performing at...

Thursday, September 18 2014

High-res

Two years ago, I was performing at The Punchline in San Francisco, and Robin came to the show with our mutual friend, Dan Spencer.
This particular batch of material was the first time I had touched upon my then still-fresh divorce wounds, and big chunks of it were pretty dark. The next day, I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize. Whoever it was had obviously been to the show and knew my number, so I figured they would reveal themselves at some point and save me the embarrassment of asking who they were.
The Mystery Texter asked how I was REALLY doing. “You can’t fool me. Some of those ‘jokes’ aren’t ‘jokes.” By now I knew that whoever this was had been through what I was enduring, as no one else would know to ask, “What time of day is the hardest?”
He wanted to know how my kids were handling it, all the while assuring me that the storm, as bleak as it was, would one day pass and that I was not, as I was then convinced, a terrible father for visiting a broken home upon my children.
I am not rewriting this story in retrospect to make it dramatic. I did not know who I was texting with. Finally, my phone blipped, and I saw, in a little green square, “Okay, pal. You got my number. Call me. I’ve been there. You’re going to be okay. - Robin.”
That is what you call a human being.

Lots of comics have shared stories about Robin Williams in recent weeks, some intimately personal like this, most not. And lots of OTHER people have, directly or indirectly, accused those comics of using Williams’ death as an excuse to self-promote, to show how cool they are for having known him.

These OTHER people have the whole thing bass-ackwards. When a comedian you’ve never heard of tells a story about how they met Robin Williams, it’s not a story about how great that comedian-you’ve-never-heard-of is. It’s a story about how omnipresent and generous and NEEDLESSLY nice Robin Williams was.

(via nedhepburn-deactivated20160723)