Jonathan Messinger and Zach Dodson of The Dollar Store and Featherproof Books
Where plugging comes with a price
Zach Dodson, left, and Jonathan Messinger are captains of cheap crap
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People are always asking us to help plug something of theirs—an upcoming show, a new record, some book they wrote. Because we’re not in the pandering business, we think there should be a trade-off. Debaser allows these folks to plug whatever they want, with one caveat: They also have to tell us something embarrassing about themselves. This week, we talk to Jonathan Messinger and Zach Dodson, co-founders of local imprint Featherproof Books; Messinger also heads The Dollar Store—a reading series that hands authors and comedians an item procured from a dollar store, and then has them write and perform a piece inspired by that object. For the first time in the show’s history, a group of authors will pack into a van and head on a tour across the country (with Dodson in tow), kicked off by a giant party at the Hideout tomorrow, June 28.
Decider: Who came up with the idea for The Dollar Store?
Jonathan Messinger: It was my idea. It started back in 2004, and the idea was that I wanted to have a reading series that put the emphasis on being a more entertaining show. And then I also just thought, "I love dollar stores and I love all the stupid shit that’s in dollar stores." So I thought it’d be fun to use that as the inspiration.
D: What’s the premise of the show?
JM: The idea is that I go to a dollar store and I look for what’s called “evocative crap,” and then I give those items, whatever they may be—the weird stuff you find at dollar stores—I give them to different writers, who then use that to write a short story or create some sort of performance inspired by that item. And then at our regular show, I co-host it with a guy named Abraham Levitan, who is the singer in a band called Baby Teeth here in town. And after each performance or reading, he does about a minute-long improvised musical recap of what just happened onstage.
D: So what's different about the big kick-off show tomorrow?
Zach Dodson: It’s kind of going to be a marathon since we’re combining with this reading series called Quickies!, which is at the Innertown Pub. The trick at Quickies! is that they do all their readings in five minutes or less, so we’re kind of borrowing that for The Dollar Store for a while. I think there are 16 readers on Sunday for the barbecue, which goes throughout the day. There’s going to be two improv teams, which will also do scenes based on dollar-store items. We may just throw them onstage at improv-ers, and they’ll have to sort of incorporate them into the scene. And then with admission, there’s free barbecue, which is provided by Eye Spy Optical. And then there’s free beer from Red Stripe for the first half. Oh, and we’re raffling off a bike from Working Bikes. They made us a custom-built dork bike. It’s really weird. We’re going to raffle that off. What else… give away some mini-books? I think I covered everything.
D: Okay, so that’s enough plugging. Let’s hear something humiliating.
ZD: Okay. So for Jonathan’s bachelor party, the rule was “no strippers,” but we had to think of another way to get him. So we concocted this elaborate scheme with multiple misdirections, including a barbecue and a fake move to another location. But the secret was that we got a few drinks in him, and a few people “spontaneously” stopped off at a psychic to get him a psychic reading on the eve of his wedding. And this psychic knew everything about him and told him all this stuff that was going to go wrong coming up, and it really freaked him out. He came back to the bar and sort of freaked out and told everyone about how dead-on this psychic was. [Laughs.] Jonathan came up to me and said, “Only you and I could know this stuff!” Like, you know, Featherproof business stuff or whatever. And I had paid the psychic off the week before and greased her palm and fed her all the information I could think of about Jonathan and his marriage.
JM: I fell for it. I went crazy. I will say that it was the most perfectly executed prank, and I’m proud to be on the receiving end of it, even if it is humiliating. But it wasn’t until two days later that I realized, especially because I had gotten so drunk that night—I think partially because my world had been turned upside-down by the psychic—that it took me a couple days to recover. And actually, the really embarrassing endnote to the story is that I had drunk so many stupid drinks and gotten so over-the-top drunk that I, two days later, went to the doctor because I thought something was wrong with me. [Laughs.]
ZD: Oh yeah! [Laughs.]
JM: I couldn’t walk straight, and it was at a time… Remember when tomatoes were banned for a little while? For salmonella?
D: Yeah.
JM: There was all this puking and stuff, and I thought maybe I had salmonella from tomatoes. [Laughs.] And I went to the doctor. I told her what was happening to me, and I was getting married the next week, and I was like, "You know, I really want to get better for my wedding next Saturday." And she was like, "Oh, you’re getting married. So have you had your bachelor party yet?" And I was like, "Oh, yeah, that was actually on Saturday." And she was like, "Oh, okay, did you get really drunk?" I’m like, "Yeah, yeah I did." And she was like, "And have you been drinking a lot of water?" I said, "Uh, I can’t really." So basically, she diagnosed me as “having had too much fun with the boys.” That’s a direct quote. And then prescribed Gatorade to get better. [Laughs.] That was the most humiliating doctor’s visit I’ve ever had.
