{"id":27805,"date":"2014-05-01T02:15:17","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T02:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rsanews.com\/?p=27805"},"modified":"2014-05-01T01:15:27","modified_gmt":"2014-05-01T01:15:27","slug":"craig-ferguson-la-times-jake-lane-devils-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rsanews.com\/new\/craig-ferguson-la-times-jake-lane-devils-night\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"Thoughtful Reporting<\/strong><\/span>\r\n\"Craig<\/a>The mix of news about Craig Ferguson<\/strong>‘s planned departure from The Late Late Show<\/em> continues to be a mixture of praise, misinformation, outright fantasy and the occasional bits of thoughtful reporting. One of the best pieces from the past couple of days appeared in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times<\/a>, from writer Robert Lloyd<\/strong>. In it, he urges everyone to believe Craig’s explanation of his decision as the truth, as do we. Thanks to the RSA’s Kay<\/strong> for being the first to bring the article to our attention. Thanks also to Bub<\/strong> for sending us a link to an audio clip<\/a> from Chicago radio personality Nick Digilio, who has been a vocal fan of the show.\r\n\r\nMore Fan Reaction<\/strong><\/span>\r\nCraig fan Little Drake<\/strong> posted a note on our Facebook page we want to share, explaining how the show has made a difference in his life.\r\n\r\n[stextbox id=”custom” caption=”Click on the plus to read Little Jake’s story”]\r\nI don’t know who to share this with, but I thought I’d send it your way. I have never interacted with anyone on your site\/page\/youtube channel, but I’ve often followed Craig through you. So I owe you thanks, as well. Here’s a (relatively) short thing I wrote after the news broke yesterday:\r\n\r\n
I was 16 years old when Craig Ferguson hit the airwaves on The Late Late Show. His first show was January 3, 2005, 1 year to the day after I had attempted suicide, and 6 months into a new high school in a new state. Craig was visibly nervous, though he was still much looser than the other hosts I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d watched late into weeknights; Anything to avoid sleep, because sleep simply resulted in me waking up to another unbearable day of high school. I was hardly functioning. Craig was an underdog for me to root for, an outcast on a show I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d only scoffed at during brief flips through the channels. He was different, though it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exactly clear why at the beginning: he tried to fit into the late-night format at first.\r\n\r\nIt was barely over a year later when, as I was celebrating my early escape from high school, Craig stepped onto the stage and eulogized his father. Watching him from my parents\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 living room in the dark of the sleeping house, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t breathe as he worked his way through a monologue that was uncomfortable, painful, and disturbing. It was all those things because I suddenly felt like I might know this man I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been watching rather mindlessly every night for a year. I felt as though I had received an ultimatum from Craig himself: get on board, or get out. This shit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s for real.\r\n\r\nI got on board, and I made a personal investment in him. It was my first investment in anything for the past 2 years. The nature of suicide is that it is most often done out of a desire to be closer to someone or anyone. People who kill themselves tend to be incredibly sensitive to what others think of them. They are often very good at hiding this fact about themselves. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why I swallowed all the pain medication and Excedrin I could one night in January during my sophomore year in high school. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to disappoint anyone anymore. I wanted people to think I was a good and kind person. My standards were and are too high, so high that I still torture myself over not wearing a hat my sister gave me on Christmas when I was eleven.\r\n\r\nWe had given each other gifts in the morning while going through stockings. She was excited to give me a St. Louis Rams hat, because I loved the Rams, and I always wore a hat. But the hat wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t right. I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t remember why\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fit right, or the crest was too big, or the bill looked funny, or I was just more attached to my other hat. Regardless of the reason, when we headed out the door to go to my Aunt and Uncle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s for Christmas lunch, I was wearing my old hat. I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ever forget the look on my sister\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face when she asked why I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wearing her hat. I cried for a week straight about that look, and I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help crying every time I think about it.\r\n\r\nWhen I told her about this recently, apologizing profusely, she simply looked confused. She couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even recall the hat. Or so she says. Because of my neurosis, I am certain that she is lying. Except probably not. Except she totally is. So I dove into those pills like they were going to cure me, like they were going to cure what I thought was wrong with my family. But they did the opposite.\r\n\r\nWhen Craig talked about his father, I had just graduated a semester early from my high school in Indianapolis. I had made several very close friends that I loved very much. Or, at least, I loved them, and they were close to me. I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t close to them. They knew nothing about me, because I had invented a whole new past and persona for myself: troubled teen forced to relocate because his parents were concerned about his alcohol and drug habits and the death of his closest friend. I made up stories about my past to avoid anyone judging me for never having experienced anything. I was good at it: people believed and liked me. So I kept doing it. My friends believed any lie I told them about my past or present self because they thought they were trading me their intimacy for mine. But I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t return the gift. I was terrified they wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like me. I fed them a version of myself they could approve of, be entertained by. But the lies got tangled, and I grew tired of maintaining them. I stopped talking to them. I started watching Craig.\r\n\r\nI talk about Craig with his first name because there is a strange familiarity that comes with watching someone on a daily basis. And Craig is personal, familiar. There is only the thinnest of formats\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhe doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stand rigidly to deliver carefully scripted jokes. It felt like he was talking to me. Sometimes I wonder if this is how people felt with Johnny Carson. Somehow, I doubt it. Johnny was charismatic and funny, but he was far from personable. Craig made me feel like he was talking to me. And I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to pretend for him. I was safe. I could sit there with the TV glow flickering around the room and lower my guard.\r\n\r\nIt was, strangely, little more than a year after his father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s eulogy when Craig gave another landmark monologue. He opened up about the anniversary of the last drink he had, and told stories about his wild benders and some of his low points. He talked about his own brush with suicide. He did this to explain why he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to make any jokes about Britney Spears, who had just shaved her head and gone on some sort of bender of her own. Craig didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel right about poking fun at someone vulnerable and confessed to his own \u00e2\u20ac\u0153aim [having] been off lately.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I watched him deliver this monologue, again, in speechless silence, this time from the dorm room I shared with a now-sleeping cokehead. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been dating several girls at once during my first semester, thinking I was finally shaking off the stigma of high school.\r\n\r\nBut Craig had slapped me upside the head with his monologue. I was only feeding the monster in a different way. Seeing multiple girls at a time only allowed me an excuse to keep lying to each of them. It kept my addiction to distance alive. In addition, the friends I was making weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t people I even liked; they were people I wanted and needed to impress; people like my druggie\/idiot roommate. But I knew people I liked: Jared, from down the hall, who loved to talk about Star Trek (I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care about Star Trek. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never watched an episode. But I was impressed by his willingness to admit his embarrassing obsession); Steven, the bearded ginger who almost always shook with silent laughter; Adam, the White Sox fan who had made it his goal to poop in every bathroom in our hall by the end of the semester. These were people I liked.\r\n\r\nSo, after Craig\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s monologue, I stopped interacting with the people I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like and started to drag this new group around with me. Before long, it became natural to be goofy and silly and unapologetic about our quirks. Jared liked Star Trek, I liked Harry Potter, Steven liked\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 (Pokemon? Video games? Jokes about Christmas? Movie murder montages?) … and Adam liked pooping. We played Wii bowling and Mario Kart while we talked about silly and serious things. We became family.\r\n\r\nA little more than a year later and an ocean away, I was studying abroad in London when Craig eulogized his mother. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have internet or television access in my dorm room, so I went to a computer lab on campus and watched it on YouTube. In the video, Craig almost seems disgusted with his situation, that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s back here again, that he has to do this. He looks angry with himself that this situation has arisen yet again.\r\n\r\nThese are not the only moments of Craig Ferguson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s show worth watching. There was the week with Corky, the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153recession puppet\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who was really just a tennis ball on a stick. There was the endless flirting with beautiful and witty women. There was the development and realization of Geoff Peterson, the gay skeleton robot sidekick. There was the slightly-obnoxious-beginnings of Secretariat before he (she?) became a staple, part of the family. There are lines I can never forget that likely no one else will ever remember: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I enjoy the simple pleasures of Daffy Dook,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We go from hotel to hotel, across the world. Restless! Always moving, always moving,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153YOUR MOUSE IS JUST LIKE ANY OTHER MOUSE!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\r\n\r\nI am sure it must serve as some consternation to Craig that the most prominent compliments that have been paid to his show over the years always concern those emotionally wrought moments. Even now, the day after he has announced his departure from the show, every article references these moments. But perhaps he can take some comfort in the same thing I have come to know: the moments worth remembering are the moments in which we reveal ourselves to other; the moments when we are splayed open before someone and have to say here I am. These moments are rare, even for the bravest among us.\r\n\r\nI am not among that number. I am not cured. What once haunted me will always haunt me. I will always struggle against being a closed tap; shut off, a small drop occasionally given to only a few people. But I am fighting, and I am 10 years into the struggle that started the day Craig started the The Late Late Show. I am fighting, and I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how to tell him thank you.<\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\nWe think you just did, Jake, and thanks for sharing it with us.<\/em>[\/stextbox]\r\n\r\nIf you have a story you’d like to share with the rest of the robot skeleton army, please tweet us a link to your site, blog or post, or just use our Contact Us<\/a> page.\r\n\r\nLane Wins Ustinov Award\"Nathan<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\r\nActor Nathan Lane<\/strong> will be honored in June at the Banff World Media Festival with the Peter Ustinov Comedy Award, according to The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>. Last year’s winner of the Ustinov Award was Craig Ferguson, who still has the award on the mantlepiece above fireplace on the set of the LLS.\r\n\r\nDevil’s Night<\/strong><\/span>\r\nIn this monologue from 2006, Craig talks about Devil’s Night.\r\n\r\nVideo courtesy: FrankGerbertson<\/span>\r\n