CULTURE
What's It Like To Be You?
by Scott Jacobs
It’s been a while since I last caught up with Ben Hollis, the intrepid
host of Wild Chicago, so I was pleased the other day when he stopped
by to tell me about his latest gig.
Hollis, 54, has lived a life of gigs. He’s been a busker, an ad man (doing Plywood Minnesota commercials), an actor, a corporate video producer, a Chicago Emmy host and a Christmas party Santa.
But he is best known for Wild Chicago, the popular PBS show in which he donned a pith helmet to explore the subterranean regions of the city. It ran for only three years in the early 1990’s with Hollis at the helm. But it left an indelible impression on its audience of Hollis as this bright-eyed, always-eager Indiana Jones of pop culture. As host, he explored the wide world of hubcap stores, belly dancing, clown schools and other what not -- before what not became popular.
Now he is back with a traveling one-man show that explores “What’s It Like To Be You?” He’s been performing it since January in living rooms, church basements and senior citizen centers. With the advent of spring, he is now looking for larger venues where he can use his unique gift of gab to illuminate the triumphs and foibles of his favorite topic, you.
“What’s It Like To Be You?” is, indeed, a show that mines the lives of ordinary people for the insights they’ve found inside their own small world. By getting people to talk about themselves, Hollis says he hopes to begin conversations that continue at intermission and afterwards.
His inspiration was a Spalding Gray performance he saw in 1981 at the Goodman called “Interviewing The Audience. “ Gray was best known for his free form monologues, but once a week he would turn the tables and bring on stage audience members to talk about their lives.
At every show, Hollis asks audience members, if they would like to be interviewed, to fill our cards with a few selected questions. He circulates among the crowd to get a feel for the crowd, sings a few songs to break the ice, then shuffles the cards and invites guests up on stage (often two stools set in front of folding chairs.)
“What unfolds is a life story, or some piece of it, that’s interesting and usually surprising,” he says. “Sometimes, I’ll ask the audience to notice the silent judgments they make about the interviewees when they first come up, so when the stories comes out they can see how wrong their first impressions were.”
“This show gets at something so basic that nobody ever talks about it: what’s it like to be you? We’re used to being asked ‘How are you?’ or ‘How do you do?’ But nobody ever listens to the answer. People just don’t get the opportunity to be heard. So the experience of being listened to in a present way is rare, and people just open up in remarkable ways.”
An evening of impromptu conversations is not without its perils, or embarrassments. Hollis recalls one night when his reach for a good joke almost spoiled a great story.
“I was interviewing a woman from Haiti and I got off on the tangent of voodoo, you know people you might want to stick a needle into. She seemed uncomfortable at first, like I was attacking her, then she explained that Haiti is a poor country and there’s not a lot of entertainment around so, for excitement, ‘you go get yourself possessed for an evening.’ It was a way of thinking about voodoo that I don’t think anyone in the audience ever considered.”
Another source of inspiration in Hollis’s current work is the philosophy of Eckhart Tolle, whose “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” is an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection.
He and his wife Julia belong to Unity in Chicago in Rogers Park, which I suggest is a new age church, but he correct me. “It’s called ‘New Thought’ now, and yes, I do believe we use our minds to create our reality.
“The name of the show is a profound question that you can play any way you want. And listening to other people’s stories has value. I think an examined life is a good life. But there’s nothing pedantic about the show.
“It’s funny most nights because people are funny – and I’m funny – and I try to make the evening funny. But the Trojan horse is that you watch and are entertained, but you come away knowing you’ve spent a couple hours contemplating a major existential question: what’s it like to be you?”
You can learn more about how to attend or host a performance of “What’s It Like to be You?" at http://www.wiltby.com.
