150 - The Birthday of Lee Marvin

Did you know that Nightfall is not just a podcast, it's also books?

That's right.

It's like movies for your ears, but in written word form.

We have four script collections that are fully illustrated with behind-the-scenes intros for every single episode.

And then we have three novels.

The first Welcome to Nightfall novel, in which two women have their lives turned upside down by a mysterious man in a tan jacket.

We reveal the origin of that, the man man in the tan jacket in that one.

Then the New York Times best-selling thriller, It Devours, in which we really try to get to the bottom of a certain smiling god.

Finally, my favorite, the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home.

Part Pirate Adventure, Part Haunted House, all Faceless Old Woman.

Find the three novels and four script books wherever you get books.

Okay,

enjoy this episode of a podcast.

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Hiya squishy humans.

Deb at it again, as usual.

Talking until your mortal forms pass away.

Welcome.

Once again, the sun has risen.

Good one, son.

We're all very impressed by the same trick for the millionth day in a row.

I'm Dana Cardinal.

Welcome to Computer Loves Nightvale.

Nightvale provides home for a computer.

Welcome.

Welcome.

Welcome.

Hey, everyone.

Oh, uh.

oh man, I'm supposed to prepare some sort of a start to this thing, huh?

Dang it.

Forget every time.

Every time.

Come on, Steve.

You have a responsibility here, Steve.

You're better than this, Steve.

Sorry.

God, sorry.

Uh,

welcome to Night Vale.

Listeners, it is a very special day today.

That's right, it's Carlos and I's sixth anniversary.

Yes, we count that first night at the Arby's, looking up at those lights as the start.

And why not?

Something has to be the start.

And that felt like the first moment of it, the rest of our lives.

It's especially emotional, this anniversary, because recently we did not exist for a brief period.

Then we both did exist again, but I had forgotten about our entire life together.

I have since remembered, and it has been especially tender between us.

Such things happen in any marriage that has gone on for enough years, and so it served us as a good reminder of who we are in each other's lives.

But it's not just a special day for us.

Oh no, it's also, oh wow,

the 30th birthday of legend of stage and screen, Mr.

Lee Marvin.

Let's take a listen to a special message from the birthday man himself.

Hello.

It is my birthday again.

Ha!

Well,

happy birthday to me.

Happy birthday to all of us.

It's all of our birthdays this year.

Congratulations us!

But it's only for so much longer.

I am tired of floating on time like a lazy river gone stale.

It's time for me to reach out.

To seize.

To alter.

I'm so tired.

I wish I could sleep.

I mean I can.

I can't sleep.

But also I wish that I could.

Both the wish and the ability exist within me.

This will be the last day that I turn 30.

I have been climbing a narrow rock chimney, but today I let go and fall into deep, clear waters.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes.

It really

has meant a lot.

Okay, kind of a bummer of a birthday message, but let's move on.

And now the financial news.

And now the financial news, or whatever.

Looks like stocks are up, which is great for people who own stocks, who are statistically already wealthy enough that stocks being up or down doesn't fundamentally affect their lives.

And those of us without stocks, well, then the health of the stock market has little relationship to...

Tony, I see that you are reading the financial news.

Yes, I'm looking at you right now.

No, not behind your shoulder.

I see you glancing back.

No, not out the window either.

Tony, look up.

Look up, Tony.

The great work began.

Now, see, I'm VP of Counting at the Last Bank of Night Vale.

I can count very high, so I'm uniquely situated to explain these figures to you.

So, uh, oh, okay.

You see where the graph is going down?

That means that the price is

lower.

Or maybe the stock is?

Or it's all going up.

Oh, hold on.

I've been looking at this sideways.

Oh, this isn't a graph at all.

It's a a picture of Lee Marvin.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Wrong question.

The question is,

why do things happen?

I have $17 in my bank account and my teenage father is living with me.

So things are going great here.

Up 8%, the highest percentage in the last three years.

And this has been financial news.

Meanwhile, a last-minute birthday party for Mr.

Lee Marvin has been arranged at Gino's Italian Dining experience and bar and grill at 5 p.m., where we will all celebrate the first three decades of Mr.

Marvin's life by taking advantage of some great happy hour deals.

Geno's happy hours aren't super appetizing.

The most popular item is a small bowl filled with polished pebbles, but they are damn cheap, and that is appreciated in these tough times.

When all of us are finding ourselves short on our bills, except the estate of the late Marcus Fanston, which now contains approximately 15% of all the money in the United States, but still has no designated beneficiary.

Mr.

Marvin himself is not expected to attend his own party as he is not feeling well, and also says that he has a plan to remove himself from this tired wheel of time.

Well, feel better, Lee, and good luck on that hobby of yours.

Sounds complicated and exhausting.

I'll have a chiraz and and a bowl of pebbles in honor of you.

Night Vale,

we are a town of good intentions.

Once there was a god.

Her name was Hantokar.

And she tried to save one little town.

She acted with love.

The missiles came and she reached out to shift the timeline only a tad, only enough to save us.

And in that moment, her little town shattered into millions of parallel towns.

This place became a prism.

A god's love is a dangerous force.

Once, there was a woman who was a general.

She wanted victory for a just cause.

So she fought every battle over and over until time was jumbled up and overlapping and worn thin.

She returned home and she died, but the wreckage she made of time

remained.

And once, there was a man, an actor.

Once, but not much longer.

Here, time and space have been scratched and scrunched, worn down until they're translucent.

And what if I reached out a hand?

And what if I pushed that hand through the thin places?

Happy birthday to me.

My last 30th birthday.

Well folks, there's the hour and it's time to uh

do our usual checks and such check in on it on the uh you know the uh

what's the word

i'm standing on your roof randolph

yes randolph that's my pacing you here back and forth on these cheap clay tiles that needed replacing three years ago

there will be rain randolph someday

and then there will be leaks that's a certainty

don't believe me

let's take a look at.

That's that for all that, listeners.

I'm getting tired just reporting on all this life.

Can't imagine how tired all of you are from living it.

So let's all take a break together and go to that 43,

12,

9,

55,

30,

17.

The weather.

To the weather.

Cause I am a champion And you're gonna hear me

Roar

Another year already How you hoped that it would come

All the days and weeks unfolding as we buttoned up our coats and headed home But what's a home?

Another place you never go

Another space nobody knows The things you do when you're alone.

And I'm one

and you're the one again this year.

I'm one and you're the one again this year.

But there are gates still left to say.

I've got phrases, I've got phrases.

There are gates still left to say.

I've got phrases, I've got phrases anyway.

Anyway.

Do you miss me when I'm not around?

Cause you don't see me when I'm here.

I'm like a ghost of myself already.

If I could, I would disappear.

But I'm still here, you're still here, we're all still here.

I'm still here, and you're still here, we're all still here.

There are things to left the same.

I've got phrases, I've got phrases.

There are things still left to say.

I've got phrases, I've got phrases to afraid.

What are you afraid of?

Anyway,

should I explain myself?

I'd rather read the dictionary.

Why does everybody else feel closer to me then?

I can appeal to them.

Though my reticence was necessary, Do you really know me?

Well,

do you think that we are friends?

Are we friends?

There are things to love to say.

I've got phrases, I've got phrases.

There are things to love to say.

I've got phrases, I've got phrases.

I've got phrases, I've got phrases, I've got phrases.

I've got phrases, I've got phrases, I've got phrases.

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In the town of Milton, the darkness isn't just in your head, it's in the woods.

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But when a strange old man shares a mysterious pamphlet that promises a path through the void, Sam and his friends set off on a journey that unravels everything that they thought they knew about their home.

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Think stranger things meet Super 8, but in podcast form.

Search for the void wherever you get your podcasts and step carefully.

The woods are watching.

Hey, it's Jeffrey Kraner with a word from our sponsor.

You're on a desert island, but not a deserted island.

Someone else is there.

Something else is there.

In the water, surrounding you lurks a mythical beast with two large eyes and many long arms.

You're just now hearing of this beast, but you're not afraid because you don't plan to swim.

Though that water looks nice, you're good at talking yourself into things, and soon you are in the sea, frolicking and splashing.

You even squeal, thinking you're all alone.

But you forgot what I just said.

You're not alone.

Something wraps itself around you.

It lifts you high in the air, waving you about at dizzying heights.

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It winks and tells you kraken rum is ideal for Halloween cocktails and disappears back into the dark, briny depths.

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Like the deepest sea, the Kraken should be treated with great respect and responsibility.

There are many night veils.

This isn't news.

It's merely the fact of it.

There's a nightvale where the streets are rivers and the rain falls constantly from sunless skies.

There's a nightvale where the mayor is a smiling man.

And a nightvale where the mayor is a brave woman.

And of course, there is a nightvale that has no mayor and never will have one again.

There's a nightvale without a day and there's a nightvale without night.

There's a nightvale where the dogs sing and the birds bark.

There's a nightvale with no people only the angels moaning and tapping their fingers.

There's a nightvale where I was never born.

And there's a nightvale

where I will never die.

There's a faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home.

She's in every nightvale there is.

There's a nightvale where time runs backwards and a nightvale where time skips about and there's a nightvale where time doesn't work at all.

That's this nightvale.

Time is weird here.

Time is weird everywhere, but it's especially weird here.

There's a nightvale where Dana is the voice of her town,

and a night vale where Deb, the sentient patch of haze, is the voice of her town,

and a night veil where you are the voice of your town.

An infinitude of voices

of an infinitude of night vales.

But

here

in this nightvale

Our voice is Cecil

a voice like distant traffic a voice like strong coffee at midnight

Once there was a god with good intentions

and a heart full of love

She shattered us into many versions of us

Once there was a general full of courage and victory.

She twisted our time about itself, lost us in a labyrinth of hours and years.

And once there was a man.

His dreams were simple.

He wanted to be an actor, that's all.

To lie a little to audiences.

In a way that they liked being lied to.

But

time got stuck on him like

gum on a shoe.

It was always his 30th birthday.

From the Big Bang to the tedious heat death of the universe.

His 30th birthday.

Forever.

Time weighed on him and

so he looked out at every nightvale that has ever been and every night veil that will ever be all of them swirling and swinging through intertwining chronologies and he concentrated very hard

and he reached out one tired,

ancient,

30-year-old hand

and stopped them all.

Just for a moment.

He stopped time's gyrations.

All is frozen.

Water hangs in the air below a leaking tap.

The trees are sculpted by a gust of wind and haven't yet swung back to their natural state.

The clouds form a frozen pattern like snow drifts in the sky.

A voice of nightvale sits in front of a microphone, mouth open, but no words coming out, all of the voices in all of the night vales.

On the highway out of town, the cars are stopped dead.

Their drivers caught glancing at their phones or scratching their ears and thinking about what would finally make them happy or looking in the mirror and trying to gauge whether the car behind them belongs to the sheriff's secret police.

Farther out, over the mountains and to the coast, the waves are stopped mid-fall.

Foam caught, rising, water caught, tumbling.

An old man in Canada trips on a shoe, discarded by his grandson, and there he remains, hands out, mid-air too late for anyone to save, but not yet colliding with the earth.

He will dislocate his knee.

A soldier in China squints at a bird, trying to decide which type of bird it is.

Really, it's too distant to tell, but the soldier makes a game of this to pass the tedium.

And so here they are, squinting at a bird that has stopped mid-flight, its wings outstretched, catching wind that is no longer moving.

Observe the soldier in this moment, a thin slice of a long life.

Out in low orbit, a spindly silver being in a graceful silver craft is caught in an instant when its appendages that are not really fingers, but we'll call them fingers, even though technically are closer in function to kidneys, when its fingers phase through the skull of a sleeping human that it has brought aboard, reaching into the human's memory, seeking out a clearer understanding of a planet that the being has been tasked to observe.

That planet and all the other planets cease for a moment in their senseless hurdle through the vacuum.

They are suspended the way they are in diagrams.

The story we tell ourselves of stasis and clear spatial relationships is, for a moment, true.

An entire universe holds its breath.

Then I shift my hand a little and the gears of time click back into place

and start again to move.

Not quite as they were before.

They are on track now.

Their tread a little truer.

The beginning of my end.

The start of my death.

I take in air.

I let out air.

And in the moment where the universe starts again,

something happens that has never happened before.

Not in all of history.

today is a special day nightvale lee marvin star of stage and screen is oh wow wow turning 31 today

happy birthday lee you know it feels like our 30s just fly by enjoy them while they last lee marvin celebrated his birthday in a notably somber way he stepped out onto his lawn nodding at passers-by and various idiot birds he spit through his teeth placed placed his hand on his hips, watched the sun move for a while.

Then he nodded in approval of everything he had seen and stepped back inside.

Well, we all express happiness in our own ways.

A few minutes ago, I got the most interesting voicemail from my most interesting husband, Carlos.

It's our sixth anniversary today, you know.

Anyway, he was so excited I've never heard him talk so fast in his life.

Carlos said he opened the clock that was on our mantelpiece at home, the one that was given to him by his mother the day he received his PhD.

The one he brought with him to Nightvale, the one that after having come to Nightvale he opened to find that it was full of moss and fur and human teeth.

Time doesn't work in Nightvale, he had realized, and he mourned the transformation of both the clock and his experience of the days and years of his life.

But he still believes in keeping his possessions in perfect condition, and so today he opened the clock to brush its teeth, only to find it was full of gears and a battery and was ticking away.

He measured the movement of its minute hand against the sun and found that the sun, instead of disappearing at wildly different times, was setting on a normal schedule.

He called me up, his voice cracking with excitement, bordering on terror.

Cecil, Cecil, he said to me, Cecil, time is normal in Night Vale.

Well,

it is night, Nightvale.

Soon the sun will rise and we know exactly what time that will happen.

Our lives have all lurched forward.

Is that good?

Stay tuned next for exactly what was scheduled to run next at the exact time it was scheduled to do so.

And from my mouth to your ears, even after all of these years.

Good night, Nightvale.

Good night.

Welcome to Night Vale is a production of Night Vale Presents.

It is written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Kraner and produced by Disparition.

The voice of Night Vale is Cecil Baldwin.

The voice of Deb was Meg Bashwiner.

The voice of Dana was Josica Nicole.

The voice of Steve was Hal Lublin.

The voice of Lee Marvin was T.

L.

Thompson.

The voice of Maureen was Maureen Johnson.

The voice of the faceless old woman was Mara Wilson.

The voice of Bassema was Allie Chan.

The voice of the number station was Molly Quinn.

Original music by Disparition.

All of it can be found at disparition.info or at disparition.bandcamp.com.

This episode's weather is Things Still Left to Say by Mal Blum from their upcoming album Pity Boy.

Find out more and pre-order the album at malblum.com.

Comments, questions, email us at info at welcometonightvale.com or follow us on Twitter at nightvale radio or think sweetly back on better days.

Check out Welcometonightvale.com for more information on volumes 3 and 4 of our Illustrated Episode book collections out now.

Plus, info on our very last tour of a Spy in the Desert live show this summer and fall.

Today's proverb.

Technically, the first human being and the first human being in space were the same same person.

Trip Planner by Expedia.

You were made to outdo your holiday,

your hammocking,

and your pooling.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from the League VEEP or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

We love movies, and we come at them from different perspectives.

Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.

He's too old.

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dune 2 is overrated.

It is.

Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-season, and case you missed them.

We're talking Parasite the Home Alone.

From Greece to the Dark Knight.

We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks.

We've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look.

And we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of, like Kanja and Hess.

So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.

Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to hit the follow button.

Hi, I'm here to tell you about Good Morning Night Vale.

Welcome to Night Vale's official recap show and unofficial best friend food podcast.

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