Northwestern University Alumni

Transcript:

[MUSIC PLAYING] MAX: Ayun Halliday is a very funny woman. After graduating from Northwestern, she put her theater degree to good use by performing with the Neo-Futurists Chicago. Since then, she has been a jack of all trades, working as an author, actor, illustrator, and playwright, amongst many other stops. She brings valuable lessons on creative flexibility and finding your next project. We will dive into all of these topics and more in this edition of "Northwestern Intersections." 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

Ayun Halliday, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Thank you, Max. 

MAX: We're happy to have you, and I feel like you're honestly the perfect guest for the podcast, because you literally wrote a book called Job Hopper. But before we get to the full career trajectory, let's take it back to your time at Northwestern. What did you study, and why did you come to campus? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: I studied theater. And I had been a Cherub in the summer program in the arts at Northwestern for high school students. And I later learned that my grandfather had engineered that. 

I'm from Indiana and I for some reason wanted to go to Middlebury in Vermont. A family friend had gone there. And my grandfather was thinking, oh, that's really far away. I want her to be closer to us. So he paid for me to go and be a Cherub. And it worked. [LAUGHS] I fell in love with Northwestern, and there were other Cherubs who I knew would be going there. That's how. 

MAX: Were there any memorable experiences on campus where you thought to yourself, OK, this set me off on my trajectory. 

AYUN HALLIDAY: So, of course, I think every theater major who is interested in acting, as opposed to something that would be a more backstage capacity, you want those starring roles. You want to be celebrated. You want to be the big banana. And I just wasn't. 

I got parts here and there. And I was in a lot of student productions. And I loved my acting class and did well in that and was respected by my fellow actors there. But I started having to make my own opportunities. 

I wrote a play that we put up on Armadillo Day. I met younger people, and they wanted to do plays in Jones, in the dorm, and I was like, yes, I'll be the star of that play. 

So that gave me a good jump start into what has become my ethos, I think. I once read a quote by Spalding Gray, the monologist who I really admired his work, and he said that the reason he started performing his autobiographical monologues at the Wooster Group was because he got sick of waiting for the big infernal machine to make up its mind about him. 

So that really struck a chord with me, because that's what I've done, too. So thanks to everyone at Northwestern, all those teachers who didn't put me in the main stage. [LAUGHS] 

MAX: Well, it's interesting, because I think that kind of leads into some of the later work that you've done, dependent on doing things your own way, a really unique trajectory. But it sounds like the start of the passion might have been in the theater realm. When did the writing and the illustrating and all those other things come about? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Well, the illustration, that was always something that I liked to do. I'm an only child. I was incredibly unathletic. My parents were not sport people, so they didn't put me on a sports team or something. 

And I would draw. I would draw for hours and hours and hours. And then in high school, I would draw cartoons of everybody at school. And people dug that. They wanted to see themselves in my cartoons. So that's just always been-- at Northwestern I would send photocopied letters to my friends from high school and my friends from Cherubs and from camp and stuff that we're little cartoons of what I was doing at Northwestern. 

The writing I also always-- writing was an arena in which I could compete in high school, in elementary school. And then when I joined the Neo-Fururists, everybody has to write for the main show, which used to be called "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind." Now it's called the "Infinite Wrench," 30 plays in 60 minutes with planned obsolescence. So every week, certain plays would get cut, and we would have to write new ones. Between Sunday and Tuesday we would have to write some new plays. 

So that was great as far as just getting me to crank it out and not be too precious about, oh, is it perfect, is it ready to be seen? And it was like, yeah, it's ready to be seen because there's a big hole that we've got to fill. 

MAX: Trial by fire-- that's a pretty intense process for writing a play. Was that your first job out of college? Or were there other things that you were doing alongside that? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Oh, yeah, no, my first job out of college was the same as my jobs in college, was waiting tables. I moved into an apartment. I came home. I spent the summer at the Edinburgh Festival after I graduated. And I came home, and there was a restaurant across the street from the apartment where I was living, and I just walked downstairs and got a job there. So I worked in lots of restaurants. 

I temped. I was the receptionist at "New City" newspaper. I worked at Broadway costumes, which is a rental house in western Chicago. I did all sorts of things that didn't make much money but were fun in retrospect. 

MAX: Do you think that those early experiences impacted your later career? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: People I know who have been really successful in the arts, as far as they've become high profile or they support themselves doing theater by doing Broadway or just hopping around, I think those people were really focused on eyes on the prize, taking classes, meeting with agents, auditioning all the time, and staying abreast of what you need to do. It is a profession. 

And for me, it's always been a little bit more like playing. I'm sort of in the sandbox making my little worlds while other people are out thinking like, yes, I've got to lose 40 pounds and memorize 10 monologues and learn this song. And that was never me. It's always been more messing around and playing, having fun. 

MAX: So you've had a wild job history. It's probably tough for someone to exactly replicate the steps that you took. But what is your general advice on being flexible and keeping your eyes open for new projects? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: My advice is that you've got it in you to make your own stuff, whether that's solo work or collaborative work. If you're a musician, you're a painter, if you're a playwright, if you're an actor-- if you're an actor, you can be a playwright. You got into Northwestern. Presumably you like to read. You like stories. You can make them. You can make those opportunities for yourself. 

And then you just got to work really hard to get it out there, to get people seeing it. And do it while you're at school. That's my other piece of advice, is I wish I had started earlier when I had access to an incredible costume shop and I had a captive audience. 

MAX: Are there any skills that applied across all of those different contexts? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Improv. [LAUGHS] It was always a really great skill that was helpful with massage, that was helpful with waiting tables for sure. It was helpful being a receptionist at an arts and news weekly. Sometimes improv is like fake it till you make it, pretend like what's you know happening or what you're supposed to be doing or what the answer is, even if you don't. 

That has probably been one of the most valuable skills. And I started doing improv at Northwestern-- I think it's now called iO. It used to be called Improv Olympic. And this big banana improv guy Del Close had an idea that he wanted college teams to compete as if it were was the Olympics. And so it was University of Chicago and Northwestern and for some reason Yale. [LAUGHS] 

And I think only lasted for a year or two. But would get together with the friends who were on that improv team and rehearse. And then we also performed. 

MAX: You just mentioned something that I wanted to loop back to. In the middle of all of this, you were also a massage therapist. How did that come about? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: [LAUGHS] It came about because of one of my best friends from Northwestern, who had also been a Cheurb, Lisa Hickey. Lisa was so very [INAUDIBLE], [INAUDIBLE] groovy, new agey, hippie-ish, so kind, so warm, but we were like, how is she going to survive in the world after she graduates? 

And the way she survived after she graduated was she went to the Chicago School of Massage Therapy, another great institution that no longer exists. And then she was doing massage and making a lot of money doing it and was her own boss and was so impressed. 

And back at Northwestern and before, we would always be giving each other back rubs. That sort of goes with the territory when you're in the theater program, I think. And I was like, I could do that, too. So I went to massage school and did massage until my first child was born. And then it was kind of spotty after that. 

And Lisa went on to massage horses. She's an equissage therapist-- still. 

MAX: Do you ever, when you look back on all the different jobs you have, were there any that still stand out as kind of, whoa, I'm surprised that I did that? Or on the flip side, were there ones that are like, oh, yeah, that totally makes sense that I did that job? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: There were a lot of one-off jobs that I would do, like a one-day thing that it was just like, oh, that cash sounds really good. I can do that. Pretty much anytime it was Ayun Halliday versus corporate America, it was going to be a bad situation. 

There was one day that I had to referee a field day for-- I can't remember what Chicago corporation it was. But I was basically supposed to be a camp counselor, cheerleader, fun person. Woo! [CLAPS] We did a sack race, run with your potato on your spoon. 

This one man asked me to hold his sunglasses. And I was like, totally, I got you, while he's running around with a potato. And I'm so busy jumping up and down and screaming and trying to get these corporate people, who really did not want to be doing any of these games-- they just wanted to talk to each other and eat some fried chicken or whatever. 

And in the excitement, I dropped his sunglasses and stepped on them. He came up and he was like, hey, got my sunglasses? And I was like, oh, no, oh. Oh. And his face when he looked at me was so full of contempt and hatred-- and understandably. He wasn't wrong. [LAUGHS] I think his sunglasses probably cost a lot more than I was making to do that dumb thing. 

I was a mime at a glassware convention with my friend Martin Drobac from Northwestern. That was another stupid, stupid thing. [LAUGHS] I think we each made $200, which was a shocking amount of money at the time. But it was the last day of the glassware convention, and all the glassware salesmen were hung over at this brunch. And really, there was not a single person there who wanted to see any mime. 

And by the way, Martin and I didn't know how to do mime. We just knew how to put on my makeup. And I had a pair of striped overalls and a beret. [LAUGHS] I could have been a little more selective with the ways I made money. 

MAX: Like you said, fake it till you make it. You could have been a professional mime. You never know. 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Still time. 

MAX: There's still time. 

AYUN HALLIDAY: [INAUDIBLE] do some mime in Central Park today, right? [LAUGHS] As soon as we hang up, I'm going to go do some mime. 

MAX: I want to talk about some of your creative ventures-- writing books, writing your zines, staying involved in theater. How did you decide to branch out to those specific projects? And can you talk to the listeners about what you do specifically with those? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Totally, yes, so when I joined the Neo-Futurists, that was a way to support myself performing. And I started dating another Neo-Futurist, who's now my husband, Greg Kotis. And between the two of us, the money that we made performing with the Neo-Futurists paid our rent in Chicago. And we did it for a number of years. 

And then he particularly was thinking, I want to do something more, I want to maybe write for TV or something. So that's why we moved to New York. And I was all in, because I had always wanted to live in New York City. 

And we were out here for a few-- not even a few, a couple of years, and suddenly I was like, ooh, I'm pregnant. It's never going to be a good time for us to have a baby, but it might be nice to have children. Let's go ahead and do it. So we decided we said yes to this pregnancy and had this baby. 

And I thought, I'll still be able to be doing "Too Much Light," the show which we had brought with us to New York. So they were doing it in Chicago, and then we grabbed some more people and started doing it in New York. And I was like, we'll take four, six weeks off so I can recover from having a baby, and then we'll do the show, and she'll sleep in the basket in the back of the theater. 

And I quickly learned that's not how motherhood works, really. [LAUGHS] We didn't have it organized to have babysitters. We didn't have the money to have babysitters. I was not particularly interested in spending a ton of time away from my baby. So that's how I started writing my zine. 

It was around her first birthday. Greg and I and the baby, India, went to Scotland, where a friend was getting married in Glasgow. But she's also a performance artist, so she and her company were teaching these classes. And I thought, great, that'll make this trip to the wedding tax deductible if we take this performance workshop. Because that's career development. 

And she was like, sure, yeah, you can bring India. That's fine. And first meeting of the class, all I remember is India just shaking this little bumblebee rattle and throwing it as hard as she could. And I was like, this is not fair to the other participants. I am dragging their experience far sideways of what they signed up for. 

So Greg was able to continue taking the workshop, and I wandered around Glasgow for about a month, all day by myself with a baby in the rain. And I was having a real crisis of identity, because I was so used to the attention that I got performing with the Neo-Futurists and with that being my purpose in life and my creative identity. 

And suddenly, I didn't have that anymore. And all I had was like, oh, that's so cute. Oh, you have a cute baby. And she was a cute baby, but wanted something more, something more than just like, oh, mommy. 

And so I started writing a zine just about us wandering around everywhere, like primarily the East Village, where our apartment was so damn small that we spent a large portion of every day outside just walking around New York and then would write about what we did and what we saw. 

And I'm still making my zine. India is now 26. She has a brother who just turned 23, who's a comedian in Chicago. So obviously it's not about my life as a mother anymore. Now I just write about whatever I want to write about. And it's autobiographical, handwritten, hand illustrated. 

And it led to all the doors opening to me as a writer. If anybody knows me for anything, it's usually for the zine "The East Village Inky." 

MAX: And you just briefly mentioned it, the books that you've been working on and are currently working on. Walk me through the full process, and tell me a little bit about your current [INAUDIBLE]. 

AYUN HALLIDAY: I don't know that I've ever written a book proposal in my life. It's always been bumbling through the back door. That was how I got my first contract to write this book, The Big Rumpus, which was just a continuation of "The East Village Inky," but with fewer run-on sentences. It was actually edited. I think run-on sentences are funny, [LAUGHS] but the editors didn't, really, or publisher didn't. 

I wrote a book about my travels, my backpacker travels, mostly before the age of 30 or before I became a mother. I wrote Job Hopper, which you mentioned, which I'm glad you know about that book, because I feel like very few people know about that book. [LAUGHS] It was just about all the crummy day jobs I had. 

I wrote a book about food. I wrote a children's book. I wrote a graphic novel for young adults. I wrote a guidebook to New York City. I think it was the last wholly analog guidebook to New York City. I was like, why are people walking around looking at their phones? Oh, I get it. That's why. 

And my last two books, which just came out in the last couple of years, Creative Not Famous the Small Potato Manifesto, it started out as an etiquette book for people working in the arts past the age of 30 never becoming a household name or something. And there's an element of people feeling dejected, feeling like they've failed, but it's also, like, celebrate your triumphs. 

But it really came out of the fact that a lot of people would say to me, hey, I've got a question, when you're performing in a show in a black box theater, do you ever look out into the audience? And I was like, of course we look out into the audience. I mean, I have eyeballs. They have to go somewhere. 

Can I see who's sitting there? Yes. Can I see who didn't come? Mhm, definitely. So I was like if-- I was trying to focus on the positive, where it was like, oh, some guy that I met in the bar of an improv theater after we both saw an improv show, and we were chatting, and he's like, well, what are you up to? And I said, well, I have this play going on. And he's like, oh, that sounds interesting, I'm going to come. And he actually came, whereas some of my best friends didn't come. 

So I realized then, OK, now I have to go see this guy's show, because that's how we do. That's the community. That's how to uphold it. So it was like an etiquette book of, do right by your community. 

And then I realized there were a lot of opinions that should be in there besides just mine. So I ended up interviewing 38 people in the arts, from puppeteers, writers, visual artists, lots of musicians, a stripping clown, because you gotta have him in there, too. 

And then I made an activity book that is for readers who want to have assignments and do exercises and fill things out. And now what I'm working on is a dystopian novel that is set in my childhood library, narrated by a six-year-old. And that is a blast. Oh, my gosh, it's so fun. It's like playing with a doll house or something. I almost don't want it to be finished. 

MAX: Am I allowed to ask when we're going to see that one hit the shelves? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: I wish I could tell you an answer. I need to send it either to my agent, who I'm not sure if she's still my agent, or just start sending it around to different publishers who I think would be interested in it. It's kind of a weird [INAUDIBLE], so it's going to-- I might end up having to self-publish it. Who knows? But I do want to share it with the world. 

And then I'm working on a graphic novel of a solo show that I wrote a few years ago and performed right before the pandemic that is from the point of view of Juliet's nurse. And I thought, hey, this would be a cool graphic novel, and it would be lots of fun to learn how to illustrate better, how do you use my iPad as something that's more than just doing little black and white [INAUDIBLE] drawings. So that's next step. 

MAX: Listeners who are interested in those books can keep an eye out for those and more in the new Northwestern catalogs, launching after September 15, 2023. Following up with a couple final questions, I want to talk about some of the interesting names that you've given yourself-- Queen of the Apes for something that you found called The Theater of the Apes. 

And you also call yourself the Chief Primatologist for your zine. Where did those names come about? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: [LAUGHS] I think it's a certain orneriness that comes with having been DIY for so long and that chafes under corporate culture and stuff. I always wanted business cards. I don't know why. I just wanted them. I've only had them once professionally when I was working in an art gallery, and I got to a point where I was like the project manager or something. And I was so thrilled to have business cards. 

But then like, I have business cards for my own damned thing with my website on it so people know all my strange little weirdo projects that I'm doing. And I was like, why do I have to call myself like the president or the founder of it? That's stupid. That's not what I feel like. 

And I just thought Chief Primatologist was a funny phrase. Like I dig monkeys. I think humans and monkeys, we are the same. And so I'm studying. I'm studying humans. I'm studying the monkey people. 

Because it's my project, I get to be the chief of it all. I get to be the number one. I get to be the CEO. So that's why I'm always the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky. 

I also used to call myself the Chief Laundry Officer, but that's not true anymore. The children do their own laundry where they live. Frequently Greg is the person who washes and I fold. So don't think I can claim that one anymore. 

And then with the Theatre of the Apes, which is the theater company that Greg and I started, it does not have a building. It's basically to do our own weird, obscure work and get it up there quickly, rather than waiting for some theater to make room in their season. And then this is just like our passion project, our love stuff that we do. 

And we just settled on the titles, the Silverback and the Queen of the Apes. Because again, why do you have to be the president and the vice president or the artistic director and the managing director? The great thing about doing your own thing is you don't really have to submit to every single rule that people tell you you have to submit to. 

Of course, there are best practices and all. But you know what? Maybe those aren't the best practices for you. Maybe it's a really uncomfortable fit, and you'll have more fun, and you'll use your time more creatively and more productively to do what you want, what you know is right for you. 

We give up a lot of power when we let people tell us how we're supposed to do things. Because what do they know, anyway? 

MAX: Yeah, it's good advice. And you've earned it. You have earned the title of Chief Primatologist. So before we close, what's your best advice for a young, creative Northwesterner who wants to work in the arts? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Don't wait for the big infernal machine to make up its mind about you. Start doing your stuff now. Don't be inhibited about doing it. Put it out there. Don't worry that you're going to fall flat on your face or that people won't like it. They might not. It's how you get better, is to just keep doing it. 

Yeah, find what you like to do, and then make it yourself. Have as much ownership over your creativity as you can. And then, of course, you can also-- you can be in other people's stuff. You can do the mainstream stuff, too. But really do explore the possibility of making your own things that didn't exist before you got in there. 

And for sure do it now while you're at Northwestern and have those wonderful resources and talented collaborators who don't have conflicts in the form of 9:00 to 5:00 jobs or children or, when you get older, illness, aging parents and all this. 

This is a wonderful time. It's like you hear it-- there's a big feast laid out in front of you, and you'd be foolish not to eat as much of it as you can. I was foolish not to eat as much of it as I could. But towards the end I really got in there with my mouth and gobbled as much as I could. And I'm glad I did. 

MAX: Are there any Northwestern shoutouts that you'd like to give? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Oh, for sure. Well, I can give shoutouts of gratitude right now to some Northwestern friends in LA, Joy Gregory, who we did improv together. She's a member of Lookingglass Theatre. I haven't seen her in well over a decade, but she's putting me up when I go to LA to see India's play. 

Shoutout to Meg Mulkey, a friend from acting class who is putting India up for two months while she does her play. This is just extraordinary to me that people are so kind. And also when you live in New York and your apartment's really small, you don't put up people as much or for as long. So that I really like. 

Somebody that I really, really admire that I went to school with who was a year older than me is Anne Libera, who founded the comedy writing and performance department at Columbia College, something that didn't exist before. Now there are a couple of other colleges that offer that major. And I think the pandemic might have slowed things down a little bit. 

I think the prediction is that shortly every theater department that's worth its weight is going to start adding comedy as something you can study the way you can study projections in technical theater. Because it's just a great thing to know how to do. It's a great thing to know the history of. It's as compelling as English or theater, that kind of thing. 

So I just really admire her for starting that. And I know she has just tended to the early careers of so many people who have gone on to become wonderful comedians and permeating every aspect of the biz, doing voice work for animation, writing for the late night shows and the news shows and making their own sitcoms and all that stuff. I just think that's great. 

And she's so modest about it. I know she has a new book coming out about comedy, so you'll have to get that on the Northwestern author portal. 

MAX: Yeah, we're going to add it to the catalog. This is this is like a perfect pitch. I didn't even have to make the pitch myself. So listeners, remember the catalog. Remember the catalog. 

If you could either write a musical about your own life or star as yourself in a TV sitcom, which would you choose? 

AYUN HALLIDAY: That's a very compelling and difficult question. Both such giant opportunities. I am going to pick the musical. And I'm somebody who runs around saying that I don't like musicals, even though my husband wrote a musical that we live off of still. [LAUGHS] 

I think that's a lie that I don't like musicals. I think I don't like bad musicals. But when I go and I am transported by people breaking into song, and it's so moving, even if the storyline is kind of dumb or whatever, I love that. So I would love to be able to give that experience to others. 

And if it's no good, the musical that I write based on my own life, it's OK. It's not going to exist forever on the internet the way a bad sitcom can for people to see and make fun of. Like what if I'm bad in the sitcom about me? That would be terrible. 

MAX: That is a great point I did not think of. Someone at the end of the road can always watch your bad sitcom. 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Yeah, and I'm actually taking a musical improv class right now, which is a blast. But it's taken me down a few pegs about thinking, oh, musicals, whatever, I'm good at writing. I can do that, blah, blah, blah. No, I can't. I can't. 

The improv teacher Del Close used to say that everybody gets 20% stupider when they step on stage. And I'm finding that I'm about 70% stupider when I step on stage to do musical improv. So it will further my education to write this wonderful musical about my life that I'm sure will go straight to Broadway and close after a night. That's what I'm going to do. [LAUGHS] 

MAX: Well, this has been so much fun. Ayun Halliday, thank you so much for joining us. And listeners, if you're interested in more podcast episodes, remember to check out "Northwestern Intersections" on your favorite podcasting sites. Thank you again, Ayun. 

AYUN HALLIDAY: Thank you, Max. This was a blast. 

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