Culture Junkie: A Petaluma stool in New York City

I never expected the little white stool to be so interesting to people.

When preparing for my late-October trip to New York City, where I was engaged to perform a one-person-show at the United Solo Theatre Festival in Manhattan, I decided early on that I would have to take my stool with me. The stool is nothing special, really. I bought it online for about $30 and it arrived in a box, ready to assemble. It’s wooden, painted white, about 24-inches tall with a round seat measuring 11.5 inches in diameter. It weighs a little more than eight pounds.

It’s really nothing special.

But it’s the stool I’ve been rehearsing with for the last few months, and I’m used to it, now. The show I eventually performed in NYC is titled “Polar Bears,” with the subtitle, “A True Story About a Very Big Lie.” It’s a deeply personal autobiographical piece about raising my kids under complex circumstances and the various holiday-related successes and mistakes I made in relation to Santa Claus and Christmas.

In the show, I sit on the stool often. I put my foot on it several times when using my knee to display some artifact from my life. I carry it around, lift it up over my head, and turn it into a place-holder from everything from a store mannequin, a firetruck and an old gray trunk to a coffin, a Christmas tree and a hearse. Before heading the New York, I rehearsed the show nearly daily and performed in numerous times for small audiences in Sonoma County.

So, after all of that, it’s obvious that I know this stool and I feel I can depend on it. When I plop myself down, I know exactly how far I will drop before my butt makes contact with it. When I grab it with one hand to swirl it through the air on its way to becoming a table in an ice cream parlor, I know exactly how much effort it will take.

While I certainly recognize that a stool is a stool, and that most stools are essentially the same, I was not about to take a chance that when I arrived in New York the theater where the festival is hosted – a place called Theatre Row – would have stool exactly like it, or have any stool at all. Knowing that I would soon be standing in front of an audience reciting thousands of words of memorized text, the last thing I wanted to have to do was be thinking about whether or not the stool I was about to engage with was heavier, lighter, taller, shorter or just completely different than the one I’d become so dependent on.

So when I was packing for my trip, I disassembled the stool. I rubber-banded the various legs and supports and bolts together, packed a screwdriver and an Allen wrench, and squirreled it all away in my suitcase along with my clothes and other travel-ready belongings. Once in my 36th Avenue hotel room near Herald Square, I reassembled the stool, tightening the bolts firmly, then carrying it ten blocks to the theater on 42nd Street.

“Nice stool,” said a guy on a bike as I stood at the corner of Seventh Street and 41st, preparing to cross, then proceed down to the stage door entrance of the theater.

“Thanks,” I said. For a split second, I considered adding, “It flew here from California,” but the streetlight was about to change and I didn’t really want to start a conversation, which such a comment certainly might have done. After signing in and showing proof of vaccination – some theaters in New York are still doing that – I carried the stool up three flights of stairs to the fourth floor studio, where the tech director and co-producer of the festival were dancing to ABBA music when I entered the room.

“You brought your own stool!” exclaimed Wendy Lane Bailey, who runs the day-to-day operations of the United Solo Festival, organizing six weeks of solo shows from around the world. “I like an artist who comes prepared,” she said.

I had an hour to rehearse, work out a few movement alterations based on the space I would be facing my audience in, then relaxed (or tried to) in the dressing room before a an assistant came to say “Places,” I got into position for my entrance, heard my cue and took the stage.

The stool performed perfectly.

I think I didn’t do too badly myself, and 75-minutes later, after completing the show, taking my bows and returning to the dressing room to calm down, I carried the stool back down to the ground floor where a lobby fully of audience members were waiting to greet and congratulation me.

“Did you bring your own stool to New York City?”

That was a common question, one that continued as several of us made our way to the Brazen Tavern on 44th for a post-show celebration, where the stool became increasingly popular as the night went on. At one point, someone lifted it onto the table and placed a small candle on top, the first of several different “hats” the thing would wear before we relocated to The Glass House Tavern, another popular post-show nightspot in New York, where the stool was once again the topic of occasional conversation.

“I understand this stool just had its off-Broadway debut,” a waiter said at one point.

“Yes. Yes it did,” various among us affirmed.

That is technically true. The stool very much just had its off-Broadway debut. As did I, of course, but I was more than happy to share the moment with my co-star.

And now, with the stool and I having made it safely back to Sonoma County again, as I prepare for a few more close-to-home performances of “Polar Bears,“ I suspect the stool’s minor celebrity status will only increase. We’ve been through this much together, I plan to keep the thing in the act as long as I am.

“Hey, see this stool?” I imagine I will say the next time I arrive somewhere to perform. “This stool just got back from New York City. It was very popular in New York. And you know what Frank Sinatra used to sing about New York ... if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

Frank probably wasn’t thinking about furniture when he sang that line, but hey, if the stool fits, right?

David Templeton’s “Culture Junkie” runs once a month or so in the Argus-Courier. You can reach him at david.templeton@arguscourier.com or find out about him at davidtempletonplaywright.com.