Welcome, everybody, to Midday Magazine for this Monday, January 13th, 2025.
Have your host, James J. Mailov here.
In part two today, we're going to talk with our Wisconsin Rapids rafters.
We're going to get to know Jake and Connor and some of the gang from there.
Right now, though, we have in studio with us our great friends from Saver the Arts.
First we have Executive Director Sally Kisner with us.
Sally, it was good to see you.
You as well.
And we have with us from the ODC and Leapak and it's good to see you.
Hey, good morning.
Thanks for sneaking in here and everything.
But more on while you're here in just a little bit.
But we want to welcome first off, joining us not only in town here very soon, but the
great comedian Jeff Allen is on the phone with us right now.
Jeff, good morning.
Good morning, man.
This is really great time to be talking, man.
Really?
You really is.
And really do appreciate you coming to town, Jeff.
Jeff is good.
I don't have to get up at 4.30 in the morning.
It's a great time.
Right.
Right.
That's it.
Jeff is going to be in town at the end of the month here.
Say Friday, January 31st, we'll tell you how you can get tickets and more and just a
little bit.
But before we start off, Jeff, I do this thing whenever we first get to talk to somebody.
I like to get their origin story a little bit about them.
And that's not just because we're both from Chicago.
It's not just all the journalistic, I should mention that.
But I did want the audience to get to know you a little bit, Jeff.
So tell us a little about yourself.
Oh, wow.
Well, I'm 68 years old, which means I have my Medicare card.
So I've lived a full life.
They didn't say it was going to be better when I hit 65.
And I set a comedy in Chicago in 1978.
And we live in Nashville, my wife and I.
We have four grandchildren and two sons and two daughter-in-laws, I guess, they're still
together, which is good.
I'm probably busier than I've ever been because it's a dry bar comedy.
The audience can, if they're not familiar with me, certainly Google me on dry bar or go
to Amazon.
I'm primarily have a couple of specials on there that they can look at.
And that's it, just working around.
Yeah.
Jeff, who are some of your influences?
What got you to want to tell, to be a comedian, what got you into that world?
Oh, he was cheaper than therapy, you know, with a therapist and all he did was laugh at me
and I said, you know what, I don't need to pay you for this.
I think I should go on the road.
You're going to make him laugh, might as well make a living out of it, by the way.
Yeah.
I really, it was so funny.
I saw a comic, my brother was a musician when I was 16.
He was working a club in Chicago and I did some comedians open for him and I remember
thinking, man, what'd that be the coolest job to go up and do that?
And it was like, you know, it's not like they have a table set up on career day in high
school, you know, stand up comic.
So anyway, years later I was working for a jewelry company and somebody said, let's
go to a comedy club and I said, what's that?
And I ended up going to my first comedy club and that was it, you know, I didn't know
I'd ever make a living out of it.
I just wanted to try it and see if I could do it.
I was awful.
I mean, really awful, like cringe worthy, awful for the longest time.
I had a club owner tell me after about a year he goes, you know, you'll never make any
money at this.
And I had the kind of personality, it was like, yeah, okay, well, we'll see about that.
Buddy.
So regardless of the fact that I slept on people's floors for years and never really made
money, I showed him, right?
Yeah.
And I think he passed away before I started making money.
Of course.
That's in that way.
So my revenge tactic didn't really work.
What I appreciate, Jeff, is not only you sharing that with us, thank you for that.
But one of the things that Sally and I like to do when we have guests on is we have a
lot of creatives out there listening and a lot of kids in our community and everything.
These can be so invigorating, inspiring for them as, you know, I know from just from
the acting world and that in radio, really.
But as you know, as a comedian, when you are getting into these worlds, there isn't really
necessarily a blueprint on how to make it or who makes it or some of those things.
To hear those stories, those early struggles, I think really can help people getting through
those moments themselves.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're getting into any of the arts to be rich and famous, good luck, I mean,
if that's your goal, I just really wanted to do good work and looking at my journey, you
know, starting at 22 and then getting married at 30, 31, I always kind of worked inside
out.
It really was kind of therapeutic for me, you know, and I'm an alcohol, I'm a recovering
alcoholic and a drug addict, I mean, 38 years have been sober, but, you know, those
early years, you know, you're working a bar and you know, you know, you have a drinking
problem.
And so I've talked a lot about that and, you know, some people relate to that.
Most people don't, you know, and then I get married and start talking about my wife and
kids and stuff.
And then at some point in my 30s, I realized that was an uneducated moron and I started
educating myself.
Something about our 30s, me too, me too, man, yeah, it was definitely my early 30s.
I remember taking, I'm an idiot and I'm here I am on stage trying to make a living with
words and I really, I don't have a very large vocabulary.
And I think I graduated high school with a fourth grade vocabulary, it's based on the
testing.
So anyway, it was, and then I started reading and, so I always tell young comics, this
is, you know, parents will come to me, my son wants to be a comedian.
I said, read and read and read and read and read.
Don't just listen and watch YouTube videos, grab everything you can from people magazine
to Dante to whatever you can find in between.
Those are your references that's where you draw life because you're not talking about
anything new as a stand up comic.
There's nothing new under the sun.
You know, it's a lazy ass.
He talks about that in the Bible.
So what you're trying to do is figure out a way to express things in your own voice and
in your own point of view of, and not let the audience know that they've heard this
topic 700 times in their life, you know, so it has to be unique from your point of view.
And I really didn't hit my stride till I was almost 40.
When I really cleaned my show up, it allowed me.
I got a sore ass out.
My son got caught cussing at his teacher in fourth grade, and I said to the teacher when
we got called in, I'd love to look you in the eye with a straight face and tell you
I have no idea where the child heard that kind of language.
But unfortunately, that's the way my wife and I talk at home and driving home, my wife
said, we need to clean up.
This is unbecoming.
When you hear it come out of your children's mouth, you know, it's really, it's a reflection
on you as a parent.
I got a sore ass out and started working my routines and seeing if I could clean them
up.
And it actually made me better at what I do.
So I want to kind of piggyback off of that if you don't mind Jeff, because I find, I
think you're a incredible comedian and very good at what you do.
And I would say that years ago, but this growth, this change with your comedy, as you're
kind of touching on here.
I want to direct people to Jeff Allen comedy.com, Jeff Allen comedy.com and encourage you to
check that out.
Not only to hear some of the, this man's great comedic mind, but there's a testimony on
here.
And if I could just read a line from it, who I was is not who I am.
Today I choose to walk a different path.
I was doing my homework for the interview Jeff and I came across that and it stayed with
me, man.
I growing up, my father was addicted to heroin, the majority of my life.
It's only been in the last 20 years, my dad has been clean and sober and that just been
his normal, weird self, who I love so much.
I grew up, grew up not just with him, but with a lot of kids in my neighborhood and stuff.
And even to this day, seeing people struggling with these things.
And we cannot have enough examples of people getting out the other side, enough examples
of people being brave and vulnerable and sharing these stories, sharing what it was like
for them and the light at the end of the tunnel.
And to be able to do it with a comedic way of doing that, I think that that's first off
one of the best ways that people register information is when you're not talking down
to them, but trying to make them laugh, whether you make them laugh or not, they seem to register
this information a lot more.
But for you in doing this, I have to ask, what was it like in the beginning of that, of
that shift for you?
Because I imagine there were people who were supportive and people who might not have
been.
Well, I was angry.
I really was.
The cap came off.
Whatever I used alcohol for, it came off and this rage came out.
And I was really, I was really just spewing a lot of bile for a number of years.
My wife occasionally would come out and watch us show.
More often than not, she'd leave in tears, she'd look at me and go, you must hate me.
By the way, I talked about her on stage and it was a process of just trying to get comfortable
in my own skin.
I started drinking at 13 or 14, I just wrote a book about it, but yeah, my sister called
me and she was in tears and she said, I didn't realize that she started drinking so young.
She was a couple years older than me and I said, well, we have our own lives.
In your teenagers, you just kind of go in your own directions, you don't pay attention.
So it was a process of learning one, to not believe the lies, because when you have a,
I call it the beast, a beast like alcoholism, the beast will lie to you constantly, that
you can't make it, you can't live your life without me, you can't, you know, you're going
to slip, you're going to, so I went to those 12 step rooms and they kept me alive.
They gave me hope, that's for sure.
I would see people hear their stories, without the stories, you know, and this is kind of
what Jesus talked about before he left the earth, he said, it'll be, make disciples and
in other words, tell your testimonies of what I've done, you know, what the Holy Spirit
has done for you, you know, and in those rooms, it wasn't about so much faith as it was
just looking at guys and they would tell you the depths of where they had gone and been
and they were looking at them today and they're clear-eyed and their marriages are together
and everything.
And I would leave there and just go, I want that, I don't know why I can't seem to get
it myself.
It took me a long time to get, to come up, I'm the reason it's an anonymous program, you
know?
Yeah, because people, nobody would have looked at me after five years and said, boy, I want
some of that.
I was, I call myself a walking scab, I was a scab and a lot of things picked at it and it
came out through my comedy and in a lot of angry ways and then when the, when Christ captured
my heart and just, I realized I can't deny this anymore and I said, I'm yours, I belong
to you.
This piece that washed over me, that's the only thing I can explain to people, I said,
I don't know how to explain it, I don't know what it, you know, it's like the blind man
in the Bible, you know?
I was blind and now I see and they go, well, what do you do?
Did he do some focus?
Did he go, I don't know, I really don't know.
I just know I was blind and now I see and all of a sudden, everything just shifted from
a different world view so it was a different point of view and I was just, I smiled a lot
more, you know?
And the material didn't really change much because people asked, what kind of change
I go?
I was already working, trying to work clean just because of the problems I had with my
son at school and in the language.
So by the time I hit 40 and said, I'm yours, I decided to see if I was in Vegas when 9-11
hit and I stepped in my manager who's Jewish, I said, do you think churches would hire me
and he goes, you're asking me what are you?
We literally were the blind leading the blind into the, you know, so I came out of all
these nightclubs and casinos and I tell pastors, I'm ready to work your church and they weren't
all that thrilled, you know?
My first year I did one church, some brave soul and Pennsylvania hired me to come in
and do comedy and it's been a wonderful, and then a dry bar of five years ago, changing
my life.
It really did.
It introduced me to tens of millions of people who didn't know I existed.
The internet's an amazing thing.
Could you, before we wrap up, do you have to, Jeff, could you mention what dry bar is for
the audience?
It's a comedy platform, an app you can go on or you can just Google a day of YouTube channel
as well.
It's the largest video library of stand-up comedy in the world right now and I think I don't
quote me on this, but 150 million people worldwide, I mean, I get emails and I get comments
from people over in Europe all the time and when you come and over, you know, to Sweden,
you know, well, you know, if it's just you, probably not anytime soon, if you could figure
out how to get a thousand people out, you know, that would be great, but yeah, that's
it.
Of all people was interviewing Jordan Harmon, the CEO of Angel Studios who puts on dry
bar and he says, so what do you guys got?
You know, other than movies, he goes, well, we got dry bar and he goes, what's that?
And he goes, tell them it's 150 million in curl.
It turns around and says, all right, I need to do a dry bar and they go, well, you got
to be clean.
And he goes, oh, I think I can swing that anyway, he just taped this first dry bar.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, they can go and look up hundreds and hundreds of comedy, it's all Queens family
oriented.
You can sit with your kids and watch it all and some's good, some's not, you know, I mean,
it's again, comedy subjective.
Yeah.
It's a nice library.
You're going to hear Jeff Allen in town here go to Jeff Allen comedy dot com to get a
preview of that Jeff Allen comedy dot com and Jeff, when you, you know, safe travels
getting here and joy yourself, we're going to make sure that we got a great crowd for
you to cheer you on and laugh and just really listen and have some fun.
Yeah.
And I always tell people it's much better live.
If you enjoy even like what you see online, it's 10 times better live.
I am, I have a much better performer live.
So we cannot wait.
We're going to give you a good crowd, man.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Jeff, you have a great day.
All right.
God bless you guys.
Have a great day.
Man, that was great.
Jeff is amazing.
A wonderful time with him.
I just really appreciate how honest and brave he is with his comedy Jeff Allen comedy dot
com is the website to check out everybody.
I have two people who are also very good at what they do with me right now.
Sally Kissner, executive director of the arts council and Anlie Peck from ODC and as much
as I love seeing it and I'm not, why, why are the ODC here?
Am I combining interviews?
Sally is that what we're doing?
Oh, no, answer here for a much very good reason.
She is when I heard Jeff Allen's story of sobriety for 38 years and his passion that
he has for programs that for recovery.
We did some research and we found that opportunity for hope which is associated with ODC was this
type of program.
So we decided to do a fundraiser and $3 of every ticket sold for this show will be donated
as well as a separate tab for donations if you'd like to donate in addition to the $3.
So I'll turn it over to Anne to explain a little about it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sally and Anne.
Yeah, thanks for being here.
Well, thanks so much for having me.
It's always great to be here and I know James, you and I have talked quite a bit about
opportunity for hope which is our mental health clinic that we outpatient mental health clinic
that was started here in Wisconsin Rapids back in 2019 and as we know, you know, just
the need for mental health services has just exploded and so we're really thrilled to
have the opportunity to be able to provide some mental health services to our community,
to our local schools and really be able to be that resource kind of in the central Wisconsin
area.
So we're really excited and when Sally called and said, hey, we'd like to do this.
What a great opportunity and I'm looking forward to meeting Jeff as well and hearing more
about his story.
Anne, would you mind giving a bit of a synopsis of what opportunity for hope is in case anybody
out there may be unfamiliar with it?
Sure, sure.
So opportunity for hope is an outpatient mental health clinic.
I know a lot of people originally feel like because it's located within ODC that they
feel that it's for people that are just participating in ODC, but that is not the case.
It's actually open to the public.
So anybody seeking mental health therapy in counseling, it's open to anyone in the community.
I think what's really unique about what we are offering is that we do offer sliding
fee scale and also accept Medicare and Medicaid along with additional commercial insurances.
And so really our goal is to be accessible for everybody in the community to have the
opportunity to get some mental health services if they need it.
We'll tell you how you can find out more before we wrap up.
I thank you for that, Anne.
I appreciate it.
It was good to have you here with us.
Sally, I think a lot of us see what you're seeing with this.
When you saw the connection of the opportunity for hope and Jeff's story and putting these
worlds together, I know I think a lot of people can relate to this and I talked to Jeff
Affair a little about what I have no comedian, but I remember finding out really early in
life that comedy that laughter is the greatest medicine there is.
And it's not just for the body, but for the mind that this is and trying to make my
mom and dad laugh.
They were my first audience and trying to just entertain them.
And Jeff has a similar story and there's a lot of people out there that can relate to
that.
But it also speaks to, I think, one of the ways that we get stronger as a world, stronger
as everything from a community to a country to a world where we're a little more open
about these things.
We're talking about them more.
And what is a great way to do that comedy, making people laugh, taking things a little
light on such a heavy topic.
It's something that I think we as human beings are mastering more and more as we go along
and meant to help us really helping us with this.
It's a really perfect combination, I think.
And a great opportunity, hopefully, while this is, we're going to have a great time.
We're going to laugh.
We're going to enjoy ourselves.
All those things.
One of the things that I hope comes from this, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, is
the conversations that can come up afterwards or anything about sharing, you know, I relate
to what he was saying here.
Maybe you haven't talked about it before, but this gives you the opening to be able to
talk about it.
I'd also like to mention, Jeffrey Ferd to his book, Are We There Yet?
I started it this weekend and I'm about halfway through and I highly recommend it.
It's so cool to get a flavor of what the person is like before you meet them or see them
performing and it's an awesome book.
And just really quickly, did also want to mention, as we're going to get into the details
how you can get tickets and everything, the name of the tour, they changed it a little
bit.
The human condition, we're still not there yet, great job by the way, that's a great
name.
But just in case you see your tickets a little different or anything like that, there's
just a slight change to it.
Feel the same show, just a bit of a different name and a, Sally, for people that want to
get tickets and want to find out more, how can they do that?
Tickets are $47 for adults and $10 for students as usual and you can obtain them through the
Arts Council, saverthearts.com 24-7, or come and see us at 10-48th Street South and Wisconsin
Rapids.
Our office hours are 10-230 Monday through Thursday or give us a call 715-424-2787.
And keep in mind that $3 from each adult ticket purchase for this show will be donated
to opportunity for hope.
And thank you again for that and doing this and to you and to everybody out there doing
this.
And if people want to find out more, just send it to the website to odcinc.com.
Yep, that's correct.
Just go to odcinc.com and check out our services and you'll see there's a mental health services
tab and all the information will be there that you need.
Be sure to check that out.
Everybody, again, odcinc.com, be sure to follow them on social media as well.
Jeff Allen's website, jeffalancombady.com, jeffalancombady.com, be sure to check that out as well.
And of course, our friends at saverthearts not only have this great show coming up, but
a couple of more shows before the end of the year.
Get your tickets for those.
We'll be talking to Sally more about those as they get closer.
But saverthearts.com, saverthearts.com, be sure to check that out.
Both of you, great show, great way to kick off our week here midday.
Thank you very much for being with us.
Thank you.
We'll have more midday magazine coming up for you, everybody, right here in 97-5 FM 13-20
AM.
WFHR, we are locally grown radio.
