My brain would not shut off when I would go to sleep. So I would have dreams that I was directing myself in a scene in my bedroom, and that the cameras were rolling, and my wife wouldn’t be asleep yet … and she would walk into the bedroom and I would be adjusting lights, and my wife would be like, ‘What are you doing?’ and I’d say, ‘We’re shooting,’ and she’d say, ‘Um, Mike, we’re not shooting.’ And I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, but we are,’ and the way I would say it was actually sort of patronizing, like she didn’t get it.

— Mike Birbiglia on the dreams he would have while making the film, Sleepwalk With Me

Hello Fresh Air Tumblr followers. This American Life at the helm here. Juuuuust in case you missed it, thought we’d start things off with Mike Birbiglia’s new short film featuring Terry Gross, from our recent live show. It may explain why the Fresh Air folks are busy with other things…

Happy Friday!  Terry + Mike Birbiglia + an actor playing Terry’s husband + the TAL Live Show + bank robberies.

(Source: youtube.com)

Audio for the interview with Mike Birbiglia is now up. Hope it doesn’t put you to sleep. (Not because it’s boring. Because he’s a sleepwalker. ZZZZ….) Enjoy!

It’s very exciting for people at City Hall when Nathan shows up. He’s kind of like the mayor of New York. … The woman who was behind the glass kind of fingers me to come over and I walk over and she goes ‘Is that Nathan Lane?’ and I go ‘Yeah’ and she goes ‘Oh. We’re going to get you a private room.’ So we went over and she says ‘The last celebrity who was here was Tony Randall’ which was like seven years or eight years before and he was getting married himself, I guess. And she said ‘And [Randall] said ‘I do not want special treatment’ so he did not go to the front of the line, I guess. And Nathan goes ‘Well, I want special treatment.’ He did not want to wait there. So we went into this private room and yeah, we got married.

— Mike Birbiglia, telling Terry Gross what it was like to have Nathan Lane as the witness at his wedding, on Fresh Air, October 18, 2010.

Comedian Mike Birbiglia, on how he became a contributor to This American Life: “So then [This American Life producer] Julie Snyder got in touch with me about maybe putting [my sleepwalking bit] on the show. And I didn’t want them to put the live version of the piece [on the show] because I thought ‘If they play the live version, when I release Sleepwalk with Me as a live CD, no one’s going to want it because they already had the podcast of it.’ So I said ‘Can we just do it in the studio?’ and Julie said ‘No, we really want the live one’ and then finally I get a phone call from Ira [Glass] one day, who I’d never met and he’s like ‘Hi Mike, it’s Ira Glass. I’m calling to convince you to let us use the live version of your show for our show.’ And I was like ‘Sure. Great.’ Instantly sold. The power of a celebrity voice — and [since] then all of my pieces on the show have been live pieces.”

Mike Birbiglia on This American Life

Mike Birbiglia’s our guest today. He’ll be discussing his new memoir Sleepwalk with Me.

Guest Monday: comedian Mike Birbiglia.