One Year of Awkward: DIY Touring Disasters, Bedbugs & a MySpace Friendship

This Show Is Awkward reaches its one-year mark with 54 recorded episodes and, to Henrique Couto’s surprise, no missed weeks. He and Michelle reflect on maintaining a conversational podcast through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, including recording days when neither felt especially ready to perform. The celebration is characteristically uncomfortable: Henrique wants a heartfelt retrospective, while Michelle offers reluctant approval and jokes that the show’s earliest listeners must have disappeared.Henrique then asks Michelle to reconstruct the beginning of their friendship. She remembers a connection through her employer’s social circle, messages on MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger, and an early walk around Princeton. A later drive to dinner at Michelle’s family home ended with Henrique badly lost on unfamiliar roads; he says the experience sent him to buy a GPS the next morning. They estimate that they met around 2007 and note that most of their long friendship has unfolded across distance.The anniversary prompt leads into Michelle’s most uncomfortable DIY touring memories. One late show continued into a nearly empty noise set around 3 a.m., leaving her to sleep in her car. Another began hours behind schedule, shuffled performers around and included a chaotic screen-door injury. She also recalls poorly promoted house shows, arriving after another date had fallen through, realizing almost nobody would attend and discovering what she believed was a bedbug rash. The stories are personal recollections, not travel, lodging or medical advice.Halloween provides the closing detour. Michelle considers socially distanced candy bags, debates whether to visit her neighbors’ porch and finally reveals homemade paper ears and a paper nose as a Gigs costume. Before that reveal, the friends riff on a cholera joke from Red Dead Redemption 2 and discuss how some depictions of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol can echo antisemitic visual stereotypes. From podcast anxiety to friendship history and rough touring nights, the episode celebrates endurance without pretending that creative work is ever tidy.LinksEmail the hosts: [email protected]