Thread by @AoDespair

1) Others longer to New Orleans will have more essential memories, but I can desitively muster one worthy tale of the legendary Dr. John from having had the opportunity to write some dialogue for him on an HBO drama some years back. And to be clear....

2) ....trying to write dialogue for Mac is an errand for a fool’s fool. No one talked like him. Even by standards the mangled patois of run-amok Crescent City verbiage, he has his own language. Mac invented Macspeak and somehow, even though the words were being conjured...

3)...in your ears for the first and possibly onliest time in your life, he’d have you nodding as if you were somehow fluent and as if only those words would suffice. He was funny as hell. So, pretending I had a good enough war for the task, I tried to stand next to him for...

4) ...a while to pick up a phrase or two that I could regurgitate on the page, the better to approximate his voice. He figured out what I was trying to do: “Aw, man, you tryin’a write your way like the doctor talk.
You gon’ trifle your way right into some righteous confusement.”

Thanks, Mac. I ran right back to my laptop and moved a page in which the good doctor, playing himself, accused another session musician of causing some “righteous confusement.” Then I handed the fresh lines to Mac. He scanned them and looked at me and gave a tiny head shake...

6) And then, when the camera was on him, he said the line and metastasized the noun even further. “Man, I don’t know what you tryin’ to say to me but that’s just some confusementalism right chear” Then he looked at me over by he video monitor and smiled. And even before...

7) ...the director called cut he said: “No one gonna write like the doctor talk. You can just give up that tragical mess right now.” I quit moving pages then and there. “Say whatever you want, Mac.” And for the rest of the show, he did.

Good enough “ear”*