Have you ever called on your phone and then realized when someone answered that you didn’t know who you were talking to? Paula Poundstone can relate. “I use a flip phone, and when I walk the dog, which I do a lot, I get bored,” Poundstone said during a recent telephone call. Seconds into the conversation I felt like I was a lucky audience-of-one at a private Poundstone show; she explored the subject the same way she shares her thoughts on stage.
“Basically, I usually say to myself, ‘Well, I’ll call this person or I’ll call that person,’ right? And a couple times now, I have forgotten to — usually like I dial before I leave the house — well, it’s not really ‘dialing,’ but you get the idea — and twice now, I have done this really stupid thing. Where ’cause once I’m out in the sun, I can’t see the screen. So I’ll say to myself, ‘Well, you know, I can kind of see something on the screen, I think this is the number here,’ and then I’ll push the thing and it’s not the right person.
And then they answer. “One person answered, so happy that I had called, and I didn’t even know who it was for a few seconds! So I just like faked it for a few seconds, until I knew who it was and then pretended that I had called not accidentally.” Will Poundstone talk about telephone calls when she’s on stage Saturday at the Hawaii Theatre? Probably not.
She’s never been one of those slick comics who takes the stage with, as Billy Joel famously put it.