Bryant O'Hara and Edward Hall

[00:05] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: My name is Edward Austin Hall. My age is 59. Today's date is November 13, 2020. I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, and my partner today is Bryant O'Hara, my friend, fellow poet and colleague in various literary weirdnesses.

[00:29] BRYANT O'HARA: All right, my name is Bryant O'Hara My age is 50. Today's date is November 13, 2020. I am in Stone Mountain, Georgia. My partner today is Edward hall, and they are my friend, colleague, fellow poet, and master of weirdness.

[00:51] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I had not realized I had achieved mastery, but I suppose it followed.

[00:56] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, so.

[00:59] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And that. That interesting choice of words from me. A thing I want to talk about some, because I don't think we really got to talk about it before, is our taste in weird media. I think you had made it to college by the end of our last talk. And, you know, a lot of my. A lot, certainly a lot of my tastes stem from. From that era. Although, you know, my novel is very much influenced by stuff I read as a grade schooler or watched on TV when I was really young.

[01:33] BRYANT O'HARA: Right.

[01:34] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So talk about. Let's start off just talking about kind of the things that you think of as influencing the writer, the poet and the coder. Right. What do you think made you those things? Not in that order, as you like to write.

[01:54] BRYANT O'HARA: Not necessarily in that order. Well, I think by the time when I went to college, my stakes as either a poet or author of any sort and, you know, a coder versus, you know, any of the other roles I have were very much. They were. Some were more developed than others. Like, my tastes in science fiction were very much oriented towards hard science fiction things. Anybody in particular? Oh, well, the ones I like. I was reading a lot at the time was probably. See, there was Greg Baer, David Brin and Gregory Benford. Let's see, basically the three Bs, or the killer bees, as they were often called. There was a lesser known guy that I was reading for a while because I was still very much interested in space colonization. It was, you know, that concept that was kind of really put. Pushed Forward by Gerard O'Neill from Princeton University and O'Neill O'Neill Colony. Well, he was. He created an idea for cylindrical space colonies.

[03:25] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right. O'Neill colonies.

[03:27] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, it's named after him.

[03:29] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, that's what I thought.

[03:30] BRYANT O'HARA: So he wrote a book, I think it was in the late 70s, early 80s, I think it was late 70s. It was called the High Frontier. Yeah, no, nonfiction.

[03:42] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: That's what I thought. Okay.

[03:43] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. And it was basically a whole cohesive plan for how to basically Establish infrastructure and space in a way that was profitable enough that you could justify essentially building human settlements both on the moon and around between the Earth and the moon. In these places called cislunar space, as we call it. Yeah, in these places called Lagrange points or Lagrangian points. Yeah, Terms are interchangeable, but they're supposed to be these points that are gravitationally stable between two large celestial objects. So the idea is you put something there, it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to keep it there.

[04:29] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[04:30] BRYANT O'HARA: And so I was utterly fascinated by that book. I think I read it a bunch of times when I was in high school. Read it again probably once or twice while I was in college. But yeah, again, the lesser known author who was kind of talking about that sort of thing was a guy named Mack Reynolds.

[04:53] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Oh, yeah.

[04:54] BRYANT O'HARA: And yeah, he. He's an interesting guy. He had a. I mean, he did. He wrote like a. I think like a series of stuff that took place in these space colonies. And I don't remember the titles for them, but he. He wrote a lot. Yeah, I liked them. They were fast reads for the most part. So again, I was still kind of leaning in that direction towards really writing short stories. This was something I was kind of working towards even all through college and, you know, while I was studying engineering at the same time. So as a. I never really did a whole lot in the way of poetry. I mean. Well, I did join the literary magazine my first year.

[05:45] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: What was it called? And what again, remind us what school this is.

[05:48] BRYANT O'HARA: This was at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

[05:50] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[05:53] BRYANT O'HARA: Oh, good Lord, I don't even remember now. Yeah, but I joined like the first year, and then I realized it was going to take up more time than I had available to me. But it that first year, a couple of things happened. One, I did, one of my first courses I took in as a freshman was Modern British Literature. And I actually got to hear. Actually talk. I mean, we'll go to a class where we talked a lot about poets and authors during, you know, the early part of the 20th century, particularly around the First World War. And that's when I really got to hear, you know, T.S. eliot, a little bit of Wilfred Owen. Those are the main. The main folks that I remember. But I really started to kind of get into T.S. eliot. I mean, basically I liked his style and I tended to like what he wrote about, at least up until a certain point. But we'll get into that later. The second thing that happened was I joined the glee club now.

[07:16] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, I never.

[07:17] BRYANT O'HARA: I Mean, I never really. I mean, I did little choir things, but I didn't do any music when I was in high school. So my. The last. Before that point, my last experience of doing anything musical was in elementary school or, you know, doing an occasional, you know, church choir. Not even that very often. So it was kind of a surprise. And the. I was in. I was basically doing my laundry, and one of the. One of the guys from the glee club was also one of the few African Americans in my school, happened to be doing laundry around the same time. Said, hey, you want to join the glee club? I said, well, first I said, what. What's the glee club? And he said, yeah, it's. It's a chorus. It's a men's chorus. It's like. He's like, dude, I hadn't sang in years. He says, doesn't matter. You'll learn it on the way. Besides, you get to travel and realize there are not a whole lot of girls here. So you. So the idea is we got to perform not only locally, but we also traveled to different places. And at least once a year, the people would travel to. We would go abroad. So I. At least twice I want to. Going abroad as well.

[08:51] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Did you have a favorite trip with the glee club or.

[08:54] BRYANT O'HARA: Well, my favorite trips were. Let's see. Well, the trips abroad were pretty much awesome all around. Where did you go? Well, my first trip abroad was to Spain, so we went to Madrid, Segovia, Toledo, Avia, and. Let's see. Let's see. Where else do I wind up going?

[09:25] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Barcelona?

[09:27] BRYANT O'HARA: No, we didn't go to Barcelona. We basically stay kind of within the. The center.

[09:31] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Okay.

[09:34] BRYANT O'HARA: We pretty much stay within the center of the state.

[09:36] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[09:37] BRYANT O'HARA: But it was another country. Sorry. But it's. That was a lot of fun. And Toledo was probably the most. Well, the two places I liked the most there were Toledo, and I believe it was Segovia.

[09:51] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Why?

[09:53] BRYANT O'HARA: Well, I think Segovia. I think it was Segovia. Well, because it had, like, this huge aqueduct that kind of ran through the center of the city. And it was the first time really seeing, you know, an architectural marvel, you know, that. You know, that up close and personal. So, yeah, that was. That. That was completely amazing.

[10:15] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Was it. Is it Roman?

[10:19] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, yeah, far as we know. Yeah.

[10:21] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I can see why that would make such an impression. I mean, did you think about O'Neill colonies when you were looking at it?

[10:28] BRYANT O'HARA: I. I did not, but I was. I was mightily impressed at, you know, that level of architectural engineering. Yeah. At that scale, it's like. Yeah. And this is pretty damn old. So. Yeah, you know, just because it's, you know, just because it was built in the past doesn't mean it was built by idiots.

[10:51] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[10:53] BRYANT O'HARA: So, yeah, no, that was, that was utterly amazing. And Toledo was great. Just because it was this, it was a walled city, you know. Well, there's, there's old Toledo, which is like the old fortifications.

[11:08] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[11:09] BRYANT O'HARA: So, yeah, it's, you know, medieval walled city was great. Yeah. Very small roads and tiny cars were trying to get through them. Well, some not so tiny, but yeah, you know, those roads were tiny. But yeah, it was, I think. And they, they had this thing about selling weapons. So I guess weapons, swords, battle axes, you know, medieval stuff that people who.

[11:40] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: And who was getting medieval.

[11:43] BRYANT O'HARA: Pretty much every member of the men's glee club wpi. I think everybody came back with some sort of weapon. One guy came back, he had like a six foot broad sword.

[11:53] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: This would have been pre 9 11, of course. So how'd you get this? Oh, never mind. Yeah, I'm sure people were probably cradling battle axes in their laps on the plane.

[12:04] BRYANT O'HARA: Well, I mean, I think you had to pack them. You had to, you had your special. Of course. But yeah, yeah, I. And, well, the guy with the broadsword, I had no idea how he got that on. But it's, I mean, it's so obvious. A weapon is like. Well, obviously you're not, you're not going to be singing out in the plane.

[12:21] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So this, it's a guitar.

[12:26] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. But yeah, that was, that was really impressive. I did like that a lot. Yeah. Let's see. We did also go to Britain at a different year.

[12:37] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[12:38] BRYANT O'HARA: And we went to. We primarily stayed. We went to Oxford, we went to Wrexham, which is in Wales, and we went to Old Worcester, the original Worcester that Worcester, Massachusetts is named after.

[12:54] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[12:56] BRYANT O'HARA: And that was interesting. It wasn't as great as Spain, but I liked the. I did like it a lot. There was one moment there that really appealed to me and that was we. Wales has this tradition of male choirs as well, and we call it Wales, right? Oh, yeah. So we went. We were in this small church where our glee club got to sing, but the community church also got to perform for us. So. And this was a group that had folks in age from 20 to 80 and their, their voices were impressive. I mean, and so at the end of that concert, I said, you know what, I want to be like them when I grew up. But the reason I tell this whole story about the glee club was that it resparked my interest in music. And from that point, I started really getting interested in the capabilities of the human voice. So I began listening not just to classical acapella music, but I was looking for music, acapella music from anywhere and everywhere. So it was like Bulgarian female choir, African chants, you name it, I was kind of interested in it. And so I didn't quite know where that was taking me. But those paths of, you know, my literary interests versus, you know, my musical interests were beginning to kind of run in parallel for a while, while I was in college.

[14:50] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, I'm curious. When I was in college, it was still almost exclusively things on vinyl. And so I remember distinctly finding out after I discovered Philip Glass in the little record store that was at the edge of campus, at the Tulane campus, Going to the basement of the Tulane library and setting up a turntable with headphones to listen to Einstein on the beach until I couldn't stand any more. Einstein on the Beach. Listen to the whole thing, as far as I know.

[15:25] BRYANT O'HARA: Oh, yeah.

[15:26] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: But what. What was the tech? What was the going technology when you were doing all these deep dives?

[15:33] BRYANT O'HARA: It was. It depended on what I was looking for.

[15:35] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Right.

[15:37] BRYANT O'HARA: For a lot of stuff that was relatively popular. It was primarily. Primarily cassettes. That's what I owned. I had a cassette player. Eventually I got a CD player, But I had more cassettes than I had. Were still a lot more expensive than cassettes at the time. For stuff that was a little harder to find, I used the library. So I would. Yeah, like you. I would go find a listening room, check out the records, and just play them on vinyl. Plus, our choir director had his own collection of choral music. And a lot of that was. It was music that was really, really hard to find, like private pressings from concerts, because that was oftentimes the way that a lot of glee clubs would have their stuff recorded. They didn't really have tapes until, you know, around the time that I started performing and they began recording. But prior to that, people were. Yeah, they were creating. Yeah. Vinyl records. And so there were. There were songs that I heard Find again back up. You.

[16:58] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: You said that the. Right after vinyl record, you kind of dropped out on my end and just say again.

[17:05] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. So basically, the most glee clubs, when they did recordings, would record them to vinyl first. Later on, I guess, they started doing tapes. But for. I mean, for the longest time, the only way that you could really find a recording from a college choral performance was on vinyl.

[17:30] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[17:31] BRYANT O'HARA: And so some of that stuff is really, really Hard to find. You basically have to ask the choir directors and say, hey, you got a collection here. What. Do you remember the choir director's name for my club? Yeah. Lewis Curran. K E R N C U R R A N Curran.

[17:51] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Very good.

[17:53] BRYANT O'HARA: He was. He went to. He was educated, I believe, at Yale. And he actually. A lot of the performances that we did were ones done by, I think, someone who taught him, a guy named Fenno Heath. And at the time, this guy was known for writing some very challenging works for men's chorus. And they were done. There was like this period of choral music, especially around, like the early to mid part of the 20th century, that was a lot more experimental, using, like, jazz harmonies. It was really interesting. And I really kind of, again, I got to hear more and more of what you could do with the human voice and not just, you know, the traditional hymns or even spirituals, but you can. The range of the human voice and what it's capable of doing really, again, fascinated me. And so again, while this was going on, I'm still trying to balance. So I. Doing music writing. I know I got to do engineering because that's what I'm going to school for. And so I did eventually, as part of. Part of one of my projects for graduation, I wrote a collection of short stories. And some of the short stories had little poems inside them. And the.

[19:31] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I read them because I had to.

[19:32] BRYANT O'HARA: Read a bunch of them as part of my sort of like. I was like almost a mini thesis.

[19:39] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: As in you read them aloud?

[19:41] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, I had to read them aloud to professors and some students. And they liked it, but they said it was a little too cerebral. All right. And they were science fiction, not hard science fiction, but kind of slipping into that. I don't know whether it was like soft science fiction at the time. There really was more. Like there wasn't these. These different subgenres of science. Yeah. Like, it was hard and they were soft. Then there was fantasy.

[20:13] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I. I think of your SF as. As being firmly in the weird camp of science fiction. So. Yeah, yeah, that was that true even then?

[20:25] BRYANT O'HARA: I think it was beginning to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I hadn't even read Lovecraft at the time. And actually, I don't even think I really knew who he was. I didn't really start getting into Lovecraft until Well into my 30s, I think. And that was. I think I can even tell when it happened. But it happened after college. I'll get to that later. Yeah, after I graduated from college, I was still kind of in this state where I was trying to figure out where I really wanted to go with a lot of this stuff. So at the time poetry slam started to become popular.

[21:14] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Sorry about that alarm going off, Bryant If you just go ahead and repeat.

[21:19] BRYANT O'HARA: So at the. At the end of college, you were talking about poetry slams. Just go ahead and repeat that. Oh, yeah. So while near the end of my college years, poetry slams started coming up and were starting to get popular. There were. There's like one or two slams that were kind of being held that were close enough for me to either walk to or, you know, bum a ride from and those. And they were interesting because, I mean, I was really. I. At the time, of course, I hadn't found a voice yet. And around that period of time, also, another literary influences that started coming into. Into the play was William S. Burroughs and his stuff. Obviously, I think that was probably my first real foray into, you know, can you call William S. Burroughs this stuff Weird Fiction? I kind of would.

[22:24] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I. Yeah. Anything where. Anything where an insanely wealthy man has a free range hog pin suspended in midair by multiple helicopters. That's weird.

[22:40] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the. I think again, his, you know, Burroughs literary style also began to kind of have an impact as well. Because I was. I was fascinated by his. His use of cut up, you know, of taking existing text and just literally chopping it up and rearranging it. And just the. Just from the idea of rearranging it, you were starting to get. You could kind of piece together a meaning out of what seems to be just, you know, random chaos. So, yeah, that was a. That was also coming into play. Let's see. And then I think close. I think he's either my second to the last year in college, I actually want to. For the first time watching Apocalypse Now. And it was Marlon Brando, right?

[23:47] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yep.

[23:48] BRYANT O'HARA: His recitation of the Hollow men. That's when T.S. eliot came running back and just body slam. Yeah. Once you realize. I mean. And again, it was the combination. I think the last time we had talked, I had said that when I heard T.S. eliot read his own stuff, I had the impression that he was reading it wrong.

[24:10] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[24:11] BRYANT O'HARA: That it didn't quite bring out what was there in the poem. And it turns out that after hearing Brando read the Hollowman, that was the Elliot being read. Right. You know, and that was like, okay, that's. That got me more into trying to. Encouraging me more and more to do poetry. But it still. It was that. But kind of influenced more by William S. Burroughs. So I was trying These sort of ideas and cut up, but still trying to incorporate some of the aesthetics that were in Elliot's work, which were varying degrees of success with. So I got to do a couple of these slams. Not enough to really gain a whole lot of any sort of recognition, but it was the first time I really got to perform live in front of people who weren't academicians, you know, people who are just looking to listen to something interesting. And that's when I had to really kind of learn how to perform on my own. So I continue to try to do that while also, you know, getting my education around near again. As I started getting closer and closer to graduation, I, you know, I started taking part time work and I worked in a couple of places. And it was my early dream jobs was to work in a library or to work at a bookstore. And I got to do both for actually most of the time. Most of my time while I was at the college.

[26:13] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Campus library.

[26:15] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, I was working at the campus library.

[26:17] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: In what bookstore?

[26:18] BRYANT O'HARA: The bookstore was called Ben Franklin Books. It was a. They had. They actually had a used bookstore that was close, kind of roughly facing the center of Worcester, I guess. They had a little square and the bookstore kind of face that. And then there was. They had a new bookstore that was around the corner which was like essentially kind of right next door to the Worcester Public Library. So I had books all around me. So I got to, you know, pick out some books that were. That would kind of one, feed my interest in science fiction, but also feed my interest in learning to write better. And I did encounter a book by another author, her name was Natalie Goldberg. And she wrote a book called Writing down the Bones, which is basically like a tutorial on how to. Basically how to kind of break out of kind of being in a rut when it comes to writing. She had these kind of rules for writing. It kind of helped in exercises as well. They kind of focus things on like single page assignments, something that you could do in the course of 15 minutes. And that not only helped me change my writing style, it helped me change things like what I wanted to write about. Because one of the things she dictated was write about the stuff you're scared about or write about the stuff that you feel kind of weird about, but to kind of basically push through it and just write. And in the course of that book, I found another poet. This one was Russell Edson.

[28:24] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I love Russell Edson.

[28:26] BRYANT O'HARA: And his what, what he was doing was kind of like where I kind of started aiming a lot of where I was going to go, Russell Edson's work is very surreal, absurd. Very much is all get out. Yeah, yeah. And. And it has a sort of rhythm to it.

[28:49] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: He's always marrying animals, as I recall.

[28:52] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah.

[28:52] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: A lot of somebody is in his.

[28:56] BRYANT O'HARA: Work, but I mean, the first time I actually listened to it, I found it, a tape of his work from some bookstore in Harvard. And I listened to it, and as I was listening, it's like, what did this guy just say? And it was basically about 45 minutes of just what, that.

[29:22] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, I discovered him through NPR and could still kick myself. At one time, I owned three copies of the Wounded Breakfast. And I thought, you know, oh, Diesel, these will never be worth anything. And I think I kept only one right away, the other two. And of course now, you know, I don't. I'm not sure that they've actually appreciated as I'd hope they might, but I wish I still had them, if only to be able to share them with friends. So.

[29:55] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, hearing his work read would be just hilarious.

[30:01] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, it's that. And it's very. It's extraordinarily strange.

[30:06] BRYANT O'HARA: Mm. So basically what I. Going forward from college was this combination of a renewed interest in music, a continuing almost constant interest in science fiction, a renewed interest in poetry, especially it being performed, and also the introduction of different literary. Different literary styles and aesthetics. So by the time I wound up getting ready to graduate, all these things were kind of in the mix, but they hadn't really been fully formed and they wouldn't be until I came back home. And that story was interesting in and of itself. I had before sworn that I would not come back to the South. I was really kind of tired of the. It wasn't. I. I don't. I don't like calling it racism because racism to me again is bigotry with a stick. You know, anybody can be.

[31:26] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, it's the system that is the system. This country was built on and for and through.

[31:32] BRYANT O'HARA: Right.

[31:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: To talk about individuals as being racists. Everything, it saturates everything. It's like we're soaking in it.

[31:40] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. Yeah, it's soaking in it. I like that phrase. It's like, you're soaking.

[31:44] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, that's right.

[31:46] BRYANT O'HARA: But. So, yeah, I. And I was. It took me a while to actually get around to the idea of coming back. What did you do?

[31:58] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Did you just stay in Worcester after graduation?

[32:00] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, I stayed in Worcester an extra year. So I. I went in. In 88. I did a five year program. Sorry, that's my wife. I'm on StoryCorps. So anyway. So, yeah, Lord, I lost my train of thought. Anyway.

[32:30] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: An extra year in Worcester.

[32:31] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah. Stayed an extra year. So I started leaving in 93.

[32:36] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Okay.

[32:37] BRYANT O'HARA: And the inspiration for it was what finally kicked off the decision was a song I heard. I was listening to Arrested Development. And the early 90s was also kind of the birth of the sort of Southern hip hop, and also different varieties of hip hop. Other than that, it kind of split from what became crime rhyme at the time, which would later become gangster rap. But also.

[33:15] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Wait, wait, wait. Crime rhyme.

[33:17] BRYANT O'HARA: Ice Teas term for it.

[33:20] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I'd never heard that. That's great.

[33:22] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, there was that. I mean, I didn't really listen a whole lot to nwa I did listen more to Ice Tea, De La Soul, a lot of De La Soul, PM dawn, and. And Arrested Development. So those were primarily the folks that I was listening to in terms of hip hop. But this. There was a song called. And I can't remember what this name of the song was from Arrested Development, but it had this phrase repeated, says, take me home. And I was listening to it. I was thinking, okay, as much as I don't want to do it, I have to go back.

[34:02] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[34:04] BRYANT O'HARA: Because I feel like some of the. I guess I feel like some of the. The. My own little childhood demons, I guess, from growing up and also going through high school were. I feel like they kind of needed to get addressed in order for me to really fully become an adult.

[34:27] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[34:28] BRYANT O'HARA: So I needed to actually go back to Atlanta and. Well, go back to. We'll go back to Georgia, to Decatur, to Atlanta, and actually kind of handle those demons when it came to either, you know, my own. My own personal growth, you know, both me and my relationship to the black community and where I wanted to go literarily, I did. And the first thing I tried to do was find places where I could perform. And I couldn't find a choir, not a. Not a vocal choir that could do what I really wanted. So I did the next best thing. I found a percussion choir. So I figured, all right, I've done voice. I at least got some rhythm. So, yeah, I can figure out how to beat a drum. And so I did find a community of poets that I could perform with. That was the Club Kaumba group that met in the West End, in Atlanta. And that's when all these things I've been learning from college, you know, and keeping from college, the interest in science fiction, you know, the use of voice, the. The sense of the absurd and, you know, the idea of poetic aesthetics, it was in that environment where I finally got the incentive to put all of that together, and that's when I was able to find a voice.

[36:19] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah, I'm curious about something. Do you remember. Have you, have you ever had direct interaction with the police? Like being pulled over or.

[36:31] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah, yeah, a couple times.

[36:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Do you remember when that first happened? Was that here before you went away to college or at Worcester?

[36:38] BRYANT O'HARA: That happened was when I was in the Glee club. We were coming back from a performance and a. Apparently a rape had occurred at the college where we were at. And they said that the suspect was a black person. So they basically interviewed every brown guy that happened to be in the college at the time, and I was one of them. So, yeah, I had to, I had to go in front of a police officer and I brought a witness, one of my fraternity brothers. I had this interview. I, I basically tried very hard to state that I was not going to give up information or give away rights that I didn't think I needed to give. I. According to the witness, they said, you know, you were a little combative in that. And it's one of the few times that I was.

[37:32] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[37:34] BRYANT O'HARA: So, yeah, I've had an experience that's interesting.

[37:39] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: I, I would have, I. I would have thought that, that something like that might have occurred in it. In the South?

[37:47] BRYANT O'HARA: No, no, this was in the North. So.

[37:50] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: But I, I gather your demons, which I guess we'll have to talk about next time that we're closing in on time. Yeah, we'll have to get more into the, the, the pre collegiate demons. So before we let kind of the college era go though, I want to ask, did you, Apart from Lewis Curran, was there a non choir director instructor who was your favorite teacher at Worcester?

[38:24] BRYANT O'HARA: Favorite instructor or teacher? Honestly? No, because he was my favorite. He was actually my favorite.

[38:33] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah.

[38:34] BRYANT O'HARA: Because he also taught music, so that.

[38:36] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Would have been my guess, but yeah, I thought it warranted asking, so.

[38:40] BRYANT O'HARA: So he was one of the few professors I had that I had more than once. So I taught. I was like an assistant in one of his classes. I sat in and audited class. I learned music theory, you know, in one of his classes. So, yeah, we, I mean, we knew each other for. We basically had been interacting for like five years. So. Yeah, no, I considered him very much a mentor in a lot of ways.

[39:07] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Yeah. You know, if he's still alive. Any idea?

[39:10] BRYANT O'HARA: Unfortunately not. He passed away, you know, maybe. I think it was like a decade or two ago. Okay.

[39:19] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Well, Bryant thank you again for talking with me one more time. But I feel like every time I think we're gonna get through the Bryant Ohar story, it's like.

[39:33] BRYANT O'HARA: I'm an onion, man. I got layers.

[39:35] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Configuration.

[39:36] BRYANT O'HARA: Right.

[39:36] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: So it just gets. It gets bigger the deeper I go, so.

[39:41] BRYANT O'HARA: Yeah.

[39:41] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Next time, Fritz. So.

[39:44] BRYANT O'HARA: Well, thanks for having me. It's been fun. I'm glad I got the chance to do it again, so.

[39:49] EDWARD AUSTIN HALL: Well, it looks like that's gonna be the case, so I think we're just gonna have to, like, keep. Keep doing these either as fill ins. Daniel, do we have a. Don't we have a Monday opening with the end? Thanks so much for having me.