It was Mark Roth’s exasperation with Kerouac’s On the Road that set him off on his first journey. He put the book down after 70 pages–and got on a bus. What was the point of reading about other people’s adventures, he thought, when he could have his own? So he set off in 1984 to go see a Chagall exhibit in Philadelphia. What he found when he got there was the Beach Boys giving an Independence Day concert on the steps of the museum underneath the “Rocky” statue. Fact, he decided, was certainly as strange as fiction.
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Roth is a monologuist, and his stories are based on his adventures. He’s always looking for new material, and he travels a lot. He doesn’t have a permanent address or phone number; instead, he gives you a string of numbers you can contact him at temporarily while he house-sits or stays with friends. Though he’s loosely based in Chicago, he moves around constantly, approaching his quest with the same fervor as the knights of the Holy Grail. Movement, he says, is “inherently good.”
As often as not, Roth will incorporate stories other people have told him into his monologues. “I don’t rule anything out if I can remember it. All the stories are based on real things,” he says. “A few go back to some of the earliest things I can remember, like punching myself in the eye when I was a little kid.”
