Andi Marie Tillman: How Pam and Pawpaw went Viral and Took Instagram by Storm | MCP #146

Morse Code Podcast with Korby Lenker

On the season finale of the Morse Code Podcast, I talk with actor, comedian, musician, and self-proclaimed recovering Pentecostal Andi Marie Tillman about… well a lot of things. When someone shows up for the taping with pointy ears dressed like she escaped from the Renaissance Faire, you know it’s going to be an interesting hour.

If you haven’t caught Andi’s many viral improvs on Instagram and TikTok, I don’t know what your problem is. Her hilarious cast of characters — Pawpaw and Pam, Charlene and Nashferatu (there are loads more) — do that basically impossible thing: they make you stop scrolling. And watch. And laugh. And then you’re forwarding it on to someone who repeats the process. That’s why she has has a third of a million followers on IG.

I met Pam first, riffing her way through an IG reel. Heavy on the eyeshadow, smack-chewing gum, her mini-confessionals covered some broad territory — advice for staying married (“since everything that needs to be said has already got said”), reluctant gossip, candid admissions about candid emissions…

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I’m not from Appalachia but somehow I recognized the types: the pentecostal teenage preacher with the drawn-on mustache, bright-lipped Bethany, sage of the church of Jesus with Signs Following, who fondles the hedonic stones and spouts wisdom sloshed around like stolen water from the baptismal.

These people are as lovable as they are funny. To see the extant of the impact they’ve had on Andi’s fans, you need only scroll the comments, which are sometimes as hilarious as the things the characters say.

Like a lot people, I saw something special, and followed. So imagine when a few weeks later I met Andi in person at my local water hole in East Nashville, sipping a mocktail. I was surprised to find a thoughtful, quiet person, more inclined to listen than talk. Which is a lot when it’s me you’re listening to.

A few weeks later she and her husband Brandon were in our front yard, playing songs around a campfire. We were neighbors and now we are riends. Life in East Nashville is like that.

To me, Andi is a consummate theater kid, and while I have some weird inclination for the stage, I was always intimidated by the theater types: those outgoing folks who seem to reflect all the light that shines on them, and then some.

For Andi, it was in the theater that she found her tribe, where she felt most at home. We open our conversation talking about that, about the earliest manifestations of Andi’s prodigious talent, and the unique way she’s gone about finding its outlet.

Over the course of the hour we get into relationships, horror films, transgression and its increased difficulty in an age of tolerance, sobriety (and not-sobriety), and we even play a couple of Andi’s Joni-influenced originals.

It was a joy to speak with someone so imaginative, and it was a fitting end to this wild first season of the Morse Code Podcast.

Over the course of 46 episodes we’ve had musicians, actors, directors, writers, photographers, comedians — creatives, all. We’ve each got our own thing we’re doing, but what ties this cast of characters together is that all of us are answering the calls to our own creative path, and doing it the best we can in the constantly changing landscape that is modern life. We wish you, and us, luck.

Be back for Season 2 in mid October!

~Korby

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