Wait, Wait, Don’t Tease Me?

Okay. I know you have all been sitting on pins and needles to hear how the show went and when you can expect to hear my laugher on your local NPR station. Short answer? No one knows. I mean, someone knows, somebody in some office somewhere no doubt has it scheduled, but it didn’t air this weekend. Sadly, I was there for the birth of a rerun. The fancy radio term for this is an "Evergreen Show". This means they can run it whenever they need to and as many times as they want because it has no reference to current events.

Okay. For a brief moment I was bitterly disappointed - in a Damn! my huge font of knowledge of trivial current events is again wasted, Damn You Peter Sagal! kind of way. I got over it when they turned down the house lights, turned on the magic spinning disco ball and played Free Bird as the cast entered the stage.

Did you know they turn down the house lights down for radio?

The show started out with introductions of the cast. Peter Sagal is balding! Charlie Pierce is tubby and has thinning blond hair, Roxanne Roberts was wearing a disco dress, Roy Blount is older and gray, and oddly, in person, Carl Kasells’ speaking voice is difficult to understand. Or maybe it was a bad mike but I often had a hard time understanding what he was saying.

Because it was an "Evergreen" show there was no current event quizzing. It was all about random trivia of days of yor. Ben Franklin gave good sound bite, if he were around today he would be a regular on talk shows and I bet he would kill on Meet The Press and The Daily Show. We learned about how flush toilets were known at first as "Quincys" because he was the first president to have one at the White House. This is nice to know, but not as cool as "Colundezza Rice was shopping for what when she was verbally attacked in NYC?". I mean I care about flush toilets at the White House but not as much as I care about Bush Admin types getting flushed by the public for being asshats.

But it got better. I laughed myself silly. Charlie Pierce is a funny guy. I laughed for the whole two hours it took to do the show. It takes awhile, what with having to repeat things and a "Not My Job" author who talked and talked and talked and then talked some more. It was like he was under the impression he had been asked to speak at a filibuster instead of an hour long news quiz. He was folksey and funny and would probably been great at a book signing, where going off on tangents for three days is cool, but at the show? Not so much. It was like "come on! We have to give someone a chance to win Carl Kasells’ voice on their home answering machine!".

I thought all this time that people just called in while the show was on. They don’t seem to, it is not really a radio call in show. Listeners call, write or email for a chance to be on and then a handful get chosen and then the show calls them and I guess they say “Call X number at X time on Thursday” or some get told “Call at X time on Friday”. I got the feeling that they were on hold until they were needed for a quiz. One guy who called in for a quiz was so sure he was going to win that he and his wife bought a new answering machine for Carl Kasell to put a message on. He didn’t win and Peter Sagal told him not to count his Carls! . The guy was really sad he didn’t win - he probably felt dumb too as he was a history nut and since the line of questions were all historical, he should have won. Poor guy. Don’t Count Your Carls!! Heeee!

Even though it wasn’t a current events version of the show, it was really funny and if you are ever listening to WWDTM this fall and there is a lot of talk about “prostate warmers”, that is the show I was at.