Thank you Moe Raka for being here. Oh hold on, oh a bigger name online.
Three.
My husband Alex is calling, hold on? What hey?
Hi?
How are you.
I?
I'm doing the podcast with mo Rocca. Say hi to moy.
Hi Alex, good to talk.
Did you call when I was doing Kesha as well? It's cold, perfect time. It is all right. I love you. I'll call you back. Say bye to MOI I was a T and T a sponsor. No, not at all. Hi, it's Elvis. Thank you for listening to my podcast. This is podcast number two. Hopefully there'll be three and four and five and six. If you missed podcast one with Kesha, roll back and listen to it. We talked about spaceships, we talked about a ghosts and she played with a
dead man's skull. Today's gonna be a little different. This is gonna be a little different podcast with someone I'm fascinated with, Mo Raka. I've been witnessed to Morocca since god back in the days. He was on MTV and VH one in those remember the eighties documentaries and things like that, And then I noticed Moroka on CBS Sunday Morning.
He also does a lot of work with CBS Television and now he has his own podcast, his own podcast called Mobituaries, which is fascinating for some reason it maybe he'll explain in a few minutes. Growing up watching his father become so exhilarated reading obituaries in the newspaper every day, he in the beginning felt it odd, and then he discovered there's a whole story to be told about people who have left us, but their legacy lives. And he goes to find those legacies and puts it in a
great Moroca storytelling way. And you're gonna hear that, I promise. He's such a sweet guy. I'm fascinated by each and everything he says. He's the smartest person I know, the host of his very own, huge award winning podcast, Mobituaries. Let's listen in to Morocca Moroka. Thank you for being here.
I always love to be with you.
Elvis, thank you for having me our second guest on my podcast. What's the name of my podcast? We have a name, right, what's the name of it?
Thinking out loud, I'm torn about being second because, on the one hand, I'm like, who was.
First, Kesha?
Kesha was first? Okay, and she's got a symbol in her name. I don't have that, I mean, right, because she's so Tollerci.
Well, we have to add a symbol. By the end of this podcast, we'll have a symbol added to your name.
She little Moroccas.
Now Mo Raka has a podcast out called Mobituaries, and we've talked about this on our show before. I just couldn't wait to get you back to go a little deeper into this.
You were dying to have me back for this exactly.
Growing up fascinated with obituaries, and you got that from your father, as I recall, right, tell the story.
Well, my father, that was his favorite section of the newspaper. I grew up outside of Washington, d C. There were two daily newspapers when I was little, the Washingtonton Posts in the Washington Star. And he would say, oh boy, the obituaries is my favorite section. And he would say it like that because he was not gloomy at all. And I think he liked the obituaries because a well written obituary is a real ride. You can really get
lost in it. It can be really exhilarating, and I think it's like a like a trailer for an Oscar winning biopic. It has that kind of sweep, you know, coming this fall, the trials, the tribulations, the ups, the downs, you know.
And there's something to be said for the fact that this person just passed away. So there's an energy there, yes, and there are a lot of family members and friends and colleagues hopefully are grieving, so that person is still somewhat a little alive when you read that obituary.
That's a great point. It's well, it's also right, it's like a first draft of that person's history, because I think that there I'm not sure that I've seen any
corrections issued for obituaries, unless so're for major figures. But I do think that newspapers, even the New York Times, get a lot of things wrong in these obituaries because you're talking to overwrought, highly emotional relatives sometimes and you know, there's only so much fact checking you can do because a lot of the stuff there's not, you know, public record for.
So yeah, you go down the list of all of the different episodes of mobituaries and it's just a wide variety of people who were very famous, people you've never heard of, and also concepts that have died or products that faded away. In deciding how to come up with these different facets of history to put on your Mobituaries podcast, how did you decide, Okay, it should be beyond people, it has to be things as well, like what was your first your first thing that you had on mobituaries.
So I think that they're two sort of main criteria, and I think you must appreciate this as well, that it has to be interesting to me, because the audience can sniff out if it's really not. They can tell if you're faking it, especially right and when it's just audio and you're just hearing, you're really focused on it, So it has to really get me in the gut. But I also think in everything there has to be
an element of surprise. So I think the surprise could be that it's a seemingly silly subject like sitcom characterists that have died, but then it ends up being surprisingly not profound, but you know, a little more substantific. It's more of sort of like, oh, that's interesting that creative choice that Gary Marshall made on Happy Days to kill
off the oldest brother, Chuck Cunningham. Because the fonds is becoming really popular, and they didn't need the older brother anymore, because why would Richie ask his older brother for advice on dating girls when he's got the Fonds living in the garage out back. Or surprise, you know, sort of between episodes within an episode, or you know, an episode about the death of a kind of banana which has a lot of serious stuff about it, but it's also kind of fun. I end up singing, yes, we have
no bananas with Andre de Shields. But then the next episode, well, one of the next episodes was really serious about a dancer who was from the original cast of Cats who died from AIDS, and I had a very personal connection to Cats. So I think it's all about keeping people a little bit off balance, surprising them because that they know exactly what they're going to get. I don't think that's interesting.
Well, another thing to think about here is, you know, in our business, in broadcast, if do they still call it broadcast under we call it broadcast anymore.
I'm a fan of broadcasting.
You I'm me too. Yeah, And you go back to the There is a broadcaster genius, man Paul Harvey, right, he used to have Paul Harvey. The rest of the story where he would talk about without using names, this person who was born in Oklahoma, who dated this woman. They had to divorce each other, and he went on to this other woman and the invented doctor Pepper. His name was doctor Pepper. And that's the rest of the story. I mean, he would take you to this story. Then
you're like, who is he talking about? And at the end he would like, just am you never knew there was a doctor Pepper. By the way, there was not a doctor Pepper. It wasn't I don't think.
It's not not in the Waco area at all. You know, maybe there was, but.
It was fascinating. Theater of the mind is what it was. And I find obituaries it totally scratches that itch for me.
Well, I love that, and I'm always i mean talking about it just a scratch. I mean that's how I look at it too, sort of. You know. Sometimes it's a subject that I actually want to spend my time learning about. So I think, well, I want to do an episode on this because I know nothing about it and I've always wanted to and now it's a good time to learn. But can I just ask you about
you know, when we were talking about the word broadcasting. Yes, a while to really sort of think about the word itself, that, you know, broadcasting as opposed to narrow casting because the world is so adomized now. Everything is so split up, like you know, everyone's watching something different, listening to something different. There are no water cooler conversations in the way there.
Used to be.
But you're a broadcaster, right, so you can't like, is it? Don't you do? You love? I know I do the creative challenge of trying to get as many people into the tent as possible.
Oh, absolutely, yeah. You know, we know that we have this massive pool to go swimming in, right, but we know that if we talk about this or that, or we forget to talk about that or this, the pool decreases because they lose interest. Right, So we find it a challenge every day to try to remain as broad as possible, and so we can scoop Actually, yeah, scoop the uh what was the word I heard it from the other day, scoop the spectrum. It is what it is. We want to get as many people who listen without
offending too many people. It's a weird balance, it's.
A really weird balance, but it's also a really cool creative challenge of how you keep everyone in without it just becoming bland, because then no one will be interested. You know, I have this roommate I had in college.
He's super genius or in Eisenberg, he's so smart, and he went and he's an English professor now you see Irvine, And we had this conversation and he said, you know, I could be teaching little seminars about super specific topics, but he loves teaching these broad based English literature courses where there are students that might be science majors, math majors, and this may be the last English course they ever take. But it's his job to keep them all in the
tent and keep them all interested. It's just a different challenge than if you have an audience that comes in that already knows they're interested in exactly what you're doing. Anyway, I just love, I love the challenge of keeping as many people in as possible.
Go to any high school in America and you'll see that, just like the college system, they have curriculum that is very specific, very very narrow and deep. When I went to high school, it was math, it was English, it was science. Now they break down science into fifteen different genres. You can choose which science you want to study. So I think, in my opinion, it's good to have a mixture of both.
Absolutely you want to go, yes, exactly, between electives and main courses, between like cheerios, and then the super specific serial like that's in that variety pack, like the really really one that's super specific.
Yeah, speaking of cereals, he's not here. Scotty b who sits in the studio that he has a podcast called serial Killers where he and Andrew, who you met on the way up. They review new cereals, breakfast cereals, and they bring old school cereals out of the off the shelves and it's just a podcast about cereals.
What's the latest hot pick?
Well, no, I tasted one today. It's a cereal from Mexico called It's Churros and it taste like little churros.
I love Mexican coke as in Coca Cola because it's less sweet, it's a little milder. So I hope that this Mexican chudral cereal is churro cereal.
It's it's hard to say that.
Yeah, it's a little bit hard to say that. I'm hoping that it's the American version of it. They it would there'd be way too much sugar, it would be too sweet.
It wasn't too sweet. I kind of liked it. It is like I said, it is from Mexico. Yeah, imported cereal. But the point of this is deep and narrow. Is this topic on this podcast that actually has a lot of fans?
Oh my god, and I love that in this they should have called this episode breakfast bad certain anyway, why not cereal coming from Mexico? Sorry, I'm with you, which is not appropriate. It's so appropriate Columbian, so I can say.
This is handed to me. Doctor Charles Taylor Pepper was born December eighteen thirty from Big Spring, Virginia. So there was a doctor Pepper. How he's mixed into the story and the legacy, I don't know. Maybe that should Doctor Pepper is still around, so it does not qualify for a obituary podcast.
Yeah, and I wonder what his specialty was this, doctor Papper?
Do we know surgeon? He was a surgeon? Okay, all right, I'm a Pepper, Y're a Pepper work, So I'm going to there was another episode you had the station wagon.
Uh huh, yes, yeah, the station wagon is well, I would say that's that's another major factor for me. And what I decide what topic I want to do is you know, we talked about scratching an inch, a feeling in your gut. It's a kind of warmth and the station wagon, and I think I'm pretty good at identifying this a subject a person that will make people go all and feel warm like John Denver was that way. I think I think it worked in doing a mobituary
about him. But the station wagon I think gets people in the same way because I think we associate it with larger families, with growing up and with the time where there were no safety precautions. None would be in the way way back, darting around like pinballs.
Right, well, dad's smoking a cigarette in the front, right exactly, We're all gonna die, yes, yes.
Exactly, and those wide turns and just being thrown. So I decide against the walls, which I loved, especially after a pizza party.
Yes, we had Spunky the dog in the back of our station wagon. Did you really going through the mountains of New Mexico toward Colorado? Spunky was in the back then there was the luggage in that back square area. And then Travis mcmhanon and I were in the back seat and day front. I heard Spunky in the back of the station wagon moaning and groaning, like what what do we do? We gotta let Spunky out.
Sorry, were you in the way back or were you in the back sheet?
No, I was in the back seat. Then comes the luggage and Spunky was in the way back.
The back seat was really boring. I'm surprised that you weren't in the way back.
It's just the way it worked. And for some reason Spunky ended up in the way back. We could even touch Spunky because those were like the limousines at the time. They were, you know, fifty feet long. So anyway, Spunky was making noises. I kept saying, Dad, you gotta gotta pull over. He didn't, and Spunky exploded in the back
of our station wagon. She didn't die, no, yeah, diarrhea thing and it hit the back of my head, the back of Travis McMahon said, the back of my mom's perfectly quaffed hair, in the back of my dad, and all the way up to the front of the car. That's my station wagon story. We all have one. If you're old enough, you have a station Wagon story. But to say goodbye and offer it its own obituary, I think it's excellent job.
I love that people really responded to the number of the memories, the depth of people's memories, and their attachment to the station Wagon. I'm surprised it hasn't made a comeback, and under a different name it will.
So I look at other characters that you've you've done, like Laura Brannigan, not a character but an artist.
I loved doing Laura Brannigan a obituary for her. We're very proud of that one because well, one of the things that was interesting and frankly eerie about it is that year, I guess twenty nineteen, the Saint Louis Blues hockey team was on this kind of miraculous winning streak. They went from last in the NHL and they would end up winning the Stanley Cup for the first time in their fifty year history, going from last place to winning the whole thing after they adopted Gloria as their
theme song. But the reason I wanted to do this was I loved that song growing up, like a lot of people, but I noticed in the press coverage about the Saint Louis Blues, about the hockey team, that there were fans that were asking for Laura Brannigan to show up and sing the song. They didn't realize she died, And I thought, this is an example of someone who had been a huge deal at one point and then died, and she died really young, and she just sort of
faded for memory right away, I mean. And so there definitely was space to do this because people hadn't thought of her in a long time. They'd forgotten that she died, they ever knew she died, but they still loved that song. So it was a perfect kind of combination of factors there.
So when you go to select your victims, when you go to select your either personalities or historical figures or items, what is the checklist you go down?
So I think the checklist is it helps very much if I have a personal connection to it or a personal ane personal desire to know more so, whether it's because I have some history with the subject, or there's something that I really have always wanted to know and
it grabs me on an emotional level. I think that there is some sort of element of surprise there, and I think it also helps and you can do this with any subject if there's a way to move beyond that person at different points in the episode to talk about kind of the larger issues or that person's Like with Benedict Arnold, the whole idea was he had been a hero before he was a trader, and so this was an opportunity at different points in the episode to
spend a couple of moments talking about other people that were heroic before they were traders, Like Felipe Petin had been this hero in World War One in France and then he was a Nazi collaborator during World War Two. He went from being you idolized in a great here road to being a scoundrel. Peanuts have went from being a favored snack to getting kicked out of schools and off of airplanes like the actual snack. So they went
sort of from hero to villain. And I'm not judging there's a good reason that people that you know, there are peanut allergies. Satan before Satan was cast out into hell, was you know, Lucifer was you know, was he was like besties with God. So anyway, so there was it was, so it was a good opportunity to kind of look at So so that's that's the fun of doing a longer form podcast.
Have you ever been digging into the meat and potatoes of a person and you find yourself emotionally, emotionally stabbed? Like, oh my god? Have you ever have you ever done a obituary about someone and you actually became emotional over it?
Yeah, that's a good Yeah, I hit a nerve for you. Yeah,
oh boy. I think the Laura Anagan was that way because I think we found the producer, Alison Byrne, found a recording, a phone recording of her having a conversation with someone that had become a friend of hers who was running her fan club, I think, and and Laura basically was she was talking about the Titanic theme song and how Selene Dionne had obviously sung it to phenomenal success, and Laura was basically saying, Ah, if only I'd had a chance to sing that, and I could you know that?
To me, I found that very poignant, like the idea of I just want the chance to show what I can do. And I've certainly felt like that. I think I felt like that at times so I found that very sympathetic.
And yeah, you gotta be careful assuming someone's alive when they're not. I mean, if you haven't heard their name tossed around for a while, it's good to check before you. For instance, we were on our show talking about actor Avagoda Ada used to be on Barney Miller Fish and he no offense and he almost looked like he was dead when he was alive. It's just the way he looked. He's had the baggy eyes whatever.
And we worked at CBS. I take no offense.
Okay, whoops. So I assumed he had passed away and we were talking about, oh, he was a character fish and then Barney Miller a great, great actor, great character actor or whatever, and uh, I basically pronounced him dead on our show and we moved on. That afternoon, I went to Barnes and Noble, the one that used to be up here, Lincoln, Lincoln, cetera. He was in the he was there. He was alive. A Vagoda was alive, and we all assumed he was dead. And obviously, thank
god our show wasn't. Wasn't his cup of tea? Can you imagine waking up and hearing you're dead and crazy.
Yes, And I think, you know, there's a story that I don't know if it's true that Alfred Nobel, the guy for whom the Nobel Prize is named, that his death was misreported, and the first line basically said Alfred
Nobel the inventor. I'm gonna get this wrong, but I think it was the inventor of dynamite, because he made his fortune and explosives, and he was so appalled that that was his legacy, that he wasn't dead that he then endowed the Nobel Peace Prize and prizes because as a way of saying like, oh my gosh, like this is not what I want my life to be, kind of like an Ebenezer Scrooge type thing seeing the future and going Okay, I've got to change this.
Do you ever go look, do you ever choose personalities from history that very extremely popular? Do you ever go because you found oh we just found out something about Joan Crawford that no one knows. Wait till we talk about this in an Hermo bit.
Yeah. Well, first of all, I think it's important to keep people in, to throw in a couple of really big names, and it's interesting I don't do it thinking, Okay, we're going to do it because we because we have we have this thing that no one knows. We didn't with John Denver, we actually didn't have something that no
one knew. But I also do I'm going to sound really pretentious here, but that the son Thai musical Sunday in the Park with George there's this line, everything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. And I really do believe that.
I love that.
Say it again, everything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. So don't go, uh, it's already been done. Somebody else did it. Well, no, you didn't do it, So if you do it, it will be different. Now I'm not saying remember that like Hollywood, lord knows. Like remember there was that year where there was like four different movies about asteroids, thing more than five about volcanoes. I'm not sure that everyone doing their own volcano movie was in fact, you know, bringing something
new to it. But but I think in this kind of a medium and podcasts, where you're not working with an army of people, you know, it's a lot of work, but it's also gonna end up being more personal. And and uh so, yeah, so I don't. I don't. I don't feel the pressure that, Okay, we can't do this person because this person is so well known, and the only way to do it is if we have you know, some you know, hidden tape that reveals that they had
a secret life. I don't think that's true. But I think the more you get into it, you'll you'll find something you know. And I do think it's important to have some big games.
So if I rolled through a New York Times this Sunday to the obituary column or they some of them are just short blurbs. They just have name, address, phone number or whatever. I mean, just like the bare minimum. And some of them are actually written. I mean, they have editorial staff that will write.
They have great writer.
Do you read New York Times obituaries every week?
I don't read them as religiously as I probably should. So I'll scroll through sometimes and then I'll select a few to read. I should read them more, probably, And I do know that the writers there, I know a few of them that they have a surprising amount of leeway because I mean, there's so many people dying all the time that they can't do full out articles for each one, and so the writers can go to the editor and say, you know, this person died, and it
doesn't have to be this person died yesterday. It can be this person died a month ago, and I really want to do something on one of my friends who's a writer over there. His first obituary was on the actor who played doctor Bombay on Bewitched.
Oh my god, do you remember his name?
I can't remember the name of the actor. But this writer said, you know, I want to do this, and it was published, like I think, like more than a month after that actor died, you know, which is fine, But so listen, it's a very popular section. It used to be fun intended a real graveyard. I mean, like you did not want to be an obituary writer. It's
where you were put out to pasture. Now a lot of journalists, print journalists, you know, really want to work on that section because it's like you're working for every section in the newspaper. You're working for business, you're working for sports, you're working for entertainment. Because it depends on who dies.
And of course it goes back obviously I'm making assumptions here. It goes back to your love of history.
It totally does because it's also I think I think you know Don Hewitt, who created sixty Minutes. I can't remember the exact quote, but I think he said, every story has to be about someone. You don't do a story about a topic. Now do as you pointed out, Tod do the station Wagon. But I look at the station Wagon as a character, almost like as a person. So an obituary is traditionally about a person, and so it's a great history lesson on that person and all the things that are attached to it.
I think, do you enjoy interviewing people?
Yes, I do. There are times in the middle of an interview I'm going right to the negative where I kind of go where I think and I hope you don't feel I know, I hope you don't feel that way right now. But there are times in interviews where I think, my god, this is work. I think I do think that.
But then you just got to like blame them. It's not your fault. You're brilliant, and exactly remind them of that. I make sure to always do that. But but it is worth it.
I mean, some of my favorite pieces I've done and I'm not being quite here. I really can't think of specific examples they have turned out well, and I thought, oh my gosh, that's that's pretty surprise. Seeing piece in the middle of that interview, I wanted to just just drown myself. I mean, it was so tough. Yeah, I think. I mean, obviously, it's great if you really connect with somebody, right.
If you have a personal interest in what they're all about. And this is why, this is why I love your interviews, mo. I always feel the best interviewers are the ones who inject themselves into the interview. And if you said something it reminds me of a story about when I was a kid with a station wagon, I feel like, well, okay, there's a conversation here. Rather than me just asking questions,
you give me a yes, no answers. You inject yourself into interviews with a very very very brilliant wit about you, and you definitely always come across as seeming genuinely interested in what they're saying. And there's a beauty to that. I don't think it's something you study or learn, it's something you just have or you don't.
Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I think that one of the things that has served me well that I sort of figured out along the way, and that you certainly know is is I think the power of sort of disarming someone. So you know that, especially with actors when they entertainers, when they come into an interview and they either had the story ready to go, or the pitch ready to go, or the persona ready to go.
Just pricking it a little bit. And I don't mean taking the piss out of somebody that's not other people are really great at that. That's not my style, but just kind of disarming them a little bit.
I don't know.
I mean like when the actress Eva Marie Saint, who's in two of the greatest movies ever made, on the Waterfront and north By Northwest, somebody had said, oh, she's not a great interview. I hate even saying that because she's such a great woman and I still want to do her. And I noticed that she was born on July fourth, and I thought, oh, that's kind of fun. And so the first thing I said to her is what was it like having a July fourth birthday growing up?
And then she was so surprised and that and she went and she lit up, and she said, it was wonderful. When I was a little girl, my father told me that the fireworks were for me, and she immediately we were off to the races. Like she she wasn't she wasn't thinking, Okay, I'm gonna have to trot out the Hitchcock story for north By Northwest, the Brando story for on the Waterfront, and so it was just this is going to be loose and we're just having a conversation.
I love that. Yeah, which leads me to this.
You know, I'm speaking in paragraphs, which I don't like when I'm in conversations with somebody. So I just want to I want to sort of tell you right now that.
I was making in paragraphs. You know.
It's interesting.
I was.
I was with a friend the other day. There were a group of us and I like this person, this theirfle but I was like, this person's really irritating me. And then the other friend later said, oh, it's it's because he doesn't understand how to have a conversation where it's like one line, one line, one line, one line. He only knows how to speak in paragraphs. And I said, yeah, that was what was driving me crazy. But we're in an interview here. So paragraphs are okay.
Well, I could see how you know, there are different types of conversations. One is like a tennis match where you rally your ball, my bile, you're all libel. But it's okay to have a beginning, of middle and an end to a thought. I think it's a story. You are a storyteller, and that's that's part of your curse.
Yes, but perhaps and look if we were at a coffee right now and I was telling you a story, or you were telling me a story hopefully as well, then we could be speaking in paragraphs.
But what if.
Every time I asked you something and then you answered, or I answered, You asked me something, I answered, and there was a story attached to it, with a name and an anecdote. I mean, you'd want to kill yourself. Not at all are people who do that? And it's really annoying, like, oh, this coffee is great, Oh yeah,
this coffee is good. When I was in Costa Rica in nineteen eighty nine, I had coffee and it was a rappic God that was a really really interesting blah blah blah, And then you just want to say, why did I even mention the coffee.
Well, so do you think that's a do you think that's a fault? I mean a faulty, a fault.
And I hate to come here and be criticizing people anonymously.
I just give me a list of names of people who do this. Go to out them right now out there. I want to give their phone numbers so that you can text them and say stop speaking in paragraphs and having an entire history and anecdote, you know, attached to everything.
It is eight thirty in the morning, we're having coffee, just catching up.
But I'll give you a good example of where there's before I forget because I'm brain dead. Moving from the BlackBerry to the iPhone. On the BlackBerry, which had the quirity keyboard and you can actually feel the button pushing down, I would write paragraphs. When I got the iPhone, it was lol, it was interesting. So I easier.
It's easier to take.
I know, but I missed that BlackBerry feeling. I miss being able to emote, I miss being able to.
Expand. Okay, that's fine. I mean I just remember when I first moved to New York and I was auditioning for musical theater and there was a vocal coach, and she was really sought after. She was very very good named Annie Lebau, and I had to come up with I was auditioning for character roles, like wacky second banana roles. And I started singing from a song, a song from that Bud Frump from How to Succeed in Business with that really trying saying, and I was doing it super charactery,
really laying it on thick. And she stopped playing the piano and she whipped her head around towards me, and she said, be easy to take, and it's bad into my memory.
That's the best advice ever.
And she said, easy to take. People will get it. They're gonna get it. You don't have to cram it down their throats anyway. I'm just thinking about that.
No, it's like we need to give people a little more credit.
Yes, the audience will get it. Like like I'm playing a nerd. Well, okay, we get it. You're a nerd. You have a nerd essence. I'm talking about myself right here. Don't need to like like really like like just lay it on thick. And so I don't know, I mean I think like and this anyway, I guess. I guess in the podcast, I'm trying. Maybe it's an age thing also, just trying to it's hard work and all that, but like letting the audience come to you.
See. For instance, you and I are from but we're about the same age. I'm a little older probably, Okay, yeah, yeah, So when you mentioned doctor Bombay on Bewitch, I'm thinking automatically, Okay, who in our audience has no frigging clue who that is calling doctor Bombay? How old are you? There's someone here in the studio thirty three, thirty three do you know who doctor Bombay is? From Bewitch? They don't get it. It's okay, doctor Bombay.
And it was a really it actually was. It was a really minor character. And I, frankly, I don't really remember. And I watched it all the time. I remember, I watched it and reruns all the time. I don't remember. I remember. And Dora and I used to confuse, and Dora with Clara I would get confused. Yeah, and Clara and Clara I confuse And uh, and what's his name? Who we all love? Who apparently was an impossible person to deal with? Derwood Dagwood, No no, no, no, no.
Paul Land, Yeah, yeah, did you read his biography? You got to read that?
Is it?
Was it a memoir or is it it was?
I think it was more biographical because it was it was. It was definitely they're telling the to you on pauland it was kind of funny.
I think it's so interesting people like Paul and Lynn and Charles Nelson Riley and I've read his two Yeah, Charles Nelson Riley. Well, Charles Nelson Riley, I think was had a much more. I mean, you know, I think pauland it was his his end was very, very sad, but you know, I think Charles Nelson Riley managed to and they both had great careers.
Yeah, well ended that. But I have to go back to a well, I have to go back to follow up on a question I asked you earlier. I asked you about interviews. Yeah, do you enjoy doing interviews? My point is in obituaries, you're basically interviewing someone who's dead. I think part of it, I feel like you're getting you go out and get the answers that you feel they would give you if you were speaking with them.
You know, I had not thought of that and I really will take that as a great compliment, and I really appreciate it because I'd never thought of that, but giving them a chance to tell their story, and you know, I've only thought about it in very tangential ways, Like I did think, without sounding too pleased with myself, that boy John Denver would like this. I think he'd be And it wasn't. We didn't canonize him. We didn't canonize him.
We talked about his own frustration with not being taken seriously, his great disappointment, like his devastation at not being asked to be part of We Are the World when he had been, you know, a celebrity who was one of the first to really put world hunger kind of on the map, as as you know, the first celebrity to do that and then was only a few years later, was considered too out of it to passe to be asked to be part of this song that had forty
different singers. They could have made space for him, so all that we included, but I do think that he would say thank you for for you know, sticking up for me, or at least telling my story.
I love it. Podcasts. There's billions of them. The one I insist you listen to his obituaries. Thank you, Thank you for all you give us, because it goes way beyond mobituaries. Thank you for being here, Morocca, thank you, Thank you for listening. I'm honored to have you here. My second podcast with Melrocco. That was fabulous. Make sure you subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to Thinking out Loud. By the way, who came up with that name? Is that the name of my book? What's my idea
to call it? Thinking out Loud? But I'm taking credit for it. Until next time, Thank you for listening, Feel free on your own think out Loud. Thinking out Loud is hosted by me Elvis Duran. The podcast is produced and edited by Mike Coscarelli. Executive producers are Andrew mcglsi and Katrina Norvel. Special thanks to David Katz, Michael Kindheart, and Caitlin Madore. Thinking out Loud is part of the
Elvis Duran podcast network on iHeartRadio. For more, rate review and subscribe to our show and if you liked this episode, tell your friends. Until next time, I'm Elvis Durant.