 Good evening, and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for tonight's program, whether you're here in the theater or joining us on Facebook or YouTube. And a special welcome to our C-SPAN audience. Before we hear from Oroca and Rita Braver, I'd like to tell you about two other programs coming up here in this theater. On Tuesday, November 12th, at noon, historian Richard Brookheiser will tell us about his new book, Give Me Liberty, A History of America's Exceptional Idea, which examines America's history through 12 documents. And on Thursday, November 14th, at 7.30, we will host a Veterans Day tribute, World War II soldier photograph photographers from the U.S. Army Signal Corps photo collection at the National Archives. The authors of a new book, entitled Aftershock, The Human Toll of War, will join historians for a discussion of these less well-known images of the war's end. To keep informed about these events and others throughout the year, check our website, archives.gov. We're signed up at the table outside the theater to receive email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities. And there's a little gaggle of members of the board of the National Archives Foundation sitting in the middle of the theater. Nice to see you. Check out their website, archivesfoundation.org, to learn more about them and to join online. And a little-known secret that I tell everyone no one has ever been turned down for membership in the National Archives Foundation. Some people think of archives as a place for dead things. Writers who have not spent much time in them often fall back on adjectives such as dusty, musty, or crumbling, much to the agitation of archivists and preservation professionals. Even those who are familiar with archives may say the riches are buried. Rather than being custodians of lifeless remnants of history, archives are filled with many lives. The billions of pages in our care contain stories of both famous and ordinary people who intersected with recorded history. Moroka discovers the stories within the records, breathes new life into them, and sends them out into the world. With mobituaries, he takes a fresh look at the lives of men and women, those well-known and those now forgotten, and shares their stories with a new audience. Moroka is a correspondent for CVS Sunday Morning, host of the Henry Ford's Innovation Nation and host and creator of the cooking channel, My Grandmother's Ravioli. And I just watched three videos of grandmothers making ravioli. Check it out. It's wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. He's also a frequent panelist on National Public Radio's hit weekly quiz show, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Moroka began his career in TV as a writer and producer for the Emmy and PBD award-winning PBS children's series Wishbone and spent four seasons as a correspondent on the Comedy Central's Daily Show with John Stewart. As an actor, most starred on Broadway in the 25th annual Putnam County Spellingby, which I saw. He's an author of All President's Pets, a historical novel about White House pets and their role in presidential decision-making. No comment. Rita Braver is a national correspondent for CVS Morning, where she reports on everything from arts and culture to politics and foreign policy. Before joining CVS Sunday Morning, Braver was CVS News Chief White House correspondent for four years and spent a decade as CVS News Chief Law correspondent. She won nine National Emmy Awards and received the Joan Barone Award presented by the Congressional Radio and Television Correspondents Association and the Star Award from American Women in Radio and Television. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Moroka and Rita Braver. Can you believe they're doing this on a Friday night? I know. Okay. After this, go get a life. This is a hot thing to do in Washington. I mean, I guess this is what passes for wild in Washington. We both grew up here, so we know. And it's just, it's such a pleasure to interview Moe, and I should say up front that it's unlikely to be a hostile interview, I'm afraid. If that's what you're here for, I hate to disappoint you. And we are going to get to this great book called Mobituaries, very clever. But I think people, you're here in part right because you want to know about Moe Waka the man, right? Okay, great. That's why you're here. This is your life. So you grew up right in Washington, outside of this city. I did. I grew up in Bethesda. You were a suburban kid. That's right. I was a city kid. You were a city kid. I was a city kid. I took the boss in Massachusetts. What were you like as a kid? I was a shut in for a lot of it. I watched a lot of TV, and by the age of nine, I memorized a TV guide, granted this was pre-cable so there weren't that many channels, but I loved TV until my parents just basically threw me into the backyard because they said, you've got to get outside. You need to get some sunlight because the woman across the street thought that they had only two children. When they actually had three children, they really thought. My middle brother Larry, he said he had a younger brother, and Mrs. Barnett said, oh, right. And then I spent a lot of time in the backyard teaching myself gymnastics, as one does. You went to Georgetown Prep. You may have heard of it. The same school as Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh went to, and I just wondered if your experience was similar to his there. I will say that during my confirmation hearings, it was a little, it got a little contentious. It never went to the full Senate. I had a great time in high school. What I mean is I loved my teachers and I'm very grateful that my parents sent me to Georgetown Prep. I had a great experience with the Jesuits. You have- I wish I could tell you something that would help my book if we made headlines here. Nothing to report. Because I was the law correspondent, so if you want to go in that direction, we could do that, but no. The theater program wasn't great. I will tell you that. I've been told that it's a little better now. Let's talk about that for a second, because it's clear that you have a passion for aging movie stars, Broadway shows, and U.S. presidents, and you honed those things growing up here. I think that, I wonder, it seems to me that growing up in Washington, a taste for politics, you sort of get it if only by osmosis. I've always thought, I wonder if the gates of the White House sort of are the equivalent of what it would be like for a kid growing up in L.A. outside of Paramount Studios. That there's maybe, if not a little bit of magic, there's at least an interest in it. Do you feel like maybe you can be connected to it growing up? Yeah, I think you do feel that way, and sort of the president, the chief executive is almost like the above-the-title movie star in a way, and the taste for old movies came from my father. I had older parents. My mother doesn't like to hear that, but it's true. And I always liked that. I always liked that my friends' parents were boomers, were baby boomers, but my parents preceded that. And so I grew up watching a lot of black and white, old movies with my father. And actually, I remember, I'm sorry, the old Biograph Theater. Remember that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And when Grace Kelly died, I remember I said to my father, I said, Pop, who was she, or I wanted to know more about her? And the Biograph, and I know my memory is not playing tricks on me, the very next day, they played to catch a thief. They were able to respond that quickly. And so he took me down to see to catch a thief with Carrie Grant and Grace Kelly. And so that's where the old movies, what was the third thing? Well, it was aging movie stars, which is part of that. And then you went on to Harvard, and you were the president of Hacy Pudding. I should say, no, I went to school in Boston. I went to school, no, it's usually, I went to school in Boston, but you were the president of Hacy Pudding, and you performed on stage frequently in drag. And so the question is, because I know that's like a highly sought after thing to do with Harvard, and the question, what did you get from that? What did you learn from it? I, so the Hacy Pudding show is, it's pretty much all student run. And one year I co-wrote the musical and I acted in it all four years. And I've seen the video, and you can find it online, and you should. It doesn't translate well in video. Just like a lot of theater kind of looks ghastly. I mean, me as a woman is really ghastly. I think because it was student run, it really was like let's put on a show. We had to do it, and then there were professionals involved, but we hired them. And it was all box office revenue that paid for it. So we kind of had to, we had a nut, I guess they say in theater, to make each week of the run. And it was an incredibly creative experience. I mean, Harvard at least then had a fairly small C conservative curriculum. You couldn't major in drama. And I think it was just as well that that's where I put my energies. But you went on, you sing, you dance. I do. You appeared, and sometimes still doing professional productions. You were in Greece, you were in South Pacific. Did you really think you were going to have a career in showbiz? Yes, and I know that you and we heard all of your deserved accolades really in Rita as a journalist, and some journalists don't love hearing this. But I still do consider myself in showbiz, meaning that I think that interviewing and doing stories on CBS Sunday morning, I think of it on a continuum with performing on stage and writing for kids TV show called Wishbone. I think of it all as performative, not as in make believe. Because I think just like in any kind of acting, the best acting is truthful. But when I'm interviewing somebody, I kind of like to think of myself. My goal is to be best supporting actor, not co-star. But so I think it's like- I'm trying. No, no, no, I'm not meaning to, but do you know what I'm saying? That I think it's like to engage with an audience is sort of creating a relationship with this. Well, I'm going to jump ahead because I found myself wondering as I was looking at this wonderful resume of yours, which I know about. But as I was thinking about coming here to talk to you that because you have these so many talents, I mean, why does someone like you who can do so many other things want a job like mine when that's about all I can do? I can't do anything else. I mean, why? Well, I think it's fair. I mean, I don't think it's preening to say that we're on a pretty great TV show. And it is like going back to college and taking only electives, and which I really wish I'd done the first time around. You know, one week it's, you know, for me it could be, and for you, a piece about the history of the pencil. The next week it's the assassination of President Garfield. The next week I'm profiling Mitzi Gainer. And it's, you know, I'm doing a piece on snails right now for our annual food show. Better you than me. Better you. They're actually kind of cute when you see them up close. They don't, but the thought of eating them? There's a great protein source. And actually most of the escargot that you're getting are, have been long dead and are shipped in. Oh, that makes it better. But that's why you want the fresh ones. That's why you want the grass fed, the fresh ones. But no, when I was little, I liked the variety pack of cereals, the little six ones, because I didn't like the big box. And that's kind of how I feel about subject matter. Frosted flakes, sugar smacks, you know. Do you, when you're, I mean, you're funny. Do you have to take it down when you're doing a piece? You have to say, I really have to like behave myself because I'm going to be on national television. Yeah, yes, I think so. I mean, different pieces called for different, I don't know. I mean, I just try to stay in the moment. I mean, I will say this, that I had a vocal coach who, not a voice teacher, she was helping me with audition songs when I went to New York to audition for musicals. And I was doing, singing a song from how to succeed in business without really trying. And I was being very character. It was the role, the second lead of the role is Bud Frum. Which song? I play it the company way, wherever the company puts me. And he was sort of scheming, yeah, sort of the scheming number two in the show. And this vocal coach, she was, she turned to me in the middle of it. She looked at me and I'll never forget this. And she said, be easy to take. And, and I can remember the moment. I want to name her. Actually, I will name her. She was really a vaunted vocal coach. She really knew what she was doing named Annie LeBeau. And she said, and I said, what do you mean? She said, they'll get it. You don't have to cram it down their throat. They'll get it. I'm still working on that. But it was a great piece of advice. Like, be easy to take. The audience is smart. They'll get it. Like, don't try so hard. And I think when you're in an interview and you're invested in it and you're immersed in it, then that comes naturally. So under the auspices of Sunday Morning and CBS, you started a podcast called Mobituaries. I remember when you told me about this. I said, you see dead people. I'm glad you didn't say mobituaries. Is this just stuff you want to complain about? My friend Bill said to me, I always wondered if you, if you just thought of the title first and then you had to do something with it. No, that's funny. Well, look, Mo is a very convenient name for different things. So, I mean, thank God my parents didn't name me Cecil because then that wouldn't have worked. But I knew I wanted to do something with obituaries because obituaries are profiles of people and it's endlessly refillable. I mean, there's so many possibilities. And then I thought and then I hit on mobituaries. I can't even remember what the working title was at first. Well, I'm sure that everyone is probably here because you have listened to a mobituary, but we're going to get ready to look at one on video, a little bit of one. And this is one that I loved when you first did it because I didn't know anything about it. But this is a piece about the original Siamese twins. And I think we're ready for the video if they can get it going. This week on Mobituaries, the original Siamese twins, Chang and Ang Bunger, the brothers were born in Siam. Now, timeline in 1911 connected at the stern by a four-inch-long band of flesh. At the age of 17, they set sail for America and became two of the first celebrities of the 19th century. They would have been a celebrity, whatever, people magazine. They are an early kind of version of ultimately what would become known as a freak show, a traveling freak show. The boys would do somersaults together. They would tend to backflip. How did they learn to do a backflip? Well, they learned it on a ship. Okay, during Comm Seas. Yeah, Comm Seas. But it's when they settled in the mountains of North Carolina that their story gets really interesting. They didn't want to spend the rest of their lives on display. There were normal young men who wanted to have a family. The twins married two sisters, and between them, fathered 21 children. And then the outhouse was down the hill, so it's obviously gone. And the outhouse, do we know what the outhouse looked like? We know it was a two-holler built for the twins. I meet some of the descendants of the twins who reunite every year in North Carolina to celebrate their legacy. Is he on the Chang of the Aang side? Aang? And he must be the youngest bunker here. Yeah, he's Aang because, oh my gosh, look at him. Today's Bunker family members tell me their ancestors' extraordinary tale of grit and courage. They are the ultimate immigration story. America was always the beacon of the place where somebody could come and build a successful life. And they came here with nothing. Hey, I learned so much from that. I remember when it ran first. How did you decide to do that? So I wanted in the book and in the podcast for each topic to be something to trust my instinct and for it to be something that I felt either a personal attachment to or genuine excitement. And when I was little, there were three things I think that would always excite me or get my attention. Quicksand, tarantulas, or hearing about conjoined twins. I'm serious. If you heard about the birth of them, you would want to see them. I think there's something in us, hardwired in us, a curiosity about that kind of unusual. Some of us. Right. Well, no, in my mother, listen, with the podcast, she said that she wasn't sure she wanted to listen to it. And I'm glad that she really ended up liking it. I loved their story because they were essentially indentured servants. But how did you find out about them to know to do this? Oh, how did I find out about them? I found out about the reunion that takes place every year, the Bunker Family reunion. And I thought it sounded interesting. And so we looked into it and then started reading Yuntou Wong, who is the scholar, the author that's featured in that preview, read a summary of his book. And I also found it intriguing, by the way, that they're from Mount Airy, North Carolina, or they settled there, which is the home of Andy Griffith, which was the model for Mayberry. And Mayberry is seen as a quintessential American story. But I think they are the quintessential American story because they come over, they're immigrants, they're indentured servants. They win their freedom. They are pull yourself up by your bootstraps. They are some of the first entertainers in America. They settle down against all odds. They marry sisters. They have all these children. And then they own slaves. And that was the part of the story that you're with them, you're with them, you're with them. And then it's like you hit a brick wall and you think, oh, oh, I wanted to love you completely. And yet it makes it a more important story. And I think it makes it a more American story, the good, the bad, and the ugly, all of it. Do you generally think of one of the mobits in terms of a TV story first or a podcast first that you're going to turn into a TV story? Does it have a? A podcast. I mean, it's something that's going to be satisfying at 30 to 40, maybe even 50 minutes. I mean, some have been close to an hour. And interestingly, the longer ones have done better. I know we're in a culture where we think, oh my god, no one has attention spans. Everything has to be really, really short. It's been really heartening that our first season, the three most popular ones were the three longest. Wow. Do you have a process for building a podcast that you do each time? Or is there a kind of way of doing it? Or has it changed from? It's changed from, it's a very small team. Meghan Marcus at this point is the main producer and she's fantastic. And I work very closely with her. But I think we've been trying, after we've laid down a few interviews, to decide what is the central question that's going to be answered? With Audrey Hepburn, for instance, I knew I had a couple of different personal connections. I had worked at Macy's at Harold Square in 1992 when she walked by my counter a few months before she died and the floor fell silent. People were like, oh my god, it's Audrey Hepburn. Even if you had cell phones back then, you wouldn't have shoved your hand in front of her face. You knew not to do that. But I had noticed that with the rise of social media that she was trending regularly and I thought what is it about her? Can we answer that question? That why she, who was a big star but her career was only about 14 years long, there were other stars that were bigger than she was who aren't remembered in the same way, who don't persist. It was that dress and breakfast at Tiffany's. That's definitely part of it. I think it's in the eyes. I think that there's a yearning and a gratitude and her two sons told me they said it was almost starving to death and Nazi occupied Holland that gave her this quality that punches through on the screen. Studios tried to imitate her. They found other actresses that were beautiful and talented and they didn't have the same effect. I was gonna wait and do this a little bit later in the conversation but one of the clips that we have actually pertains to that Audrey Hepburn Moe bit. So I think if our video people are ready, we could roll the second clip, we think. Here we go. That's what I love about these because you're thinking you've got a story about Audrey Hepburn and suddenly there pops up Bill Clinton. The book is full of these wonderful little surprises and besides being all these interesting stories about interesting people, it's kind of a weird tour through Moe Raca's mind which is probably the reason I liked it so much and there's a whole section in the book that's so great about people who coincidentally died on the same day. You wanna give me some examples? I have them down here but you know them. Jim Hanson and Sammy Davis Jr. died on the same day. Too much talent on one day, they should've spread it out by a day and gotten their own new cycle. That was unfortunate. Mahatma Gandhi and Orville Wright died on the same day and obviously Mahatma Gandhi, it was one year after independence from the British Raj from the Empire and it was an assassination so of course it was a banner headline. Orville Wright lived 45 years past the first successful flight so he was down below the fold. Annette Funicello and Margaret Thatcher died on the same day and I kind of you know and they both had very eventful lives and I kind of like to imagine sort of a freaky Friday sort of thing like in the afterlife where they switch places and Maggie Thatcher stars and how to stuff a wild bikini, something like that which was an actual title of an Annette Funicello movie. Orson Welles and Yule Brinner, now that is an interesting comparison. I think it is and Yule Brinner as a died of lung cancer and actually taped a message to people, an anti-smoking message so I think that and that was a fairly new thing back then to do that and so his death sort of dominated. Not that it's a competition but it kind of is and that happened recently. Rip Torn and Ross Perot died on the same day. But also Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett and poor Farah. And I had to do, it shows you how we work in our program. I got the Farah O-Bit to do for Sunday morning. Right. And others got like four or five other people did Michael Jackson stories. Well, thank God you were doing that because Farah was great. I mean I have this theory that I think that people, I think audiences are smart and can see into a person if they've been in the public eye for long enough and I think there was a reason that Farah Fawcett, we liked her long after her pin-up days. I think that there was something really decent about her and the way she dealt with her cancer at the end and you know, and cutting off her hair in public. I mean she could have hidden away and obviously Michael Jackson was a bigger story but Farah, I wanted to give her some love. Because with Farah we also knew she'd been sick and with Michael Jackson it was a big surprise. Right, exactly. We kinda jumped ahead and so I didn't get to ask you the question that I wanted to. The big question about this book because I've said what I have thought about it but you tell us a little bit about why you decided to write the book and for people who are gonna read it give us a little sense of what's in it. Well, it's different kinds of death and I wanted to, I wanted the book, I tried all my pieces and I bet I think you do this too, to sort of balance the protein with the carbs. I think that I wanted the fun which, that's the carbs, right, that's the sugary stuff and then the protein which is the substance and to surprise you so that a chapter about the death of sitcom characters is really fun in a ride through your favorite, like the two Darren's and Chuck Cunningham and Opie's mother who was dead before the series started. But also sort of makes you think a little bit about suspension of disbelief. But I have everything from the death of the Fantastic which is the death of the belief in dragons. I was reading a Tom Paine biography, Tom Paine is also in the book, death of a forgotten founding father, a very underrated founding father and I found a parenthetical that mentioned that in 1735, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, went to Hamburg, which was then an independent city-state now, part of Germany, for an exhibition of a seven-headed hydra and everyone in Europe was talking about this seven-headed hydra in 1735. It was like a Picasso show at MoMA. I mean, it was a mob scene and he showed up there and went, this isn't a seven-headed hydra, it's a bunch of snakeskin sewn together with a weasel skull and feet and some monkey gut stuffed in. It's not real and he said God would not create a creature with more than one head, which I'm not thinking anyway, but the Chang and Ang were not, they were two different people, but just like that, very soon after, this belief that people had had for millennia that dragons and creatures like dragons were real was dispelled and I thought that deserves a mobituary, that deserves a commemoration, that moment. So the book is, how many of the things that are in the book are things that you've already done podcasts on and how many of the things that maybe you're thinking of doing podcasts on or never gonna do podcasts on. Let me tell you something, 75% of the book is all new material, it's not in the podcast. It's so much that I almost had to write my own mobituary and putting this together. You say in the book that you're kind of sad that you can't write a mobit about Barbara Streisand because she's still alive. She's immortal. Right, she's immortal. She's immortal. So she'll never be. Do you ever kind of find yourself thinking, gee, I can't wait for that person to die? No, not Barbara. No. Never Barbara. Never Barbara. We love you Barbara. No, I mean, have I thought about people that will make good mobituaries? Like you're interviewing someone and it's going to the back of your mind. Yeah, I see like the vulture circling overhead. Like in the cartoons, imagining. No, I mean, there are people that I've interviewed that when the time comes, I think it would be an honor to commemorate a person like that and putting it as nicely as I can. But because I love that person, I think that person has an extraordinary story. Do you ever start to do a mobit on someone? And I think we've all done this with profiles. We've done it with people. You think, oh, this person will make a great profile, a great mobit. And then you find out that you're not really that interesting anyway. And maybe you put it aside trying to think of how you can do this later. Well, there were, and this wasn't because she wasn't interesting because she really is. I had this idea and I couldn't quite execute it, which is about Nellie Bly, the great muckraker who wrote 10 Days in a Mad House, went to what is now Island in the East River. What am I thinking of? I wanna play Inspirations. Oh, okay. Well, I'm gonna get you to ghost write it then or no, I'll give you credit. No, I had this idea that it could be written as a screenplay treatment, just trying to play with a different form. And it didn't quite work. If there is a sequel, I would like to do that because her story is amazing. And then I think based on Jules Verne's 80 Days Around the World, she then beat that. She went around the world and actually beat it. I mean, she was an extraordinary figure. And she was a woman and she got to be a journalist. Right, and it's extraordinary that there is not, I mean, that to me is total Oscar bait. Like I wanna do a whole section on roles that will win you an Oscar. I mean, Amy Semple McPherson is probably somebody like that too. You referenced Tom Paine and I had thought since we are here in the National Archives. I and our mutual friend Peggy Noonan who got an advance copy of the book said, be sure and ask Moe about Tom Paine because most of us heard a little bit about Tom Paine as we were studying American history as the writer of Common Sense. But what happened to him afterward was absolutely news to me. Even though it happened 200 years ago. So talk a little bit about that one because I think the substance of it is so fascinating. So Tom Paine wrote Common Sense, which was published about six months before the Declaration of Independence. And it really galvanized, marshaled the colonists to support a break with the crown. And Common Sense did even more than that. Before Common Sense, the colonists really viewed themselves as Marylanders, Virginians, New Yorkers. They didn't really see themselves as Americans. And American was also a derogatory term. He kind of rebranded it with Common Sense. And so it was also the way that he wrote it. Most of the country, the future country was illiterate at that point and it was meant to be read out loud. It sold, I mean there are varying estimates on it, but it's a pretty safe bet to say that based on the population at the time it's the biggest selling American publication in history. And yet, when he died, only six people showed up at his funeral. Three were the housekeeper and her two children. And the obituary at the time, the very paltry obituary read in part, he had lived long, done some good and much harm. And in the book I give sort of PR advice on how he could have been a first tier founding father. One of the things he did was when he went over to support the French Revolution and was thrown in jail because he was a man of such conviction he was against capital punishment. And the Jackamins loved that guillotine. I mean, cutting off heads with a real crisp efficiency. And so he was thrown in jail and the other founding fathers wanted nothing to do with him, they didn't help him. So he wrote an open letter trashing George Washington. And then he wrote Age of Reason where he refuted the divinity of Christ. And so, I mean, father of his country, son of God, I mean, you gotta know your audience. And so he was alienating everybody even though most of the founding fathers were deists as he was and agreed with him. But what I found, talking to one of his great biographers, is a lot of it, he had one setting. He was a revolutionary. The other founding fathers were revolutionaries who became statesmen, who eventually worked the Georgetown cocktail party circuit. I mean, they knew, he had one setting. He's the guy at dinner where you just wanna say like, okay, I get it, but can we not talk about the issues? Can we just give it a rest? Can we just talk about reality TV for like 10 minutes? And he was incapable of that. Which, and ultimately, I don't think he would have cared if he wasn't a first year founding father, which is the beauty of Tom Payne. So, so many stories like that in the book about people that you either care about but didn't know things about, or people which is more interesting, people you never knew that you cared about, but Mo, you make us care about them in the book. And in the podcast, too. Did I make you care about Lawrence Welk? I happened to have watched Lawrence Welk as a child with my grandmother and done the polka with my sisters while my grandmother applauded. So yeah, so it was touching for me as well. He's a badass. I mean, there are just so many great people. So what do you hope that readers will get from this book? I hope that readers will be delighted because that's, delightful is the kind of word my father loved to use. And it's a great word and it's not used enough and not enough importance is placed on it or value is given to it. So I hope that people are delighted by it, have fun with it. And I hope that topics that seem heavy and are important like the black congressman of reconstruction, that pocket of history that's been forgotten, that it will go down easy and it won't seem like, oh, we're learning about reconstruction, we're sitting in a classroom. I mean, I like to take on challenging topics and make them go down easy. And I like to take topics that seem like they're just gonna be fun and fizzy and make you go, wow, I didn't expect to choke up over the story of Billy Carter, say. I mean, you know, and I've been really gratified. That was the first podcast of the second season. It's out now, I talked to President Jimmy Carter about Billy and it is a poignant story. It's also a funny story, but it's a poignant story. When I saw the story and read it, I kept thinking of how when I worked as a producer behind the scenes and we would go to Plains, Georgia and set up shop, Billy would always drop by our trailer with a six pack of beer even before he had Billy beer. Is that right? So yeah, he just wanted to hang out with. And what was his personality like? You know, he was always, he was both complimentary of Jimmy and always very happy to put Jimmy down a little bit. Really? And I think, and honestly, like I have interviewed President Carter and it really wouldn't have occurred to me to do a story about Billy now and it's worth reading. And you'll learn things like the fact that Moe has been to TGI Fridays on five continents. Is that true? And I tweeted that out. I know that, oh God, was I violating new standards? But I tweeted it out kind of hoping that TGI Fridays would say, we'll fly you to Australia. So you, or we'll let you dedicate our new Antarctica, our seventh TGI Fridays. So while you're writing this, because again, you talk about the journalism side versus the personal side. And I loved all these little personal sides in the book, but I wondered why you decided to include them because in many ways the book is journalistic and then we're frequently and pleasurably, I would say, interrupted by your musings on whoever you might be writing a piece about. You know, that's great. I hadn't really thought about, it felt like the right thing to do. It felt like if I wanted to share my perspective in any of my story and judiciously, because it is a history book, this seemed like the right way to do it and make it, I mean, I think of like that Stephen Sondheim quote from Sunday in the Park with George, everything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. And so, you know, I thought the story of Elizabeth Taylor and her advocacy on behalf of people living and dying with AIDS has been told, why am I telling it, but I'm telling it because it's me. Say the name of that chapter. It's people who... Celebrities who put their butts on the line. I wanted to talk about celebrities who actually put themselves out there like Marlena Dietrich, who, you know. A real serious historical home. Well, I mean, but the story, I mean, yeah, I think Marlena Dietrich's story is a pretty great one of, you know, remembered as a screen star, but also really did put her butt on the line. That was one I didn't know. Yeah. I mean, I really didn't know. You say, and we're gonna go to questions in a minute, but you say in the intro to a book that almost everyone eventually ends up forgotten. I know where you got it from. Well, you can tell. I got it from you, basically. Yes, well, not from me, but. Yeah, but. Well, you got it from someone I interviewed, and you can explain that. Well, this was, and I thank you for this because Rita is in the introduction to the book because in 2002, I think you interviewed Nora Ephron about a musical called Imaginary Friends, which was based on the story, The Rivalry Between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman. And I remember this piece, and you saying to Nora in the middle of the piece, how do you wanna be remembered? And she kind of laughed, and she said, remembered these two women were incredibly famous. They've been gone, what, for 10 or 12 years and no one knows who they are. And so she said, I don't expect to be remembered at all. That's what Nora Ephron said. Cut to last year when I was working on the podcast for Audrey Hepburn, the episode for Audrey Hepburn, I wanted to use a piece of an interview I had done with Nora Ephron where she had a great story about Edith Haddon and Audrey Hepburn. And it's a small group of people who work on the podcast, but all the people under the age of 35, really smart people, whip smart, had no idea who Nora Ephron was, and she'd only been dead for about five years. So everyone has forgotten, and I actually find that kind of liberating in a way. And so. But Sherry, you're doing your job to revive some of these great figures. I hope. And to make us care about things that really, you have this weird ability to make us care about things that we never thought we'd care about. I mean, I never really thought I'd care about the end of Prussia or something like that. Well, I mean, especially with the people, maybe not so much with the things, but Prussia and the station wagon. Which have so much in common. I know. Can you imagine? It would be very difficult to be out of on Bismarck riding a station wagon because the Picklehauben with the vertical spike, you'd need a sunroof for that. But that's what it's called, Picklehauben with the spiky helmet. I try also, I've realized, and I thought about this with Billy Carter, to be compassionate with the past, to cut the past some slack. Because I think that there's a tendency to disqualify people from the past. And I talked to, here's a name drop I'm happy to do, name drops with David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin for a piece that will re-air soon. It was preempted on the East Coast a few weeks ago. But Doris Kearns Goodwin, she said, she lit up when I brought this up. And she said, my God, she said, FDR, he should have allowed more Jewish refugees in the country. That internment of Japanese Americans was a terrible thing. But he brought us through World War II. He brought us through the Great Depression. And she said similar things about Abraham Lincoln. So I air on the side of generous. And I think maybe that's also the influence of Sunday Morning, our colleague, Mary Lou Teal, who actually got to, you knew Charles Kralt also, right? Yeah, of course you did. But Mary Lou had, and I didn't get to meet him, but Mary Lou said that Charles Kralt said, you know, it's okay to like the person you're interviewing. And that's, I feel like I like all the people in this book. And that's the joy of Sunday Morning, too. We can do that, we can do that. Well, we have this great audience, so we promise to take some of your questions. There's microphones. And the only thing I will ask is to come up with questions, not speeches. That's gonna get the biggest round of applause. Please, please, I love questions, please. Please, come on. Come on. Someone's making his way out. While he makes his way out, I'll ask you a quick one that I'm sure that everybody asks you. In this book, we obviously know you have a soft spot for Audrey Hepburn. Is that your favorite? Oh, is that my favorite? I mean, it's one of my favorites. Gosh, there was a lot. I love telling the story of Herbert Hoover's pre-presidency and John Quincy Adams's post-presidency because they both had lackluster terms in office but had extraordinary lives on either side. So I love doing that, yeah. Well, let's start over here. Hi, speaking of Charles Corralt, I was just thinking of him as you were talking and I thought that would be a great opportunity for you to go cross-country and interview people. Is that anything that you would consider doing, especially with your history with my grandmother's ravioli and other things that you've done? I'd love to do that. Well, I think it would be a great idea and I'd drive. Okay, that's great, thank you. That was the missing link. Thank you very much. All right, let's see some more people from the other side, but we're gonna go over here now. My impression is from the way you were describing your childhood that you seemed to be more of an indoorsy kind of guy and watched a lot of TV. How did you come out of that and feel comfortable performing in front of people? Well, I think I always had an impulse to perform. I'm sure my teachers, oh wait, my fifth grade teacher is here, I think. Is she here? Are you here? Ms. Vinisee, are you here? I think, oh, she is there, she's up there. Hi. Hi. She's up there. No, I had to stick with the sixth and fifth, but anyway, I was in the mixed fifth, sixth, right? Anyway, so I always, she can vouch for this, but so I would call it performance, others would call it disruption. Maybe fueled by sugary cereal. But yeah, I think it was, I'm glad, I'm fortunate that my parents encouraged me to perform. I started doing local theater here in the D.C. area with something called the Bethesda Academy of Performing Arts, and that really took energy, the large amount of energy I had, and it channeled it, I think, in a productive way. I loved it, it was an extraordinary, putting on shows and performing, and I performed at the Post Office Pavilion, which is no longer the Post Office Pavilion, when it first, Washington. Some of us, Washingtonians, don't call it the Post Office Pavilion. Okay, all right. Okay, I performed there for its inaugural in the mid-80s, in sequins, actually. The tapes have been burned. Well, as a former, oh, I shouldn't say former. Once a teacher, always a teacher. As a retired teacher, my hat off to you. Yeah, this is great. I'm interested in your research process and your sourcing of materials. In terms of the research process, I assume the journalism side of you has trained you to work on deadline, but I would think the actor side of you makes you get lost in these characters, and how do you sort of balance that to get the product out? Well, there were a lot of YouTube polls, I'll tell you that, that I went down, and I think there's a story that sticks in my mind that I think told about Rodgers and Hammerstein, that when they were working on The King and I, that Oscar Hammerstein was over-researching and getting so involved in the history of the court as I am, and that Richard Rodgers had to stop him. So I always keep that in mind and try to not go too deeply in, and so I would sort of oscillate between kind of the substantive history part and then the more personal side, and then figure out what I needed. If I were to do this again, and I hope I have the opportunity, I would try to identify what the takeaways are early so that it doesn't sprawl out of control, but that was a challenge. So Rita, my speech will be less than 20 minutes. My guest tonight wasn't able to make it, but I was asked to ask you, Moe, there's a story in mobituaries about a relative of yours and a trumpet that we should hear about tonight. The feedback I got brought tears to my eyes, so maybe you could share part of it with us. Well, so as I wrote this book and worked on the podcast, and I mentioned the word delightful before, a word that my father used a lot, I found that so many of the things I wanted to write about and talk about were things that I inherited from him, affection for them, and even more than that, thought what would he, I lost my father in 2004, what would he think about these stories, would he like them, which I think is a pretty great motivation, it works for me. And then on father's day, I sat down and just started writing about him, and what I, I wrote about that at the age of 50, in 1979 for Christmas, my mother went down to a pawn shop in D.C. with her mother who was visiting from Columbia, my mother's Colombian, and my mother bought my father a trumpet. My father had played the trumpet a little bit as a kid, but then life intervened, he started a business, he got married and he had three sons, and he longed to play the trumpet again, and he regretted stopping, and he'd only, he played it for a short time when he was a kid growing up in a factory town of Lemonster, Massachusetts, and I can remember on that Christmas morning when my father opened up the case, and he was so excited, and every week, day morning, my father would play in the cellar in our house, in our split level in Bethesda, he would play scales, he had taped on the wall Xerox sheets that were telling you how to improve your embouchure, which is how the trumpeters lips form around the mouthpiece, it's really, really hard, and then at night for an hour, every night he would play Dixieland jazz, and I would put on metal roller skates that could go over your sneakers, like that would stretch, and I would skate around, and there was a pole so I could grab the pole when I skated by and spin, like I was doing a sal-cow, and the dryer, my mother's not gonna like my saying this, but the dryer had crapped out in like the late 70s or something, so we would line dryer clothes, which would make it really fun so that my father would be playing the bass and street blues, or when the saints go marching in, and I'd be going in and out of towels and sheets, and when, and my father did not think that he was going to get a record contract, he didn't think that he would be playing at clubs in New Orleans or New York, he was doing it because he loved it, and he loved it so much, and it was an act of faith and of love, and it made a big impact on me, and yeah, so that, and after I finished writing that, my editor said that should be the final mobituary in the book, and I made that the dedication of the book, and yeah, my father wasn't a cynical person, he had a real sense of the romance of life, and I know he would have loved Sunday Morning, I know he would have loved that I was on it because he had that same kind of wonderment of, oh, what's it gonna be this week, and I think that was a real gift for me. Is there anybody, I have a million questions, but do you wanna, yes, now I'll repeat it if you want. She wants to ask about Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which. You all, tell them for people who don't know, I think they all do, but just in case, well, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me is. Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me is an NPR news quiz comedy show, it's been on for 21 years, it's hosted by my friend Peter Sagle, who is the Fred Astaire of public radio, because he makes what is actually hard look easy, it's really hard what he does, and so there are a panel of guests each week, I'm frequently one of them, sounding off about the news, and about the big headlines and the small, and then there's a, then it's. And not afraid to look silly. Not afraid to look silly, which is really, really important, because I think that's, you have to be willing just in life to fall on your face, and when we go there, you say what's on your mind, you don't go in with prepared jokes, because what makes it work is, it's what, you know, you're kibitzing with friends. And so I don't really prepare much at all, we have to write a little thing called The Bluff the Listener, which is kind of a fun segment, so that has put out a lot of time, we write them on our own, but that show was really important for me because it made me really comfortable with sounding like myself, which is this book is also, you know, over time, and I'm sure you feel this way, you learn to trust your own instincts, and I would hope that if I'm interested enough in something and I execute it well, the audience will be interested in it, and if I'm not interested in it, I'm not gonna be able to fool you. And similar to that, and wait, wait, don't tell me, when I started doing it, I tried to sound like someone else, and because I didn't like the sound of my own voice, and then I let go of that, and I had a better time, and I got more laughs, so I think there's a lesson in that. Yes, sir. Yeah, from what I heard, it seems that the people you write about are people that you're appreciating in some way, or artistic, or for some quality they have, is there anyone about where you started writing, thinking that someone that you liked, and you learned something, like what you learn about the young brothers, the Siamese brothers that they ended up, and all the slaves, have you learned something about someone that you thought, well, this is just too terrible, and I'm gonna drop it, I'm not gonna write about this person? Well, that didn't happen, but there were people that early on I thought, oh, this person might kind of be, people might have a sentimental attachment to this person, but then I was told that they were either not that interesting or kind of awful, and so, and I hate to even, even though, look, dead people, I highly recommend writing about dead people, they're just so easy to deal with. Like, they don't have publicists, they don't have handlers, well, some of them actually do have estates, right, and lawyers, I'm a little careful about trashing the ones that I didn't, but there were a couple that I thought, oh, this person's not gonna be great. I were almost out of time, but these nice lady, I think is gonna be our last question, so it better be good. Oh, I feel excited. The pressure's on. Yay. So, you were talking about how inspirational all these people were through writing mobituaries, and I couldn't help but wonder and think about wishbone. Would you ever consider doing a TV show similar to wishbone about some of these mobits so that you could reach your younger audience? Obviously, they would have a lot to learn about these people as well. So, wishbone was a PBS Kids series that I wrote and produced for in the mid-90s, I'm very proud of it, and I thought what you were gonna ask is, have you ever considered doing a mobituary for wishbone the dog? Oh, so good. And in fact, we did start one on the podcast side for soccer was the name of the dog who played wishbone, and I do wanna do one because animal stars, I mean, people have a huge attachment to them. So, yes, but mobits for kids, oh, I don't know, that might be a little bit tricky. We might have to be euphemistic. I'm like, oh, I'm writing about somebody who just went away for a long time. So, he'll be back. Just don't worry about it. The good news is that you can go out and buy this book, you can tune into a podcast, you can watch Mo on one of his 30 or 40 television programs that he works for, hear him on the radio. So, tonight we've had a, just a little tiny smidgen of the wonder of Mo Raca. Thank you. Thank you so much, thank you, thank you so much. I think Mo is gonna sign some books too, huh? Yes, there will be a lot of you other than people. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you. Oh, it was so much fun. Appreciate it. Thank you, and so nice of all these people to come out on. Yeah, yeah, very nice. You're free to sign this book. I need you to help me, I'll go out there. Yeah, of course, please. What is this? This is a First Aid Company. Weren't you the White House Correspondent? I was. When Clayton was in, yeah. Where would you like this book?