Ira Glass

They each, but especially my mom, had a kind of performy, hammy side.

I'll play you some of these.

I think you'll be able to hear that.

And I never asked them about this, but I think they also liked what a kind of like public sort of affirmation it was of them as parents.

Like, oh, see, we're a nice family.

Like, see, they were good parents.

And it really did change things between us.

Like, my parents are both dead now, and it still kind of floors me as this lucky thing in my life that I just stumbled into.

And so what I'm going to do today is play some of their appearances on the radio show and maybe jump in just a little here and there to point out things that I am noticing.

And there's one that I'm going to play at the end.

This is a conversation with my mom that still, honestly, it makes my skin crawl today the way it did the day we recorded it.

This whole episode today, the way this came about is that about a year ago, we started doing these bonus episodes that we put out in our podcast feed.

And so I'm constantly trying to think of behind-the-scenes stuff to share with listeners in these bonus episodes.

And that led me back to re-listen to these old interviews with my parents.

And then a couple weeks ago, I put these four interviews into a bonus episode.

And honestly, it came out so nicely that we thought, like, we should put this out as an actual regular episode of our show, one that anybody could hear.

And so that's what you're hearing right now.

And where I want to start things, this first excerpt is from an episode that we did called Adult Children.

This is the fourth time I had one of my parents on the radio show.

This is May 1996, which means that my mom in this recording is younger than I am right now.