Wait, Wait!

I'm put off writing at least one blog post about India because the prospect of sifting through hundreds of photos and attempting to sum up a trip like that is intimidating. One thing I've done to entertain myself while I'm stalling has been to drive into Denver to watch something I'd never seen before but was intimately familiar with: a live taping of the radio news show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

I'm a big fan of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. My family sometimes spent Saturday mornings walking quietly around the kitchen while preparing and eating a late breakfast, all the while listening, rapt, to this hilarious show. Once, while driving through Georgia, I got pulled over. I didn't bother to argue with the policeman or try to justify the fact that I have been speeding. I took the ticket as quickly as possible because it meant being able to turn my radio back on faster and thus get back to the show. So the prospect of seeing it in person was exciting, if a little strange. Would the hour's drive to Denver and the price of the tickets be worth seeing at something that was meant to be listened to (for free)?

In short, it was. We arrived to find the entry to the Buell Theater absolutely jammed with people. Everyone seemed excited, and it took ages to pack them all into the theater, so we started a little late.

Poundstone

The show itself lasts 45 minutes on the air, but we sat in the taping for over two hours and even left before Peter Segal, the host, re-recorded some of the flubs after the official end. I knew that there would be some editing and some content that didn't make it onto the show in the end, but I had no idea there would be so much. Paula Poundstone in particular added to the timestamp. She was the funniest comedian of the three on the panel, and one of her trademarks is going off on long, rambling rants about whatever topic happens to be on the table. She alone was probably responsible for  at least half an hour of the runtime. 


It's always a little strange to see people whose voices you know well. I always imagine what radio personalities look like an almost always turn out to be dead wrong. Tom Bodett looked younger than I thought he would and Paula Poundstone was older. Peter Segal was shorter and Bill Kurtis was rounder. At first, it took a little while to reconcile these strange appearances with the voices that were so familiar, but eventually I settled in.

Bodett

Segal

Kurtis

 Each show features a famous a guest, and this time it was John Hickenlooper, democratic governor of Colorado. Although Colorado is a thoroughly purple state and therefore John Hickenlooper is controversial by virtue of his party identification alone, this was not an audience that had mixed feelings about him. (When you figure that the liberal public radio station listeners who filled the theater had been culled from an already liberal geographic area, you can probably imagine the kinds of content that got these people fired up.) I have never heard a politician so whole-heartedly cheered. The crowd was beside itself, and although I didn't know a lot about him before seeing the show, he did, indeed, seem like a pretty nice, regular guy. His term limit is up in 2018, and Peter Segal tried several times to elicit his commitment to running for president during the next election. Hickenlooper dodged these questions gracefully and winningly and was even a good sport about all the pot jokes that are par for the course when someone interviews a Colorado politician.

John Hickenlooper

Listening to the show on Saturday morning was quite interesting. I knew that quite a lot was going to be cut out and I wondered how they would do it. I found that although editors did cut liberally even changed the order of some of the things, the whole show ran perfectly smoothly and I didn't feel as though listeners were missing out on too much of what I saw live. However, Ed and I both agreed that we were glad we had gone. The experience of being surrounded by so many enthusiastic audience members while listening to a show that I usually hear on my own was a fun experience.