On today’s episode of Bonusnanza: Extravaganza, “Your Voice”, I got to do two impressions that I have been doing in my car for years. I’m not saying they’re great. They’re just good enough to amuse myself (and maybe you?) The first impression is Larry Mantle, who hosts a call-in radio show on one of LA’s public radio stations, KPCC. The show is called “Air Talk” and Larry usually has an in-studio guest and one or more topics to discuss each day, but what makes it special is that the phone lines are always thrown open. A lot of the calls are perfectly fine – intelligent, thoughtful people offering on-topic questions or opinions. But often enough the callers are nuts, spouting total nonsense and I really enjoy slash hate listening to poor Larry handle those calls.
He’s clearly a nice guy, a nerdy film enthusiast and avid Los Angeles-phile whose references to his kid make him sound like a great dad. I like him. And he is usually so patient and appreciative of his callers, doing the work to make their input fit into the show. But man, you can hear it when he’s exasperated and disappointed and, honestly, it cracks me up. I feel like I can hear him sometimes wishing he wasn’t bound to the awful call-in aspect of his show, the nicest guy in the world wishing he could just be left alone to talk to his interesting guest all by himself. It’s a compelling human drama!
And he has a tendency to start his show off by listing all the people he can think of that it would be great to hear from today and that makes me laugh even more, because it’s like he’s trying to control something that is inherently out of his control. “Maybe you’re an in-home health care provider or someone who has used those services, maybe you’re someone who’s had a hard time getting in-home care covered by insurance, maybe you have some tips on how to handle that”. He lays out his ideal show and then we get to hear what he actually gets. Delightful. And in this episode, Matt Gourley and Rebecca Delgado Smith did a very funny job of throwing wrenches into the poor host’s gears. Also, I named my character Randall Canfield (Matt came up with the name seconds before we recorded, which is why you can hear me at some point asking him if that is, in fact, my name), for reasons that make perfect sense to me but I just realized I can’t explain coherently here.
There’s also a brief impression of Jon Ronson, a wonderful writer who thankfully reads his own audiobooks. I love his voice and I basically just drive around listening to him and repeating back everything he says. His books tend to be accounts of his own experiences with extreme people, such as conspiracy theorists (Them: Adventures with Extremists). He often quotes himself in conversation with his interview subjects and my favorite thing is when he’s quoting himself getting angry or indignant. I don’t think Jon Ronson would consider himself an actor and would not claim to have a technique for faithfully reliving fraught moments in his life, but I always get a kick out of hearing him try it! He deviates just this particular amount from mild-mannered narrator to performer of intense emotion and it always makes me smile. You don’t hear me do anything like that in this episode. This is just a short silly joke. But anyway, that’s what inspired it.
And that’s Behind The Podcast!
By the way, you can hear this podcast episode when you subscribe to the Maximus plan on CBBWorld.com.
