You know you listen to too much public radio when you find yourself shouting “Enough already!” and hurling an apple core at your beloved Sony AM/FM in the next room after hearing guest after news-program guest carefully enunciate, “Thank you for having me.”
Speaker, your insights are noted and appreciated, but a simple “Happy to do it” would suffice. “My pleasure”? Something, anything, different. Because once you notice “Thank you for having me” — and now it’s migrated to the start of interview segments, not just the close — you cannot unhear it.
Are we sheep, or are we freethinking, autonomous beings? Or would that be both at once. Sure enough, in my exasperation I find myself parroting, uh, myself, as I’d complained about this exact thing nearly four years ago in this very column.
At the time, I invoked curmudgeonly Fran Lebowitz for her tendency to pointedly answer any thanks with a “You’re welcome,” rather than more thanks. True, the reference is as dated as the personage, a figure from the days of the Abe Beame mayoralty, when essays and late-night talk shows mattered.
But maybe that’s the point, as then there were smarts, and sober newscasters and actual criticism, and today brain-shrinking digital technology counterintuitively pushes society ever backward into a darkening past.
Not to overstate it or anything.
Further on public radio, out here in the sticks, where we’re traditionally a little too dependent on signals from the Nutmeg State, you may have noticed the dispiriting effects of an unrepresentative federal government’s cutbacks, trickling down like something bodily to the point where WSHU, 89.9 FM out of Fairfield, drops, for just one example, its noontime broadcast of “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, the best interview show in syndication, to be replaced by lesser fare.
And still I listen. You never know what you’ll catch. Why, earlier this week I heard from the Ridgefield Playhouse that on Friday its Entertaining Conversation Series will welcome none other than Fran Lebowitz.
Let’s see, an hour and 15 minutes to Port Jefferson, another hour and 15 across the Sound on the ferry, 40 minutes’ drive time from Bridgeport, and I’m there.