27 June 2025

Walking out of the Portsmouth Public Library last Tuesday was like walking into an oven, and since then, the 103^o my GTI registered there in the parking lot has been confirmed as a record-breaker for the port town where proximity to the cold Atlantic waters generally means cooler-than-inland temperatures.  Not so this week. Thankfully, the heat dome began to dissipate on Wednesday, and by Thursday, once-celebrated New England temperatures—warm summer days, cool nights—had returned, reminding this Floridian how exotic I once found the L L Bean and Lands End catalogs featuring models wearing shorts with sweaters! as their midsummer ensembles.

Despite this welcome respite, staying cool remains a challenge. The AC in our Madbury Public Library has been victimized by mice biting through wires I suspect are encased in soy-based insulation, so it’s doubly lucky that cooler days, at least temporarily, lie ahead.  How unfair that mice have joined DOGE and the Felon-in-Chief to hobble public libraries, an uncanny conspiracy of Human and Mother Nature.  And how narrow not only my thermal, but also my temporal comfort zone has become:  surely not all retirees experience a 9:00 meeting at the Library as sleep deprivation.  How ever did I make it to UNH from Portsmouth to teach an 8:00 Brit Lit class all those years ago?  Thank goodness those days are done.

Post meeting and fueled by a restorative nap plus more than usual coffee intake, I set out last night for Portland’s Merrill Auditorium to attend a taping of NPR’s weekly news quiz show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me (WWDTM), a long-anticipated respite from the grimness of the 24/7 new cycle: news made comic.  Traffic on I-95 was not bad on a Thursday night; I made good time and negotiated a new parking garage without incident.  One always wonders if unattended machines will honor a pre-purchased QR code to lift the entry gate.  Hesitant to rely exclusively on my ability to retrieve the code on my phone, I always print it out.  But now I’ve discovered a new impediment to my plan B:  my printout worked at the garage, but the Merrill Auditorium scanners will NOT scan a QR code that’s been printed out:  only the bar code on one of their in-house printed tickets or the QR code on a phone will work.  One step forward, two steps back:  I had to pick up a printed ticket at Will Call to get in.

But once I got through the metal detectors that are yet another sign of how much our civilization has regressed, the atmosphere in the Merrill lobby was festive.  Maine Public Radio had set up a table with free public radio swag:  buttons, bumper stickers, and fans, and clearly the audience—mostly older—shared a political persuasion.  My seatmates, Mainers from Rockwood (classically dressed for summer in shorts, windbreaker, and a cap never removed), were happy to chat; turns out they knew well my friends’ son Sam Richman’s fine restaurant in Rockland, Sammy’s Deluxe, and were enjoying their first visit to Merrill Auditorium, interested in its 1912 construction and 1997 renovation as well as the WWTDM setup waiting on stage.  We speculated not only about the technicians seated at a table right behind the performers, but also about how different the live show would be from the broadcast version to come.  Man-in-shorts next to me suspected the comedians were “tipped off” as to what the topics would be, the better to prepare their jokes.

I already knew something about that because I’d heard Peter Sagal at Portsmouth’s Music Hall last April, when he devoted most of his stage time to explicating threats to our Constitution; in 2013 he’d done a four-part series for PBS called Constitution USA, travelling cross country on a customized red, white, and blue Harley-Davidson, to find out where the Constitution lives, how it works, and how it unites us as a nation  (see https://www.pbs.org/tpt/constitution-usa-peter-sagal/ ).   A quick-witted Harvard grad, Sagal was funny, passionate, and moving about the history we don’t know and the perils we now face, but he’d also detailed a typical WWDTM work week that leads up to the show’s taping, so I knew that much was scripted—and that much of the script went out the window in performance.

What I didn’t know was just how much was scripted and how much improvised.  And I still don’t!  What was immediately clear, however, was how very much more there is in the live show than in the broadcast:  the Thursday night taping in Portland began shortly after 7:30 and lasted without intermission until nearly 10:00.  The first thing that happened was a plea from Rick Schneider, CEO of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network:  call your congressmen to protest the pending rescission of funds to public broadcasting; don’t write letters or emails, call!  The audience assented with supportive applause.

Then the performers came out, veteran newsman and announcer Bill Kurtis, comedians Karen Chee, Paula Poundstone, and Josh Gondelman, and finally host Peter Sagal.  I saw that Poundstone, dressed in a red-and-white striped suit, another of the clown costumes that are her performance hallmark, held a sheaf of papers, and she had several pre-show exchanges with the tech staff behind her.  Sagal spoke directly to us in the audience, congratulating Maine on its definitive rejection of Donald Trump (great cheers ensued), and then they started the show.  I saw immediately just how much longer all exchanges between Sagal and the comedians were, clearly many scripted, but also many improvised, including lots of callbacks to earlier material, including several running jokes about the “Massholes” Gondelman and Poundstone, the boyfriend Chee once had in Portland, and Poundstone’s inability to recall any of the movies in which she’d seen the celebrity guest booked to play the “Not My Job” segment, Portland native Anna Kendrick, who proved more than a match for all the professional comedians on stage.  Poundstone had recognized and greeted Kendrick by name backstage, but could not place her in any movies she had seen—a delicious running gag that had a big payoff when Kendrick later recited some of her childhood performances in the Merrill Auditorium, including humming from the balcony as part of the children’s snowflake chorus in The Nutcracker, sparking Poundstone’s long delayed epiphany of recognition.

All the performers wore headsets, and the jokes and back-and-forth wit was so quick and spontaneous that quips were sometimes covered by the audience’s laughter.  I reckon the engineers edit that out. When either Kurtis or Sagal mis-spoke something, they simply said it again immediately and correctly, and at the show’s end, they took about five minutes to re-record a few phrases out of context.  Amazing that all of that early editing had taken place while the show was going on.  Then Sagal took some questions from the audience, including one from a 9-year-old who wanted Sagal to know that he went to sleep every night to WWDTM (!), and that it had been his idea, not his parents’, to come to the show.   A young woman in the balcony shouted that she was born on the day the show first began, 3 January 1998.  Sagal grimaced and revealed that at least one of the production staff behind him was even younger than the show.  Another audience member complimented the cast and crew on supplying such much-needed laughter in our currently so vexing time.  Sagal replied that the show was the thing that kept him going as well. 

As the 1908 members of the sold-out audience made their way out the exits, I saw Paula Poundstone, the only performer left on stage, confer with the staff behind her for a while, and then respond with an exaggerated change of direction move I once saw Jackie Gleason make (“And away we go!”) to speak to an audience member who called to her from below at the edge of the stage.  Poundstone walked downstage, and leaned over to take the woman’s question.  Last thing I saw over my shoulder as I walked through the exit, Poundstone was sitting on the edge of the stage, her big black-and-white oxfords dangling, leaning into a conversation with this woman.

Poundstone’s a mensch.  They all are.  The show was great.  I still feel great, buoyed by their generous art.  And they’ll all do it again tonight.  I’ll listen to Saturday’s broadcast and relive the delight. 

Thank you, thank you to cast and crew for the respite.  You are indeed a saving grace.