Approval Junkie

by Faith Salie

  Does this sound crazy? I’ve since learned there’s actually science behind it. Researchers have discovered that memories of traumatic experiences can be passed from one generation to another through DNA. (I hope this does not mean that either of my children will genetically remember how I got felt up by Edward James Olmos in a margarita line after I interviewed him at Comic-Con.) And one more nutty detail, just to be the icing on the castor oil cake of it all: after the yob heard ’round the strip mall, both of my hands froze. I mean, they were seriously paralyzed. My fingers were splayed, and I couldn’t move them at all. I started panicking—I had no idea what was happening, and I was terrified the price I paid for Enlightenment was to go through life looking like I had severe rheumatoid arthritis. I was crying to Light, “I can’t move my hands, I can’t move my hands!” She told me to make them dance. At that point, all my unintellectual spirituality had been tapped, and I was back to overthinking. And what I was overthinking was, WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU PEOPLE DONE TO MY HANDS??? Janine and Light held my hands and waved them in the air. I guess you could call it “dancing,” if dancing looks like a stroke victim getting physical therapy from two women of color in caftans. Slowly, slowly, I began to be able to wiggle my fingers. Later Light told me I’d experienced “tetany,” which is “the involuntary contraction of muscles.” Even my body was temporarily shocked by what I’d released. Having survived tetany, I now think it sounds like a great celebrity baby name.

  —

  Since the Kaya Kalpa I’ve never mourned my mother the same way. I miss her every day. There are times when I profoundly miss her, like when my son picks up a photo of her and smiles and says her grandmother name, “Gigi.” I weep for myself and I yearn for her. But I no longer experience that despair that feels like a dull knife is scraping my insides hollow. The misery that stifled me and made me angry at anyone who had a living mother has been flushed out like a simple, American-made enema.

  A day after I returned from my Ayurvedic adventure, I whipped up some ghee. Even if Steve didn’t detect my dramatic release of dark energy, I did surprise the hell out of him by eating butter. Three days after I returned, I prayed to God in a new way. It wasn’t a prayer to fix things or bring me something I wanted. It was an “I completely give up” prayer. I got real with God and said, “I’m not doing this right. I’m nothing but unhappy trying to get what I want. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it. Even if it’s being a kindergarten teacher or a firefighter.” I actually listed those two jobs as proof of my submission, because God knows I’d be so wrong for them both: I’m not patient enough to be the former, and I don’t cook enough to be the latter. A month after I returned from the Ayurvedic center, I was strolling by the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, inhaling the very New York City scent of roasted chestnuts, on the way to an audition that would change my life. A year after I returned, I was living in that city, hosting a national public radio show. (God had been gentle in assigning me a new career.)

  I didn’t quite know it at the time, but I had been reborn. Steve didn’t quite know it, but he’d exorcised me out of his life. And though it would take awhile, I was starting to possess myself.

  It was the mouse in my office that told me I’d arrived.

  The mouse didn’t actually speak, although that would have been awesome. It was the fact of the mouse, because it meant I was really living the public radio dream. I dug the grittiness, grassrootsiness of it all.

  If, even a couple of years before, you would have told me I’d be living in Manhattan, hosting a national public radio show and some new thing called a “podcast”; if you’d told me I’d be happier to have a rodent in my office than I was to have once had my own parking spot on the NBC lot; if you’d told me I’d finally make it to Broadway—because our offices were on Broadway, where our hipster team shared office space with a low-budget law firm, one of whose clients left an indication of his satisfaction with their representation in the form of a fecal deposit we all had to step over one morning to get to our staff meeting; if you’d ever told me any of those things, I would have told you to shut up.

  Shutting up is what I learned to do, and it changed my life.

  An e-mail from an old acquaintance was the beginning of how radio killed the (wannabe) TV star. Her name was Marit, and the last time I’d seen her, we were acting in a college production of the play The House of Blue Leaves.

  Hi Faith -

  I don’t know if you remember me, but I was the Little Nun to your Bananas. Until last week, I was actually working at VH1 (it always gave me a kick to see you on one of the shows!). I just quit to go back to where I came from—public radio. A friend of mine is launching a new show, distributed by PRI, the folks behind This American Life. It’s a comedy show, and right now we’re trying to pick the brains of all the smartest comedians we know.

  I thought Marit was being very generous putting me in her brain-picking group. I’d been keeping myself sane while waiting for Hollywood to give me lines by scripting myself, appearing as a talking head on those ur-reality shows like Best Week Ever and 40 Most Awesomely Bad Dirrty Songs…Ever, where my job was to make culturally meaningful observations about Britney Spears and the lyrics of “Whoomp! (There It Is).” I was also performing stand-up comedy alongside gals with names like Chelsea Handler and Sarah Silverman and Tig Notaro. They were so much better than I was: funny, confident, specific. People were always asking me what my “brand” was as a comedian—what made my voice unique?

  I welcomed the chance to talk with Marit about something new. She explained they were looking for hosts, and did I know anyone in LA who might be good? My new marriage was on the rocks, and I’d always wanted to live in New York, so I Dick Cheneyed myself into consideration. Then I slept my way to a public radio career. Oh wait, that part’s not true, but I wouldn’t kick Ira Glass out of bed for eating spelt.

  The show was called Fair Game from PRI with Faith Salie. There was my name, right there in the title, but the best part was that, suddenly, I had my own show that was not about me. I’d spent a decade trying to sell myself, but now I got to focus on the not-me—on politics and science and arts. I read books and saw plays and films and researched fascinating people. I got to ask them anything I wanted. (Except Nick Cannon, whose people told me before the interview began that I should not say the word Mariah.) No one had to ask me what my brand was, because public radio is its own brand. No one asked me to define my figurative voice since I now had a literal voice. And I found that voice by listening.

  I’d always fancied myself a pretty good listener, not least because I did improv comedy. A big rule of improv is to pay attention to what the other players are saying—to use it so you can build on it. But that kind of listening, even as part of a team, is self-serving, because you’re keeping your ears open until the moment you add your funny block to the fun tower your troupe is constructing. There’s a huge difference between listening to help yourself seem funny or smart or right and listening to help someone express himself. I was also, when I started, more of a good questioner than listener. I thought being fearless about making bold, droll inquiries meant I’d be a good interviewer.

  I had a lot to learn.

  So here are some things I learned about listening. Master these interviewing skills, and the world is your oyster—becoming a truly fine listener creates a kind of magic that makes people fall in love with you a little, because you’re really helping them fall in love with themselves.

  The following techniques work on everybody. Listening has made me a better friend, daughter, mother, and wife. If you treat your significant other like a guest you’re interviewing, then the goal of your exchange is really to understand him or her. It’s not to make your partner see things from your perspective. This one is really hard to do, because our exchanges with loved ones can become so emotional. Sure, there are still plenty of times when the closest I come to treating my husband like a guest is, “Welcome to the Faith Salie Show, please sit silently an
d allow me to be right!” But it’s much more ingrained in me now to breathe respectfully through tense exchanges rather than huff until I can insert my point. I try, during such discussions, to say this to myself: This is his story. I may not agree with it, but I can at least listen to it. If you can just pretend that it’s your “job” to help your partner to express him- or herself, you can really learn a lot. And s/he will be so surprised and appreciative not to be met with interruptions or hostility or self-interested persuasion that you might get your way after all.

  These tips work on first dates and job interviews. They work with your mother-in-law and in the middle of a fight with your spouse. And definitely with famous people. I’ve gotten Robert Redford to recite poetry to me, Anthony Hopkins to sing to me, and Don Rickles to insult me, all because I dared to ask and listen. (I’d add that I got Russell Brand to flirt with me and Ryan Gosling to ravish me with his eyes, but those guys can’t help themselves and would do that if I were Charlie Rose.)

  Stop Listening Like a Girl

  The executive producer of Fair Game was a woman named Kerrie who looked like she floated out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting wearing Converse sneakers. She was a couple of years older than I was and became my radio big sister. She knew she was hiring a radio rookie, but she trusted me. She taught me to trust myself. Not to try too hard. To talk to my audience like I was talking to a single friend. (By that I mean “one person” and not “a single friend” who’s looking for a relationship, in which case I’d talk to that friend like this: “Freeze your eggs, and go to a public radio fund-raising mixer.”) You know that line about making love to the camera? You really have to make love to the microphone. It’s exquisitely sensitive. If you laugh loudly, you have to move back from the mic; you must gently work your lips around certain words so you don’t “pop your P’s.” The mic picks up your gasp, your giggle, your breath. Respecting the mic works like technological Xanax—you really have to calm yourself down or you’ll alienate your listener.

  When I started Fair Game, my wasband and I agreed it would be a temporary thing that would be good for my career, which, after all, he was managing. I flew back and forth from New York to LA a couple of times a month to attempt mouth-to-mouth on our marriage. Whenever I’d return from a cross-country flight, I’d roll into a taping of the show supertired. Tellingly, that’s when Kerrie always told me I did my best work. “You sound like you,” she’d say. “You’re too tired to think of what you sound like and whether you’re doing a good job. And your voice gets lower.”

  I sounded girlier when I started out and not just because of my pitch. Here’s a gender stereotype—a genderalization, if you will: when women listen, we tend to give a lot of audible affirmations to the speaker. Kerrie pointed this out to me about myself. Acknowledgments such as “uh-huh,” “I know,” “mm-hmmm,” and “TOE-tully” all serve to express, “I’m listening, and I’m with you.” And off-air, that can be a lovely impulse and handy on a drinks date, but it turns out to be really distracting. I had to learn to be judicious in giving voice to encouragement. The best way to let my guests know I was listening was not by making little listening orgasms (“yes!”) but by letting what they were saying lead organically to my next question.

  Another thing ladies and gentlemen alike tend to do to prove how well we’re listening is to interject “That happened to me, too!” and then launch into a tale of our own experience. It took me over a decade to stop telling people, upon learning that they’d lost a loved one, “Yeah, my mom died when I was twenty-six.” We think we’re building a bridge of sharing, but, most of the time, we’re really putting up scaffolding over someone else’s story and clambering all over it.

  Fair Game helped teach me this restraint, because the show was “live to tape,” which meant I needed to act as if there would be no time to edit and fix my mistakes. (In reality, there was a smidgen of time, but the producers had less than an hour to fix my mistakes before the show was sent out nationally.) I was “on the clock”: I literally faced a clock with digital red numbers that stared me down, relentlessly reminding me how much time I had left during every interview. At first I hated that clock. Then I learned to love the clock; it instilled discipline in me. I wasn’t there to trade stories; I was there to help someone tell a story.

  You’re Not That Fascinating

  Well, of course you are when you’re not conducting an interview. You know that, and I know that. But if you pretend this conversation is not about you, you will learn a lot more. In college, we’d roll our eyes at people who’d ask “flex questions.” Those were the kinds of questions that didn’t seek answers but rather sought to demonstrate the insight, acumen, and toolness of the questioner. The simpler and more direct your question is, the richer the response you’ll most likely get. Sometimes a quiet and earnest “Why?” leads to the most revealing answers. I found that that simple query would knock many celebrities off their game—which is a very good thing. So many people—both famous and not—are used to talking about what they do and what they think, but they’re rarely asked merely, “Why?”

  I interviewed Minnie Driver as part of a retrospective on Good Will Hunting. She explained that making the film had been so uniquely fulfilling that she hadn’t actually desired to watch the movie too many times over the years, because she feared tempering her memory of it. She described the experience as “precious.” The way she said it was so whispery and lovely that my first instinct was to leave it there, precious as it was, unprobed. If she didn’t want to watch the movie too often, perhaps she didn’t want to say too much about it. But then I remembered it was my role to ask, “Why? Why was it precious?” And she told this story, seemingly for the first time, about how, during filming, Matt Damon, exhausted by being writer and star, had fallen asleep on the set. She didn’t want to wake him to rehearse their pillow talk scene, so the crew set up the lights silently around him as he slept on the bed. When the director was ready to shoot, she gently whispered to Matt what they were doing, and he played the scene genuinely half asleep. It was an intimate story, shared with palpable pleasure, that let the audience feel like they’d learned a secret or almost had sex with Matt Damon. (Which I almost did, by the way, in college, when he and I hooked up on a pool table after a cast party for a show we were both in. But we didn’t have any type of sex, because I was a virgin. And an idiot, obviously.)

  You’re Not That Funny

  Now you, you’re hilarious. You make me pee. But something I learned from radio is that if I’m going to interrupt someone to make a joke, it has to be a joke that is totally worth it. Otherwise you’re interrupting someone’s train of thought and forcing the audience’s attention to come to a screeching halt. So it has to be a joke that will kill, like murder in the first degree, a joke with blood dripping off it and a Lifetime movie in the works in which the joke will be played by Eddie Cibrian.

  When I first started Fair Game, I’d get really nervous about the interviews—especially the ones on the ISDN, which is a digital telephone line, which basically meant I couldn’t see the person with whom I was speaking. I’d stand in a booth and wait for the Famous Person to get on the line and pray that he was having a good day and hadn’t gotten stuck on the 405 on the way to talk to me. When I could connect by making eye contact and smiling, I always felt more confident. One of my very first interviews was with Weird Al Yankovic. I could hear my heart pounding in my headphones and not because he looked so sexy in “Like a Surgeon.” It’s amusing to me now, having interviewed people way more famous and weirder than Al, but in the beginning, I approached every exchange self-consciously. I wanted to be funny and to ask all the interesting questions I’d prepared. Soon enough that nervousness dissipated as I realized, to my great relief and personal edification, that I didn’t need to be funny, and, while preparation is essential, the best questions come from focusing on what my guest was saying in that moment rather than running down a prepared checklist.

  I didn’t need to be interes
ting; I just needed to be interested.

  When I took the pressure off myself and became comfortable with shining the spotlight on someone else, even the most famous person became someone I was there to help. I wanted to help him or her tell a story, and I wanted to help my audience learn something new. This role focused me. It also cured me of starstruckedness for life. Knowing how to interview people is a very democratizing skill: it doesn’t matter if someone is famous or not, since everyone has a story you can unlock if you’re willing to devote your energy to it.

  I once spent a week testing to be one of the hosts of a daytime talk show. It’s called “a chemistry test.” The producers throw all the potential hosts in a room together with pitchers of water and fruit plates, and they take you into the studio in groups to see which assortment of humans might deliver ratings. It’s an inhumane process designed to bring out the worst in everyone. Hungry personalities talk all over one another, trying to be funny and relevant. During one of those vocal gang bangs, the lot of us were supposed to be interviewing a popular African American chef of humble roots. I could just see that he had more of a story to tell than all the jokes the ladies were getting him to make about his meat. I waited for my moment and asked him what it was like to be a southern boy who liked to play in the kitchen while the other boys were playing football. He got serious and shared a moving story about how he learned to cook because his family never had enough money to put food on the table for all his siblings, and he wanted to help out by finding a way to stretch the vittles in the kitchen.

  I didn’t get the gig, but I got a good story.