Katherine and I listen virtually all the time and know commentators by ear and have a sense for their journalistic personalities. To put it bluntly, we’re self-admitted NPR dorks– and proud of it! It has been a long-time dream of mine to be interviewed on NPR.Well my dream has finally come true… The cliche says to be careful what you ask for because you might just get it. I now understand that trite bit of wisdom.

Recently I got a call from Ira Glass of the NPR program This American Life. He introduced himself and said he’d like to record our phone conversation for his show. I couldn’t believe it, I had finally made it to the big time, and with Ira Glass no less! As he began talking I was racking my brain trying to get ahead of him to figure out how he got my name and what important things we had to discuss for the benefit of a national radio audience. That mystery was revealed soon enough.

It appears that my loving wife saw fit to write a letter to Ira and This American Life pleading for “Pledge Drive Justice,” a.k.a. turning in your loved ones for never pledging to NPR despite being avid listeners. Right, so you get the picture. I’ve finally made it to be interviewed on NPR, and its about my lame-itude as a NPR fan.

I won’t bother with the details of the interview, you can listen for yourself during the next local NPR pledge drive, or, you can click on the link below and stream it.

I will tell you that I have now pledged to WHYY, our Philly station, and WCPN, our Cleveland station. I called into WCPN right after they played this piece and mentioned that I was the guy Ira had just interviewed. The volunteer seemed unimpressed but took my information and pledge none the less. Then, during the next pledge break the hosts mentioned that a guy “claiming to be Weylin” called in to pledge, and then they stated that “of course we cannot verify that it was actually Weylin.” I couldn’t believe it, not only had I been publicly exposed as a lazy freeloader, I was now also being accused of being an impostor!

Update: I’ve gotten word from This American Life producer Seth; he tells me that the show has been playing well on the air and they’ve been able to raise lots of money.

Parting Words: Don’t be like I was. Donate a few measly bucks to your local NPR. Their news programming blows television out of the water- and they really do have to rely on public funding to get it done. If that’s not democracy then I don’t know what is.

UPDATE #2: I recently got a call from WCPN notifying me that I have won prize! It appears that they entered recent pledge drive contributors into a drawing and one of the prizes goes to this new member! I have won 4 season passes to the Cleveland Playhouse. That means I’ll be getting 4 tickets to each of the 6 shows for the next season! Cha-Ching! I’m starting to wonder why I waited all those years to contribute. Yet another reason to support independent news and creative programing.

Ira and Weylin.mp3

Related articles by Zemanta`

• Creating Jobs At NPR Ends in Job Losses (jossip.com)
• Ira Glass On Newspapers, TV News: “They Deserve To Die” (philebrity.com)

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.