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I miss Deborah Solomon

Jill

Ugh Andrew Goldman are you serious here?

Did you choose “Fresh Air” over having children?
First of all, I never really felt called to have children. And when I started hosting “Fresh Air,” I had a lot of plants. After a few weeks of hosting “Fresh Air,” I had no plants. I couldn’t even keep up with watering them. I know I’m missing out on very, very special things; things I will never understand, because I will never get a chance to experience them.

I imagine you don’t particularly like kids.
I relate to children much better when they get verbal. Sometimes I feel like when I see a baby that I should throw my catnip toy and scratch them under the chin like I do my cat.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that they have erotic associations with your voice.
With my voice? That really makes me laugh.

This can’t be a surprise to you.
I don’t get that a lot. I’m very short, under five feet, and I often think of myself as smaller than life. Until I was on radio, I went through life being, as far as I was concerned, invisible, which of course I am on radio. But it’s one thing to be invisible on radio; it’s another thing to be invisible in real life.

I gather that people frequently assume you’re a lesbian. Several years ago, it came up at a cocktail party for your husband, the writer Francis Davis, celebrating his Pew Fellowship.
The spouse of a recipient went up to my late mother-in-law and said: “That’s Terry Gross. Did you know she’s a lesbian?” She just thought that was hysterical. There’s actually a Web site called NNDB, where they list people’s biographical statistics, like your date of birth and religion. They have my sexual orientation as “Matter of Dispute.”

God bless Terry Gross for putting up with that bullshit. Note to Goldman: Provocative interviews are fun, but asking the most stereotypical (and simply rude) questions possible isn’t interesting or effective; it’s lazy and obnoxious.

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6 thoughts on I miss Deborah Solomon

  2. I’m with Lucy. Deborah Solomon wasn’t much better. Bets on whether Andrew Goldman was just trying to see if he could be more obnoxious than Gene Simmons or Bill O’Reilly were on Fresh Air?

  3. Thanks for posting, especially this part:

    Sometimes I feel like when I see a baby that I should throw my catnip toy and scratch them under the chin like I do my cat.

    This is my new favorite quote about babies!

    I don’t have any children of my own but I love interacting with them when they’re old enough to talk. In fact, I’ve been to a few parties where I ended up talking with the kids more than the adults.

    But babies? I never know what to do or say. I usually say something generic like “Oh, how adorable!” and that’s enough for most people. Now when I say something like that I’ll be thinking about cat toys and trying not to laugh.

  4. Yeah. I recall Solomon asking Seth McFarlane if he was gay, and it came across as even more homophobic than Goldman’s “I gather that…”:

    “Are you straight?
    Yep. I don’t have a steady gal.

    Why is that?
    Oh, boy, we’re getting deep.”

  5. The only way I could imagine “asking the most stereotypical (and simply rude) questions possible” to be at all fun would be if Martin Short (in the character of Jiminy Glick) interviewed Terry Gross (or if Martin Short, in character, were being interviewed by Terry Gross and decided to “turn the tables and interview the interviewer”) and asked these sorts of questions of her: I actually have always imagined (or maybe it actually happened and I am just remembering it as something I imagined) Jiminy Glick asking Terry Gross about her religion and sexuality and Terry Gross just making Jiminy Glick look like the obnoxious person he is by handling it so gracefully but with just the right amount of frustration with his questions — and yet here we have an actual interviewer asking these questions (and Terry Gross responding pretty much how I would imagine her doing) …

    A parody of the style Andrew Goldman is using can be very funny, in part by showing clearly how obnoxious such interviews really are by having an over-the-top obnoxious interviewer ask questions that are, alas, not really all that different than some of the sorts of questions “serious” interviewers ask.

    Along those lines, Atrios posted some of the questions asked of Dr. Sally Ride not so long ago. Some of those questions really were quite obnoxious and, as Atrios points out, Sally Ride displays true grace and tact in not just throwing up all over some of her interviewers: I don’t think I could be nearly so graceful or tactful if I were in her place.

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