How to get stuck in a barn with Anthony Fauci, Jamie Lee Curtis and Yo-Yo Ma
MY ORIGINAL idea was more a coping mechanism than a plan. As covid-19 struck, my normal job — rambling down the highway with Sinead O’Connor or tracking down witnesses to one of rock’s greatest disasters as the national arts reporter — became Zoom interviews out of my house. Like so many, I immediately began to feel the loss of connection.
That became the nugget of the idea. To cope, I would try to speak to an interesting artist, musician, comedian or actor every day, and we would publish the conversation.
For one thing, The Washington Post wasn’t going to run a chat each day. But on a Sunday in March 2020, I phoned ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons — he was available, his publicist said — and we talked about the uncertainty of the pandemic, Prince’s guitar playing and how he had ended up in a hotel room without a guitar cord. When we got off, I sent out a round of emails and found out that singer Richard Marx would be available the next day.
Thankfully, around this time, two of my editors, David Malitz and Phoebe Connelly, heard what I was up to. They actually had a doable idea. What if we launched The Post’s first Instagram show? We could do it twice a week as an experiment.
That launched ‘Stuck With Geoff,’ an hour-long interview show I did more than 100 times on Instagram Live. The first one featured comedian Tiffany Haddish, who coached me on how to start a garden. Our final episode was last month, a multiguest affair with Anthony Fauci, comedian Jim Gaffigan, actress Jamie Lee Curtis, director Paul Feig and a closing number from mandolin master Chris Thile. We shut down ‘Stuck With Geoff’ because, theoretically, the pandemic was ending and I was back on the road doing my normal job, not stuck in my office barn. Travis Lyles, who runs our Instagram, has also expanded his team to the point that he’s going to add other programming with reporters across our coverage areas.
But I’m grateful I got to experiment and stay distracted. Doing ‘Stuck’ taught me that, during a pandemic at least, famous and accomplished people are as desperate as we are for human contact. For all that we’re Zoomed out, we can actually build those connections through social media.
I also learned to appreciate that even a giant institution like The Post, owned by a dude who has built a spaceship, can DIY itself into a weekly show. A key part of ‘Stuck’ came through nagging my daughter, Lila, who was deferring her first year of college, to craft my social media sign each week.
I’m grateful for the stack of them that I’m keeping forever. I’m also grateful to Anying Guo for her enthusiasm and editing help, and Amy Hitt for carving out the print space each week to edit and run an excerpted version of the show. So that’s it.
Here, for the last edition, are six guests who captured ‘Stuck With Geoff.’
Dr. Fauci
How strange that an immunologist educated at Cornell University would need a private security detail during a pandemic. But for most of us, Anthony S. Fauci wasn’t controversial at all.
He provided reality in a sea of Twitter blather. He ’s also a great conversation, whether talking about the value of masks or the genius of Stanley Tucci in ‘Big Night.’
When he came on for the first time, in August 2020, I took a sip of water out of my Fauci mug and asked: “I assume you’re not receiving any residuals from all of the products out there?” He said, “Absolutely not.”
He also provided a glimmer of hope at a difficult moment. “It will end,” he said.
“We will get out of this and we will return to normal. Don’t give up. Don’t despair. Don’t throw caution to the wind. We can end this.” Fauci returned for an update on Dec. 24, his 80th birthday, and for the final show on Aug. 27. I couldn’t resist asking him about his main political nemesis, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
“I sort of go back to the ‘Godfather’ theme,” Fauci said. “It’s nothing personal. It’s strictly business. But occasionally somebody goes over the line and you’ve got to push back.”
Yo-Yo Ma
During the pandemic, the world-famous cellist popped up on the Internet performing a concert at Tanglewood and on his own website. He played a solo inside a gym in western Massachusetts after receiving his second coronavirus vaccine. And he came on ‘Stuck’ to talk about the power of music. “You can’t touch, you can’t hug, you can’t shake hands. But what music does, its sound moves air molecules. So when air floats across your skin and touches the hairs of your skin, that’s touch. That’s the closest thing to someone actually touching you. It’s as if you were miniaturized and you’re in the middle of a lake. But that lake is a bowl, and that vessel is holding you. That’s what music can do.”
Dionne Warwick
There was a ragged glory to going live. Some guests had no idea how to use the medium. We usually solved this with a preshow test.
But others declined the test without understanding just how silly I might look, a live feed launched, desperately trying to invite them onto the show.
It took 14 minutes to bring Marlo Thomas and Phil Donohue on. Billy Gibbons couldn’t figure out his sound for a half-hour. Our viewers were treated to the ZZ Top beard and no audio. Eventually, Lila made a ‘Be Patient’ sign that I could hold up. This helped. But some issues weren’t technical. When it came to the singer Dionne Warwick, she arrived on the show without anything to balance her phone on. I felt bad. I wanted to beam her up a tripod.
She was sweating after a few minutes and clearly bothered. But Warwick eventually got her bearing and we had an conversation that included not only her favorite cover of her own work (Luther Vandross doing ‘A House Is Not a Home’), but also her honesty in admitting that she still smokes because she likes it.
Jamie Lee Curtis
I got the actress’s email from a mutual friend and asked whether she would come on the show. She wrote back within seconds. “Yes,” and then, “Do I seem too needy?” What I loved about our chat was that Curtis did have something to promote — a new podcast dramatizing a summer camp story — but wasn’t at all trying to push me to talk about it. She wanted to talk about what we’ve been through, about social justice, about photography, about whether it was appropriate for me to let my son, Calvin, who is 11, watch ‘Trading Places,’ which very definitely revealed to him her breasts and language he doesn’t normally hear in middle school. Then I brought up ‘Halloween,’ the horror movie franchise in which Curtis made her film debut in 1978.
“Exposing a 5-year-old to a horror film is just wrong,” she said. “And so I bring up your question about when to show someone. I only was, you know, kind of blushing a little because I thought, ‘I don’t know how many naked women he’s seen.’ And so I kind of felt a little honored that maybe I might be one of the first set of actual breasts that your son has seen in his young life.”
Doug E. Fresh
The beauty of ‘Stuck’ is that although editors Travis Lyles and Phoebe Connelly might have given suggestions, they didn’t demand guests with only a certain numbers of followers. Which meant I could go after such first-timers as 92-year-old Burt Bacharach, who appeared at a piano ready to walk us through the creation of ‘Walk on By,’ or one of my favorite old-school hip-hop icons, Douglas Davis or, as he’s known, Doug E. Fresh. He isn’t half as famous as Drake, but he was a perfect guest, showing up on my iPhone in shades and with a generous smile.
My favorite moment is when he talked about what it felt like to walk through Harlem in the 1980s, past the Apollo, past Bobby Robinson’s record shop, and how that led to creating ‘the fifth element’ of hip-hop: the beat box.
“I heard Grandmaster Flash, Spoonie Gee, Funky Four, and I say, ‘All right, I’m a do the baseline — boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.’“— The Washington Post