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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Mo Rocca is here and why not? Mo Rocca seems like he's everywhere right now. On CBS Sunday Morning, on Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, on stage in the play Fairycakes through this weekend, on CBS as host of Innovation Nation, on his podcast Mobituaries season two, and now as author of the paperback edition of his book, Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving. Mo, welcome back to WNYC. How'd you find time to squeeze us in?

Mo Rocca: Brian, it's always great to be with you and I'm exhausted hearing this. This is a break. This is a time for me to regenerate before I move on to the next project.

Brian Lehrer: We'll try to be that friendly. Remind everyone why you do Mobituaries. They're not just mobits, as you call them, of people you're interested in, but they need to have been overlooked or misremembered in some way, right?

Mo Rocca: Yes, I wanted to give people a second go-round, if you will. People and things. Ideas that when they disappeared the first time didn't get the acknowledgement they deserved or any acknowledgement at all. It's a conveniently flexible idea. In the book Mobituaries, which I co-authored with Jonathan Greenberg, we start off with the death of dragons. Dragons never got an obituary, but indeed in 1735, Carl Linnaeus-- and anyone who took high school biology may remember their Linnaeus taxonomies.

Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, went to an exhibit in Hamburg to see a widely touted seven headed hydra. He noticed pretty quickly that this was, of course, a fiction. It was just simply a bunch of snakeskin sewn together with some weasel skulls and feet shoved in there and the guts of rodents and that this was indeed not a real creature. Pretty quickly, this 3,000-year-old belief in dragons and dragonlike beasts disappeared. That was the kind of thing that never really got the play it deserved.

Brian Lehrer: I see also on the non-human mobituary side, you have mobituaries for dead countries, dead sports teams, what you call the dearly departed station wagon. On the dead sports teams, you might need a new chapter on the New York Jets even though they still exist, but that's another show.

Mo Rocca: That's a little too controversial, but okay.

Brian Lehrer: Did the station wagon really die or did it just get muscled up into the SUV?

Mo Rocca: Well, the station wagon got muscled out at first by the minivan, which we may not want to admit was once considered sexy. People were rushing to buy one, and then it did in a sense get reincarnated as the SUV. As a friend of mine at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, the curator of transportation told me, there's no reason the station wagon can't come back.

It would, of course, have to be a lot safer because the way, way back was basically a death chamber. As a kid, I loved it. I loved going to Shakey's Pizza parlor in Bethesda, Maryland, and then getting in the way back with other little kids and ricocheting around like pinballs. That, to me, was really exciting, but it was also incredibly dangerous.

Brian Lehrer: You have a group chapter for people who had rest stops named after them on the New Jersey Turnpike. Really?

Mo Rocca: Yes, really. Well, I'm a big fan of Clara Barton and Walt Whitman, and I love their concessions there. I believe both of them have Auntie Ann's. I could be proven wrong. I'm counting on your listeners to fact-check me on this. Look, the New Jersey Turnpike is incredibly convenient, but it's the only exposure that many people have to New Jersey.

A lot of people just use it to go through New Jersey, a lot of people from out of state, and I thought that they needed to know more about these important people that are memorialized on that turnpike.

Brian Lehrer: Quite a diverse group when you think about it; Clara Barton, Walt Whitman, Vince Lombardi.

Mo Rocca: Right, and Vince Lombardi, somebody who I used to always confuse with Guy Lombardo. I have to admit that.

[laughter]

Mo Rocca: Guy Lombardo deserves his own mobituary. I will say that there was some upset about the treatment of Joyce Kilmer, the poet of the poem Trees.

Brian Lehrer: Also a rest area.

Mo Rocca: Yes, also a rest area. He was a World War I vet, died in war, and so in a follow up to Mobituaries, we'll be giving him the treatment that he deserves.

Brian Lehrer: I could no more see Guy Lombardo coaching the Green Bay Packers as I could see Vince Lombardi conducting Auld Lang Syne on new year's Eve.

Mo Rocca: On new year's Eve, that would have been great.

Brian Lehrer: It wouldn't work with the New York State Thruway, by the way, where the rest stops are named things like New Baltimore, and Sloatsburg, just saying.

Mo Rocca: Yes, but I will tell you that it's now my ambition in my time on earth to be awarded a Guy Lombardo trophy.

Brian Lehrer: Now, let me jump to the end of the book because you close it with a mobituary of your father who got you into obituaries in the first place. Who is your dad and how did he do that?

Mo Rocca: My father was probably the most optimistic person I may ever end up knowing. He loved obituaries, which sounds counterintuitive, but a good obituary is really about someone's life, not their death. I think a really good one feels like sort of a sweeping movie trailer for an Oscar-winning biopic. It has romance, it has drama, and he was somebody that loved both those things.

He would, growing up in the Washington DC area, read the obituaries in The Washington Post, and at that time, The Washington Star when it existed, the afternoon paper. That got me interested in them at a fairly early age and I wanted to close the book with a dedication to him. Also, his romance with the trumpet, something he took up very late in life. He had played as a boy and had given it up when he started a small business and got married and raised a family.

Then one Christmas in the 1970s, my mother went to a pawn shop and bought him a trumpet-- a trumpet that is now mounted on the wall of my apartment, and he began playing in his 50s, rehearsing every weekday for a half an hour in the cellar of our home, working on scales for half an hour. Then when he would come home from work for an hour, he was absolutely religious about this, and eventually joined a band, formed a band with some buddies of his that played Dixieland jazz.

It gave him unimaginable joy. It made a big impact on me that he didn't think that he was going to become a famous jazz trumpeter at that age, but he may as well have been playing at the great clubs, playing at the Blue Note when he went down into the cellar.

Brian Lehrer: Were you living at home at the time when he took up the trumpet again in his 50s?

Mo Rocca: Oh, yes. I was just a boy and in our split level, you could hear the trumpet in every single room when he played. We would say, "Put the mute in," and he would put the mute in, but really the metronome, and I think they're different now, but the [unintelligible 00:08:14] with the reverse pendulum swing was the sound bed of my youth. I write about this when I was probably about a boy, 12 or 13 years old, he was driving me back from a dance class.

It was a Monday evening, the night of his jam session, where he would go and rehearse with his buddies. As he was dropping me off to then go to his jam session, my mother came out on the front lawn of our house and said, "Dick [unintelligible 00:08:48] is dead." That was a friend of his in the army, a close friend of his. My father bowed his head, very sad, and then he looked up and he said, "I have to go to the jam session."

That made a big impact on me that his dedication to this thing that he loved was really important and it would have really done no good just to say, "Well, I'm going to stay home and do nothing tonight."

Brian Lehrer: Maybe a new trumpet for his 50th birthday and he could have gotten you a pair of noise canceling headphones for whatever birthday you had at that time.

Mo Rocca: Right. Did they have those in 1980? In the late '70s? I'm not sure.

Brian Lehrer: Probably not. Probably not. My guest is Mo Rocca for another few minutes. You're on stage in Fairycakes at the Greenwich House Theater. This is Shakespeare meets famous fairy tales all performed inverse.

Mo Rocca: It is performed largely in rhyming couplets, and it's the most cardio I've done since the presidential physical fitness test, Brian. It is exhausting, in a good way. It's exhausting. You think, stage actors, they do it eight times a week. They only get one day off but it's two and a half hours. That's the workday. No, it is so off-consuming and it's really, I feel like I've gone off to join the circus. I've been able to do this. My boss at CBS Sunday Morning had said, "Go and do this, you're passionate about it." It's been a blast. I'm working with fantastic actors, some of whom I've admired for a long time, like Julie Halston, Ann Harada, Jackie Hoffman, names that are familiar to theatergoers.

I'm learning a lot from them. It's also interesting what's similar about acting with interviewing. So much of it is about listening and thinking about the larger story. It's been a blast, I played Geppetto as in Pinocchio's Geppetto.

Brian Lehrer: Is it hard to do rhyming couplets on stage and sell it. This is not Hamilton, and not everybody finds rhyming couplets charming. I would even say, some of the worst callers that we've ever had to the show thought they were being really clever with some rhyming couplets that they called in with.

Mo Rocca: I can see how rhyming could destroy relationships, I really can because if you're not really good at it, it just-- sometimes they'll just lean into the rhyme and that makes it sometimes even more grating. Luckily, Douglas Carter Beane has written some pretty great couplets. I will say that it's stressful, because if you screw up a line, then you better think of a rhyme very quickly to make it rhyme because they're expecting by the end.

The whole first act is rhyming couplets. Most of the second is not, then it's in prose. Rhyming can be tough on the rhymer and the listener if it's not done right.

Brian Lehrer: What's it like for you who are always creating new stuff, just even this conversation, if anybody didn't know, it is like, oh, here's a guy who really does improv to do the same show with the same lines every night.

Mo Rocca: I see that it requires a certain set of muscles that I haven't entirely cultivated because many of my scenes are opposite an actor named Arnie Burton, who started his career in the original run of Amadeus. I've watched him make choices, and sometimes make new choices night-to-night to keep it fresh. To be on stage with somebody like that, it's like going on a ride.

It's like riding a wave but it requires, obviously, a certain kind of fortitude and just commitment. I think that the more you commit to it, into the story, into what you're saying-- and really this idea of making choices is very, very important, you can't just play a mood, each line has to really mean something and commit to it, I think sees you through but that requires a kind of musculature that I see in some of these other actors.

Brian Lehrer: Developing musculature on stage at the Greenwich House Theater through Sunday is Mo Rocca, one of the stars of Fairycakes. Go ahead, Mo, real quick.

Mo Rocca: I was going to say I end the show with a dance. I dance and my not so little secret that that's really the reason I get this because, at heart, I'm a dancer, Brian. That's what I am.

Brian Lehrer: Mobituaries now out in paperback. Mo, thanks a lot as always.

Mo Rocca: Thank you, Brian.

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