Andy, hi, I'm so happy to talk to you today. Same here Meg. I just loved a very

Nixon Halloween and I've been dying to talk to you about it. Tell me it's origins.

I really like biography and when I read a biography the one thing I've noticed is that most

biographies tend to focus on the events in one's life that are prominent historic.

So if you read a biography of Napoleon,

they'll talk about Waterloo, and they'll talk about Austerlitz

and all the big battles, and then they'll kind of race through the end of his life when he's in exile as if that's not significant.

But to me that's really one of the most interesting parts of a person's life because that's the time when they think about what they've done.

They have a lot of time to think about what they've done. The biggest events are over in the past and Nixon and Napoleon actually had a lot in common

because Nixon was also in exile and he left office in 1974 in disgrace and he bounced around a little bit. He wound up in Saddle River, New Jersey and he had an office kind of in a strip mall in New Jersey And to me that's just a delicious setup. It's so incongruous, the notion of the former commander-in-chief sort of shuttling back and forth between his suburban house and the barber shop and the strip mall office.

And I want to know more about what that was like for him, what was going on inside his head.

So that was kind of the jumping off point for me.

And I did some research and as wacky as the story is and as wacky as it reads when it's performed,

most of the underlying facts of the story are true.

That was what was kind of interesting to me as I dug into the Nixon biography of that.

Well, you showed me a couple of photographs of Nixon with these kids in Halloween costumes,

and the incongruity between him and them is wonderful to see.

Well, he, it turns out, did host like a big Halloween at the White House.

And there are some moments in the story where we refer to this.

Pat did wear kind of a fortune teller dress.

The star of Dark Shadows, Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas Collins on this very weird

1960 soap opera called Dark Shadows appeared in his vampire outfit and there's a photo of

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