Welcome to the Dinner Party Download.

This is your icebreaker.

It's more of a true story than a joke, but the very first reading that I gave in San Francisco,

this woman came up to me and she said, you know, I had a really effed up family.

And I was like, oh, really?

She was like, yeah, I could write a book about it. I was like, oh, really? She was like, yeah, I could write a book about it.

I was like, oh, you should.

And then she said, well, I'm not really a writer.

I don't have a book in me, but I've got other ways of dealing with it.

And I was like, what do you do?

And she's like, I'm a dentist.

I'm Brendan Francis Nuneum, and from American Public Media, this, well, is sort of the dinner party download. First of all, my co-host Rico Galliano, gone missing.

I received some enigmatic Facebook messages from him, from Italy, talk about Pancetta and what have you. But that's the last I've

heard from him. Rico, if you're listening, please come back. I didn't mean that stuff I said about

Pittsburgh. Another reason this isn't a normal episode of our show? Well, that's because, as we told

you two weeks ago, we're taking a few weeks off from our regular programming to experiment with new show segments and ideas that can be used in an upcoming hour-long

version of the dinner party download. That's right, the DPD is growing up. We're old enough

shave and realize how sad, you know, it all really is. So yeah, we're experimenting with how to make an hour-long version of our show,

and we wanted to include you the listeners in the process.

So for the past couple of weeks, we've been playing you mock-ups of different segments

that might appear in our show, and we've been asking you for feedback.

And man, you gave it.

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