From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

It's the Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell, and my guest is someone who, if we discussed on this show before, is interested in storytelling and identity through storytelling.

And the way that reflects on masculinity, which is certainly a kind of identity through storytelling.

My guest, for whom the phrase Black History Month has recently taken known a new meaning.

The first guest was ever brought a companion animal to the show in 25 years of doing this is Joe Maginnell. First of all, Joe, thanks for coming back.

Great to see you. Great to be back.

And we've talked about this both here and privately, how much the idea of identity means to you.

I was just thinking about one of the last great things you did, Max Fist, identity and public

persona and who that character was in that world, but so many things that you've done,

I mean, true blood to Magic Mike, so much of that is about identity.

So you were recently invited to do

finding years with Skip Gates, Henry Lewis Gates.

And what was that first conversation?

For about 10 years, I was trying to get accepted onto a genealogy show

because I had dead ends in my family history.

I'm descended from an Armenian genocide survivor who lost her entire family.

My great-grandmother, you know, the Turks came in, they murdered her husband,

killed seven of her children and shot her and she didn't die.

They left the eighth child to cry in the crib and starve.

And she picked up the eighth child, put it on her back, escaped a death march,

and made it to the Euphrates River and swam across with the baby on her back.

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