I'm Alan Alda and this is Clear and Vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

I'm sitting here in our studio with Clear and Vivid's executive producers Graham Chad and

Sarah Chase.

Along with our new associate producer Jean Cherme.

Jean may be new to the production team but she's been organizing my life now for many

years and we're all here to talk about our upcoming season of Clear and Vivid season

7 and some of our wonderful guests.

Who do you want to talk about first?

Well we have to talk about Lafayette's guests Tom Hanks.

I loved the conversation, the part of the conversation we had about his fascination

with typewriters, appreciating the typewriter like a work of art or a tool to make art.

I was so taken with how much he sounded like a poet when he talked about typewriters.

That's right.

Senseate in every sense, you know, the tactile in the audio and what it does to the paper.

He was just loaded with these really senseate images about it.

He made me feel that typing a letter for him was an act of creation before he ever got

to the words you put into the keys.

Yeah.

And such a connector, such as I'm putting myself right into this paper and giving it to him.

Yeah.

What we had in the personal thinking about the audience too, right?

Every time he chose like which text you or which color or which typewriter he was thinking

...