The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode Two: Amy Schumer, Jorge Ramos, and the Search for a Lost Father

Episode Date: October 30, 2015

Amy Schumer began her career playing a deranged, rich party girl. With three seasons of her Peabody Award-winning series Inside Amy Schumer now complete, Schumer has since shifted to a more deliberate agenda, one that’s earned her the favor of Hillary Clinton and her distant relative, Senator Charles Schumer. The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick spoke with Schumer about her evolution as a comic and a feminist spokesperson, and how she’s reconciled the desire for laughs with a changing climate of political correctness. In the second installment of staff writer Jill Lepore’s story “The Search for Big Brown,” Lepore’s childhood friend Adrianna Alty starts learning about her biological father, a black street poet whose time in Greenwich Village in the 1960s brought him the admiration of Bob Dylan. Some of the rumors seem to pan out, but the man remains elusive. For many Americans, Univision journalist Jorge Ramos first came to public prominence after Donald Trump kicked him out of a campaign event in August. But for Spanish speakers, Ramos has been one of the most recognizable and respected voices in the media for decades. New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan asked Ramos about the Republican party’s stance on immigration, and why he engages with people who seem to hate him.   Then, writer Carolyn Kormann tries out Bird Genie, a new app that attempts to make birding easier by capturing snippets of songs in the field and comparing them to existing recordings. The app’s creator, Tom Stevenson, joins Kormann for some technologically assisted birding in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

in a conversation with someone when they have that revelation. It's making sure. How does this work as a national story? From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. You know, every week, it's my pleasure to sit down with the cartoon editor and the managing editor, and we go through about 50 or 100 rough drafts of cartoons.

They're called ruffs. It's a lot. So we thought we'd check in with some of the artists here who spend their week churning out those cartoons. Here's Matt Diffey and Drew Dernovich. Hey, it's Matt Diffey, a cartoonist of the New Yorker. One week to do it. I've been working on my...

There's a giant wave. Two surfers are riding it. One of them has a wetsuit, but there's a bow tie top of the wetsuit, and he's saying it's a rental. But what have you been doing in the past couple days? Any new ideas? Maybe it's not a cartoon.

Maybe it's something you actually make and wear yourself. It wasn't funny at all. Happy cartooning. We're going to hear from Drew and Matt a little later in the show. If there's one comedian who's everywhere these days, in fact, I think I just saw her on the side of a bus, it's Amy Schumer. She's running her own Comedy Central series.

She wrote and starred in her first feature film. She hosted MTV's Video Music Awards and just recently HBO released Amy Schumer live at the Apollo. Amy's comedy is a mix of the political, the raunchy and the scathing, and it also has an undercurrent of sadness. She's very good at making you squirm, too. Amy, I can't help but ask this question. I grew up in a household that sounds, I can't begin to tell you, very similar to mine.

Really? You bet. I had a mother with multiple sclerosis and eventually a father who lost his business. He was a dentist because he had Parkinson's. You don't want a shaky-handed Parkinsonian dentist. No, you don't. It's kind of like a bad Buster Keaton movie. Yeah.

It sounds like there was a lot of tumult, but a lot of humor where you were growing up and in your house. Can you kind of give us a picture of that? Sure. Is that how you guys dealt with it too? With insane humor. Yeah. But between brothers, more than the parents. Right, more than two of the parents.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, my siblings and I are close. I have a younger sister. She's three and a half years younger, and my older brother is four years older, so I'm right in the middle. The first sort of horrific thing that happened. was that my brother's is a different father than us and his dad died. And I remember he told me, he was 12, I was 8 and he told me, and my dad died and I just smiled.

Like I had the biggest smile on my face because I was so uncomfortable and I didn't know how to process that emotion. So it just went to like, you know, the ultimate sadness just went to like a smile. And he just looked at me like I was insane. And I felt horrible. You know, and I think that that's probably in some way still still in him, and the shame of that is still in me. But that's been my reaction to real tragedy. The only way I can deal with it is to find a way to laugh about it.

And I'm better now. I was eight years old, and now somebody gives me bad news. I react like a human being. But my dad got MS. How old are you? I was 11. and it came on loud and strong and I'm the middle child trying to keep everybody laughing

and I really did. We all really did. It would be like, you know, seeing your dad that vulnerable and human, it's so awful you can't believe you're seeing it so it becomes funny. You're like, like no one should ever have to see their parents. Weak. Weak and shitting themselves.

at JFK Airport. Like, you just shouldn't have to see your parents this vulnerable. And we would find a way to laugh about it always, the whole family. There was nothing that was off limits. Including your father. Yeah, still with my dad. He still has his wits about him. Yeah, he's got some dementia.

Like, he forgets a lot. He'll call me three times in a day and be like, why haven't I talked to you? And I'm like, we've already talked. How does it become something that you're not just funny in front of your family at dinner or cracking wise in the back of a classroom in Long Island or wherever? And it's something that you begin to see as a possibility to be and become and to shape. And how did that happen for you? It was my brother and sister were my favorite people to make laugh.

And then my parents and then the kids at school. And I just, I loved it. And I loved it because it was fun for me. It wasn't this need for approval. Because I'm Arnery, you know. I just, I liked making myself laugh. And then did plays and then, you know, I tried stand-up. I just tried it.

I never thought I would ever be a comedian. I just liked it. And I was like, oh, I'll do it again. And I kind of just did it kind of. Because the reward is right there and then? Yeah, it was like if you're, you know, you do plays your whole life and then you're in college and you get to perform and you're doing it. And then all of a sudden it's just like, boom, you're waiting tables and you want to perform. And it's a really good.

good way to get to get on stage and perform. Amy, at what point do you think that your work as a collection of jokes and decent performing skills and all the rest moves to something more not elevated in a kind of pompous way, but more serious that you, there's an idea behind what you're doing. There are ideas behind what you're doing. Yeah. Well, I think you just evolve. As a comic, I was just jokes.

I was just set up punchline and you're just trying to get laughs. You're trying to get better. You're figuring it out. So I used to play a character, really, kind of like a deranged, just like white, rich party girl, maybe Republican, I don't know. But I do have an agenda now, and it's, you know, my agenda? Yeah. To make people laugh and feel better. To make them feel better.

So inside Amy Schumer, and I consume the show the way I think a lot of people do. Maybe most people do, which is to say I watch. Most people don't. But in terms of one sketch at a time instead of watching it on the network But it was one that was just stunning It's called I'm sorry And it's four women on a

Doing a panel discussion You know what just for time I think we'll take an audience question Sir in the back Yeah my question is the first broad there You do peps and shit right Oh I work with neuroprotective peptides So our team

Forget it. I thought you could help you with my stomach and whatever. I'm sorry. I should have made it more clear. You're in pain. Do you want me to get you something for your stomach? Yeah, it'd be nice. Yeah, I'm going to run out. Does anybody need anything? No, okay. Amy, why don't you just stay here? I mean, we can send someone up, but you're part of our panel, so. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Well, I want to know how the sausage is made. How the process is. When you're a stand-up comedian, you're doing this by yourself.

Right. We were talking about just how women say, I'm sorry so much. You know, it's not like revolutionary. stuff. People know that happens. But I was like, we got to do a scene about that on the show. And then I pitched it in the writer's room. And then we figure out, what could it be, like a panel? And people like, oh, yeah, like a panel. And then we came. It was like women's innovating women. Like, we just came up with some horrible name that could be real. And then... How many people are in the room? Seven people plus a writer's assistant and a dog. And we, and it's nice. It's totally different than stand-up. And you prefer it now?

No, no, I love the different things. I like writing a lot. I love collaborating. You make a joke out of yourself about your body, about your sex life or your fictionalized sex life or whatever it is. Yeah. And that's a, that's a price to pay, and it's also there's a price in that a lot of people don't get it. I'm surprised by how many people do get it. But the people who don't get it are not. Why do you say that? I think I have had a low opinion sometimes of with the way I've seen our country, which is dirty comedy clubs for 10 years. I was so happy when Obama won. I just was like, oh, there's no way.

This country. Like, we're just too. People are just too stuck in old ways and they're too racist. But I'm pleasantly surprised by America all the time. But if someone doesn't get what I'm doing or misinterprets it for the truth, if I say something like really ignorant, And it's clearly I'm making a joke about a person that would say that. Then I'm like, well, that's not someone I would ever want to have a conversation with or want them to be in my audience. If somebody hears that I support Hillary Clinton and that makes them not want to come see me live, well, good.

Then don't come. There's so many other comedians that you can go see. How are you feeling about her right now? Love her. Just straight up, uncritically, no problems. No, I'm not like no problems. So what do you wish she'd get better at? I mean, she's struggling with the millennials right now, which is who she should be cleaning up with.

What's your contact with her? We call each other every night before we go to sleep. Really? Milk, cookies, and Hillary. Nighthill. No, we've just met once, but I hope, I mean, I plan on being involved with her campaign. What would you do? What I really want.

However, I can be most useful, you know, I think which will probably be very spare. Nobody wants me to be the face of her campaign. But did you, last time around, it seemed to me, and I'm not the only one, that she was scared of feminism as a forward issue in the campaign. The cliche way she didn't want to make too big a deal of being a woman. Was it? Yeah, because that scares off men and women alike because they still don't know what that word means. Because when she's honest and she's just like firing stuff off, you're like, oh, she's a bad. I was on a show one night, and Seth Myers, and I'm sitting next to as if in a dream, Jerry Seinfeld.

And he went into a long rant that he feels uncomfortable about telling a certain kind of joke because he's going to get attacked by what he sees is the PC police. Sure. On the other hand, what he sees as being PC also is make sure that we don't say some really ugly things and hurt a lot of people. how do you feel about that issue? Do you find that there's a lot of pressure on you not to do things, not to say this, a condemning atmosphere? You think he's right? Yeah, it's such a gotcha society.

But I feel like the minute I really am worried about that and I don't want to say something that I think is really funny, then it's like you're dead in the water. When we're punching up, punching against power, are punching against bigotry. Yeah. All bets are off. Great.

Yeah. But when you're punching down... Sure. Well, like Jim Norton right now, who's one of my favorite comedians, he talks about how, like, what are we not allowed to talk about right now? We are not allowed to talk about Caitlin Jenner. You know, like, all the late night shows, everyone's like, nothing, no humor to be found here.

And he's like, well, I'd like to take a shot at it, you know? And it's like, I support Caitlin, I support Caitlin. But Jimmy's like, I support, I've been supporting transsexuals for years. What kind of reactions do you get? People love it. And it feels good to be like, yes, why are we all pretending? How did you react? You got criticized about the question of race and making jokes about race.

Yeah. It didn't hurt my feelings. It did not. No, because I feel like if there's a part of you that's sensitive to that, that it's probably because there's a little truth in it. Nothing works 100% of the time except to Mexicans. Yeah, that's a joke. It's old.

It's an old joke of mine. I wouldn't write it now just because that's not the stuff I'm doing. I don't think it's particularly brilliant. The punch of that is supposed to be like, oh, that's a horrible thing to say. And that's why we're laughing because it's horrible. I don't apologize for that joke. You know, any jokes, I have so many. part of my character was being kind of like vaguely racist.

Maybe maybe that one is, that doesn't work. I wouldn't do any of my old jokes now. Because they feel stale or because you thought they were offensive or often some way? Because they feel stale and I have a bigger audience now and it's more people are looking to me and I have become in some ways a role model. And so I have more responsibility. But I didn't. I didn't then.

You had a choice a while back. It's no longer a secret. it wasn't a secret for very long, that the John Stewart people came to you and said, we'd like you to do this show. Right. Or at least think about it. Yeah. You didn't want to.

I thought about it a lot. But yeah, I didn't want to. What was the thought process about it and why did you come to the conclusion? It wasn't a good idea for you. I'd have to be in that same building every day for five years. Were you tempted? Yeah, I thought about it. I thought, okay, I can actually, I can give everyone my family jobs.

And I can really, I mean, just like the, you know, this stuff like this, that and it's New York and it's, yeah, I just kind of didn't want to know what I was going to do for the next half a decade. And your horizon now has to be limitless. How do you look at it? I just want to do stuff that scares me. And what is that? Directing bigger things scares me and excites me.

I've been enjoying being on camera less and less. Maybe that's because I'm aging poorly. but I'm like a stay in your lane type of girl. I mean, you know, we all like will humor people when they're like, oh, I play the tuba now and I'm going on the road with a band. And I only want to talk about the tuba. And people are just like, okay, but can you tell two jokes? You know, I'm not that. Like, I'll do dramatic.

I know I'll go back to doing plays. Now, is there any concern that your life is going to get so good that it maybe is not comic material? I notice that the... Nope. You know, you were... Not at all. I watched you at the Apollo and I realized she's telling a story about having courtside seats at a Laker game. Sure.

But you know what I mean. So if your life becomes private planes in courtside seats, is there a price to pay in your work? I think so. Not the level I'm at, especially because this is my first time having court side seats. And it did not go well for me. And things always backfire. You know, just it's always like, I think I have my foot in the door and like, am I really? Yeah, and I just get ripped right back down.

You know, we have trouble. When we publish fiction every week. It's fiction? Some of it. Some of it. And there's, for most writers, after a certain age, they stop writing short stories because the market is telling them novels. We want other things. And so it's very rare that you get a Jumpa Lahiri or Alice Monroe, who,

who keep writing short stories to the end of their careers and lives. A lot of comedians stop doing stand-up the minute they can for whatever economic or creative reason. You want to put that behind you with this performance, or you wanted to keep doing that? No, I'm working on my next special. I'm hitting the road hard. I'm out there.

You're writing new material all the time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And thematically, is it different, or do you find that you're digging the same? It is different. It's because I'm living life. And so I have a niece now and I'm a woman in Hollywood now, which, you know, I don't feel like that.

But I can speak to it at least. You're not going to move, are you? Ew. That's the reaction I wanted to hear. Amy, thanks so much for coming. Thanks for having me. The indomitable Amy Schumer. Just this past weekend, she appeared yet again in support of gun control legislation with her cousin, New York Senator.

Chuck Schumer. Coming up, William Finnegan sits down with the real hardest working man in television, news anchor Jorge Ramos, who went toe to toe with Donald Trump and came out on top. No, you don't. You haven't been called. Go back to Univision. You're listening to the New Yorker radio hour. I'm going to turn stuff in tomorrow. I was thinking about cameras. So I have a guy standing on a street looking like a director with a backwards baseball cap. And he's got three legs and, of course, he's holding a camera, and then some onlookers who are saying he literally was born to make movies.

So what do you got? I've got one. Tell me if you think this is a... You haven't even told me and I already did. I'm not really sure I should be hearing these conversations, to be honest. I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. We'll hear more from Matt Diffie and Drew Dernovich in a few minutes. People sometimes knock me or tease me for being a workaholic, but even with this new radio

show, I'm pretty sure I've got absolutely nothing on Jorge Ramos. He's the co-anchor of the nightly news on Univision. He's written a dozen books. He hosts a Sunday morning show and a weekly news magazine, and he writes a syndicated column. I'm not even sure that's the whole list. For Spanish speakers in this country, Ramos is like Diane Sawyer, Bill Moyers, and Walter Cronkite rolled all into one. But Ramos has often been criticized for the way he approaches journalism. He doesn't pretend to dispassionately cover issues that concern Latinos.

He is their advocate, and he wants to mix it up with people like Donald Trump. Staff writer William Finnegan recently published a profile of Jorge Ramos in the magazine, and he recorded this conversation with him from Univision's headquarters in Miami. They started right off by talking about politics. Two Latino U.S. senators, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, are in the national spotlight, running for president. Neither of them defends the undocumented. I've heard you say that you'll be thrilled if a Latino becomes president, even if it happens to be one of those two men.

Isn't that complicated for you? First of all, I have to say that I hope that at some point in my career I'm going to be able to go to the White House for the inauguration of the first Hispanic president or the first Latina president. Marco Rubio's parents, both Cuban Americans, were immigrants. The father of Ted Cruz is an immigrant.

And many immigrants in this country cannot understand why. the sons of immigrants in this country are not supporting other immigrants. And it is incredibly unfair and sad that these two politicians are closing the door or trying to close the door behind their parents. Have you been shocked personally by the extent of Trump's appeal? Yeah, I think we all are. I thought that the era in which we would see a candidate attacking immigrants openly, and suggesting that it is possible to deport 11 million, I thought that era was gone.

I just read a fantastic article from the Pew Research Center. They were saying that by 255, and I'm going to be 97, and I don't even want to ask you, Bill, how old were you going to be in 255, but I'll be 97 if everything goes right. By then, the white population will become a minority, and to suggest that you can rule in this country, with only one part of the population, I think it is wrong and it isn't going to happen. Many of our listeners became aware of you for the first time when Trump threw you out of a press conference in Iowa in late August for standing up and asking a series of questions and refusing to sit down until you got answers.

Okay, who's next? Yeah, please. Excuse me, sit down. You weren't called. Sit down. Sit down. Sit down. Go ahead.

No, you don't. You haven't been called. I have the right to underwent. Go ahead. Go ahead. You cannot deport 11 million people. I was sitting directly behind you when that incident occurred. And I was struck by how calm you were, you know, with Trump interrupting you and snarling at you. And then with this bodyguard who was a huge guy, manhandling you out of the room. You didn't seem nervous.

You didn't raise your voice. Do you remember how you felt when that was going on? And also, what do you think the upshot of that incident was? In terms of being calm and not reacting violently, you have to remember, Bill, that I've been on TV for more than 30 years. Of course, you get nervous. But I've been trained for 30 years to be on camera. When those moments happen, I've covered very difficult moments in our national life.

I was on the air for hours and hours on 9-11. And of course, what you want to do in those moments is to react emotionally, to cry and to do things that you would only do in private. But I had to remain calm. And maybe because I'm also taking yoga and yoga helps me. And with breathing, it's amazing what you can achieve. Speaking of people who shout and scream for a living, Ann Coulter's latest book is a tirade against. immigration in general and Latinos in particular. I mean, she basically makes you living by saying outrageous, offensive things.

And yet you had her on your show. You've said that Americans should fear immigrants more than ISIS. Yes. Most immigrants are not terrorists, not criminals. I have a little tip for me. No one is biologically predisposed to commit a crime. If you don't want to be killed by ISIS, don't go to Syria. If you don't want to be killed by a Mexican, there's nothing I can tell you.

Very easy to avoid being killed by ISIS. Don't fly to Syria. Are you really saying that we're talking about 40 million immigrants who live in this country? I thought you were just disputing that. No, no, 40 million immigrants who leave immigrants. I'm not talking about undocumented immigrants. Overall immigrants legally here and those who are not here. I think we're closer to 40 million with illegal.

Jorge, I'm sure you remember that moment. One of the things that was striking about it for me was not just, the incredibly offensive thing that Coulter said, but the kind of silence that followed. I've heard you say that silence is death on TV. You know, you've got to keep the conversation going, keep things happening, which I'm sure is a good rule of thumb. But in that moment, you didn't reply,

and then Coulter tried to fill the silence. I thought it was so powerful, and the audience was so quiet. I'm just in front of a live audience, I assume a mostly Latino audience in Miami, and it was an amazing moment. When I first heard her saying that, I thought of two things. First, I was honestly shocked that she was saying such an outrageous statement. And then at that moment, I made the conscious decision of not talking, of just staying silent,

because it didn't matter what I would ask. It would be weak in comparison to what she had just said. So I let the moment hang. And the more that she would talk, the more outrageous and the more offensive and more out of place that it became. That was quite powerful. Do you worry that giving somebody like Anne Coulter a platform just increases the availability, even perhaps the acceptability of her far right wing and anti-immigrant ideas? No, I do that all the time.

I go to Fox News frequently. I invite her to talk to us. I just recently went to talk to Joe Arpaio. I think I've talked to him three times in Arizona. I am completely convinced that we have to talk with those who don't agree with us. That's the only way for them to get to know us, for them to know that we are not criminals, not rapists, no terrorists, and also to advance the idea that it is possible to legalize immigrants in this country

and that we are part of the United States. There was a moment when we were in Iowa, well, we ran across Anne Coulter. She was there to introduce Trump. And you guys caught each other's eyes as we were passing, and you swerved and each of you sort of gave a silent fist bump. Yeah. That was probably not your favorite part of my piece. My interpretation at that moment was that you guys were both working and that you were just saying hello, acknowledging each other. But it was striking because of the great political and personal differences between you.

I doubt you guys go out and drink beer together. I could be wrong. Was my interpretation wrong or of that moment? No, I think what you described was exactly what happened. And what many people don't understand is that sometimes when you are on TV and you only have five minutes, not only to express your point of view, but also to attack your opponents and to try to defend your positions, you have no time to be pleasant. right from the beginning. So the intensity that you see on TV, the confrontations that you see on TV, that's not real life. TV is an exaggeration of life. So after you do those interviews, they know that it is not personal, in other words, that I don't have any personal animosity against Unculture or Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly. And at the end, we can have a normal conversation like two human beings and no we've never had a beer together. You grew up in Mexico in the bad old days of the pre, the perfect dictatorship, the

revolutionary institutional party, noticed the pre. You worked briefly as a TV reporter there right out of college and had trouble with censorship and had to leave. But you came around as a Univision anchor and were able to interview Carlos Salinas, the president who was perhaps the most feared in recent times. In Mexico, you can't do that. Sarina de Gortari governed from 1988 to 1994. He was incredibly smart, but also his government was very corrupted. And the election in which he supposedly won, there were thousands of places where 100%

of the population went to vote that day and nobody got sick. and 100% of the people voted for him. It is funny because it was a major fraud. So if I were a reporter in Mexico, I wouldn't have been able to ask those questions. But after he left power and I had the chance to talk to him, I confronted him with the fact that he made a huge fraud to become president. He made another huge fraud to decide who was going to be the next president after him.

because many Mexican journalists cannot do that. More than 80 journalists, reporters, have been killed in Mexico. And I always wonder what would have happened to me had I stayed in Mexico City. Well, I'm glad we're taping him because I don't know what else to say. Finish with a personal question, Bill. What would you tell yourself to your own, Bill Finnegan when you were 25.

Ah, can I steal that? Yeah, I'll use it to. You know, at 57, I think I would tell him to slow down a little bit. I lived so intensely for the last 30, 35 years in this country that I don't know how to stop. Now I realize that I should have enjoyed a little bit more certain moments in my life. But I think I didn't know how to do that. You know, there's a beautiful sign that I kept with me for a long time that said, it's only television.

And those of us who work on TV sometimes think that television is the most important thing in life. Well, what I would tell him is that don't be stupid. That's not the most important thing in life. That was Jorge Ramos, co-anchor at Univision. I'm William Finnegan, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And I'm David Remnick. Let's check in with our cartoonist now and see if they finally made their deadline. I did not sell a cartoon this week from my bat.

Oh. Yeah. Well, you know, it happens more often than people realize. Right. So did you sell? He didn't buy any of the ones that we were talking. It's kind of tossed in there at the last minute, and he bought that one. But in the back of the magazine with no caption.

It's a multi-card pile up on the highway. It was actually a stack of cards, and the person who's sitting in the saying, should I say the captions? Am I allowed to do that? I guess so. Okay, he's on the phone and he's saying. So how does that make you feel? They took your idea and took your caption off.

Half the time I'm actually excited to see what other people will say. You know, I drew it, but I don't think it's the funniest thing in the world. And, you know, I like seeing what other people who haven't seen the image before can come up with when they see this picture. So, and another interesting thing is for a small percentage of ones that have been in the caption contest, the winning caption that's submitted by the readers is almost identical. If not to the language, then to the idea that I submitted. So it's kind of validating in a way. But doesn't that make it even more annoying that they didn't just buy your cartoons to start with? I mean, we can always draw more than next week.

That is true. That's Matt Diffey with Drew Dernovich, New Yorker cartoonists and valiant warriors in the art of cartooning. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And still to come, the search continues for a man named William Brown. That's just ahead in the New York. New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last week on the show, we heard the first part of a story about a woman's search for the biological father she never knew.

If you didn't hear it, you can find the story at new yorkeradio.org. But to bring you up to speed, the story is about Jill Lepore, a New Yorker staff writer and a professor of history at Harvard and her best friend, Adriana Altie. Adriana was adopted and grew up one of the few people of color in a small town in New England. To tell you how white it is, there is a statue of a lamb, a white lamb in the town common, and that is because Mary Sawyer of Mary had a little lamb is from that town. White families adopting children of color was a new development in the mid-60s when Adriana was born, and her parents didn't really know what to do with the complications. But I am different, though, and they're like, no, you're not.

And I said, but I look different. And they're like, well, you're just the same. You're just the same. And it doesn't matter what color you are. You could be orange. You could be blue. You could be light. And I'm like, well, I know orange or blue.

This other color. Adriana knew very little about her birth parents until she was grown. We'll let Jill Lepore pick up the story here. When we were graduating from college, we were both 22, her father died. And at his funeral, her biological mother showed up. You know, she's white, and she had two small, like small children who were, you know, my color. And I was with a college friend of mine, Ed, and it was a very weird thing where I looked, and I said, oh, Ed, I know who that is. He said, who, who is that?

I said, oh, it's not good. It's not a good thing. And he said, what? What, who is it? I said, Ed, I think. I said, I think that's my birth mother. And he said, what? And I said, no, I think it is.

And I remember saying this night. He's like, well, how do you know? Why? I said, I don't know. But that's what I think. And I was thinking, oh, my God. Like, what is she doing here? Like, this is not a good thing.

What's happening? And she said, hello. And I said, hello. And she said, you know, I'm your mother. or whatever, and I said, okay, I know whatever you are. I was mainly appalled at this woman

for showing up at Adrianna's father's funeral, but her story behind that was that she had tried to go to the house over the years to see Adrianna, maybe even to steal her or to talk to her or something, but Adriana's father told her not to come back, to just respect the family. So

she saw on the paper that he was dead, so I guess she figured, well, he's dead. I don't know, there's a good and a bad sort of interpretation of it. On the one hand, she wanted to, like, pay respects, but also you could say, well, oh, so he's dead now. So now you don't have to respect his wishes anymore. You don't have now. Well, now it's fun.

The very first day that I met her at the wait, and she asked me to come back to her house, she also asked me to come work for her. and she was actually published these magazines and she probably thought it would be a good way for us to get to know each other it just seemed like she had this plan and it sounded like you know it sounded good even though I was a little I was a little leery but I'm like well how can I not do this I mean it just it works you know I did end up working for it for a time so when we were working like during the day or in the office we were doing the thing of like trying to get to know each other a little bit, she used to say to me a lot, you think you know everything.

You don't. And I don't think I know everything, and I didn't think I knew everything then. But I said, why do you? She says, but I know you. She says, like I know you because I knew your father. The story that Adriana's birth mother told. We'll call her Nina, but that is not her real name. The story that Nina told is a really surprising one.

One of the first things Nina told me was that Bob Dylan really loved your father. And what you should do is, and it's so happened that there, I guess the reason she thought to say this is that there was going to be a concert somewhere or something. And she said, you need to go and you need to like go backstage and, you know, introduce yourself to Bob Dylan and say you're Brown's daughter and he will love you. he may even know something about where Brown is, you know, and so, of course, I'm listening to this, and I'm thinking, well, no, I mean, I'm not, this is not the sort of thing that I would do, even if I believe it to be true,

and at that point, you know, I wasn't sure that I did. If you're traveling in the North Country Fire, while the winds hit heavy on the borderline, remember me to walk. who lives there, but she once was a true lover man. Nina, in 1965, had gone to New York from Worcester. She was a Jewish woman from a very traditional, ordinary family in Worcester, kind of conventional.

But she wanted to see the world, like you would want to see the world in 1965. And the place who'd go is Greenwich Village, which in 1965 is just an incredibly interesting scene to be dropped in the middle of. It's an interesting scene poetically, musically and artistically. And when she was there, she fell in love with this street poet, a guy named William Brown. She said, well, he would walk through Washington Square Park, and she saw him one day, and she just decided, you know, that she was going to have him.

She just thought he was great. What the hell is going on here? See, we have a sort of a situation here. I fell in love with your daughter, and as incredible as it may seem, She fell in love with me. And we flew back to San Francisco to see if you or Mrs. Streaton would have any objections if we got married.

I guess they had their own version of, guess who's coming to dinner, guess who's not staying for dinner, kind of thing. So Nina brought Brown from Greenwich Village. They went up to Worcester to meet Nina's parents. But it didn't go well. Not everyone is Spencer, Tracy, and Catherine Hepburn. And Nina's parents got really terribly upset.

And it sounds like maybe even got a bit violent. Particularly her father. But she said, he said to me, your father is in a lot of pain. So I'm going to leave. You need to stay here. You need to stay and be here with him. But I need to go. You know, of course, the one interpretation is, well, you know, he ditched her.

But that isn't the way she was saying it. And I think the point she was trying to make was that this man, like, you know, basically attacked him and was, you know, angry and got violent with him. And his response was, you know what, he's in pain and he's having a hard time. So I'm going to, you know, go. That's the last time that Nina ever saw Brown. She found out she was pregnant and her parents decided she couldn't. keep the baby and convinced her that she should give the baby up for adoption. They spirited her away to a lying-in hospital in Boston.

And this would have been May of 1966. Nina gave birth. And when it came down to that moment, she couldn't give the baby up. She just couldn't do it. She was also really ill at the time. And so Adriana was put into foster care. It was an unusual placement. Actually, before about that time in the middle of the 1960,

that kind of placement, interracial placement, putting a mixed race or a black child in a white family, that would have been incredibly unusual. My name is Sheila Frankel. I work for the Department of Children and Families, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and my job title is adoption search coordinator. Sheila Frankl worked for the state in the early 1970s, and the social worker who trained her is the social worker that went to that lying-in hospital in May of 1966 when Adrianna was born. and brought her to her foster family. In the 60s, there was a lot of shame connected with adoption for all members of the adoption triad. By the adoption triad, Shula means the birth mother, the adoptee, and the adoptive parents. Social workers try to match the physical characteristics of the child with the adoptive parents and also the race and the ethnicity.

but Clayton Hagen was the head of adoption for Lutheran Social Services and more than transracial adoption, he had an idea that adoptive parents could figure out what they wanted and what they needed, what they could do, and if they wanted to adopt a child from another country or race, we should let them do it. We shouldn't ask too many questions. I don't think there was a lot of preparation for what went on.

we actually, our agency, placed many black and mixed racial children because of his influence. But I think it was 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers protested this practice, and they came out with a position paper. And so after that, there was a whole new concern about whether this was the right thing to do to place these black and mixed-rised kids in white families. I mean, think about this moment, like the Black Panther movement. has come to power. Muhammad Ali is talking about black is beautiful.

There's a kind of notion of racial pride that's suffusing the whole culture. And then you have the adoptie rights movement with people looking back at their childhoods and saying maybe this wasn't the right thing. So after 1972, it's just a different conversation. I was really struck as a historian. I think about that time that, you know, before 1966 when Adrianna was born or after 72 when she was finally adopted, there's just this moment, this little window in the middle of the 20th century where what happened to her could have happened. In May of 2015, Adrienne was

visiting. She visits a lot. She's really close to my kids. And I was in the middle of working on a New Yorker piece that I'd been really obsessed with all spring where I was trying to track down this long lost, forgotten African-American artist from the Harlem Arts Movement, who happened to have been a sculptor. And Adrian is an artist and an amazing artist. And so I had a thousand some questions for her about sculpting. How do you cast in bronze? And what does it mean to work in plazder? And she was really patient with all my questions.

And finally, she just told me to stop. I said, you need to, you know, can't you help me find my father. And I said it like that because, you know, she finds things. She gets things done. And I also knew that this sounded like something she should be very interested in. So I was really interested. You know, I tried before and I had any look. But the thing is that so much has changed, so much is on the Internet that wasn't on the Internet.

Even like month by month, week by week, new stuff is up there. There's like digital newspaper collections that weren't there, recordings. So I said, all right, so I'm okay, I'll try. I will take a look. Well, I will if. Yeah, but if you gather up everything that you've done. Put together a memo. But she said with this lovely, tidy email with all the research she'd done over the years,

and every little scrap of information that she found out about the, this guy, William Brown. And a lot of it is stuff that we've heard before. Like, this is going to go newer. But then she sent, at the bottom of the email, there was a list of things that he was called. And it was like, around town with William Brown. Or like, they were just like a bunch of rhyming things, downtown brown. And one of them was Big Brown.

So, oh, this seems like a made-up character. And that actually is another reason that it probably sort of failed to find him sooner is that there were other names. And also I was always just looking for, you know, William Brown is a pretty common name. I thought that she meant like that was something that she called him or that people, friends of his call him. I think once we did have the internet, I was like, it never occurred to me to like for Big Brown. I mean, it was like, well, people probably call him that, but that's not his real name. Then when I started trying Big Brown and just like doing a basic Google search for like Big Brown and Bob Dylan, he pops up. And then he's kind of everywhere.

The first thing that was incredible was finding this photograph that was from 1965 in Washington Square Park. It's quite a dramatic and beautiful photograph. He's wearing, he's a very large man, very strongly built and speaking publicly before an audience. So you can see like a white college student sort of sitting at his feet and another student with a backpack is wandering behind him. And he has his right arm outstretched and reaching upward

in his index finger pointing. And if you follow the sort of sight of, sort of sight line of his arm with the finger, so it goes up towards the American flag, which is waving from the top of building in the background. I sent it to Adriana, and she didn't get right back. I emailed her, she didn't get right back. So I texted it to her.

And I said, oh, my God, this is your father. Oh, my God, this is your father. And I said, well, why do you say that? You know, why? Why? Because he's big and he's brown, and I was kind of joking and kind of not. She's like, no, that's not why, because I think it looks like.

She's like, I'm 100% certain, and I don't know. Like, I'm, you know, so I started to think, well, if I do see it now, am I, like, trying to see something because I want it to be true? But I, you know, so I sent a picture to Nina. You know, she wrote back, oh, my God, where did you get that? That's him, that's him. So after we found this incredible photograph, I looked up the photographer. It's this guy named Leroy Henderson.

This guy brown, being brown. he would be out there reciting his poetry. And he was really quite vocal and quite, you know, like, big guy, huge guy. And so that picture of him, and with him looming in the foreground like that, with that expression on his face and with his finger pointing in the air, he was good for those gestures. So what do you think it says about Brown? He could have been up in Harlem doing his poetry,

but he's gone down in the village and he's going into, like, like a different audience. I think that's a sign of his vision. I think that shows that this guy saw something beyond being a black man. If he had stayed up in Harlem or East New York, Brooklyn, or something, that probably would have been too limiting. And furthermore, I think the issues of concern in the black community were too intense to be concerned about this creative expression. We were worrying about how to survive, how to pay, you know. I mean, they were dealing with issues of social. justice and racial equality and all.

And Brown, I'm sure, was too. And also, he might have felt that he had a message coming from a black man to point of view that he felt that a white audience need to hear. That's Leroy Henderson talking with Jill Lepore. The search for Big Brown will continue next week.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. I'm not exactly what you'd call an outdoorsy guy, But at this time of year, I guess I can't even complain about a trip to the park. So that's where we'll end up today in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, where the writer Carolyn Korman went recently to try out a new app. Red Wing Blackbird, Cedar Wax Wing. That's right. An app.

Red Wing Blackbird. For bird watching. Cedar Waxwing. Robin behind us. Those are Robin. Those are the frog. I'm Carolyn Korman, and we're in Prospect Park. very distant songs. Brooklyn. I'm here with Tom Stevenson to do a field test on an app. He's been developing called Bird Jeannie.

Shazam for Birdsong. House Burroughs. That's a good description. For most birders, knowing what the songs are around them is one of the most difficult parts of birding and in some ways the most important part of birding. Because maybe 85% of the time, especially in migration, you're hearing the birds way before you see them. most birds you don't see unless you have incredible quick eyes. I'm going to try to pitch this house friend to see if it stirs it up. It stopped. Normally in the spring, that bird would just keep singing.

I mean, a chipmunk over there doing that chipping. Let's see if we can get this Robin. Okay, we've got a dog there. So I just tapped it to start and I tapped it to stop. And here's the recording, and I can play it. So that's the sonogram of what we just heard. It's a bunch of gray marks. Like an abstract painting.

You can see that there's a song and then a gap. And then I can say, all right, match that song. And there's Robin. And then I can go to Robin and I can say, right, you can match that. Or was it, well, Ariel? See how the pitches are slower and it's not as rhythmic? And then you can say, oh, I think it's a Robin. Oh, yeah, it's Robin.

and there are the pictures of the Robin. You can email it to somebody, or you can put it on your Facebook and Twitter, I think. Tweet's on Twitter. I'm not 100% sure of Twitter. There's a way in the program you can opt in to anonymously sharing your recordings. And that will allow us, assuming that people adopt the program across the country,

to develop a database of all the covered species all across the U.S. That would be the first time that's ever happened. I'm going to record that, Wharling Viro here. There it is, Worthing Viro. Right away. Right away. Right away. Yeah, because it was a little bit louder than, see how it was a little louder than the, so there's the sonogram of Worling Viro.

That's incredible of a sonogram so quick. Yeah, it's all fast. And I was still walking around a little bit so you can hear me clunking. We should go get the house running with the robin singing in the background here. See, if we got it, it looks a little quiet. You can read Carolyn Kormon's piece about Tom Stevenson and about other nature app. at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick.

Thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll be back next week with more stories. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. Talk to us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio, or you can reach us at new yorkerradio.org.