Legendary Maine Humorist: Tim Sample

And on Radio Maine. We like to explore creativity and the human spirit, and I can't really think of a better person to explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit with than Tim Sample, who is so many creative things. When we asked you for a background, which we didn't really need to ask because we know who Tim Sample is, if anybody who's lived in Maine, who knows who Tim Sample is, author, illustrator, humorist, friend of stray dogs. Tim Sample (00:00:45): I mean, that's the most important part. Dr. Lisa Belisle (00:00:47): I think that probably is actually as also a friend of stray dogs. So you're here today in the studio. There's so many different directions we could go in. I think I want to start with Phil Barter. Tim Sample (00:00:58): Yes. Dr. Lisa Belisle (00:00:59): Because that is how we got to be connected because that is the way Maine works. Tim Sample (00:01:04): Exactly. And it's what I call bag shots like in pool. You go here, it goes over here, ends up here. And Phil was a dear human being, a lovely man and a classic Maine creative entity. He talks about working on the water and then recognizing this gift that he had. One thing he said this many times, he said it to me and I identified when he was in school, he spent more time drawing than he did, paying attention to what was going on in school. And so his works, his mature work. I interviewed him when I worked at CBS News Sunday morning, and you go over the singing bridge down there in Millbridge, you go off in the Willy Wag and you're off in Sullivan. And his son, Matt, was a little kid at the time. I think he just won some kind of a musical contest or something. Tim Sample (00:02:02): But it was just the joyous world of the Barters. I remember all the doors were illustrated, painted, the whole house was walking inside of Phil Barter painting. And I also interviewed Jamie Wyeth years later out on Higgin. And that was a little bit like that. You just walk around the house and say "Oh, I've seen this in a painting I've seen." But Phil's approach to the gift that he had for creative expression was so unfeigned. And so I say naive, but in a very, very good way. Unselfconscious is a better phrase or term because I've always said self-consciousness is the enemy of creativity. You start, you overthink it, and you just, you're always hearing, I heard some Paul McCartney years ago did an interview and they were asking about how he wrote yesterday. He said, look, if I could explain everything that went into it, I probably wouldn't have wrote the song. Tim Sample (00:03:09): And Phil, his work is like that. It's joyous, it's evocative, and it's strangely sort of granular Maine without being representative in that. I just got back from Paris, France, I went to the Dorsey, and that's just, oh man, what a great museum that is. But you see these Van Goghs and I been to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and you just see this. It's just expression. And yet he just nails it. And I love that about Phil's work. So yeah, he was a dear friend, and I actually sent him a portfolio of these drawings. Oh, I don't know, a few years ago. Of course, he was not in good health. He just goes, I said, what do I do with these? I don't know. I don't know. They're great, but where do they go? I don't know. And it wasn't until much later that I kind of found a connection and moved that along. But Phil was, he was a lovely man, and I think represented something elemental about the main visual archivist. There are all these painters that just Mars and Hartley and all these people that just do, they just kind of keep Neil saying, I have to see this. I have to put this down. And the body of work he left behind. I've driven by those blueberry fields in Washington County, I've seen. And it's like, how could you even say that? Well get yourself a good Phil barter painting that goes along the way. Dr. Lisa Belisle (00:04:51): It's very true. I think he absolutely brings forth Maine in a way that's actually also unique. I mean, there are a lot of people that represent the landscapes and the seascapes of Maine and do a wonderful job. And Phil just has a very different way of looking at the world. And when he paints mountains, they don't look like other people's mountains. Tim Sample (00:05:12): That's right. Or trees in these round trees. And somehow that looks absolutely normal when he is painting that and on some quantum plane, they're just like that. But yeah, absolutely. And I think that one of the mystery creative expression is deeply mysterious and evocative, and that's the way it should be. But part of what I think art teaches us is there's no right way to see slash represent the world. I've said for years, I have a son who's almost seven feet tall. He can tell you what's on top of your refrigerator. I know people that are four and a half feet tall. They could probably explain a lot more about your belt buckle. But everybody's got a different perception. And that fully embracing that where the self-consciousness comes in is, I'm doing it right. No, I'm doing it wrong. No, I'm doing it right. That's not the point at all. Tim Sample (00:06:18): In my expression experience, my favorite art story is the little girls in kindergarten. It's been bounced around for decades, but I love this little analogy. So little Janie is in kindergarten. She's four years old. She's drawing a picture. And the art teacher comes to me and said, what are you drawing, Janie? And she says, I'm drawing a picture of God. And the art teacher says, well, that's silly. Nobody knows what God looks like. She said, they, well, when I get done, and it's just that I have to say it stuff. And that is truly a touchstone of a sense of centeredness and connection and reverence. What I love about having a gift, if you have a gift for something, it's hard to, in my experience, it's hard to express that without a certain amount of humility because who's Zoom zooming who you didn't make that happen any more than my son. Tim Sample (00:07:14): I think he's actually more like six eight or six nine. He didn't make himself be that height, but he has to deal with it. And it's got pluses and minuses. He has, when he had an office out west, he had a little thing that said, no, I don't play basketball. And then sometimes he said, do you play miniature golf? But you get the cards you're dealt, but you have to deal with 'em. You have to see what you're going to do with 'em. And to me, that if you're approaching it the way I think is a healthy way, it contains a big element of humility. And a lot of them, I've been very fortunate to meet and work with some of the great creative people ever. And they're almost without doubt, without exception, very, very humble. I think of humility is the WD 40 of a spiritual growth or something. Tim Sample (00:08:07): It's just a little bit of lubricant. And that's why humor is such a powerful thing. If you can get, I loved my favorite thing in the world, and this happened numerous times, especially when I was living down east and all this political polarization and cultural polarization. And I would do a show to raise money for somebody whose kid had cancer or something like that. And you'd have a whole room full of people in a gymnasium in Perry, Maine or something. And there'd be Trump bumper stickers and Hillary bumper stickers and gay pride, bumper stickers and guns, God guts and glory and all this. And all of them were in the same room laughing at the same thing at the same time. And I said, that to me is a powerful connection with something deeper than the superficial issues that we all deal with. And that's what humor can do Dr. Lisa Belisle (00:09:02): For you. Creativity has taken a lot of different forms. I mean, you've been a writer. You are a writer, you're an author. You're clearly are a visual artist. You have interviewed people. So that kind of level of creativity, conversational creativity. You've been a public speaker, you've been a comedian, and you also have had your very real struggles with your own life Tim Sample (00:09:30): Without a doubt. Dr. Lisa Belisle (00:09:31): Where, I mean, you grew up in Boothbay Harbor and you had an undiagnosed Tim Sample (00:09:37): Learning disability, Dr. Lisa Belisle (00:09:37): Learning disability for many years. Tim Sample (00:09:39): Well, I had a closed head injury when I was 10 years old, could have died from it. It was a very bad brain injury. And I recovered, but ended up having this learning disability, which nobody knew anything about, and A, it was Maine B, it was my family. So nobody talked about anything, anything. And so that was a challenge that created a lot of, for lack of a better term, harmonic discord and dissonance. And this idea that for one thing, one of the simplest and most profound and upsetting aspects of this, not unlike a lot of folks who have some learning, they learn differently. The spectrum disorder. And the thing I have is an autism disorder thing. But what I would do is I would score astronomically high on aptitude tests and do poorly in classwork. Well, in 1961, in a little town in Maine, there was only one explanation for that. Tim Sample (00:10:46): You were a or two really. You were lazy or you were acting out and goofing on the teachers. Neither of which was the case. It was a more subtle, more complex problem. But because of that dissonance, by the time I was 15 years old, I was suicidal. I had suicidal ideation. I didn't know what end was up. I dropped out of school. But what saved me in a way was real life, because I would go when I finally stumbled through high school and went to art school in Portland in 1969, and people say, oh, you seem to be very smart. I said, no, you're confusing me with my brother. He's smart. I'm the dumb like that. But you have these definitions of yourself. And I quickly realized that in the world at art, so here I am at what used to be the Portland School of Fine and Applied Art, dear Old Piss Fa. Tim Sample (00:11:40): But anyway, we would sit around, there'd be 12 of us in a drawing class, and there'd be a model or a bowl of fruit or the dead Pearl Fisher or something, and we would be drawing, and you could walk around that room and everyone could draw. That's why they got to art school and wanted to be in art school. But none of those drawings looked exactly alike. And we would do critiques, but it wasn't, this one's good and that one's bad. It's like what we were shooting for here and how we was doing that and we'd like that and that I was at what, 18, 19. And that opened. I said, oh, so this is a world where there's no right answer, but it is a world where what resonates with you. Some things you identify with. Some artists, you, many, many years later, Robert McCluskey from Blueberries for Sound, one morning in Maine, a time of wonder, all that stuff was one of my influences that made me want to be an illustrator. Tim Sample (00:12:40): And you could have knocked me over with a feather in 1983, I think it was, or 81, it was way back in the early eighties. I got a call from Western Woods Moore Shin down at Western Woods, and they wanted me to narrate Bur Dow deep waterman. I mean, that was like, I'm sorry, that was like, and I went down, I did it, won all kinds of prizes. Subsequently, I met Bob and it turned out Bob was a big fan of mine, and we became great friends for the remainder of his life. And I interviewed him for CBS Sunday morning. But one of the things, you have these things, so his books like Make wave Ducklings obviously and lentil. And there was a quality of the line on the page that was unlike anything I'd ever seen, that it was a rich, it looked like you just took the pencil and drew right on the page. Tim Sample (00:13:35): You're looking at it, could not figure. And I would try to get that technique down and we'd go onto for books that I had illustrated, it didn't work. So I'm having lunch with Bob and Peggy, and so this is Father's Day around 1984 or something, and I had done a show at the Grand in Ellsworth. It was then the Hancock County Auditorium. And my wife said, I was surprised for you. It was Sunday morning. I said, okay. We went out and we stood out on a pier in the middle of nowhere, and this lobster boat comes in to the dock. And I grew up in a shipbuilding frame. So I take a line, tie it off, and this woman is piloting a boat, and she shuts down the boat. She jumps off. She said, hi, I am Sam McCluskey. And I said, for God sake, from blueberries for Sal. Tim Sample (00:14:21): But we went out, we had lunch with Sal and Bob and Peggy was still alive. And I had to ask Bob. I said, Bob, there's the thing. He said, oh, oh, he got so excited. He took me in the studio. He said, it took me years to figure this out. And you draw, he'd get frosted, and you draw with black prisma color on the other end. Then you flip it around, you shoot it on the platinum and you reverse it. He told me this technique. And last summer there was a beautiful Scott Nash from the Illustration Institute, did a beautifully curated show of Bob's work. And I spoke and like that, and they had these. Sure enough, there were the original drawings from Bayway for ducklings, and they were on Mylar, and it was exactly that. So when I illustrated Saturday night at Woody's Diner, I used that technique and I joke with Bob afterwards. Tim Sample (00:15:08): I said, it worked beautifully. The only thing I was a little disappointed, the artwork wasn't as good as yours, but the technique work. But who would've guessed? That's just synergy. And it comes from, people get excited about expressing their unique individual expression of perception of the world around them. And there's no end to that. It resonates in a positive way, and you can't perceive it without perceiving the underlying mystery. How does this come to be? I look at some drawings that I did years ago and I said, I don't know if I could, I heard Bob Dylan interviewed recently, or it was actually 20 years ago, which is recently for me. But he was talking to Ed Bradley at CBS actually, and said, and Ed said, well, what about these lyrics? And Bob Dylan said, I couldn't write those lyrics. And who writes like that darkness at the break of doing shadows, even the silver spoon. Tim Sample (00:16:11): But I wrote it then. And that's the power of creative expression that is centering humbling. It's very efficient. You have to really be a jerk to think that this is you. It's not really, but you're responsible for where it goes. So anyway, so I have all these drawings that I started doing. I sobered up so many other people in the arts. I mean, you've done the show long enough to know why is it that artists and singers and writers and poets and people are so often beset by addiction issues? Well, it is not that complicated. In my experience, looking back on it, is that we are, folks in this kind of line of work are sensitives, and we perceive a lot and we see a lot. And for folks like us, oftentimes reality itself is overwhelming. And the culture I grew up in and the world I grew up in didn't give me a lot of tools to parse reality. Tim Sample (00:17:22): And so what I did was, instead of finding my place in reality, I tried to make it go away, call it a different name, paint it a different color, do something impress an external narrative. And that never works. That's the fool's errand. At the end of the day, the literature on addiction, a lot of it talks about the fact that the addiction is not the real problem. It's a symptom of a deeper problem. And the deeper problem is an inability to function in reality. And that resonated with me. And I realized my problem wasn't drugs and alcohol, it was reality. It was crushing the life out of me. So I've been sober, it'll be 28 years in September of this year. And reality, as far as I can tell, has not changed. One wit, it's exactly the same as it always was, but I sleep better. Tim Sample (00:18:19): I'm more comfortable because one of the things I realized pretty quickly when I stopped drinking, because if you've been drinking and you put down the drink, you get a lot of pain. Somebody said, alright, if I could just quit drinking, I said, yeah, well, if that's all it took, all you'd need is a radiator, pair of handcuffs, somebody to give you a meal and bathroom breaks. You could live to be 50 years and never take a drink. It wouldn't be much of a life, but you could do it. But the point is, how do you participate? How do you engage? So I had to learn, and I'm still learning, but I had to learn. One of the things that people aren't taught about in any formal education, a lot of families and cultures, I think our culture is getting better at It, is there's this bizarre level of codependency that's never examined. Tim Sample (00:19:12): Lisa, it never crossed my mind for decades that if you walked up to me on the street and said, Tim, I have a broken leg, it never crossed my mind. That wasn't now instantly by virtue of you telling me about it, my problem, my responsibility. And that's crazy if you think like that, well, you drink too, because it's too much information. It's too much responsibility. So I had to learn to parse out. And I've had many, I wouldn't be where I am in the arts without mentors, wonderful mentors. I'm a big believer in the mentor Charles Caral to Marshall Dodge and no, Paul Dukey and Stephen King. I mean, I don't know how I ended up getting these folks to help me out and to give me advice and steer me in the right direction. But they have done, and I've had many mentors in the recovery community, and one guy who was quite a bit older than me, and he was saying, Tim, you got to stay on your side of the street. Tim Sample (00:20:13): I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the problem is I could see what's going on on the other side. And I said, what do I do about that? He said, I love what he said next. He said, it's not always easy because that's reality. The reality, pat answers and dog and meet God and force easy steps that that's not a good thing for me. But it's not always easy. Then I'm open to, well, how do you do it? He said, I'll give, see if this works for you. This is something that works for me. I said, I'm all ears. He said, I find if I'm obsessed with it, want to talk about it all the time, think about it all the time, get a posse to support my perspective. It's quite likely none of my business if I hope I never have to look at it again, and nobody ever finds out about it, and I can keep it to see that is an excellent place to start. Tim Sample (00:21:02): And it turned out that was true for me. And I had pain and I had confusion and misunderstandings. And rather than look at those things and ask for help with those things and sort my way through, I just walled them off. And I have a very vivid imagination. I would create an alternate storyline with all the same characters, but it came out the way I wanted. Well, that didn't work. So finally, that stopped working. And when two or three years into my recovery, it dawned on me I was someplace. And a friend of mine who was also in recovery had a sketch pad and he was drawing it. He said, yeah, he was an artist. Bill Gilchrist, you might know Bill, but he passed away a few years ago, and he was a love, he was an illustrator and artist. He said, I just realized that when I got into recovery, I had never picked up a pencil or a paintbrush unless somebody was paying me to do a commercial art job. Tim Sample (00:22:01): And that hit me like a ton. I said, yeah, me too. And he said, didn't you used to love to just draw just for the pure enjoyment? I said, yeah, why don't you? And I started this series of pen and ink drawing, bought Bristol pads and micron pens and just, I did these and business meetings and recovery groups and airport waiting rooms, and I did some in England. I did 'em all. As I traveled around the country doing shows backstage at shows, I just let this stuff flow. And it ended up being probably 1500 of these very complex and elaborate drawings that don't bear. There was absolutely, it was like automatic writing. I don't know what, I would look at it afterwards say, oh, that's interesting. Look, that dinosaur was in this other one I did a year ago. But I don't know how that, and it's a lot like the dream state when you're dreaming at night, your unconscious mind has a whole language, a visual language. Tim Sample (00:23:07): People have repetitive dreams wherein I've dreamed very vividly. But I'll say to my wife, well, I was in England last night, my dreams, but it wasn't the real England. It was the England of my dreams. She said, oh yeah, I like that. So you have this colorful, complex landscape of images and ideas that bears some resemblance to your perception of the world. But it's not at one-to-one conscious. This means that, and that means this. That approach doesn't work for me. Trying to find the correct dogma doesn't work. But recognizing that someone is a wonderful Paul Simon documentary that's out in Dreams. I walk alone from Sounds of Simon and Restless Dreams is the name of the piece. But Simon is wrestling with his creative processes, aging, some physical infirmities, but he talks brilliantly and evocatively about trying to, what am I trying to say? What am I trying? Tim Sample (00:24:14): And that to me is very worthwhile exploring because what I found was mystery and the unknown and the everlasting story, the never ending story is calming for me. It's calming. I had a lot of these, what I thought of as ellipsis moments, whereby I had convinced myself that if I just get this or do that or achieve this goal, then what? I never finished the thought, then what? No more problems. I don't know what, but I was addicted to this idea that if I could just get to some place, and it turned out the place is reality and infinity. The place is the quantum universe. Oh, you don't know what's going on. Hey, welcome. Because nobody does. We're all ad-libbing. But to be able to do that creativity without being harnessed for a commercial entity or without being tied to a narrative, just expressing it, gave me a connection with that deeper place that is by its definition, not about this thing or that thing. Tim Sample (00:25:42): It's the state of being, its consciousness itself. And that I've seen so many wonderful. I sat with Charles Caral for about an hour on the sixth floor of 5 24 West 57th Street in New York years ago, and he just gave me about a half hour primer on how to interview and honest. I said, it was like a masterclass, and it was just a few handful of things, but it was exactly, it was what he was really, the cards that he was showing me was 25 years on the road and all this other kind of stuff. And Marshall Dodge, bless his heart, left us way too soon, 45 years old. When we did sample and Dodge in 1981, Marshall was 45, I was 30. And Marshall was what a mentor. And he said, Tim, you have to remember two things if you want to be a great monologue. Tim Sample (00:26:36): He said, first thing, never ever interrupt them when they're laughing. I said, what? He said, don't, and this is harder to do than you thing. He said, if you walk out on the stage and say one line and they want to laugh for 45 minutes, what business is it of yours? It's none of your business. That's why they came for. And if you can discipline yourself that way and wait, they will tell you when they're ready for another line. And at the end of the night, they'll say, you have brilliant comic timing. Well, you don't. It's their comic timing. It's they. That was brilliant. And I've used that ever since. And he also said the most brilliant marketing idea in American marketing history was a seven ounce Coca-Cola bottle. I said, what are you talking about? He said, you remember those? Yeah, when I was a kid, the little stubby, little Coca-Cola bottles, Raymond Lowey designed them. Tim Sample (00:27:28): And I said, well, why? He said, they had about one ounce less Coke than you really wanted. And he said, if you think of your show as one of those little Coca-Cola bottles, you go into a town, you do a show, you give one less ounce than what they really want. Next time you come to town, they'll all pack the joint. And that was in the era of the 20 ounce, 30 ounce big. And everybody left half of it sitting. He said They'll enjoy it, but they won't. When you come around again, they'll say, yeah, we already seen him. Brilliant. But that's life experience. That is reality resonating back to me and saying who I am. What are those essential questions? Who am I? What am I here for? What's going on? Who invented this place? Anyway, that reality will tell you that information. But you have to have enough humility to put down your preconceived notions and say, okay, I'm all ears. Tim Sample (00:28:28): Well, it goes like this. It's fascinating. And the net result sneaks up on you is that you feel like, okay, I made my peace with this. I'm okay here. Oh my gosh, I'm going to die. Welcome to the club. So is everybody else sooner or later, whatever. And that sort of thing allows me to be fully myself without wanting to hit the eject button on every chair I sit in and wanting to paint everything a different color and call it a different name. And one of the things is some things just suck. And the grief, there's grief and anguish. I have a profoundly mentally ill family member who's a lovely human being. There's nothing I can do really. Tim Sample (00:29:21): I got involved with nami. I read a lot of books. I educated myself, but that's all I could do. I can't make things turn out for other people much less myself. But there's this weird way in which things turn out right, but right isn't a freestanding external place you go, do you ever read, there's a little book by CS Lewis called The Great Divorce. It's one of his little 80 page, 85 page, and you can go to hell to heaven, and there's a bus and you can get on the bus. And hell is this foggy dark place. And Napoleon lives 10 miles out of town, and everybody gets, the longer you stay there, the further away you get from everybody else. And you can get on the bus and you can go to heaven. And if you want, you can stay in heaven. But these people get to heaven, and the sun is too bright and the grass cuts their feet. Well, I have to go. But that's a lot about, that's a sweet little analogy about reality. It cuts your feet. It does. It's a little, but you get used to it. So anyway, ask me a short question. You'll get a long answer. Dr. Lisa Belisle (00:30:29): I guess that makes me wonder, well, again, I knew this was going to be a very interesting conversation. You have so much wealth of experience in so many different areas. But I do need to ask, what did Charles Corral say? I mean, as somebody who also spends this time talking with people, what were the main points of how you actually interviewed people? Tim Sample (00:30:48): This is what Charles said. First of all, Charles Gault was a genius and a men and a lovely guy. So 1996, he calls me up. I thought it was a gag. I was living in Bath Maine and my assistant picked up the phone and Charles Gault on the phone, and I thought it was, I don't know, Chuck Krueger or somebody just putting on a Charles Gault voice, but it wasn't, it was Charles. I was thinking, I might come up and interview for a book. I'm writing, blah, blah, blah, and said, well, yeah, what am I going to say? No, no thanks or whatever. So Charles comes up, and I was living in Bath Maine at the time, and the street in front of my house was all torn up. So I'll tell you what, I'll meet over at the public library, and there's a gazebo in the middle of the library grounds and see Charles in a red car looking just like Charles Gault with a blue blazer, rumbled like this. Tim Sample (00:31:35): And he's looking at this gazebo. He's down his head, oh, hi Chu. Hi Chu. Now what about this gazebo? And I realize this is the essence of Charles Gualt. He's seen every gazebo in America twice, and he genuinely cares about this gazebo. So when I'm sitting up there, it was the 15th anniversary of the show, CBS. It was Sunday morning and was just, I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. That was where when I met Maya Angelou, I met all these wonderful people, but I was sitting up there, we were doing makeup for the show, I think, or something. We did it live on the set of CBS and was Sunday morning. And Gault had just done an interview with the New York Times or something, and he was just sitting out there and I said, Charles, can I just talk with you? Tim Sample (00:32:20): And he said, how's it all going? You're doing a great job and blah, blah, blah like that. And then he said, alright, give you some advice. He said, first of all, I'd only been with the network for a month or two. I'd done one or two pieces. He said, Tim, this is how this works. He says, you'll submit something on a futures meeting and here's this idea. And you and Mary Lou will submit this. And if they give it the green light, they spent a lot of money on production. I think they were like a hundred thousand bucks a pop back in those days where we'd shoot 18 hours of footage and post-production, all this kind of stuff. It was like the NBA. But he said, they're going to approve this idea. And then you're going to get out with the crew on location. And the first thing that is going to be a challenge for you is you're going to find that what exists on site is never exactly what they approved in New York. Tim Sample (00:33:10): So your first big choice is, am I going to take what I find here and try to fit it into a pre-approved mold, or am I just going to shoot the story that exists? And if there is no story, am I going to go find a story When I got AC crew and he said, "I would strongly recommend the latter, just don't try to." And that worked out many, many times. He said The second thing, there were three things. The second thing is, and you broke this rule and I let you go ahead and do it. He said, when you interview someone for network television, he said, never ever say word one. Don't even shake their hand or say hello until the cameras are rolling. Let Izzy set 'em up, do the mic check. Do I go smoke a cigarette, make a phone call, do something, come back. Tim Sample (00:34:02): And the first time you meet them, the cameras are rolling. And he said, I'll tell you why. Because if you talk about this stuff, they're going to say this wonderful stuff before the cameras are rolling. And you're going to spend half your interviews saying, now, before we started, we were talking about this. And I've seen dozens of network interviews to make that mistake. And they say, well, during the break you were saying this, this crawl was right. Get it down the first time. And he said, most important of the three things, well, there was actually four he said. The third thing is when you're asking them questions, don't ask them some kind of question. You think a news reporter would ask them, they're an interesting person, and this goes the zebo. If they're interesting enough to be on network television in front of millions of people, theoretically you're interested, ask questions you're interested in. Tim Sample (00:34:57): And then the last and most important thing is when they start talking, shut up. And if there is a pause, which there inevitably will be, he said, you are a polite person, right? I said, yeah, in a social situation, you'd fill in the blank. You'd prompt somebody. Don't do that. Just let the awkward pause. If it lasts five minutes, fine. And when they start talking, they will say things even they had no idea they would be saying, I interviewed Sister Francis Carr from the Shaker community and oh boy lot. I found out a lot about Shakers. They had just, what's his name? Who was the documentary filmmaker that did the Civil War? That guy, he had just done one called The Last Shaker, and the information was wrong. He didn't know about this community. Well, anyway, they weren't crazy fans of his, but I was talking to this sister Francis Carr, and my producer, Mary Lou was sitting next to me and she would kick me under the table if I interrupted her or went on too long. Tim Sample (00:36:04): But this one, I was fascinated. I think I asked three questions. The interview took 45 minutes, and when it was over with Mary Lou said, that's the best