The New Vice President
From our November 2007 issue: In his new book, Peter Sagal, the smart and impish host of NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!, turns his attention to porn, gluttony, swingers' clubs, and other forms of behavior that he'd never, ever have the nerve to do on his own.
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These forays in Babylon are a far cry from Sagal's nondescript middle-class upbringing in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. His father, Matthew, was a telecommunications executive and his mother, Reeva, a schoolteacher turned stay-at-home mom. In high school, Sagal, the middle of three sons, gravitated to theatre. "I was a typical theatre dork, brainy, someone who found actual interaction problematic," he says. He went to Harvard, where he majored in English and wrote and directed student theatre productions. After graduating magna cum laude in 1987, Sagal moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as the literary manager for the now-defunct Los Angeles Theater Center, reading a mountain of plays before turning to writing them himself.
A playwriting fellowship in 1992 took him to Minneapolis, where a friend suggested casting a pretty blond actress named Beth Albrecht in a staged reading of one of his plays. "I thought, This guy is so funny and smart," she remembers. "I immediately had a crush on him, and because my friend had been talking me up, he immediately had a crush on me." Although the high expectations led to a disastrous first date—"We both were trying too hard to impress each other," Albrecht says—they married in 1994.
Fate may have played a hand. In one of the occasional humor columns he has recently written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Sagal recounts how, shortly after Albrecht rejected his suggestion that they live together, one of her housemates inadvertently set their furniture on fire; Albrecht moved in with Sagal that night. "With that example, I have taken a more accepting, passive approach to achieving my desires in life," he concludes in his essay. "If somebody refuses a request, or if things don't work out the way I had desired, I don't argue. I sit back, and I wait for something to explode."
While in Minneapolis, Sagal was hired to ghostwrite the autobiography of a 1970s porn-film director named Gail Palmer, only to discover that she was merely a front for her pornographer boyfriend. He went ahead with the project but created a smarter, more self-aware version of Palmer who reflects thoughtfully on her life in the memoir. Palmer refused to let it be published, but Sagal revisits the episode in his own book and says that the exposure to the porn industry laid the groundwork for Vice. During his Minneapolis stint, Sagal also wrote a play titled Denial, which found its way into the hands of the Hollywood producer Lawrence Bender (Reservoir Dogs, An Inconvenient Truth); Bender later hired Sagal to write a screenplay that eventually became 2004's Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.
Sagal moved from fellowship to fellowship until 1995, when he and Albrecht moved to New York to try to piece together a living in the theatre; he wrote, she acted. Two years later, the couple moved to Brooklyn, Albrecht became pregnant with their first child, and Sagal was asked to audition for a spot as a panelist on a new public radio humor show. "We didn't want traditional performers," recalls Wait Wait's creator, Doug Berman, who also came up with NPR's Car Talk. "We wanted people who had something to say and had a funny take on things."
Sagal became one of the show's original group of four panelists and shortly afterward once again benefited from something exploding: When Wait Wait debuted early in 1998, its host was Dan Coffey, a comedian best known for his radio character Dr. Science, but it soon became apparent he was a poor fit. "He's a talented guy, but it turned out we wanted someone who had more news savvy," Berman says. By the time the producers decided to look for a new host, the show was committed to WBEZ because it was the network radio station with adequate production facilities nearest to Coffey's home in Iowa City. Coffey lasted only until the end of April, but during those few months Sagal established himself as the panelist best able to take the reins. "You could hear him thinking," Berman says. "He was able to bring out the best in other people around him as well as share his own ideas." Midway through a nine-week tryout, Sagal was hired. He moved to Chicago with Albrecht and their newborn daughter in May 1998, eventually settling in Oak Park, where the family has grown to include two more girls.
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