Terry Gross
Terry Gross
Terry Gross is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview format radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed throughout the United States by NPR. She has been in this position since 1975 and has conducted thousands of interviews over the 40 years working at the job...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRadio Host
Date of Birth14 February 1951
CountryUnited States of America
brother dad boards
All my brothers and sisters have stories about Dad like this. I remember, when my sister was about to beat him in checkers for the first time, he knocked the board over.
football dad children
I mean, Dad was one of these people who simply could not lose, you know? He could not stand it when a kid was beating him. He would go crazy when the child came to that moment, which, you know, you have to come to - I mean, Dad played Old Maids like he played football. He just simply had to win every single thing every single time.
mother dad kids
"The Prince Of Tides" is a lot about my mother - what my mother would do after Dad would hit one of the kids or hit two of the kids, hit all the kids, hit her, she would usually get in the car. We'd drive out. She would say, I'm going to divorce him. I'm never going back.
dad book years
We grew up as this family of deniers. And people who knew us for years were stunned when "The Great Santini" came out because we had this appearance of being this happy, large, smiling family. We were taught to smile, put the best face forward. And so when the book ended up - Dad swatting us around the room, no one believed me.
dad mean tone
I mean, Dad's - you know, Dad's friendliest tone was a scream.
morning children dad
Dad mistook - for some reason unbeknownst to me - he mistook his family for a platoon of Marines. I mean, he - the exact same thing he brought to the disciplining of a squadron, a battalion, a platoon, he brought to the disciplining of his children. He ran the house - he had Saturday morning inspections for us, he had white-glove inspections for us as kids.
commercial
We don't want commercial relations. We don't need that clientele.
constant resisted
Mooney is a constant agitator who has resisted the seductions of conformity.
thinking ideas issues
I was thinking about comedy and how comedy in many ways opens us up to ideas and really being influenced by Richard Pryor and sort of the way he would use comedy to really speak about larger social issues.
might assault
Rapists who might've been convicted were free to assault other women.
art thinking doctors
I think there's always an expectation when you're a first generation, especially a first-generation Nigerian, of sort of being a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. And so, you know, sort of my initial pursuits into the arts and that I was going to pursue film as a career didn't confuse them, but it was definitely something that they were scared about.
mom dream crazy
My parents were pretty open about a lot of things, especially my mom. And any kind of little crazy thing I was into, she was very supportive of. You know, whether it was BMX bike racing or being in the Boy Scouts or surfing or anything else, she always seemed to sort of support it. And I think it's because she was an immigrant and that idea of sort of having her kids be able to have access to their dreams and whatever they wanted to follow was very important to her.
growing-up kids names
I'm first generation American, and my parents were both from Nigeria. And so I always say that I'm literally an African American. So my last name is Famuyiwa, it's different. And so that was a part of my experience from people not being able to pronounce it to not sort of having sort of a shared, common history with a lot of the kids that I was growing up with because my parents were from Africa.
creative eras late
That era in the late '80s through the '90s was really when the music was so new, fresh, energetic, but still creative. It hadn't quite gotten corporatized yet.