Your Mama's Kitchen Episode 9: Conan O'Brien
Audible Originals presents Your Mama's Kitchen, hosted by Michele Norris.
Conan And I still go home and I go into that kitchen. If I'm a clay pot, this is the kiln where I got baked. This is where it all happened. More so than my bedroom, more so than any other place in the house. Food is the excuse and it gets us in there. But then that's where all the molecules bang up against each other. And that's where there's the laughter. There's also some of the most intense arguments, you know, that I was in with my brothers or with my parents … So, yeah, it's ground zero, really.
Michele: Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how we are shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids.
I'm Michele Norris.
Joining me today is the flame-haired funnyman Conan O’Brien. You know him from, well, you know him from everywhere.
The Harvard grad started off his career writing for SNL and then The Simpsons.
He bundled up all that nervous, comedic energy and went on to host NBC’s Late Night… then The Tonight Show… and then charted his own path with his own eponymous late night show, Conan, on TBS.
Since then, he’s started a media empire, traveled the world, and has gotten… a bit more introspective. As he’s turned 60—he doesn’t mind me telling you that—he seems to look through a more serious lens as a man with a long-time loving marriage and kids who’ve headed off to college… and as someone who has been able to watch his parents move into old age in the same house he was raised in. His podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, digs deep, with interviews that are sometimes historical or anthropological—and yes there is still the occasional joke about—I can’t believe I am about to say this—farting in public.
Well, since Conan needs a friend, we decided to invite him to our show so we could turn the table on him—in this case the kitchen table—to learn more about his great big loud Irish Catholic family, his hardworking maverick of a mother, and how people might not always speak the words “I love you,” but they say it nonetheless through food. I think you’re going to love this conversation. And as a bonus, we learn about Conan's favorite food growing up and, well, he's a ham and it turns out… he likes ham. He REALLY likes ham. We'll hear about that.
Michele Conan O'Brien, thanks for being with us.
Conan Honored to be here. Thanks for having me.
Michele I have heard you talk about your mom so many times, your family so many times. It sounds like it was a big, loud, raucous household. So I'm eager to talk to you about your mom's kitchen.
Conan Well, I'm not sure my mom's eager for me to talk about her kitchen, but I'm going to go for it anyway. Yeah, it's I just to bring your listeners up to speed, I'm one of six kids, so my mom had six kids, and she went back to work as a lawyer at Ropes and Gray law firm. And my father worked at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and so and our grandmother lived with us and we had multiple dogs, cats. My brother had parakeets. So, yeah, it was kind of madness in the house. And but the kitchen was a major focus in our home because we love to eat.
Michele Now, just a word about your mom, because we're going to talk about what life was like when she went back to work. But she graduated Yale Law School. Yeah. 1956.
Is that right?
Conan Yeah, I believe that's right. Her story is pretty interesting because my people, both sides of the family settled in the Worcester area, which is kind of central Massachusetts. And my grandfather, my mom's father was a policeman and he was the guy that would direct traffic in downtown Worcester. And he earned, I think, $55 a week. My mother grew up in that environment. Of course, he hadn't been to college, His mom had not been to college. I mean, her mom had not been to college. And so she came from this modest household and she was very bright and very hard working. And she got a full scholarship to go to Vassar because, you know, my grandmother, her mother, had grown up during this era of racial prejudice against Irish Catholics, and she had once passed Vassar, I think, and like a wagon, I'm going to say, like a horse and buggy. And she saw all these ladies dressed in white, sitting on a lawn having tea. And she said, What is that? And they said, That's Vassar. And she thought, My daughter's going to Vassar. So my mom went on a full scholarship and did very well. And then she got a full scholarship to go to Yale Law School at a time when not a lot of… it's very rare for women to go to Yale Law School. And she has amazing stories of graduating excellent law student graduates Yale Law School in the mid-1950s and goes to work at a law firm and they go in to meet with clients and it's time to break for lunch. And they told my mom, this is men's only dining room here at the law firm. And they set up a little card table for her to eat at outside the dining room. Now, you know, today that's a nice lawsuit. We can all retire on. And so my mom really was a just did a super heroic job of taking care of all of us and also being in a state attorney at this big time law firm. She always knew what time when our appointments were for different doctors. She had our clothes laid out in the morning when we were little, what we were going to wear. She just took care of everything. And then at a time when it was very uncommon, had this very serious job.
Michele And she had stayed home for a while and then she went back to work full time as a lawyer. And I had read somewhere that she did a very lawyerly thing. She had almost like a deposition with all of you and sat down and said, What do you think of this? Yes, Mom's going back to work?
Conan Yeah, I don't think it mattered what we said, but she wanted to at least ask us what's that like? I think if we had said, we don't like it and you're not going, she'd have said, okay, well, anyway, I start tomorrow. She took my brother Neal, who's about two years older than me, two or three years older than me. She took Neal into downtown to the it was on it was at the State Street Bank building into this big high rise bank building and got in the elevator and took him up and showed her office to Neal, which was, I think, a modest office when she first went back. And then she worked her way up to partner and she got a corner office. But Neal said it was like a kid showing you his new bike. She was so proud that she had her office in the law firm, and Neil remembers that very well. Obviously, we were very proud that she was doing that, but I did. Remember not liking it suddenly that I would come home from. Fourth grade and she wasn't there.
And in that stinging a little bit.
Michele So your dad did something that was interesting also, he shifted to take up a lot of the workload that I guess was traditionally seen as a woman's work, the kind of thing that a mother would do in the home. I wonder when you look back on that, what you think about your dad stepping in to do something like that?
Conan Well, you know, what he did specifically was there was a bunch of things he didn't step in and do. But what he did, which I thought was remarkable you know, my dad's a very brilliant man. And he was doing this research, and he ran a, a laboratory where he studied microbiology and infectious diseases. And my mother has to go back to work. And also she had various health problems at the time. She had a very bad back injury and they operated and this is the 1970s, and I think they actually probably made it worse since she had a bunch of problems like that. And she was in a lot of pain. And my there were times when my mom was in the hospital and she just wasn't able to do the traditional Sunday meal because we would have a Sunday meal. And that was very important. And so my father said, I'm going to step in and do the Sunday meal because that still needs to remain. That's important. That's the time when everybody gets together. So my dad said, well, I'm you know, I'm a scientist and I'm really good at chemistry, so I'm just going to check out a bunch of books. My dad got a bunch of cookbooks and studied them and then approached it like a chemist. And he went and he and what I remember very clearly is he learned how to make about two meals or three meals. He'd make a lot of like they'd be potatoes and sweet potatoes and, you know, some vegetables, a grilled swordfish when it was in season grilled steak. And what he didn't do ever was clean as he went. So and my wife would be laughing because any time I make something which is not often, I'm not talented, but whenever I'm trying to make something, stuff just piles up around me. And, you know, there's like batter covered balls and broken eggshells and everything. And my wife is always astonished because she'll say, you know, you can as you go, Well, while this is simmering, you can clean up that area. And I think I did get that from my dad because when he was done, it looked like there had been an explosion in the room over in the kitchen area and we'd all finish our meal and he'd say, Well, I got to go to the lab. I'll see you suckers later. And so that was up to us to try and—
Michele And so when you have six kids, you know, you know that it'll be taken care of. Somebody's got kitchen duty.
Conan Yeah. Somehow I have the bad reputation in my family, among my brothers and sisters, as somehow I was very good at looking like I was pitching in with everyone else, but I'd disappear pretty quickly.
Michele And so that's what you would do. You never wanted to wash if you had the choice of washing and drying, because if you dried, you could kind of like just back out of the room.
Conan Yeah. What I want, what I liked was when offered the choice of washing or drying, I liked sneaking out and watching television. And so I was, I had a pretty bad reputation, which I'm still living down to this day, because if I go home now to Brookline, Massachusetts, and visit my family, if at any point I get up, rinse a dish and put it in the dishwasher, any one of my siblings can say, Oh my God, look, Conan's cleaning a plate and they all explode in laughter.
Michele You will never live that down.
Conan No, I will never live it down. I'm like a guy that, you know, lives in a small town who, you know, robbed the bank when I was 19. And I still live there now. Since then, I've been a good citizen, but no one will ever, ever forget it. So, yeah.
Michele What did that kitchen look like?
Conan I can remember it very well. My parents bought this old house. You know, you have to remember at that time they bought the house in 1962. It was a house from like
1902, and it had a kitchen with like a big trough sink and it had heavy black drapes. And I think the house was painted black. I mean, it looked, I think, a little like a haunted house. My parents got it, and they didn't have a lot of money, but they started slowly fixing as they went. And the first thing they did was they put down red 1962 linoleum tile on the floor in the kitchen. And that's my biggest memory is this red linoleum tile with kind of a swirly pattern that they put down on the floor. The kitchen, not that big. And what's interesting about it is kitchens have evolved so much now. Now the kitchen is where everybody wants a kitchen where you can you can cook, but you can also watch television and the family can hang out. Everybody wants that kitchen. And every time you go to someone's house, the kitchen has that kind of vibe.
Michele Yeah, it’s the heartbeat of the house.
Conan Yeah. People can sit and sip a glass of wine and if there's a game on, you can be watching the game while someone's cooking. It's that whole thing. Back then, this was a kitchen that the people who had owned the house were these old women. And they had like, you know, it was like the cook is in the is in the kitchen taking care of things. So nobody went into the kitchen. I remember our kitchen by today's standards would not be the nice eat-in kitchen of the modern era and it had an old fashioned stove in it and it had an old stone sink where you could, you know, I think with a real ringer on it, you know, if you needed to ring something out. So I remember the kitchen being kind of the hive of activity, though, because it's where everybody gathers. I mean, when you have six kids, food, everybody is really interested in food. And so when it's time to eat, you're very motivated to get in there and you're really motivated to get your pork chop. And maybe if there is an extra pork chop, the extra pork chop. And so I eat as a result very quickly. And now I'm a 60-year-old man and I— my wife will be in a nice restaurant and the food will come and I'm stuffing it in my face.
Michele And my she's telling you, slow down, you don't have to eat this fast.
Conan My wife is always putting her arm or her hand on my arm and going, Your brother Neil isn't here. Neil isn't here.
Michele But so was Neil your nemesis? He was going to get that pork chop ahead of you?
Conan And guess what? He's still my nemesis. I'm still battling it out with Neil. Yeah, Neil was usually the one that would. He was bigger than me and older than me. And he could probably he could get that. So and there's so much that happens in our youth when, when we're kids, there's, there are these things that happen and they get set up as patterns and then your life changes later on. But you still have the old pattern built in.
Michele Like what?
Conan Well, just like that. Meaning I've got to eat quickly because someone's going to eat it if I don't eat it. And I better get out of here quickly afterwards in case someone tries to make me clean up. So there are all these behaviors I have where I'm eating fast and dashing out of a room and people are saying, What are you doing? And it's just these old habits that die hard. But that was that was a big one. My mom would make. The big thing I remember is she was even though she had this so much to do and so much pressure, she was in the kitchen making breakfast every morning because, you know, in New England, when you get up in the morning for nine months of the year, it's dark outside and it's cold. You'd go in in the morning and man, it's Monday and it's February. And we live in Boston and it's dark out and I don't want to go to school. And my mom's in the kitchen and she's making enough scrambled eggs for 35 people. And so it was kind of that mass production cooking.
ACT II Kitchen is Kiln
Michele Did you learn how to first be funny at the kitchen table?
Conan I think you will find that many people in the comedy profession, it all starts at the family meal. Because that's the first time where you think about it. It's your first real audience, especially if it's a large family. So that's a good number of people. And you're there and people are eating and people are starting to be wise guys and, my mom was very much a straight man. You know, she was very much, “Oh, don't say that. Now sit up straight. Now, why would you say that?” And what happens is that made me want to be really funny, because the way if you ever watch an old Marx Brothers movie, Groucho Marx worked off this woman who was a genius named Margaret Dumont, and she was always saying, please, please, you know, please, Groucho, behave yourself, please. And he said, you know, walk this way. If I could walk that way, you know. And it was a great thing for him to bounce off. He could be really funny because she was so straight. My mom was a little bit like a Margaret Dumont, and that made me want to be really silly to bounce off of that. And also when you're a kid, you very much pay attention to what makes your parents laugh because you're really trying to especially, I think, sometimes fathers, you're looking at the father who's not around as much and seems more remote. You're looking What? Wait a minute. This guy really laughs when he watches television at night. This guy really laughs at some people on TV. What's he laughing at? And then you figure out if you can do it. And he really laughs. Wait a minute. I know how to crack this guy. So that's an early connection that you make that I made with my dad, specifically, and my mom. And that all happened around that table. All I wanted to do when I was in my highchair is make those two people laugh and whatever I'm doing now is just an extension of that.
Michele You know, our show is called Your Mama's Kitchen. And the assumption is that we're going to talk about food. And of course we do. But all kinds of things happen in the kitchen that have nothing to do with what happens at the stove or what you pull out of the refrigerator. It's where when we talked to Gayle King and Michelle Obama, they both talked about getting their hair done. I bet that's where you probably got your hair cut.
Conan Yeah, I have. That's, you know, you joke, but my mom used to do all of our haircuts at the same time. And she had a, it came in a plastic kit, a Sears and Roebuck haircutting kit which I can see in my mind to this day. And it was when it was haircut day once a month, she would call us in, I think, by birth order, one at a time. And you would sit on a tall chair and she would cut our hair and her method was nothing fancy. Straight across bangs, just straight across bangs like Moe on the Three Stooges. And that's what we all got. Boy, girl, didn't matter—straight across bangs. So every picture of me as a kid, orange hair and then straight across bangs. And I know that that came from that haircutting kit. And then it was only I think I'm, when I'm like 15 or 14, I get to go to a barber, you know, who and I and I get to start to say things like, Hey, can you kind of comb it up a little bit so it's got a little bit of a wave. And he'd be like, What do you want to do that for? It's the seventies. No one's doing that. You're going to look like Shaun Cassidy, you know. So yeah, but that was what she did. The kitchen was where we got the haircut. The kitchen is where, you know, our dogs and cats got fed. It's funny because my parents are still with us. They still live in that same house and I still go home and I go into that kitchen. And I think this is really the same, you know, if I'm a clay pot, this is the kiln where I got baked. This is where it all happened, more so than my bedroom, more so than any other place in the house. This is where it really happened. Food is the excuse and it gets us in there. But then that's where all the molecules bang up against each other. And that's where there's the laughter. There's also some of the most intense arguments, you know, that I was in with my brothers or with my parents. That's the room where they gathered us. When they told us that my youngest brother was going to be showing up. They gathered us all in the kitchen and I remember sitting around the table thinking, What is this all about? And then they said, There's going to be someone moving in. I thought they were taking in a tenant. And then and in a way they were. And then my brother Justin showed up. But so that was where major announcements happened. That's where I that's the room where someone would come in and say, I have to tell you, we know your grandfather just died. Like, that's for some reason, that's where everybody happened to be when big news happened. When big things happened. It's the room that you started your day in before you went to school and you're miserable. It's where the day kind of ended because we'd all go in there for a snack before we went to bed. So, yeah, it's it's ground zero, really.
Michele A lot of life lessons in a room like that. What did you learn about generosity, about, you know, important character traits in that room?
Conan One thing I learned, and this has been an issue between my wife and myself, and it's a kind of a running joke. I saw that my dad, my mom, they made a lot of food. To make people feel comfortable, especially when company's coming over. You make a lot, my wife, her family is just so, they're sensible. They're so much more sensible than my family.
Michele What does that mean?
Conan Sensible meaning, I mean, the best way I can describe it, it's not, you know, but it's that we're Catholics, and they're kind of this, you know, WASP family of lovely, lovely people. And they make enough food and everyone has it and they're done. And then I think we were louder and there was more food. It just had more of this kind of raucous Irish, like immigrant kind of feel to it. Like, there's more noise where, I mean, her family came over probably on the Mayflower. And my family maybe it was the bus that took us from Boston to Worcester. But it was not the same experience. So as a result, when people are coming to visit... When I first met my wife and we were dating and we would host people, she'd say, Well, how many people are coming? And I'd say, Well, I think it's going to be nine of us. And she'd say, Or it's going to be eight of us. And she'd say, okay, I'll go out and get eight bagels. And I would say no. We need to have like 18 bagels. And she'd say, What are you talking about? So we just need that. People need to see a lot when they come in. We need to. And she'd say, Well, then we're throwing the food away. And, you know, I realized that that was a big difference with us is that, and my wife would joke about it all the time, but she'll now do the cone math of, okay, we're having 15 people over. So I'm going to use his math and get this much food because I know that that's what makes him comfortable. But that's what I was used to, because otherwise I would have that fear that, Oh my God, Neal's going to get it. Someone else is going to get it. So it was just easier to to have that kind of sense of abundance. And what I saw was that whoever came to our house, my mom and my dad were, and especially my mom, nice to a fault. I mean, whoever came to the house, come on into the kitchen. Everybody gets fed. Everybody gets coffee.
We don't naturally say "I love you" ... those words don't come naturally. But what you can do is hand someone a corned beef sandwich that's the size of your head. And that means the same thing.
I went through something. This is years ago when I was doing the show out of New York, but I had a stalker and the stalker was getting treatment. But then the stalker got away. And it's sort of, you know, it became a bit of a story for a day or two that there's this person who is obsessed with Conan O'Brien and we don't know where they are right now. And so someone in Boston or in Brookline said, let's just send a car over to be across the street from Conan's parents house because this person knows where Conan's parents live. And because my parents were always in the phone book. And my mom was on cloud nine. She loved it. She loved it. She was like, well, there's a police car outside. And I would say like, yeah, I don't think they're going to show up. Oh, you never know. They could show up. And we've got this police car outside and the next thing I know, she kept going out there and bringing them in and was making them coffee and food. And then, of course, they caught this person and he went back into whatever treatment or whatever and was not, you know, never a problem again. And I think my mother was crushed. I think she was really disappointed because she loved feeding these policemen, these detectives that were sitting out in front of the house. She actively wanted to feed people and she loved that. And that act of feeding people is so, you know, my wife will laugh because I'm not great. I'm not a good cook or anything. I'll order a lot of food for stuff. But I love to have people into my house and I'm constantly I mean, I can be talking to someone for 30 seconds and I say, do you want to come on to the house? You want to come into the house? I'll give you the tour of the house.
Michele You’re doing what your mom did.
Conan Yeah, I'm doing what my mom did. And, you know, I'll come in and I'll go, you know, Hey, why is this crazy person out on the street, you know, wearing a tinfoil hat and throwing rocks at a tree? I just want to show them. I want to show them what we did here.
Michele Would you like a bagel?
Conan Yeah. You know, you want nine bagels? One bagel, you want nine bagels? I'll make you a necklace of bagels.
Michele There's something beautiful about that.
Conan There really is.
Michele Yeah. That your parents had that radical hospitality.
Conan Yes, that's a great word for it. I love that. Radical hospitality. Almost aggressive hospitality. Aggressive, invasive hospitality. Yeah.
Michele Did they ever experience hunger? I ask this because that often happens in places where people didn't have a lot. You know, it's like that Rosemary Clooney song, Everybody eats when they come to my house. They counter that by making sure that that that theirs is a place of plenty.
Conan I'm quite certain that they didn't, I'm quite certain that they always, that both of them, you know, they grew up in the Depression and still they were very fortunate because both [of] the grandfathers had jobs and work throughout the Depression and so everybody had enough and had plenty to eat. No one went hungry. So I don't think anyone went hungry when either of my parents were growing up. But I do think they saw food, you know, it's a culture. Talking about my culture as a culture where we don't naturally say, I love you, I really care about you. You mean a lot to me. Those words don't come naturally. But what you can do is hand someone a corned beef sandwich that's the size of your head. And that means the same thing. And I think, you know, because my dad, I grew up in a house where, you know, my dad didn't talk that way. You know, it was just he's a different generation. You know, my mom's comfortable saying, I love you. My you know, it's not the language of my father or father's from that era. But he would rush out into the kitchen and start cooking up a big meal that would take him like 5 hours to make and leave half the house destroyed. But that that's his way of doing the same thing. And so I think culturally, that's I mean, that goes across so many different cultures. Food. Food is a way of saying, I'm literally want to sustain you. You know, you mean a lot to me. I want to I want to enrich you, sustain you. I want you to know that you mean a lot to me. And so that makes sense. And I'm probably I will use the word it was going back to use the word guilty, like I'm guilty of the same thing, but I do. Like to, you know, feed people. I like to take people to dinner. I like to, you know, have people over and then make sure that there's a lot of food. It's it's very primal way of letting people know you value them.
Michele I hear that Halloween is your favorite holiday.
Conan I loved Halloween at our house because we grew up in this sort of kooky old house. We would go all out, so we would carve pumpkins. We'd put them on the roof of the house.
Michele We would put pumpkins on the roof of the house.
Conan Yeah, there's a there's a lower roof. There's that. There's the lower roof that goes over the porch that you could climb out onto if.
Michele Oh, I see. Yeah. Like a little veranda.
Conan Yeah. And so it wasn't finished. So we put it on that roof and we loved it so much that we would keep the pumpkins going way too long, like into late November. And we would, they'd start to rot and would use toothpicks to try and keep them held together. And it would really get grotesque and stink. But loved Halloween, loved going out at night. To me, that was the key is going out at night. The fact that it was just so cool to get to walk around. At night at a time when usually we were supposed to be in bed when we were little kids. And my one of my favorite memories is that my brother Luke, the pious good one, would, he would always make his costume? The rest of us would, you know, get those plastic masks and the little smock you wear. And I'm Spider-Man, and I'm whoever. He would always make his. And they were incredibly elaborate. And I remembered one year there was like, my parents got a new washing machine and the box was in the basement. And my brother Luke went down to the basement and you could just hear sawing and hammering and all this, all these noises. And then this thing came out of the basement and he had built this like giant robot that he was inside. Little things would come out of different slots and he was in there working it all, but he couldn't see very well. So remember us just walking around at night in our neighborhood in Brooklyn and you see there's Spider-Man, you know, there's Batman, there's Wonder Woman, there's a giant refrigerator.
Michele Box.
Conan And it's moon and it's crashing into trees. And bubbles are coming out of it like it's, you know, he had he had put all this thought and craziness into it. And there was a place where like a little arm would come out and get the candy and then retract again. And I think he was suffocating in there. He's probably oxygen deprived. But yeah, those are just the those are memories that are fantastic.
Michele Did you choose your own costumes?
Conan We did. Although sometimes early on, my mom would just go out and get a bunch and sort of, you know, they came in that box and they were pretty cheap. Yeah, she just. Yeah, Yeah. Hurl it at you. And one year I was not happy because I think it was the height of Vietnam War, Watergate, all this, kind of, people questioning what is America all about? And my mom tossed me my costume, and it was Uncle Sam.
Michele Oh. It was like.
Conan A mask of Uncle Sam in a big sta- spangled smock that you wore that said, like,
Go USA. And it was, you know, it would have been fine during Reagan's— Michele The big tall hat. No.
Conan Yeah. It was plastic, like the face melded into the hat. And you wore it. And I just I remembered vocalizing my displeasure that, you know, this isn't cool, man. I look like a narc.
Michele And how did how did you get to be Uncle Sam instead of…
Conan It was just random. I honestly just think she just you have to remember, when there are six kids, it's just like you walk in, you walk in the door and you've got up six boxes and you just start chucking boxes at people. So I don't think a lot of thought went into “Conan is Uncle Sam,” it's just what happened.
Michele So what tastes like home to you? Because we always leave our listeners with a recipe that means something special to the guests. So if you wanted to share a recipe from your life, what would that be?
Conan Well, I would say I don't know if it's a recipe so much, because things were pretty simple when I was my mom would cook. But what she used to do in the morning is and again, this is probably not going to meet the standards of, you know, the surgeon general or anybody in the cardiac health industry. But I think my mom learned from her mom. And in those days, you just got a big skillet out and you put a hunk of butter down and then you sliced up big chunks of ham and you fried them. And so it was just fried ham in butter. And then you'd have that with in the morning, you could have that with eggs. But, you know, to me, if anyone can beat ham frying in butter. I will shake their hand, but I don't think it can be beat. I just think it's and it's such a simple thing. I wish I could say there was one special recipe that if you do this and you do that, but then you add this and add that. And I think, yeah, I come from, you know, Irish farmers and stone wall builders, and it's just been passed down over the years that if you can get your hands on some ham and fry it up in some butter, there's nothing better than that. And that's still in my genetic code to this day.
Michele And to this griddle. A big skillet.
Conan Yeah, a day where I might go to like a nice sushi restaurant tonight, or I might be invited to some fancy person's home. And they have, like, here's, you know, this really fancy meal. And I'm thinking, where's the why don't we get a hold of them? Why don't we steal a ham, hack it up into chunks, not even slices, and fry it in deep butter?
Michele That actually sounds delicious.
Conan It is delicious. I'll make it for you any time. Because an idiot can do it.
Michele Ding-dong. Don't say that. I'll show up.
Conan Oh, yeah. And I will bring you. I would invite you in and I will fry up some big chunks of ham in butter. And then we will all go to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and have our cholesterol checked.
Michele It has been so much fun talking to you.
Conan I've loved talking to you. This is nice. It's actually been… because you've had me thinking about things I haven't thought about in a long time and really making me go there, which… or leading me there. So it's nice. I feel like I just got in a time machine and went back to a nice place. So thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.
Michele Thanks for being with us.
We were glad we could take Conan O’Brien in the way back machine to learn about his childhood and how he became the unfiltered, introspective funny man that has kept us laughing for years. In some ways he has practiced his own version of radical hospitality, welcoming us into his life over all these years. Making us laugh and making us think. And isn’t it ironic that the guy who has hammed it for a living finds that hot buttered ham sizzling in a skillet is the taste of home? That was a surprise. I was NOT expecting that. But I do expect that there might be some hot buttered ham in my future because, I gotta admit, it sure sounds good. Sometimes you just want to keep it simple.
Make sure and check us on Instagram to find recipes from all of our conversations—including Conan’s hot buttered ham.
Thanks for listening to Your Mama’s Kitchen. I’m Michele Norris. See you back here next time.
This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original. Produced by Higher Ground Studios.
Senior producer - Natalie Rinn.
Producer - Sonia Htoon.
Associate producer - Angel Carreras.
Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Ryo Baum.
Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camila Thur de Koos.
Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and me, Michele Norris.
Executive producers for Audible are Zola Mashariki Nick D’Angelo and Ann Heppermann.
The show’s closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels.
Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media.
Engagement and Marketing from Inside Projects.
Talent booker - Angela Peluso.
Head of Audible Studios: Zola Mashariki.
Chief Content Officer Rachel Ghiazza.
And that’s it - goodbye everybody. Come back next week, and be bountiful.
Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.
Sound recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.
