The Dad Who Came In From the Cold

What's it like to meet your father at twenty-eight years old? What's it like to find out you have a son at fifty-eight? For once, we have answers. Michael Frontain, biological father of your host, and beloved grandpa to your other host Julian, is here to tell the story of our meeting and the development of our relationship. It is... not... unmoving. We didn't not cry a little.

Then, an old friend-of-the-pod stops by to pick up his long overdue NATFITOIA. From now on, every NATFITOIA winner must perform a feat at least as daring and ludicrously heroic as this one.

Here's the Steve Earle TOWNES album Mike gave me the day we met on E. 86th St. (I already owned it. That's how spot on he was.)

And here is the website for Baron Vaughn, man of many extraordinary talents, from stand up comedy to acting to sketch show hosting to bringing babies into this world.

SEASON ONE FINALE next Monday! The guest? Is a big deal. Do not miss it.

Head over to podrepod.com for more information about the show and to sign up for email updates so you never miss an episode or that moment in the near future when we blast out the special patented PODRE secret instructions for how to be the perfect dad.

And follow us @podrepod on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to stay tuned in to the frequencies.

Transcript

Chris: Dads. They've been around since the beginning, but what do we really know about them? It's time to start asking questions. I'm Chris Brunt. This is PODRE.

Julian: What does Grandpa what that means?

Mike: What does what mean?

Julian: To make our audience laughed. Oh, we weren't talking about anything. Nothing?

Mike: No, nothing. We weren't keeping any secrets from the audience. Not us.

Julian: We were just planning a surprise for you guys coming in some of the episode.

Mike: One of the surprises is that don't tell them.

Julian: We're going to be talking about something new. That is, we're going to be talking about when you were a baby, weren't you? So you.

Mike: It was so cute when I was a baby.

Julian: Me too. You got to admit it. I know you were cute. When you're a baby.

Mike: Everybody, since he was old enough to talk, Julian has had a best friend. He calls him Grandpa.

Mike: Wow again. Okay. Wait till it comes a little closer.

Julian: Okay, you ready? I'm going to do it hard.

Mike: Wow.

Chris: These two, thick as thieves, and have been from the beginning. And though the pandemic meant they got off to a slower start, Nico is catching up quick. These are remarkable relationships because this grandpa, my biological father, never really got to be a dad. I'm his only son. But as you're going to hear, we didn't meet or even know about each other until I was 30 years old and he was nearly 59. This is a grandpa who no one has ever called. Dad who didn't know how to change a diaper. A year after I met him, I married Chanelle. He was at the wedding, and he's been a huge part of our lives ever since. In both of our kids lives, we've never lived too far away for him not to hop in his car and come visit just about every month. He is inexhaustible. He's infinitely creative in the ways he finds to provoke their imaginations. Running years long enterprises involving pirates who leave handwritten scrolls and buried treasure in the backyard for the boys to find, or FaceTiming as a wizard for 3 hours on a Saturday morning. With multiple costume changes and what amounts to an entire prop department. He is an unfailing source of joy and love and tenderness in our lives. I can't imagine him not being a part of our family. It's wild, because one day back in 2011, both of us, me and him, more or less just dropped out of the sky and sat on a park bench and introduced ourselves. That story in a minute. This is the only in person interview I did for this season. Mike was at my house for one of his frequent visits, so you're going to hear our conversation in studio. The sound quality is a little less crisp, a little less glossy than you're used to, but I don't think you'll mind too much. I wanted to let him tell the story of our first meeting, and he does. He gets emotional. We both do. I get emotional when I listen to this. I hope you enjoy it. I'll talk to you afterwards.

Chris: Um, all right, so let me see if I can set it up. It's 2011. You've been sober over a decade.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: You're living in Houston. You're teaching, you're taking care of your folks who are getting older. You have not had any children, and you're single. And one day what happened?

Mike: Well, I suspected I had a child with a woman in Huntsville who was gay. And my last night in Huntsville, before taking a job in Houston, I had an overnight with a woman who left to go have a baby in Wisconsin. A convent. I don't know the convent, really. And they were pretty sure that probably was my child. So in the back of my mind, I always thought someday I may get a knock on the door, but who knows? But it certainly wasn't in the forefront of mine. Hold on.

Chris: You've never told me this.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: You're saying I might have a sibling out there?

Mike: It's possible.

Chris: How old would they be?

Mike: Four years older than you, perhaps. Wow. Okay. I'll give you the mother's name. Not in this setting, but her father was the dean, the College of Art at the university. And my friends, who were art majors, all of them, I guess, were gay, but they knew this woman. This woman knew my name through them. She knew of me. And we met in a bar. It was spring break, and I had decided I was leaving. My last night in Huntsville, all my friends were gone. And I meet this woman in the bar who knew my name. And one thing led to another. The next thing, and I think, I'm sure I tried to call her and wherever she was living with other women, wouldn't put my call. Oh, she's not here? No. Wouldn't take a message. So I just assumed, that's fine, she doesn't want to deal with me. And then I heard I don't know how long after that from a good friend of mine, and he told me that, oh, Becky left and she went to Wisconsin and she was going to have a baby. And so he and I talked about the likelihood that she had had another affair, which he said, my friend said to me, no, you're the only guy she was with.

Chris: Wow.

Mike: But she never contacted me. I got absolutely no word from her. And again, she had not returned any of the calls. Now I'm in Houston. It's a long distance call, but she couldn't just pick up the phone and dial.

Chris: Okay, so that's the precedent then.

Mike: Yes. So now I'm working with the Alternative School, which is a school in the.

Chris: Klein District, north side of Houston.

Mike: Right. As far north in Harris County as you can go. So we're quite outside the city. And when we first moved there, it was Lily white. One of the things that Clinton did was he was spreading housing money around to different areas. Klein was rapidly becoming more diverse, and the school district really knew how to handle it, and they do not know how to handle kids with behavioral issues, kids with gang affiliations. We're almost speaking almost entirely of kids of color. So they open the school to these kids, and that's where I'm I'm teaching now. The kids are sentenced there for brief 30 days, maybe the rest of the semester, maybe the rest of the school year. A lot have criminal charges hanging over their head. It's an environment that was extremely required. My full attention from the moment I walked in to the moment I left there. And I joined a gym across the street, and I would leave. I changed clothes real quickly. After the last bound, we got these kids on their buses on their way back to their group homes or wherever it is they're going, and I would run for that gym, and the stress relief was important to me. So I get to the parking lot. I got my bag on my shoulder, and a woman is out there, and she says, Are you Mike? Yeah. I don't recognize her at all. Mike Frontain? Yeah. Do you remember me? Where might I have known you from? I don't recall. And she proceeds to tell me that she'd been my girlfriend back in 1982. I'm thinking, I had a lot of girlfriends in 1982. And then she said, and I have to tell you, you have a son. I said whoa. Time out. Who are you again? Right? And she starts telling me I was your girlfriend. And New Year's Eve we went to we spent New Year's Eve with your friends, Steven and Lee. They were my friends. But I remember New Year's Eve in 1982. She said, and I gave birth in November. I said, look, please stop, please stop. I said, here's what we're going to do. You give me a way to contact you, and I'm going to give you an email address. So I go home and I open. Actually, I drove over to the gym, but I never went in. I'm sitting in the parking lot. I called the guy, Steve, who we spent time with, said, do you possibly remember who this woman might be? He never clue. Either. I go home, I open a new Yahoo account or something, and I give her that information. She starts sending me pictures that she had of you. I look at this picture of me. Yeah, she must have gotten them from Facebook. Okay. And she sends me a copy of a letter that you had written when you contacted the adoption agency. They suggested that you write a letter to your birth parents explaining why you might like to have contact at this particular stage of your life. She sends me this incredibly beautiful letter. And I look at this and say, I like this guy. If I had read this in any context, I would have said, I like this guy. So I said, all right, in kind of a state of shock, but I'm having difficulty really pinning down my am I happy, am I scared?

Chris: By this point. Do you remember her?

Mike: I remembered her father because in 1982 I hung out at this bar during the day. It was all white collar execs. In the evening, my crowd took over. And then Saturday afternoons I would tend bar, which paid my bill for the week. And I lived right across the street in an apartment complex from this place, so I was there a lot. And her father would come in on Saturday afternoons and he stood out because he wasn't part of a white collar typical clientele. He had a long red beard and he had a business that was like cleaning supplies or something. And the place was never busy, so he and I would talk quite a bit about a lot of different things. Name was Les. When she told me that she was Les's daughter, I said, Wait, I remember Les. And this, by the way, drove her crazy that I had to remember her father before I remembered her.

Chris: Understandable?

Mike: And then I remember he got her a job on the dining room side. I had a lot of girlfriends. I remembered. Yeah, I guess we had some time together. We'd go across the street to my apartment when the place closed. She was considerably younger than I was. I was 28 and she was old enough to work in the place. So she was 18 at least, but probably not much more than that. But that's all I remember. And she was tall and extremely slender. I mean, extremely thin. I remembered that. But we had no real connection of any kind. I'm transferred to New Orleans in February of 82. Never gave her a thought. I mean, I can think offhand of at least four women from Houston that came to spend weekends with me in New Orleans. Those were the women that I remembered. I had relationships, girlfriends. Yeah. That this woman I really did not. But I can say with all honesty that I made every effort to be as understanding and polite as I could be to this woman during this encounter.

Chris: When she came to your well, as.

Mike: We started progressing, as she sent me information, then we started corresponding. I took her to dinner. I met her someplace. We go for a walk. I was trying to be as agreeable about this, even though I felt I felt anger. But I could channel the anger into thinking of what this poor woman went through in 1982.

Chris: What do you think you felt anger about?

Mike: The fact that she withheld this information for me for 28 years and I couldn't help. I mean, I made a vow to myself, I am not going to allow myself to think and say, what would my life have been like if I'd known about this boy? Because it's pointless. But it's hard to say, oh, my God, I certainly would have had a different career. I had a wonderful career to that point. But that's because I indulged myself. I could say, Wait a moment, I want to work on this kind of project. I want to work on this. Had I been responsible for supporting a family, I would have been much more conservative. How would it affect my sobriety? Would I have ruined this boy? Or would it have given me the incentive to get help at a much younger age than I did?

Chris: And you literally can't know the answer.

Mike: So I'm saying, why tear myself up? So I made this foul. I'm not going to allow myself to think about that. And I tried to take that anger and channel it some other way because it wasn't going to solve anything at that point either. So I tried very hard to show as much empathy for this woman as I could, thinking that at least I wasn't traumatized and I haven't been torn up on a daily basis for 28 years. So I can indulge. At least I can do is you.

Chris: Didn'T have to go through labor and then give the baby away.

Mike: I can't even conceive of what that might be like.

Chris: Me either.

Mike: And I didn't pretend to. So I indulged her. I would take her to dinner sheet. And I was very honest with her about my sobriety and some health issues that might be important. I had had cancer at that point, alcoholism. I said, these are the kinds of things that this young man needs to know.

Chris: But did you want to meet me at that point?

Mike: Yes.

Chris: Okay.

Mike: Yes, I did. If it had just been her, bring me that news, I'm not sure. But once I read that letter you had provided, I said, I want to meet this guy. So I sent a message to you. I remember typing it out, just saying, I've got this news. And I forget how I phrased it, but I said, I would like to.

Chris: See an A test. Yeah, it was very short, it was very brief, it was very friendly, but sort of to the point, right? Like, let's take this test and go from there.

Mike: And so then I order a test somewhere. And for one that was like it would not hold up in a court of law, but it was like 99% accurate. But it was the quickest way to do it. So I send it to you and you do the swab or whatever. You send it in, I do mine. And I shared with your birth mother, Michelle, we can use her name, the code, to access it. I said, we're supposed to have it this day. And so she knew about the same time I did.

Chris: Just for context, this is all within a couple of weeks of me establishing contact with her for the first time in my life. Right. This is all happening, I want to say, in March. And I had gotten in touch with her in February. So it's all brand new to her as well. Right? I still haven't even seen her face to face. We talked on the phone. We've sent a lot of emails back and forth. But she's also in that headspace of this all being very brand new as she made that contact with you.

Mike: But she had shared my name with you by this point.

Chris: She shared your name with me on.

Mike: The very she withheld for some time?

Chris: Well, no, she withheld it when we spoke on the phone for the first time, we talked for about nine straight hours. So she withheld it during that phone call until about the 8th hour. But it wasn't as if she she kept it from me for, like, days or weeks or anything. It was just a very dramatic conversational tactic to tell me, like, I'm going to tell you who your father is tonight, but I can't tell you yet until I tell you all these other stories. So it really kind of built up the sort of legend in my mind during that phone call. It was a marathon call, and she.

Mike: Had a captive audience.

Chris: Oh, yeah. I mean, I smoked two packs of cigarettes during that phone call out my out my apartment window as I kind of got her life story. And I gave her my life story. And it was and she kept kind of, like, prepping for this big reveal such that by the end of it, I was convinced you were, like, a famous person. I was like, ****, is it Reagan? I feel like it was bad news. There would be a reason for me to be shocked and dismayed at the identity of my father. But when she finally kind of revealed it, I was like, I don't get it. What's the big deal?

Mike: He's nobody. Well, no, it's just like, guy.

Chris: She was like, well, he's this guy, and here's where he's from, and here's what he does. And I think he's living here now. And she kind of Googled you a bit and kind of gotten a read on you. And I was like, well, what was the problem? What was the big deal? But finally it became clear. The big deal was that you didn't know I existed. That's what she didn't want to reveal. I thought it was about your identity, but it was really just about the fact that you didn't know that she had gotten pregnant.

Mike: Why? Why, Chris, do you think the fact that she had never told me was she ashamed of that?

Chris: I don't want to speculate as to her interior truth. I think that that's what she was afraid of revealing. I did get the sense that she was afraid that I would be angry with her for having done that, but I wasn't. I immediately was like, okay, yeah, you didn't tell. I get it. I get why you wouldn't do that. I wasn't sitting in judgment of her in any respect, and she was very defensive and ready for me to judge her in all manner of ways, but I wasn't coming at it from that angle at all. It was purely a kind of process of following curiosity for me. I was just curious about who these two people are or were, and I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I wasn't expecting anything in particular or needing anything in particular. I just wanted some knowledge. But of course, it's very different for her. It was so emotional for her and so bound up with this very long, complicated story of her life. Right. She never had another child after that, and I don't think she ever fully resolved what happened and came to a place where she could move forward. So even though she was incredibly forthcoming and sort of spilling over with ready to tell me her life story and the story of her family and the story of you and her, which, of course, hers is a bit different than your version? Pretty clearly. Like in that nine hour phone call, I got the sense that there's some things here that never got put to bed in a healthy way. It still sounded very tormented by a lot of it.

Mike: How she convinced herself that she was my girlfriend puzzled me. Well, she was so young.

Chris: I mean, she was a teenager. She was 1819 years old, and you were this swaggering bartender.

Mike: She saw me with other women all the time.

Chris: Yeah. That doesn't seem that uncommon or strange to me. One of the I think what was harder to understand was how she interacted with both of us from the point forward, where you and I had already met, and now there was a kind of triangular communication going on. That seemed to really rattle her and trigger a lot of whatever those older problems and issues had been around putting me up for adoption and around keeping that from you, that really seemed to just kind of touch off. Again and make it impossible for the three of us to remain in contact the way we were because she got very distraught over feelings that we were talking about her behind her back or keeping things from her, things that we were expressly not doing. She kind of couldn't see around her fears about that stuff, as if now that we were in touch, we were going to kind of conspire against her, and it didn't seem like anything we could do or say was was making her feel more secure.

Mike: You you might remember me telling you that my mother was adopted and late in her life or when she was 70. I mean, she lived for quite a while after that but she decided she'd like to know about her birth parents. So they hired an attorney to get the records opened in New York. Were unsuccessful and I won't get into legal issues. So I was very sensitive to someone wanting to know something about their history. So when I read your letter, that reverberated. Or I could hear my mom saying the same kind of thing. We get the test result and we.

Chris: Know it's like 1000%.

Mike: So I send you a letter giving you a thumbnail sketch of who I am and what I think is important. So now I'm going to be in New York because my older brother was kind of like the biographer of a very well known playwright, Terrence McNally. Terrence McNally. And Ray was up there for premiere of Catch Me If You Can who's also made him to a movie, a Broadway show. Yeah, right. And when Ray was in Manhattan, he would stay at McNally's place. So I'm going up to the premiere, which means the party with all the cast and all these Broadway people you're.

Chris: Going to go hobnob with the Hollywood folk who are coming down to Broadway.

Mike: Which is not typically what I do on weekends. I'm going to fly to New York for this. My sister Elaine had a daughter who was about three. This is my sister who's 14 years younger than I am and she has had a very successful career in television. She was probably running the History Channel at that point, but she was a television executive. So I was staying with them in Riverdale. We make arrangements. I'm going to be in town. You're at Syracuse? Of course. But you're going to be spending that weekend in Manhattan. I think you said that the class about to finish was brought to Manhattan. Maybe to meet agents.

Chris: Yeah, they took us on a kind of like kind of like one of those expensive safaris that you were on in Nepal but for the publishing industry where they kind of like it felt like we were sort of put into a vehicle and sort of we waved the publishing industry as they drove us past.

Mike: That's where the New Yorker is.

Chris: Yeah. There's the Conde Nast building. You'll never go inside, but there it is. They took us inside those places and kind of led us through. But yeah, it was like everyone hold onto the rope and wave at the powerful editors and agents.

Mike: But it's a coincidence that we're both going to be in Manhattan.

Chris: Yeah, I was in New York all the time at that point because I was living up here in Syracuse. But that was the reason I was in there that weekend was for that trip.

Mike: Well, I flew in on Friday. You and I are going to be meeting on Sunday morning.

Chris: We haven't even talked on the phone yet.

Chris: We just had these very kind of.

Mike: But I've seen a picture of you, several pictures of you, so I know what basically what you look like.

Chris: Okay. I hadn't seen a picture of you.

Mike: That's right. I get in Friday afternoon, and I meet Elaine in her office, and I'm going to kill a few hours, then go home with her. So I dump off my bag. I said, Elaine, I got to find some music, because on the wall your Facebook page was Towns Van Zan. I've been a fan of his for years. When I meet Chris for the first time, I just want to have something in my hand. So music store is not easy to.

Chris: Find, even in 2011.

Mike: So she gets me on the subway, and I go down there, and I find the music store, and I buy Steve Earl. Steve Earl doing covers of Townes Van Zandt. So I said, I like this. All right. So now Sunday morning comes around, and I go down with Elaine, drives me into Manhattan with Bella, her three year old, and I think we went to the Museum of Natural History. Yeah. And I'm watching that. I'm checking the watch, and I'm saying, all right, Joe, it's time for me to meet Chris.

Chris: Go meet my kid. I'll be right back.

Mike: So I'm waiting in the designated spot outside the museum, and we said, you come out of the subway, and somebody comes walking along Sunday morning. The streets weren't that crowded. That's Chris. You walk straight to me. Let's start our lives. And we walk across the street to Central Park. It was cool and rainy, as I recall.

Chris: April Day.

Mike: Yeah. We find a park bench to sit on. And I give you this, and you open it, and you smile and you say, I went to somewhere to hear him record this live last year.

Chris: Yeah, Woodstock.

Mike: Woodstock, yeah.

Chris: The concert. Yeah. I saw him do it at sort of a concert hall setting where we were, like, sitting in actual seats, and it was very somber, and he was.

Mike: Sort of paying tribute to any apprehension I felt is gone.

Chris: Yeah. We like the same music.

Mike: He likes my present. What's next?

Speaker C: All right.

Mike: So we sat there for an hour and a half. Pretty soon into the conversation, I'm sitting there smoking. You're smoking. I said, there's some information you got to have. And I said, I've had cancer. And those records, you may be interested much later in life. It's a late developing cancer. Also, I have to talk to you about sobriety issues. And you said to me, Michelle might have mentioned something about cocaine. Well and you pull out a one year chip and show it to me. You hold it in your hand. I just said. Wow. Good. He's 28.

Chris: Yeah. So we're caught up.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: We don't have to.

Mike: I said, yeah, I think I think I got ten years in now or something like that. Yeah. Move on. We move on to something else. Politics, probably. Oh, yeah. You tell me that you were in Austin. You're working Rosemary, the woman who's a DA. Yeah. Who wind up getting a DWI. I thought she was going to be a star.

Chris: She was. She was on the path to, you know, maybe one day running for governor until she got not just that she got the DWI, it's that she was the sitting DA of Travis County. She gets out of the car during the DUI and does the whole do you know who I am? Y'all sons of ******* just torched her career. This is back when you could still do that in one night, right? Just torched her career in one night. On camera, talking **** to the arresting officers. They put her in the tank, and she's just, like, waving her fist at the camera. It just went down in complete flames. But it wasn't her, though. The connection was that in working for her, I had gotten to know Glenn Maxey a little bit.

Mike: Right.

Chris: And that had been relatively recently. I'd been around some campaigns in Austin, and he turned out to be a good friend of yours.

Mike: Glenn had been my landlord, a friend, and his parents had bought him a trailer to save rent when he was in college. Painted as an American flag. And Glenn got tired of living in it, so I moved in to him. So I was actually paying. This is a couple of years ahead of me, but we were very close in the student mobilization organization. He had moved to Austin at this point. He was like the doyenne of Austin politics.

Chris: That's why I knew him. He wouldn't know me well. He's just everyone knew Glenn Maxey. If you worked around Austin politics, he was the kind of godfather figure.

Mike: He served seven terms in legislature in the East Austin district, which became gradually more Hispanic as time went by. And he gave up the seat, saying the seat should be Hispanic. I got to make one point here that it's a vivid memory of my day. Yeah. I'll meet you in Central Park this weekend, Chris. Oh, let's go have lunch with my television executive system. Oh, would you come with me, please? We're going to go meet my brother. He's at Terrence McNally's house.

Chris: Literally. That's what it was like.

Mike: Let's go sit there.

Chris: It was great.

Mike: And then we left there, and there was a playground, and you pushed Bella on the swing. We were over there continuing the conversation, and you're just so great with Bella. And then we had to leave, and you had a train to catch back to Syracuse. And I get on the plane the next day and I'm thinking, holy ****, I got a problem. Now this boy thinks that I weekend in New York with television execs and hang out with Terrence McDowell. You do what do I do next?

Chris: You do you just keep being you.

Mike: What I do for a follow up? This is going.

Chris: To be great.

Mike: I got to tell you how I got over that. And that's the last thing, last thing I got to say. I get home and we continue our dialogue, and things are not going well between me and Michelle, and eventually I had to ask her, please not contact me longer. But in the interim, you sent me 40 pages of poetry, which I think was your thesis. God, I think 40 pages of poetry. Yeah.

Chris: I'm sorry.

Mike: Which I read avidly. And there was one poem, and I can't believe I can't recall the name. Chris but you're writing about being in Galveston. You're wondering if one of these guys could be a guy in Galveston, a Cajun missing a finger, a waiter in New York, an Italian.

Chris: In the Bronx, yeah.

Mike: And I'm thinking Wow. He's been wondering about this for a lot of ******* years. Yeah. That poem. Really? I feel bad, man. I can't recall no

Chris: I don't remember the name of it either. Meeting you was such a delight. That's the only word for it. It was just a delight.

Mike: We had no pressure. Chris yeah.

Chris: It was just but everything was a nice surprise.

Mike: Yeah. But you drop into my life and I'm thinking, Man, I have a son. I was 20, 28, 28. He looks like me. Yeah, he's a great guy. He's fun, he's smart. I've never had to take away his car key. I never had to bail him out of jail. If he had been my kid, if I raised this boy, there would have.

Chris: Been a lot of that just a year or two before you might have had to bail me out of jail. It was good timing. It certainly was good timing for me. I don't know about you.

Mike: Can you imagine what it's like to have a full formed human being drop into your life?

Chris: No. I can't say I want to ever have that experience, but if you do.

Mike: If it's half as good as mine, you'll find it very rewarding. Chris the effect it had on me was this. My parents really needed help at that time. I sold my house and moved into their house because they were losing the ability to care for it. Mom had a major stroke in the year 2000. Used to walk her. Eventually moved. To make a long story short, they needed me there, and I got fulfillment from that. Helping these kids at school was fulfilling, except every day it reminded me how far removed I was and how little I really could do for these kids.

Chris: So I was far removed from their experience.

Mike: Yes. And how little I could do to truly influence their going forward. So now I'm treading water. I'm trying to be responsive to other people. I'm doing nothing for myself at that time. And sobriety felt painful. Where is the joy in my life? Again, I'm getting satisfaction, but that's not the same as getting joy now. Suddenly I have something totally new to live for. This is before the grandkids, man. I've got something totally new. It absolutely changed my life. It rejuvenated me in ways I don't know if that's the right word, but that's what comes to mind.

Chris: And then the grandkids. A year later, you were at my wedding.

Mike: Right? And I met your parents.

Chris: You met my mom and dad.

Mike: And they were gracious as they could be. And all I could do is express gratitude to them for the job they had done. And then I met friends of yours. My whole world, really. One in particular. Spent a lot of time educating me about was like being Chris Brown's best friend.

Chris: The guy I got drunk with in 6th grade.

Mike: Yeah, right.

Chris: Mary Karr's nephew.

Mike: Okay, blame her. Blame her genes.

Chris: Yeah. And then you got to be a grandfather.

Mike: The first time I saw Julian was at my sister Donna and Tom's house. You must have been three days old. Of course. My parents had both passed away. They had met you there once. So you had met my parents. But of course, Julian wasn't with us yet. But I have a photograph of me holding Julian. And, I mean, I've held babies. I have four little sisters, but I've never felt anything more fragile in my life than holding children. And . Am I doing this right? It's a feeling like, I hope you're going to enjoy it. And then every day that boy gives me joy, excitement. I don't have to be with him to get joy. We've seen I've got pictures of him all over the place. And now Nico is providing that same level of fun. I'll never forget the first time you asked me to sit. You and  going to go out for an early dinner, and he was sleeping a lot in those days. All I had to do was you showed me how to hold him. And then at this time, you put him down in his crib. And the scary part was, I was great. Holding him was reaching over without waking him up and getting him down just right, just the way you do it, so you wouldn't know anything was different.

Chris: It was scary for us, too. And then, God forbid, he wakes up. And then you got him on your hands again.

Mike: I was going to call you and bring back dinner. One weekend. You called me on a Saturday morning and said, we need some help. I said, what can I do? You and Chanelle were definitely sick. Julian had been sick. And then both of you came down.

Chris: With the dreaded daycare viruses. Yeah.

Mike: So I said, I'll be right down, so I drive down and come get our germs. Mike, you and  said, we got to stay in bed. But Julian was getting over it at that point, and he must have been a year, maybe ten months or something. No longer as delicate he's crawling around. So everything was fine and I stayed. I went home that night, went back Sunday morning, stayed till late afternoon. And you and  getting back in your feet and said, okay, fine. So I went home, and then I spent a week in bed. Sorry, man. No, but feeling so useful, I mean it's taking care of parents is one thing. Taking care of a baby, a sick baby, nothing. Hey, that's why we're here, right? And I never had that feeling because I never got to raise you or any other kid.

Chris: Yeah, well, I mean, from the very beginning, you were just an integral part of our family. We couldn't have done that without you.

Mike: Going to Mississippi the way we did for whatever it was eight days for.

Chris: The class we were teaching.

Mike: Yeah, you and Chanelle were teaching, and it was spring break, and you were taking that select group of students on a view of the civil rights trail, the Blues trail, literature trail.

Chris: Yeah, we had, like, a dozen college students trekking through the Mississippi Delta for a week.

Mike: Everything's so well planned.

Chris: And we had Julian with us.

Mike: You invited me along to care for Julian, and he was 18 months old and we had a ball. He's so freaking smart. He absorbs. He just learns. He just learns. He just learns. I don't know if I could have done that with any other 18 month old.

Chris: Well, you guys have always just been best friends.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: And beautiful to watch.

Mike: He's creative. We can play for hours and we have no idea where the game is going. Just wherever it takes us. And there's no hesitation on his part to drive the theme, Where are we going today?

Chris: But there's no hesitation on your part to go with them.

Mike: It's easy for an adult, right?

Chris: No, it isn't. It's something that you're great at and that makes you a special person in his life. Because when he was little little, I would get down on the floor and play with him. But I wasn't putting on wizard costumes the way you do. I wasn't going to find a new wig to wear the next time he wants to play warlocks or whatever.

Mike: He's discriminating. Right? He knows which ring goes with which wizard. So tell me about fatherhood. You tell me the most rewarding and the most scary aspect being Islamic.

Chris: I'll start with the scary. That's easy. The scariest part is learning to live with your heart outside your body all the time, wanting them to grow and to try new things. But from the very first minute, you're terrified that something's going to happen to them and that they're going to get hurt or that they're going to suffer. And it's terrifying. Remember that playground in Memphis when we lived on Evergreen and we could just walk right across the street and we.

Mike: Went there every single day?

Chris: Yeah. That was like Julian's big playground because we were there from his, like, year one till almost three, right? So we're just always at that playground. I was always so worried that as he kind of got better and better at climbing around on that thing and trying all the slides and trying all the different aspects of the playground, that he was going to lose his footing up there and fall. So you're enjoying it, you're playing, but you're also a little anxious.

Mike: Stress, right? It's stressful.

Chris: He's just like, no, yeah, try it, try it. Try the next slide. But oh, God, don't back up too fast. And one day, he really did fall. He looked over the edge, and he just took a step. And I jumped from the other side of the playground and got my torso horizontal on the platform such that I could reach over and grab his ankle as he was falling headfirst onto the ground, and he just dangled there in a literal cliffhanger. It was my finest hour, at least.

Mike: Great catch.

Chris: It just as an athlete, I've never had quicker twitch in the muscles than in that moment. But it's like I always knew that was going to happen one day, and it finally did. And he probably would have been all right. He probably would have been cut up. He probably would have been really frightened, but he'd have been fine.  always tells a story of, like, falling all the way off the top of a slide onto the back of her head when she was a little toddler, playing at the playground with her mom.

Mike: Kids fall.

Chris: They fall, they get hurt, but you live in terror of it, and then.

Mike: You don't want the kid to be afraid of taking that step the next time they're in that situation.

Chris: So I think one of the most rewarding things I don't know if it's the most, but the flip side of that is letting them go and trusting them and then seeing what they do. Buying Julian an escape board at six years old was kind of an act of madness, especially given I'm so prone to worrying about him suffering some kind of terrible bodily injury. That's like one of my hang ups. So what do I do? I buy him a skateboard, because the other part of me being a dad is like, I want him to have all this all these cool experiences and to be this sort of well rounded person. So I buy him the skateboard, which he's been clamoring for, and we go out in it. And after the first afternoon, he's surpassed what I can do on a skateboard, right, because I never skated. So this is just all his, and I'm watching him get better and better, faster and faster and riskier and riskier. And now he's just zipping in between the poles as he's kind of skating around the tennis court. Now we're going to the skate park, and he's trying this ramp, and then this ramp and then this ramp. You've been there with him, right. You see how quickly he escalates what he's willing to do, what he's willing to try. And that is also one of the most rewarding things is to watch him skate away from me and fall down and get back up and figure it out on his own. And now this has become his become his because I didn't give in to my own impulses to sort of shelter him from any possible harm. Now, don't get me wrong. He's in full body armor. I've made it as safe as I can. But let him go and let him figure it out. And it's incredible what he can do.

Mike: But when you told me the story, you lay with him every night after story time until he until he dozes off. When he told you, I think I'm ready to move on. You don't have to stay with me tonight. Yeah. The choice of words, the range of emotion I felt when he told me that. But now on this trip and this visit, he's telling me he's saving the last night I'm here. I get to lay with him till he falls asleep.

Chris: Yeah, that's probably truly the most rewarding thing, is just the tenderness and the sweetness you feel when you can actually express love for your kid and they receive it and they express it back.

Mike: But I don't want him to grow up. In some ways, I want to keep him. And while I'm proud of the fact that he is moving on, it's like, oh, no, because I got so much out of laying with him until he fell asleep. I could ask you one more question. Since you've become a father, has it affected your relationship with your father? Have you gained an appreciation for the sacrifices he was making that you might have taken for granted?

Chris: Absolutely. You can't not revisit all of those kind of childhood and adolescent and teenage resentments and bitternesses and the fights you had and sort of see it through the lens of being a parent and you see the other side of the curtain. You see what was behind the curtain all along. And my parents were very big on kind of, like, putting up. There wasn't a lot of sort of transparency in our house in terms of what their lives were really like as adults, what they were dealing with as adults and what they were giving back to us as parents. It was just this kind of very baby boomer style. There's an adult world and there's a child world and never the twain shall meet. But I can now kind of go back and remember conflicts we had things that I was really impatient with or angry about as a kid and just think, like, yeah, he was going through this at that time. He was worried about his other kid in this way, or he also had to think about his marriage or he had to. I know what it's like to come home from work to unappreciative children who are just clawing and clamoring for the next thing that they want. That feels really small in comparison to whatever you may be worried about. It's tax day and they're yelling at you about you served them the wrong kind of pretzel. Yeah. If you're thoughtful at all. I think as a parent, you're going back and you're kind of reassessing your own parents behavior and style now that you know how ******* hard this is and how stressful it is and how little time. Little real time. You get for yourself. Little space you get for yourself and how easy it is to be impatient, how easy it is to not be a mindful parent because you're just trying to grab some little shred of independence or autonomy for yourself in your day. And in that moment, you turn around and you dismiss whatever your kids got going on or you're just not empathetic to them whatsoever. You forget that they're a four year old. And you say, like, can we just be rational about this for a second? Nobody's perfect parent. My parents were certainly not perfect. So there's a measure of grace that you sort of retrospectively want to give them. I understand now much more than I ever could have, how hard it was and what you guys are going through and sorry I was such a **** all the time. All right, we got to get to work. We got other stuff to do today.

Mike: Absolutely. But one final thought, if I might listen to you describe your thoughts now about your relationship with your dad. And I think back to my relationship. There's one thing I wish that both of those gentlemen could have experienced, and that's that I wish I could have been more of a friend to my father. At times we had friendly encounters, but I wish I could have been a friend to him, especially as his friends retired and moved away and started dying and things like that. He needed a friend, and I wasn't able to carve that out at that stage of the relationship. I'm not going to have that problem because you've been my friend as friendship, as a son, and what a gift. All right, we done.

Chris: Love you, Mike.

Mike: I love you, too. All right, I got the hard work to do.

Nico: I want to read that book.

Chris: Called Priest Daddy by Patricia Lockwood. It's really funny. What do you think it's about?

Nico: Mainly doggies.

Chris: Doggies? Mainly doggies, yeah.

Nico: Or Mighty Pup.

Chris: Or Mighty Pups. Yeah, it's partly about that. Probably also Daddies or Mommy. Or Mommies. Yeah, there's a Mommy in it. There's a Mommy and a Daddy and there's daughters 

Nico: And a Julian? 

Chris: No, Julian is not in the book, but there are brothers and sisters in the book.

Nico: What kind of brother?

Chris: Big brothers. Do you have a big brother yeah. Julian's your big brother. Is Julian a good big brother?

Nico: Can I go in there, too?

Chris: Can you go where? Can you go in the book?

Nico: Yeah.

Chris: Well, yes, if you read it, then you're in the book?

Nico: Yeah. It's like me and Julian.

Chris: Yeah. If you read it together, then you're both in the book. It's like jumping into it.

Nico: But how we jump into it?

Chris: You just have to read it, and then you jump into it with your imagination. What kind of martin said do you ever play pretend? Do you ever pretend that you're a doggie or a firefighter or a race car driver?

Nico: I am a doggie.

Chris: Yeah. So you know how to pretend that's using your imagination.

Nico: Can you give me a waffle?

Chris: Sure, buddy, I can get you a waffle.

Nico: I will go with you.

Chris: I love this show. If it wasn't for PODRE, I wouldn't have an excuse to sit down with amazing people and make them talk about what I want to talk about and learn about new siblings I might have drifting around out there. Hey, if you're a roughly 44 year old woman born in a Wisconsin convent to a sophisticated, gay, art mother and an unknown father, it's nice to meet you. Feel free to get in touch, be cool to have a big sister, one can help. If you want to hear more from my conversation with Mike Frontain, I have an extended interview with him I'll be releasing soon as a bonus episode where we talk about his upbringing and his father. A very lovely man I got to meet before he died. And they're very colorful. New York, Brooklyn, Queens, French Canadian family. So, given the topics in our discussion today, there's really only one person left to talk to. Who else do we know met their father in a park one day in their thirty s and found that experience to be a profound reckoning with their entire past and identity and sense of the world? That's right. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. Baron Vaughn is back on the pod, and this time he's taking home hardware.

Baron: Oh, hello, Chris.

Chris: If it isn't Baron Vaughn. Baron Vaughn!

Baron: Well, you called me.

Chris: Hey, buddy.

Chris: Welcome back to PODRE.

Baron: Happy to be here.

Chris: Our very first guest, our debut guest.

Baron: All right, guest, you are number one.

Chris: I mean, you know, because I gave you a little a little heads up.

Chris: But not only were you our very first guest on PODRE, but you are our final recipient, at least for this season, of the Not a Terrible Father in this One Instance award. Congratulations, Baron.

Baron: Thank you. I wish I had that crowd from Beyond Thunderdome cheering for me right now, like two man enter one man leave

Chris: That I saved you for the end because I didn't want the bar for this award to be set at the level that your story is going to set. I mean, I didn't want people to Think that they had to perform a feat of equal or greater heroism just to be not a terrible dad in one instance. Okay, we're going to help people here. We're trying to lift people up. So I've never actually heard you tell this story, but I kind of almost heard it just after real time, because I think you called  right after it happened and told her the story. And as you were telling her the story, she was so blown away that she was, like, telling me while she was on the phone with you, one Line at a time.

Baron: Hey, what? Baron?

Chris: Just yeah, like one letter at a time. Anyway, if you would please, at your leisure to let us know what happened on this very remarkable day.

Baron: Well, on a special day in June 10, it was June the 10th. I'll never forget because it was the birthday of this **** I call my youngest child Jaime. Look, we were in Los Angeles, and we kind of luckily found this midwife who had I guess it's called a birthing center because you can do a home birth. But then there's also you can go to the birthing center, where it's like a place where they kind of create the environment of a home or a cave, but, like, midway between a layer.

Chris: Between home and hospital. You've got a birthing center.

Baron: Yes. And with our first child, Savion, the plan was to have him at a birthing center, but that didn't end up happening. We ended up at the hospital. So, yeah, what happened was that there was a lot of, I guess you could say, resistance from Rhiannon's body. So they had to relax her, which is how you get the whole I think it's called pitocin, which helps sort of induce the birth. But by the time that that was happening, she had the epidural and all of these things that really deaden the pain, deaden the experience of the birth. And what the narrative is in popular culture is birthing a child is the most excruciating blood curdling pain that you can ever experience. Which brings us back to the youngest child, because she did not think that she was having the labor experience purely because it did not hurt enough, because she thought it was going to hurt more. Right. She didn't really get to feel what it felt like to birth safety.

Chris: She missed out on that world historic pain.

Baron: Yeah. And so it's a thing for the average woman who is having a baby for the first time, it's, like, super intimidating because nobody can really describe it to you. And even if they can, they're not you. But that's why we got tripped up with our second child, because there's I guess it's called, like, the fake it's like birthing pains. Braxton Hicks, where it's like it's contractionally birth, but it's 

Chris: Real contractions.

Chris: But there's all kinds you're giving birth at that moment.

Baron: Exactly. So she was convinced that what she was feeling was Braxton Hicks and not actually, the baby coming now.

Chris: We're on baby two now. And what's the plan here? The plan is to be at the birthing center for baby two.

Baron: The plan is to go to the birthing center again. Yeah, because we didn't really get to do it with the first time, but we had a relationship with this place, so we thought or she thought, this doesn't hurt enough. This must be Braxton Hicks. I'm just going to go lay down, right? So I'm like in the living room this particular day, watching 42 with my oldest, watching Chadwick Bozeman be Jackie Robinson and Rhiannon, and my wife is in the back. And I could hear the screams and the call. It wasn't really screams. There were more like moan yells, like primal yells. It sounded like a really good Sade, a B side. It was like, Damon is the color soulful.

Chris: Soulful.

Baron: Yeah, very soulful is the right word because it is like a soul yell. It's not like I'm in pain, but it's more like I'm Stargate. I am literally about to become a portal to a different universe, and someone's going to come through it. That's what that kind of exactly. A king is being born, and here. He comes from the other side. I'm Stargate. Not like I heard.

Chris: Not like, ow.

Baron: Like I am.

Chris: Ow, ow. I'm having a baby. Ouch.

Baron: She kept going like, ow, ow. Yes. And I went into the room, and I was like, are you okay? She's like, I'm fine. It's Frank Hicks. I just really need to take a shower. I think if I take a shower, I'll be fine. And she gets up out of the bed, and her water breaks, right? She was like, oh, no, I peed. I'm like, no, that's your water breaking, right? And then she was like, oh. She immediately felt like, okay, he's here. He's coming. Okay. Good God. So the next thing I know, she's on her hands and knees, like, on all fours on the bathroom floor, looking at her phone. She's on Google. What to do when you're having a baby at home. Literally, that's what's going on. Our oldest Savion, who at the time was just shy of two because they're 20 months apart. So he's just kind of like he doesn't know what the heck is happening. There's just a lot of actions happening. I had to literally abandon him with 42 and be like, just find out How Jackie Robinson changed the world. I'll be right back. And so she's on her phone. She's like, okay, get a bunch of towels. And I'm like, check.

Chris: She's literally reading the directions off Google. She has the presence of mind to spell into Google. What the **** do I do right now? Yeah, she's quarterbacking.

Baron: It was like a combination of Google but also maybe like I think it was like a handout, actually, that the birthing center gave us, like, what to do if you're going to have a baby at home.

Chris: Here's a step by step.

Baron: Exactly. Good flyer.

Chris: Good flyer. Just to give to everybody. Put this in your phone.

Baron: Very good. Yeah, we should all have little fat little FAQ. Yeah, because you never know. You never know when that baby's baby is going to come.

Chris: Look, I'm in my office right now on campus. I mean, someone in this building could have a baby in any minute. I don't know. I need to have that. Can you send me that flyer?

Baron: You have no idea. Yeah, I'll see if she still has but here's a big important side note. While all this was happening, it was 05:00 p.m. On a Friday in Los Angeles, right? So she was like, I am not getting in a car to be stuck in traffic on the way to the birthing center, which was like a ten minute drive, or the hospital, which was.

Chris: Because in LA. But it was ambulances are just sitting there too, right? Just sitting, like, on the ******* 405, just not moving.

Baron: Friday, rush hour. She's on all fours, and I'll get the howls, wash her hands. I look over at Savion. He's like, I'm like, I got this, son. And she's like, okay, check to see if anything's happening. And I look, and Jaime's face is already coming. And I'm telling you, like, this is ten minutes after her water broke, right? So she was like, okay. I'm like, yeah, there's a face. And she's like, all right, what you have to do is push on my taint. She didn't say taint, but that's what it is. perennium or perineum, depending where the stress is up to you.

Chris: Especially at a birthing center.

Baron: Exactly.

Chris: That stress.

Baron: Exactly. So it's like, there is a big thing, and a lot of people have talked about this. I'm not the first person to talk about this. A woman being on her back with her legs up in stirrups is literally the worst way for a woman to give birth. Like, most other countries have banned that because it actually increases maternal mortality, because you're fighting against gravity. So being on all fours actually helps gravity does a lot of the work with you. So it's like, I push on her taint, and he's like, schloop. Like, he came right out. He came right out. And, like, I'm holding him all of a sudden, like, whoa. So it's like, Jaime is there. He's like, in my hands. And I hand him to her, and it's like they say apparently this is scientifically true as well. Women supposedly forget, at least in that first moment, the pain of childbirth, because the endorphins of, oh, my God, my child is here, just like, goes it's like you're an ecstasy. Drugs, basically. Like, the body made the.

Chris: Ecstasy, dream calm and tranquility that comes over this person who a moment ago was doing the primal, soulful, screaming, yell thing. And you're like, wow, this is nature. Here is nature.

Baron: Exactly. And they're over, and then their body is flooded with endorphins and oxytocin. That's literally what happens after the birth. So it's kind of like she's, like, almost blissed out by this point while she's holding her son. And then five minutes after that, this is when the midwife I go out to check the babysitter shows up first, and she's like, watching Savion and watching Rhiannon. And I go downstairs and I see the midwife walk up, and she walks up, and it's like she brought her team with her. Like, four or five different qualified women. They all come in, they clean the baby up, they take care of Rhiannon. They're like, okay, we got this. Good job, dad. Good job, substitute.

Chris: Cool substitute Midwife, good job.

Baron: Exactly. I was the middleman. Not the midwife, but the middleman. I mean, look, I'm an anxious person, so I spend a lot of time, like, catastrophizing about the worst possible things that can happen and the worst possible way that they could happen. But when I have been faced with crisis in the moment, I become hyper focused and hyper calm, because I guess there's a part of me that does know freaking out is going to do nothing except for make everyone else freak out. So I became, like, super hyper-logical because also I was scared. So I'm like, if I do something wrong and if I'm freaking out, I'm more likely to do something wrong. But I could hurt my child, I could hurt my wife in irreparable ways. So I was like, all right, just stay calm and get this baby here. And don't squeeze too hard and don't shake too much because I don't want to drop this baby, and I don't want to drop the ball on this birth.

Chris: Don't you feel like something sort of takes over in those moments? I mean, they're very few and far between, right? These are not common experiences. I'm not even talking about giving birth, right, or delivering a baby, but these moments where something very serious is required of you, and it's a crisis, and you don't really think, right? You don't become self conscious. You don't have time to be anxious. It's just like you are acting, and this preternatural calm comes over you too. And thank God, right? Because if I was my usual self.

Chris: I would be part of, I would be contributing to the crisis, right?

Baron: Look, the only thing I can really compare this amount of calm to, like, when I've been robbed at gunpoint, a calm comes over me of like, well, this is it. Like, what am I going to do, run? No. What if I go?

Chris: You can calculate, right? It's not as if, like, your rational mind turns off. You can calculate, but nothing else is interfering with it, right? And it is a kind of it's like the film score fades out and you just it's that kind of real quiet.

Baron: It's literally life or death. Hyper focus. That's the only kind of that I can describe it.

Chris: Don't you wish you could ******* just queue that up whenever you wanted? That'd be bad ***.

Baron: That'd be bad ***. That you could just be like, who knows? With a couple of years, we'll have a pill.

Chris: Both times when Chanelle went into labor, I was like, what if I ******* turn into some kind of anxiety ridden mess and I just make everything work? But it didn't happen. And all I had to do was kind of stand there and not get in the way. But I still felt that same kind of calm come over me because I was so concerned about her. Right?

Baron: Yes. Well, but, you know, that was a big thing in a lot of these classes at the birthing center for the men, or at least where it was like a male female partnership, where it was like, look, the person not giving birth, the best thing that you can do is stay calm and attend to the person giving birth. Like the birthing. Someone's got that. But that person needs to know that you're with them. Look them in the eyes, hold their ******* hand. If they ask for water, get the **** water.

Chris: Stuff like that. That would not be helpful.

Baron: Exactly. So I kind of had, like, if you will, run the plays in my mind to a certain extent. And this was nothing like this was not what I wasn't expecting. Game day, you know what I mean? It was like I woke up, like, airlifted into the World Series and someone gave me a ball, and they're like, all right, you're the first pitcher. I'm like what? I was in bed. What's going on? I'm still in a robe. What's happening? So it's like, that's why Chadwick Bozeman has a special place in my heart forever and ever. Amen.

Chris: God Baron, what a beautiful story, man. What an amazing thing. How often do you remind Djimon that I delivered you with my two hands?

Baron: Trust me, when he's a teenager and he's testing me, I'll probably say, like, I literally brought you into this room.

Chris: I'll say, like, because moms have that line, right? Chanelle just said it to Julian, like. Two days ago, right? Like, you came out of my body.

Baron: Okay?

Chris: Don't talk to me that way. We don't normally have that. We're just this thundering stranger, like, going, hey, knock that off. But you can actually Djimon, I've lifted you from your mother with these two hands, okay? I am your father.

Baron: Yeah, I was the first person and that's because make eye contact when he's coming.

Chris: Did he wink at you like, hey, pop?

Baron: No, because his eyes baby's eyes don't they don't develop for a while. I was just a blob. I was the first person to touch him. I was the first person to have my hands on him. And I always remember that. So that that is very special to me. That's something that I'll very that I'll cherish forever, that I am the first to ever touch you. And I caught you.

Chris: That's old school, man. I mean, you know, before before, like. Modern society, right before doctors, before all this ****. Humans were doing that, I assume, for hundreds of thousands of years.

Baron: Midwives. This is where Midwives came from. They were the ones.

Chris: Yeah, man, you did it. You did it. Do you have plans to deliver any more children? I mean, did you get bit with this bug?

Baron: I will deliver them to school. I will deliver them to their room when it's time for bed. I will deliver them from evil when I can.

Chris: Oh, my God. Baron, well done. And congratulations on a very well deserved, Not a Terrible Father In This One Instance Award. You will sit in a seat of honor here at PODRE for all time.

Baron: I appreciate that.

Chris: All right.

Baron: Good to see you, man.

Chris: Talk to you again soon.

Baron: All right. Peace.

Chris: And that, as we say, is our show. Thanks to Mike Frontain for my biological existence and also coming on the pod and being willing to talk about it. Hey, do you have a remarkable story about adoption? Long lost familial relations, secret sisters, found fathers? Write to us at chris@PODREpod.com and give me the lowdown. I want to hear about it. I want to relate and identify, as we say in the rooms. And the rest of you, go over to our socials, leave us some comments. Tell us how you're liking the program. Okay? Tell us your faves. Let's get those Twitter, gram and Facebook accounts to a robust level of engagement. Let's keep the conversation lively. Join us next time for the season finale of PODRE, when I'll be talking To... checking my notes here. Oh, that's right. Local father of two, fellow who writes things. Civil War history enthusiast, George Saunders. That's right. See you next Monday.


Chris: PODRE is created and produced by me, Chris Brunt. Original artwork for the show is by David Wojo. Special thanks to Brad Franco and Julian and Nico Benz-Brunt.