Carl Sagan and Stormy Daniels: Workplace gems?

I Couldn't Throw It Out, Season 3, Episode 34
Carl Sagan and Stormy Daniels: Workplace gems?

Michael Small:
On this episode of I Couldn't Throw It Out, we ask you to close your eyes and try to recreate a place where you used to work. Now, try to remember what you put on your desk or on the wall or in a drawer, and the question is, do you still have those things? Because if you do, it's time to get them out and remember why you saved them. That's what happened to journalist Alan Carter. He saved something that brought back this memory.

Alan Carter:
There's me talking to Stormy Daniels. And by the way, I'm sort of mad at her because, in 2007, she could have broken the story to me about Trump, and she didn't. We talked about her kid, her necklace, life, being a porn star.

Michael Small:
Find out the full story of what Alan saved from work and to hear the stories behind other unusual work treasures. Keep listening.

[Song excerpt begins]

I couldn't throw it out
I had to scream and shout
Before I turned to dust I've got to throw it out

[Song excerpt ends]

Michael Small:
Hello and welcome to I Couldn't Throw It Out, the podcast where we dig out the treasures we've saved for years and try to throw them out. On this episode, I have gathered four friends who worked with me at People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, and NBC News. And we're all going to talk about things we save from work. Just in case you're wondering, why the work angle? Here's my reason. I did a little calculation. If you sleep seven hours a night, and if you work maybe 50 hours a week, you're spending almost half your waking hours at work, especially if you count in the commute, it's even longer. So that's a lot. And of course, after all those waking hours, many of us are going to end up with treasures or just plain junk we save from the office. This could be why, if you remember back in 1987, the band King Missile, the band that brought us the song Detachable Penis, they sang a song called Take Stuff From Work. And it's sort of an inspiration because people do that. I'm sure you all listen to that song constantly and if not you can hear it on YouTube. In any case, either now or later if you took stuff from work, you're gonna have to make a big decision. Will you keep it or will you throw it out? So let me introduce today's guests in the order that I met them. First of all, Mr. Alan Carter.

Alan and I sat across from each other as fact checkers at People Magazine in 1981. And after that, he had an illustrious career as a TV and magazine reporter. You may remember Alan who brought hilarity to our Diana Ross episode in the last season of I Couldn't Throw It Out. Welcome, Alan.

Alan Carter:
Thank you. Hey, Michael. Hi, everybody. And by the way, in 1981, I was four.

Michael Small:
Yeah, liar. Next up is graphic designer extraordinaire Stella Anastasia, who collaborated with me on the website for Entertainment Weekly. Now she's the founder of Tart Break, a New York City company that creates funny greeting cards you can eat, which sets me up to say, Greetings, Stella. I wish you brought us cookies.

Stella Anastasia:
Thank you, Michael. I know it would have been delicious.

Michael Small:
Now we have Berndt Abeck. Berndt is another design genius who moved from Germany to San Francisco in the 90s and built his own graphic design firm from scratch. In 2005, he delivered absolutely beautiful designs for the remake of Rolling Stone's website that I was leading, but our whole team was fired just a few weeks before it would have launched. So the world never saw that beauty. Guten tag, Berndt.

Berndt Abeck:
Michael, nice to see you all. I met Michael a long time ago.

Michael Small:
I know. Once you meet me, you're stuck with me. Like one more guest who joined us today. Meet a man who shared an office with me when we were digital managers at NBC News until COVID required both of us to work from home. He recently made a big career leap. He left digital media and bought a skydiving company outside Providence, Rhode Island, introducing Brett Mickelson.

Brett Mickelson:
Yeah, we shared an office together, which is why the things that I had in the office, you know very well, you're very familiar with, because you had to stare at them all day, every day, pretty much for almost four years or however long it was.

Michael Small:
Yeah, so well, thank you for joining us, all of you. And now comes the fun part. Each of you brought a treasure you saved from your work life, and I brought one from mine, and we're gonna decide what to do with them. We're gonna start with a question that is only for Stella and Alan. I want you to think back a minute. Try to imagine any of the offices you worked in. Do you remember anything at all that you hung on the wall or anything you did to make that office your own?

Alan Carter:
I have one that comes immediately to mind. So I worked at People Magazine, as Michael said, with our friend Lisa, who was in the next office over. She had this weird thing with Mel Gibson, and I had a picture of MLK on my wall, Martin Luther King. And she goes, you know, the mayor of Boston was Mel King, I believe. So we got this weird... I don't even remember how, we got this weird idea that she would collect pictures of Mel Gibson, and I would collect pictures of famous kings. And I got King Tut and King Lear. I mean, you name it.

Brett Mickelson:
So you had King Tutankhamun, but did you also have Steve Martin's King Tut?

Alan Carter:
Of course, that goes without saying. I mean, I want to do the King Tut dance. Can't remember how it goes exactly, but yeah. So I had the King wall and she had the Mel wall and people would come in and go, this is the dumbest, not good thing I've ever seen. And we literally got written up in our company newsletter and I'd walk down the hallways and stuff. People would go like, are you the King wall? Yes. I had the King family. You named the King. I had it. So we had this competition of who would end up by the end of the year with the most King pictures or Mel pictures. And I believe I won by two photos.

Michael Small:
Well, Alan, I've got an update for you. No kings. And I'm assuming you didn't keep those photos.

Alan Carter:
I may have kept the MLK one, but I have the newsletter somewhere of us being written about. It was kind of our 10 minutes of fame.

Michael Small:
Yeah, all you need is 10 minutes. Okay, now Stella, what about you? Did you do anything in your office that you remember, or anyone you know?

Stella Anastasia:
I didn't really do much decorating in my office, but I do remember having a Jean-Luc Picard bobblehead doll on my desk that I would use as like sort of a stress ball. So I would like rub his head whenever I was getting stressed and I still have it actually somewhere in here.

Michael Small:
Well, if you find it, let me know and I'll make you decide what to do with it. But in the meantime, can any of the four of you give me a reason why there's a great significance to what people choose to display in their office? Just like, why do people do it?

Alan Carter:
Well, I think you want to show a little of your personality to your coworkers. And I think it depends on the place you work. People Magazine was this fun sort of camaraderie based place, show your personality, you know, scream down the hallway kind of place. I've also worked at places that were like, are we in a funeral parlor? You know, and literally edicts coming down from management saying no pictures on your desk.

Michael Small:
You hit on the main point, which is you are probably spending most of your day doing something someone else wants you to do. Either it's your boss or a client. And this is one way to show a little bit of yourself, which is why each of us here today brought something we saved from work. We'll try to describe these things in an accurate way, but if you want to see them, I'll also post photos of everything on our website at throwitoutpodcast.com. So we're going to start with Brett. Brett, what did you save from the office we once shared?

Brett Mickelson:
I have two things. The first thing is a picture of Carl Sagan. Now, a lot of times people will see this picture and they ask me if this is my father. And in a lot of ways, Carl Sagan, I suppose, is spiritually my father, but not biologically. For context, this is the crappiest plastic frame that you could possibly have. And it's a terrible print- out from some random office printer. It's not in any way a fancy or nice print of Carl Sagan at all. The background behind this is at my first job at Hearst newspapers back in the day. We were moving offices and we had this really gross plastic frame and one of the top guys at Hearst was in town. He was normally very stern, but he would sometimes be really weirdly goofy and it would surprise you. And so he would walk around with this plastic frame, put it around his face and then stick his face in your office or around the cubicle or whatever. And just like laugh in your face through this crappy plastic frame and then run away, you know, giggling.

Alan Carter:
Did this man drink? That's like drunken behavior.

Brett Mickelson:
He did. I don't know if he was drinking during the day, but he sure did. And then my friend Keith, who was also at the time my boss, decided to print out Carl Sagan and put him in the frame. And then from that point forward, this crappy thing just followed me around everywhere I went. It lived on every desk I ever had. And then when I went to NBC, it came with me and it lived on my desk there where everybody was asking me if this was my father. And that was always kind of a way for me to know whether or not this person was nerdy enough to be sort of like spiritually aligned with me. If they knew that this was Carl Sagan and not my dad, then we could be friends.

Michael Small:
And how do you feel about Carl Sagan? What's your, what did you think about him?

Brett Mickelson:
Anybody who knows anything about Carl Sagan has to love Carl Sagan. As a science communicator, whether it's Cosmos or even though the movie Contact was pretty bad, you know, as an author and a thinker about things like the concept of Contact and the novel that he wrote there, and just generally, you know, as somebody who is responsible for putting the gold vinyl on the Voyager spacecraft to sort of be the messenger for humanity out into interstellar space. He's a truly remarkable person, even though he did, I don't want say he lived a short life, but it was shorter than it should have been.

Michael Small:
Well, Brett, we have a little surprise for you today. Give me one minute, please.

[Phone dialing sounds]

Hello, I'm calling you from I Couldn't Throw It Out podcast. And I would like you to introduce yourself and tell your name to everyone on this podcast.

Rachel Sagan:
My name is Rachel Sagan.

Michael Small:
Would you be able to tell us the story you told me about your grandfather and his cousin?

Rachel Sagan:
Sure. So my grandpa George, when he was 13 years old, came over from Russia and he brought his three little boy cousins and they were all tied together by a rope because he didn't want to lose them and one of them was Abe Sagan who is Carl Sagan's father.

Berndt Abeck:
Wow.

Michael Small:
Did you get to meet Carl Sagan and what was he like? You have any story to tell about him?

Rachel Sagan:
Well he was just really really nice and you know he was my dad's age so I kind of thought of him as an old man. But he was a big part of our family and he was a lovely person.

Michael Small:
Brett, do you have any questions for the second cousin of Carl Sagan?

Brett Mickelson:
I just, you know, I would want to say thank you. You know that Carl was an extremely meaningful person to a lot of people in the world and he is sorely missed.

Rachel Sagan:
Yeah. He died too young. He had cancer and he died young.

Michael Small:
What's his mother's name? Rachel?

Rachel Sagan:
His mother was named Rachel, but she went by Ray.

Michael Small:
We appreciate you calling in representing the Sagan family. I can tell you by looking at Brett, we blew his mind a little bit.

Rachel Sagan:
I'm calling to give you a message that Carl says hello. From wherever he is.

Brett Mickelson:
Wonderful.

Michael Small:
Rachel, thank you so much. You made a great impact on this podcast episode. We really appreciate it.

Rachel Sagan:
Thanks, Michael.

[End of phone call]

Alan Carter:
Michael, that was awesome.

Stella Anastasia:
That's wonderful.

Berndt Abeck:
Yeah, it really was.

Michael Small:
Rachel and I are friends from college. I never knew she was related to Carl Sagan.

Berndt Abeck:
Wow.

Brett Mickelson:
I was gonna say, how could you hold out on me the whole time we worked together if you were friends with a Sagan and you just let me have this picture on my desk?

Michael Small:
That leads us to the next step, which is you've had this picture, it's now with you. What are you going to do with this picture?

Brett Mickelson:
Where it has lived until I found out about this podcast recording was at the bottom of a bin in my closet since I no longer have a traditional office that makes sense to display any items in. However, I don't think I could possibly in good conscience throw it out. So I will probably keep this. Where I will put it? I don't know. Maybe since I'm in my childhood home at the moment, maybe I'll put it on display on a wall in there, because I do have space in there.

Stella Anastasia:
Couldn't you take it up in a plane with you? I think Carl would like that.

Brett Mickelson:
Well, I could take it up in the plane with me, but then what I do is throw it out to the great beyond.

Alan Carter:
You have to dive with it.

Stella Anastasia:
Yeah, exactly.

Brett Mickelson:
It's a wonderful idea, but this flimsy paper, there is no way.

Stella Anastasia:
Yeah. Right.

Brett Mickelson:
Unfortunately. I wish it would.

Michael Small:
Okay, so the picture's staying in your childhood home, what's your other thing you brought?

Brett Mickelson:
The other thing I brought, this is contemporary with my time at NBC. When I got hired at NBC, it was May 2017. And at the time of my hiring, I already had a scheduled, it was already planned out to go to Grand Teton National Park to do a 10-day hike through the back country, to see the 2017 total solar eclipse. And one of the things that I needed for this trip, but I didn't own, was an ice axe. Because there was going to be, even in the middle of August, there was going to be some high elevation passes where there might be ice sheets and snow fields that I would have to cross where you need an ice axe to stop your fall if you happen to fall, that kind of thing.

In my time getting onboarded at NBC, I met someone who worked for a sister group within the company. Her name was Katarina. She worked for CNBC in a similar function. both in product management and she's an avid mountaineer, mountain biker, general outdoorsman type of person. She said, well, you know what? I actually have an ice axe, that's an extra one, because I bought these fancy new ones and you can use it for your trip. So she gave me this ice axe. I needed it to sit around for six months while I waited for the actual trip. So where else was I going to put it? I just, you know, stuck it on my desk or hung it on the cubicle wall or whatever. And every day people were walking by being like, who is this axe murderer, literally, with this axe on their desk?  But I didn't know where else to put it. I went on my trip. Turns out I never needed this. It was warm enough that I didn't actually need to use it. I stuck it in the snow one time just to prove a point and that was it. And then I came back and tried to return it to Katarina. So I would put it on my desk and wait until she would take it from me. And for four years or so, she refused to take the ice axe back. And as you can see, because it's still here in my hands, she never wanted it back. So now I have an ice axe. Next time I need to go traverse a snow field, I'm prepared.

Michael Small:
Okay, well that's a keeper because it's got a use for the future.

Brett Mickelson:
Yes.

Michael Small:
And knowing you, there will be trips to ice fields. You kind of proved Alan's point because I would say the ice axe and Carl Sagan do tell us something about Brett Mickelson and his personality established in that tiny office that we shared that was meant for one person, but the two of us were there.

Brett Mickelson:
One other thing that I will add, if anyone listening to this podcast has not seen a total solar eclipse in person, make an effort to go see one. It is life-changing. The things that change around you during the moments before and during totality, you wouldn't expect, you know, you can sort of intellectually think, I know what it's going to be like, and then you're actually there and it's completely different from what you thought. It's a completely beautiful and astonishing experience.

Michael Small:
Wow. Okay. Thank you for that. And I really, really appreciated sharing an office with you. And now you're sharing your stuff with us. And now we move on to Berndt Abeck. And I need to point out something that he would never point out himself, which is that we tried out many people to redesign Rolling Stone's website and Jan Wenner was not impressed with anything. And he saw what Berndt did and he loved what Berndt did. I remember Berndt used special golden clips to hold it all together. He's like, where did he get these clips? I don't think I ever heard him like anything while I was there, but he loved Berndt's designs. And although the designs never happened because we were all fired and they would have happened if they kept us one month more. They would have had a new website. Two years later, I got a call from Rolling Stone. Do you still have those designs? Yeah, that's how those things go. But anyway, Berndt, tell us what you have saved from your office life.

Berndt Abeck:
Well, so we had an office South of Market in San Francisco and at that time it was a really bad area. So we had a nice like this classic loft space, industrial office like this high ceiling, concrete floors, big windows. Then we discovered next door there was another warehouse space and they these big garage doors that open up and we saw them painting something so we went in there and what they did is they painted these big record covers. They would be used as advertising that used to hang at Tower Records. So whenever there was a new release they would paint these record covers and they're like tall, they're like... six by six feet. We just loved it, right? Because they're all hand painted. So once in a while we would go in there and buy them from them because they would just take them back when the record release was over and then they would over paint them. We just thought it's such a waste because some of them just really beautifully done. They were like brush paint and airbrush. So we put them in my office, which was nice because we had these high ceilings behind them from the ceiling. And I still have three of them. You know, two in my office now and one at home.

Michael Small:
Now we're going to pause for a moment and notice that Berndt has saved 1990s album covers from three new wave British bands that were mostly famous in the 80s. So in 2025, this is like doubly retro. Berndt, which ones did you save?

Berndt Abeck:
So we have Blur, Pet Shop Boys and then Eurythmics.

Michael Small:
Do you have a favorite? If you had to get rid of two and only have one, which one would you save?

Berndt Abeck:
I think it would be the Pet Shop Boys one because I like the kind of like weirdness. I don't know if you can tell. They're sitting in a subway. See, the window in the back is blurred and their faces are blurred, but their bodies are solid. So it's just a little kind of a weird play on the subway, right? So that's my favorite. And I have that at home in my house because what I like is that it's so big, like scale. Like normally if you go to people's houses, they have little pictures framed. So I think that the scale is kind of part of the effect. And I like that it's kind of commercial art, right? It's not like unique. They didn't create it, right? It's just, it's almost like Andy Warhol, right? Where you just recreate something and not perfectly.

Michael Small:
By the way, did you have any of the albums?

Berndt Abeck:
Yeah, I know. I have all three of them. I had the Eurhythmics and the Pet Shop Boys and then later I bought the Blur one because it's just such a beautiful cover.

Michael Small:
And because girls who like boys who like boys who like girls, but always whatever they sang. That was their most famous song. And I also found it interesting that you liked the Eurythmics whose line was, "Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused." I'm wondering if this tells us anything about Berndt, but I hope not. It tells us probably that you're cooler than Alan Carter. I think that's safe, right Alan?

Alan Carter:
Everybody, everybody is cooler than Alan Carter.

Berndt Abeck:
No, that's not possible. no, no.

Alan Carter:
Trust me on this.

Michael Small:
It's 2025, you have these 1990s albums dominating your work life, large over your work life, large over your home life. Is your plan like, yeah, they're going to stay up until whenever, or do you have some plan of what you would do with them if you weren't going to have them anymore? Have you ever thought of getting rid of them?

Berndt Abeck:
Not really because such a unique thing. Hopefully I can give it to my kids or something.

Michael Small:
Okay, that's it. The I Couldn't Throw It Out answer that is very acceptable is give it to your kids. Those are so cool. Thank you so much for sharing them with us, Berndt, and you know, you did tell us something about yourself when you told us about those. So now it's time for Stella. Hey, Stella. We worked at Entertainment Weekly together with another favorite designer, Alex Knowlton. And we need to shout out to Alex.

Stella Anastasia:
Hey, Alex.

Michael Small:
What you saved is especially interesting to me because it shows some overlap in the way you and I think about saving things.

Stella Anastasia:
Okay.

Michael Small:
And I bet there are lot of other people listening who feel the same way we do. So tell us what you've got.

Stella Anastasia:
I found after looking through possessions the very first portfolio of first websites I ever designed in the late nineties. Now I was waitressing at the time and teaching myself how to design websites so that I could pivot out of waitressing and do this instead. It occurred to me when I was trying to find work that I would go to talk to people about hiring me and I would never know if they had reliable internet, right? Or people would say, what's a website? When I would ask them, can you know, can I do your website? So my solution was to print out websites, which seems so ridiculous now, you know, like I'm printing out this website to show you, right? This is my portfolio. This is my very first design of my company website. My company is named Hairy Legs and Company and my logo is a hairy-legged spider. And so this is circa 1996.

Berndt Abeck:
Whoa.

Stella Anastasia:
It's like a little time capsule of the internet, right? So the big thing was, choose one of these search engines to find what you're looking for on the web. It's Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite. Are you guys familiar with any of these? And if you look at the top, you'll see this is a screen grab of the Netscape browser.

Berndt Abeck:
Yeah, I remember those.

Stella Anastasia:
Remember Netscape? None of these businesses are still in business.

Alan Carter:
Not your fault.

Stella Anastasia:
Yeah, honest, it really wasn't my fault. And then we get to early, early, early Entertainment Weekly website designs. Now, when we were doing these pages, we're hand coding this stuff, right? So like no database stuff, no dynamic stuff.

Brett Mickelson:
I mean, I just want to shout out the X-Files page that you led with there. That's, you know, Scully and Mulder talking about science and science fiction and everything. I'm all about that.

Stella Anastasia:
Wait, think I have another one of them.

Michael Small:
Stella, one of these things this makes me think about is that my first internet job was in 1995 for Wired Magazine's website, Hotwired. They told us that if it's on the web, it'll be around forever. So you don't have to archive anything. So I didn't save things for the first time in my life. You know, I saved everything. So I didn't save. I did audio interviews with Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono. They shut that site down. They took it off. It's not even on Time Machine or anything. It's gone. It was such an early site they didn't know anything about permissions. They were just like, to clear permissions on everything we stole would be way too hard. So they just got rid of everything.

Stella Anastasia:
That's heartbreaking.

Berndt Abeck:
Didn't you have a tape recorder or something?

Michael Small:
I didn't even think I need that. You know, it's on the internet.

Stella Anastasia:
Right, it'll be there forever.

Berndt Abeck:
That's so funny.

Michael Small:
That's why I think what you've got is so important. I mean, we put so many hours of our life into work, such a high percentage of our life goes into work. And what do we have to show for it later? Especially if you're doing creative work, you've done creative things and they're gone, if you don't do what you did. You've saved history there because that stuff's not available.

Stella Anastasia:
It's actually nice to hear you say that because this, these things, they have no practical purpose. Like, you know, they're not a portfolio I'm going to use now. Right? I've lugged these things around with me through three moves. And now I live in a one room studio apartment and I'm still holding onto them. Right? Like I have no space for anything, but I'm going to keep these because it's a little time capsule of the start of my career, you know,

Michael Small:
I think you should be thinking about if you ever are going to have to divest yourself of things like where you choose some kind of internet archive they should go.

Stella Anastasia:
That's true. Although I do wonder if anybody would really be interested in Sightline. This one was actually a pretty good one. Public Works. This guy was an artist who used to do oil paintings of firefighters in Philadelphia. I should track him down and send this to him. I got a list of things brewing now. Thanks, Michael. Cause I don't have enough to do. I'm going to start thinking about this now.

Berndt Abeck:
Yeah, exactly.

Michael Small:
Well, thank you for sharing those with us. And now, on to Mr. Carter. You interviewed so many people during your career. Can you name a few for us?

Alan Carter:
Okay, Richard Gere, James Earl Jones, Jackie Collins, Joan Rivers, the cast of Melrose, you name it, Cheers, Soap Stars, Susan Lucci, you name it, 40 years at newspapers and magazines.

Michael Small:
What shocked me is that after all those people he interviewed, I asked him what he had saved and he basically had saved almost nothing compared to me where up in that attic is every interview tape, every note I took for every interview. But Alan did save something. What is it that you saved, Alan?

Alan Carter:
I found this drawer where I found old badges from things like a Melrose Place VIP party, which I thought from 1994, why do I have that? The finale of Cheers badge, the daytime Emmys, which I consulted on at one point. I wrote the soap awards a couple of times. I was a guest speaker at the NGL, National Gay Lesbian Journals Association, talking about soap operas. Like that's gonna be on my resume. Forgot I did it. Okay, but the thing that I found that I laughed and cracked up the most. And Michael's already laughing. Early back in the days of the web, and I was at CBS Local in Los Angeles, we were rogue. We did everything. We covered, you know, the finale of Big Brother, Survivor, all that stuff. My boss at the time said, why don't we go cover the porn convention? Porn is big. The show was going. So like, it was like, well, if the show's going, well, like, we should go. So it was 2007 and there was an erotica convention. There you go. And it was happening the same weekend that Hillary Clinton announced that she was running for president. And this becomes significant in that we went to the porn convention over two days. My boss photographer took about 400 photos. We did a slideshow on our website. 9,000 people loved it, wrote in, that's so great. And these are like half naked women, couple of like Chippendale types, but mostly it was naked women, bikinis, that kind of thing.

We get this one irate letter from a woman in Orange County. And if you know Orange County, California, this is sort of redundant, very conservative area. "How dare you? Hillary Clinton announced today, you don't have this on your website." It was front and center. And she said, "And I will never watch your station again. You people are disgusting and gross and this exploitation of women" and on and on and on, two pages. And she said, "I'm gonna start watching channel seven."

At the time, the web was rogue and they allowed me to answer mail and stuff, which I have no idea why. So I wrote back and I said, "Lady, that's nice. But channel seven was in the booth right next to us and basically go bunk yourself." Anyway, the general manager was not amused and tried to fire me.

Michael Small:
Is it not true that you met someone special at that convention who you want to mention, someone who's now famous?

Alan Carter:
Okay, so this is funny. Yes, 2017, 2018, I have a boss at the time, and this is 10 years later. He goes, "You've met everybody," like Michael always does. "You know everybody." And he'd throw out a name and I'd say, Yeah, I met her. He named 2000 people and I knew like 1999 of them. So he says Stormy Daniels. And I said, yeah, I think I've met Stormy Daniels. He goes, come on.

So I called the then supervisor who was now working for another company. And I said, do you remember the porn convention in 2007 and 2008? I swear we met Stormy Daniels. He goes, I don't think so. He said, I'm a straight guy. I would have remembered, but he goes through 400 photos in his archives. And sure enough, there's me talking to Stormy Daniels. And he goes, how did you remember that? And I go, I remembered her necklace. It had a beautiful charm on it and it's diamonds. And he goes, You gotta be gay. She's standing there, you know, basically her breasts hanging out and you remember her chain. "If there's anything that I needed to tell you to prove that I'm gay, it's that." I remembered Stormy Daniels because of her chain. So yeah, I met Stormy. And by the way, I'm sort of mad at her because in 2007, she could have broken the story to me about Trump and she didn't. We talked about her kid, her necklace, life, you know, being a porn star. And by the way, here's the funnier part.  I'm the gay guy walking around with the channel two logo on my microphone and women who, you know, TV, they light up. it's TV, right? They didn't know I was the website. I had more offers for things from women.

Michael Small:
Okay, other than those types of offers, do you remember if any celebrities ever offered you a gift of some kind?

Alan Carter:
I've gotten some things that I thought, okay, thanks for this. I once jokingly said to Joan Van Ark that she kept me waiting so long and was so annoying and kept the photographer waiting so long. I said, you should buy me a car. And she said, what kind of car would you like? And I just threw out Porsche. Two weeks later, "Mr. Carter, you have a delivery at the desk." This is at the New York Daily News. And I'm like, I'm not expecting anything. No, please, you have a delivery from Hollywood. And I was like, okay, so. I go out and there's this huge box and I'm like, what the hell is this? And it's JVA on it. Anyway, she sent me a Porsche. Now it was a mini Porsche. She said, "I love you and I'm so sorry I kept you waiting. Love, Joan." So yay, thank you.

Michael Small:
Wow, that's impressive.

Alan Carter:
And I thought, how do you get mad at somebody like that? She was thoughtful enough to send me the car, I still have it. It's probably worth like a couple hundred bucks, but you know..

Michael Small:
So why didn't you bring that? Where is it? I think you didn't tell me the truth when you told me you didn't save anything.

Alan Carter:
I can go get it. Here's the funny thing. Here's my confession to Michael. When Michael first broached the subject to me, I thought in my head, well, Michael, I'm not a saver. I kind of do chuck things out. I'm not a big sentimental person. And I'm going through these drawers going, you lied to your friend Michael.

Michael Small:
This leads us to the question we need to answer, which is, what are you going to do with those badges?

Alan Carter:
What's that movie line? We don't need no stinking badges. I'm sort of downsizing in my life right now, because I've hit the AARP age. I kind of don't know if I downsize what I'm going to do with a lot of this stuff. It probably will go in the trash. Now, my autographs and my picture with me and, I don't know, Burt Reynolds, those kind of things I'm probably going to keep because they're not easy to replace. The badges to me, if I have to go, "Wait, I attended that?" It couldn't have been too important if I don't remember the event.

Michael Small:
Do you want to set an example and get the trash can and throw some of them out right now?

Alan Carter:
No, because I'm not that brave. I talk a good game.

Michael Small:
Isn't it true that by saving these things that the memories come back and that's the value of saving them?

Alan Carter:
Well, yes. And sometimes it's, I don't even remember this happening or like, did this happen to somebody else?

Michael Small:
I feel like you've got something to say about my cause, which is these stories came back to you when you looked at the things that you pulled out of the drawers. You'd forgotten the stories and the things brought back the stories. So I think there's a value in saving them just for that.

Alan Carter:
No, you're right, and I don't think I saved them at the time for the idea that 30, 40 years later I'd go, remember that time when you did X, Y, or Z? Sometimes it was just throw it in the drawer.

Michael Small:
I think you said one thing that wasn't true. You said, I don't know why I saved the porn event badge. And of course you saved it because how many people get to go to a porn event? I mean, it's funny. And you saved that for a reason and I don't think it's random.

Alan Carter:
I think you might be right there.

Michael Small:
Did you just say that I'm right? Because in that case, we'd better move on before you change your mind. This is the last item from work we're going to share today. And it's something I saved from the 1980s 
when I was writing the Chatter gossip column on the last page of People Magazine. I saved it for 40 years, partly because it shows the ridiculous aspects of being a gossip columnist and the decisions you have to make, and partly because it involves losing my temper at work, which is really not a good thing to do, and partly because it involves people who were super rich and very famous at one point and probably no one younger than 50 knows who they are today. What I have in front of me is a pen set. It has on one side a clock with those glow in the dark hands that probably are extremely poisonous. Then it's got a pen in the middle, which I just tested and is still working. And then it's got a thermometer thing on the other side. Those are in brass and it's on a wooden plank. And on the wooden plank is a little brass

engraved item and it says, "Sweet guy, thanks for everything, Mike. Marty." During my six years at People, I collected not one, but three of these pen sets. Only one is still in my possession, which is very strange because you know I save everything. So it all begins with the person who sent them to me. Marty was a guy named Marty Ingels and I know this is a long shot. But has anybody heard of Marty Ingels?

Alan Carter:
Raise hand. Marty Ingels was a huge comic in the 50s, 60s, early 70s.

Michael Small:
Exactly. In the early 1960s, he starred in a TV series called I'm Dickens, He's Fenster. And it was a slapstick sitcom about construction workers. And his co-star was John Astin. Anybody recognize that name? 

Alan Carter:
The Addams Family.

Michael Small:
Okay. Who'd he play?

Alan Carter:
Gomez.

Michael Small:
Another win for Alan Carter. John Astin played Gomez on The Addams Family and Marty Ingels later made guest appearances on many other TV shows including The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched and The Love Boat. He was the voice of Pac-Man in the TV series about Pac-Man. He also happened to be the nephew of Abraham Beame who was the mayor of New York City from 1974 to 1977.

Alan Carter:
Never knew that.

Michael Small:
But the most relevant thing about Marty Ingels is that he married Shirley Jones. Now, do any of you recognize that name?

Stella Anastasia:
Partridge family, right?

Michael Small:
Ding! Score one for Stella! Shirley Jones was the mother on the Partridge Family TV series.

Stella Anastasia:
God, I just dated myself.

Michael Small:
That was from 1970 to 1974 and they had a number one hit song. Does anyone else remember what the name of that song was? 

Alan Carter:
Is it, think I love you?

Michael Small:
Well, it certainly is. You got it right.

Alan Carter:
I think I love you, so what am I so afraid of?

Michael Small:
I'm afraid that I'm unsure of a love that is too good or whatever.

Alan Carter:
I cannot remember what I had for breakfast, but I remember the lyrics of I Think I Love You from 50 years ago. What does that tell us about our minds?

Michael Small:
Let's not go there.

Alan Carter:
I was a 14 year old boy who had a crush on David Cassidy.

Michael Small:
Okay, David Cassidy was the shaggy-haired heartthrob singer in the Partridge family, but what was his off-screen relationship to Shirley Jones?

Alan Carter:
She was his stepmother because at that point she was married to Jack Cassidy, his father.

Michael Small:
Right, but she and Jack Cassidy also had two other kids.

Alan Carter:
Patrick and Sean? I win!

Michael Small:
Yeah. Both of became teen stars and then serious acting credits. One of them was in Pirates of Penzance on Broadway.



Alan Carter:
Yeah, they all had pretty good careers. You know, they were a talented family.

Michael Small:
But what's interesting is that Shirley Jones, before the Partridge family, she starred in the three of the biggest musical movies ever made. 1955, Oklahoma, 1956, Carousel, 1962, The Music Man. She was the Timothee Chalamet of musicals. She was so big. She was like so famous, and she is 91 and still alive today. But her marriage to Marty Ingels was kind of stormy. She filed for divorce in 2002, but then never followed through and they stayed together until his death in 2015.

Alan Carter:
I remember her once doing an interview and somebody said, Shirley Jones, the classy, refined actress, singer with Marty Ingles, who was sort of a goofball comic. You know when they say opposites attract? I'm not sure they could find somebody more opposite than Marty Ingles.  But she stayed, she's a loyal woman.

Michael Small:
He was a guy who had sort of a temper. He sued the National Enquirer for defaming Shirley for $20 million. He said at the time, this will make the Carol Burnett suit look like a high school prom. He also sued the actress June Allyson in 1993 for not giving him a commission. He was a talent agent and she got a job doing Depends commercials.

Alan Carter:
You could say she was pissed off. Adult diaper jokes.

Michael Small:
I was writing the gossip column on the last page of People called Chatter and he, like many other people, would call me with tips and stories. His stories were always about Shirley Jones. So Shirley Jones was not that well known at the time. Unfortunately, after the Partridge Family, she never returned to her former fame, although she did do some acting and she was still incredibly talented. I did place some Shirley Jones items and when I placed the first item, I received these notes. Now this is Marty Ingels' stationery. He has a little drawn cartoon of himself in the bottom corner of his stationery and he writes things out as if they were poetry, almost like e.e. cummings. I did save the one from when I ran my first Shirley Jones item and it reads like this: In a William Morris world of hold button words and cellophane promises and disposable everythings, it is good to know that the sweet and compassionate likes of a Mike Small ain't going away so easy. Parenthesis, I thank you, Mike. We all thank you for your constant indulgence and your friendship.

Alan Carter:
That's so nice. In my history at People, Entertainment Weekly, and all these other places, the rare times you got notes from people, and it was rare, you'd almost sort of fall out of your chair when you got one. I usually got calls from people saying, how dare you, I'm going to kill you. He obviously put some thought into that. And that's very sweet.

Michael Small:
I think I'm going to disagree with you about that and we'll see as this goes on. Along with this note came one of these wooden things with the clock and the thermometer and the pen. And then I ran another item and I got another one of these, another letter, another one that I didn't save. But a third time he called me and had a Shirley Jones item and I said, I can't run any more Shirley Jones items. And he screamed at me. He reamed me. He was furious. He told me he would have my job, whatever. He was so angry. Then I didn't like that either. So I yelled at him. So somebody nearby hearing like me yelling on the phone at Marty Ingels and Marty Ingels is yelling at me. They can't hear that. I thought that was that. The next day, a package arrives. Guess what I get? Another pen set.

Alan Carter:
I was gonna say he must have had a warehouse of these clocks but what did you get?

Michael Small:
And on this one, it says, here's the same sort of note with the drawing in the corner. The first line is written in black, a magic marker, handwritten: In a hair temper, hair trigger world of misunderstanding, miscommunication, misjudgment, and miss everything else. I can only be grateful for someone so far away who seems always open and ready to listen. Whatsoever else comes by us, MS, let us not lose that. Marty. That was after I screamed at him and didn't run the item.

Alan Carter:
Wow.

Michael Small:
I also happened to have with this dated July 27th, 1984, a letter from Michael Small on People Magazine stationery. And it says: Marty, please don't get angry. I appreciate the thought behind this. But the last time you sent me a gift, I told you that I could not accept anything else. That's company policy. And I think a sound one. The kind letter you sent was certainly enough of a thanks, much as I didn't deserve it, without the gift. As I hope you could tell from our phone conversation, I have no hard feelings. But practically speaking, our past experience does change things between us in terms of the Chatter column. I don't think I could submit items from you for some time. Sorry, but that's the way it is. Anyway, thanks for this nice gesture, and I hope you understand why I can't keep the gift.

Alan Carter:
You should have said, PS, I think I love you.

Michael Small:
Why am I so afraid of you yelling at me?

Alan Carter:
You did raise an interesting point. I have about 10 celebrities who I had bang up meetings with, like, let's have lunch, let me have your child, like, let's go to my pool, hang out with me. And a year later, they'd see me and say, I'm gonna kill you. Like, okay, we were close once. And sometimes it was sort of justified, like, hey, the magazine, like, we wrote a thing. I'm sorry, I didn't write that. And then there were times it was like, I wrote something that your mother could have written, what are you talking about? There was never any rhyme or reason to it. And it's like, you know what? That's the nature of this business. You're a movie star and you loved me on Thursday. And on Saturday, you offered to kick me and break my pencil neck.

Michael Small:
In this case, if I wrote anything about Shirley Jones, he loved me. He only hated me when I didn't write about Shirley Jones. So that's where it went. I returned one of his pen sets. Bearing all that in mind, do I keep these letters? Do I keep my clock and pen set? Do I put it in a box? Do I put it on display? Opinions, please.

Berndt Abeck:
I think you have to keep at least one of them, right? And the letters.

Stella Anastasia:
Yeah, it's like the universe is telling you, right? They sent you three of these things.

Berndt Abeck:
It's such a classic old school gift.

Brett Mickelson:
So you have two of the pen sets now.

Michael Small:
No, I only have one left. I guess I gave one away and clearly from that letter I returned one to Marty Ingels.

Brett Mickelson:
Okay, I was gonna say if you had two, one's a perfect re-gift.

Michael Small:
That's funny. I think the re-gifting idea is going to happen eventually and I should think about who will be re-gifted this.

Brett Mickelson:
In my family, we have a tradition where my aunt, my mother's sister, many years ago, she was at like a tag sale somewhere and she saw the ugliest plastic poinsettia and it's huge and it's disgusting and she bought it for $1. And then every year it gets passed from one family member to another. Whoever receives it has to prominently display it in their home for the rest of the year and then they're allowed to pass it on. I mean, this pen set could be something like that. And I believe in my family tradition, there's like a poem you have to write when you re-gift it.

Michael Small:
So this is perfect because in my case, Marty Ingels already wrote the poems.

Brett Mickelson:
Exactly. That's what made me think of it.

Michael Small:
In other words, if you know me, beware when the holidays arrive because this is just one of the many things I've saved from work and they've all got to go. But that's it for today. Until I come knocking on your door with gifts. Brett, if our listeners want an adventure, what can they do?

Brett Mickelson:
Anybody in the Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut area you want to come skydive come hit us up and we'll throw you out of a plane

Michael Small:
And to sign up, I go to your website.

Brett Mickelson:
Which is bostonskydivecenter.com.

Michael Small:
Okay, beautiful. Berndt, if I want to hire a graphic design firm in San Francisco that does visually stunning work that even Jan Wenner loved, how do I contact you?

Berndt Abeck:
Go to my website abeckinc.com So anytime you want anything big or  small.

Michael Small:

We do it. And that's A-B-E-C-K-I-N-C dot com, abecinc.com. Excellent. Stella, if I want to buy cookies with really funny greeting cards printed on them, how do I get them?

Stella Anastasia:
You go to tartbreak.com

Michael Small:
Do I have to be in New York City?

Stella Anastasia:
You do have to be in New York State to order from me. I'm working on expanding that.

Michael Small:
Okay, tartbreak.com. Alan, if I'm a listener to this show, if I want to ask you on a date, how is that done?

Alan Carter:
My number is on bathroom walls all over. 1-800-HORNY-BLACKMAN would probably be the best one.

Michael Small:
Thank you. That's what I was hoping you'd say. If you enjoyed this episode, please sign up for our newsletter so you'll always know what's coming next. You can do that at throwitoutpodcast.com. And once again, if you want to see the treasures we've saved today, I'm posting photos of all of them on our site. That's throwitoutpodcast.com. That's it. Thank you, Stella, Berndt, Brett, and Alan. And remember anyone who is listening, if you save stuff from work, it's important. Think about it before you throw it out. Bye everybody.

Berndt Abeck:
Bye, thank you.

Brett Mickelson:
Thanks Michael.

Stella Anastasia:
Thanks everybody. Bye.

[Theme song begins]

I Couldn't Throw It Out theme song
Performed by Don Rauf, Boots Kamp and Jen Ayers
Written by Don Rauf and Michael Small
Produced and arranged by Boots Kamp

Look up that stairway
To my big attic
Am I a hoarder
Or am I a fanatic?

Decades of stories
Memories stacked
There is a redolence
Of some irrelevant facts

Well, I couldn't throw it out
I had to scream and shout
It all seems so unjust
But still I know I must
Before I turn to dust
I've got to throw it out
Before I turn to dust
I've got to throw it out

Well I couldn't throw it out
Oh, I couldn't throw it out

I'll sort through my possessions
In these painful sessions
I guess this is what it's about
The poems, cards and papers
The moldy musty vapors
I just gotta sort it out

Well I couldn't throw it out
Well I couldn't throw it out
Oh, I couldn't throw it out
I couldn't throw it out

[Theme song ends]

END TRANSCRIPT