The Colin McEnroe Show

Ghostwriting evokes an image of the writer who toils away in obscurity, secretly penning books credited to another. In reality, ghostwriters are just good at turning someone's undeveloped vision into a story that others want to read. Their services are in demand from people wanting help writing everything from  celebrity memoirs  to  Instagram captions  and  online dating...

Thornton Wilder's  Our Town  debuted more than 80 years ago. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and, over the decades since, it has continuously been one of the most produced of American plays. It is known for its spare set -- just some chairs and tables, perhaps some ladders -- and lack of props and sometimes even costumes. It's known for its metatheatricality and its Stage Manager ch...

The octopus has always been the stuff of spine-tingling legend, like that of the  kraken , the many-armed sea monster believed to drag ships to the bottom of the sea after dining on the crew. Or  Gertie the Pus , the giant Pacific octopus that lives under the Narrows Bridge connecting Tacoma, Washington, to Gig Harbor. In reality, the octopus is more benign but equally fascinating. Did y...

The U.S. is about to surpass 500,000 deaths from COVID-19. That said, new  cases  are declining,  hospitalizations  and  deaths  are trending down, and vaccination rates are picking up, though  inequities  remain. We talk vaccines, variants, messaging, and more. Also this hour: A new  study  finds that House members who hold extreme views receive f...

In  a new essay for  Harper's , filmmaker Martin Scorsese criticizes the current state of the movie business and all these new fangled streaming platforms and their algorithms. "We can’t depend on the movie business, such as it is, to take care of cinema," Scorsese says. And:  Judas and the Black Messiah  is a biopic of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton. It is direc...

Cartoonist Bill Griffith based his legendary character  Zippy the Pinhead  on  Schlitzie , a real life sideshow 'pinhead' who appeared in Todd Browning's 1932 film  Freaks . Early audiences were appalled by Browning's use of real sideshow characters to seek revenge on those who treated them cruelly. Griffith's graphic novel is his effort to understand Schlitzie and the sideshow...

We live in an " Everything Should Take Twenty Minutes " world.  Movies are too long . SundanceTV has  a show that airs in 10-minute episodes . Tierra Whack has  a 15-minute album made of fifteen 60-second songs . Todd Rundgren's memoir has  183 one-page, three-paragraph chapters . So today, we turn our hour over to five short, little shows about short, little things. Here's a S...

The Senate voted to aquit Donald Trump Saturday after falling shy of the two-thirds majority required to convict him. Fifty-seven senators, including  seven Republicans , voted to convict him for "incitement of insurrection" and 43 Republicans  voted to acquit  Trump for a variety of reasons.  Reliving  the January 6 insurrection during last week's Senate impeachment trial...

As of Monday morning, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are still working out the details for the Senate impeachment trial scheduled to begin this Tuesday, February 9.  Forty-five senators  say it's not constitutional. Conservative lawyer  Charles Cooper says it is.  We talk to Connecticut U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal on impeachm...

WandaVision  is a Disney+ miniseries that's part of the  Marvel Cinematic Universe  and that's set, like, inside the history of television? It follows Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as Vision as they try to conceal their superhero powers and blend into a generic sitcom neighborhood. Episodes so far have taken on the look and feel of American sitcoms from the 1950...

Who's afraid of the Bix bad Beiderbecke? Hartford has an amazing jazz history, and Colin has a lot of jazz musician friends. This hour, a little onstage jazz party recorded in front of a live audience long before the pandemic put a pause on live audiences as a thing. Colin and the panel look to make jazz accessible to mere mortals. They talk about what makes jazz jazz, invite the audience to sing,...

We have a complicated relationship with our food. We need food to live; yet, we've become removed from the food we eat and how it's grown and processed.  Even with the best of intentions, today's ultra-processed foods make it hard for us to know exactly what we're eating or how the methods used to mass produce our food are affecting our environment and our health. And I haven't even touched o...

Colin interviewed Hal Holbrook on February 3, 2015, in advance of Holbrook's performance of  Mark Twain Tonight  in Hartford on his 90th birthday on February 17, 2015. Colin wrote at the time that Holbrook was one of the most remarkable people he's encountered of all the remarkable people he's interviewed over the years. Holbrook was so passionate and fun to speak with that Colin never g...

Some  say  the press continues to portray the Republican Party as a "mainstream, center-right entity," long after their words and deeds reflect something more ominous. Is the media  failing to convey  the extreme behavior of the GOP out of fear they will be accused of liberal bias? It's not the first time the media  has been accused of bias  or been too slow to see so...

Olivia Rodrigo's " drivers license " is in its second week as  the No. 1 song in the country , having debuted there last week. It is the first debut single by any artist to hit the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 1 in history. And:  Pretend It's a City  is Martin Scorsese's seven-part Netflix documentary series about Fran Liebowitz that's actually also kind of about New York City. And fina...

Applications to nursing schools  spiked  during the pandemic from those who wanted to help. They chose to be nurses at a time when the risk to their own health was never greater. Why are some people willing to run toward the fire when others are running away from it? Most of us fall somewhere on a spectrum of altruistic behavior. We might adopt a stray pet, donate a liter of blood, or ch...

André Gregory has directed and acted in the theater for more than 50 years. He has appeared in a number of movies, including Martin Scorsese's  The Last Temptation of Christ , Woody Allen's  Celebrity , Brian De Palma's  The Bonfire of the Vanities , Peter Weir's  The Mosquito Coast , and many more. He has starred in three movies about the theater with the playwright, ac...

Moderna announced today they were  making new versions  of their vaccine that can be used as boosters against variants seen in South Africa, Brazil, and the U.K. The vaccine should be effective against variants but it seems to create fewer antibodies against the one that has emerged in South Africa. Either way, vaccines alone will  not be enough.  We talk about mutations and va...

The  House will transmit  its Article of Impeachment charging former President Trump with "incitement of insurrection" to the Senate on Monday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asked the House to wait two weeks to let the former president work on his defense. The House chose not to  wait any longer  , possibly influenced by more than a dozen Republican senators  tryi...

Most of the Western world is organized by  alphabetical order , which is so much more than the 26 letters that make up the alphabet. Alphabetical order is an organizing principle that allows us to save, order, and access thousands of years of humankind's most precious documents and ideas. Without it, we'd never know what came before us or how to pass on what's with us. It's ubiquitous, y...

Yale University's Dr. Nicholas Christakis explores  what it means to live in a time of pandemic . He looks at historical epidemics and current medical and social research to help us understand the potential long-term impact COVID-19 will have on people and culture.  Greek mythology holds that the arrows of plague  Apollo  shot down upon the Greeks led to great death and sufferi...

Tom Cruise's seventh  Mission: Impossible  installment has been one of the few huge Hollywood productions trying to to figure out how to film during the pandemic. Cruise has been in the news lately for  blowing up at his crew  for breaking COVID protocols, and now he's back in the news for…  buying COVID enforcement robots ? And: Could front porches be just the righ...

Previously on  Pardon Me (Another Damn Impeachment Show?) : House Democrats voted to impeach President Trump on two Articles of Impeachment: "abuse of power" and "obstruction of Congress." He was later acquitted promptly after Senate Republicans voted against calling witnesses or admitting new evidence. Now (less than 48 weeks later), on Season Two of  Pardon Me : House Democrats, along...

Do you talk to yourself? Is it a silent inter-narrative or do you talk aloud? What form of address to you use to yourself? When I'm mad at myself I sometimes address myself as Colin. But, I sense that when LeBron speaks to himself as LeBron, it's more affirming.  I talk aloud quite a bit. A hangover, I think, from growing up as an only child. The Spanish and Argentine novelist Andres Neumann...

Wednesday's insurrection by Trump supporters at the Capitol was the culmination of months of Trump perpetuating the lie that the election was stolen from him. The fire he built might have sputtered without  oxygen from Republican colleagues  and right-wing media intent on capitalizing on his lies. House Democrats introduced an  article of impeachment  Monday. It charges Preside...