Feeling “crotchety” (untrue) and “antiquated” (true), John Moe ’90, national radio personality, humor columnist and erstwhile theater major, recently returned to the scene of “many dramas,” Whitman College, to talk about life, read from his recent book and reassure students that “it doesn’t matter what you major in.”
Moe is a senior reporter for “Weekend America,” a national radio program produced by American Public Media. He also writes regular humor pieces for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, part of the McSweeney’s publishing net. Before he went to work for “Weekend America,” he produced and hosted a weekly program called “The Works” for National Public Radio affiliate KUOW in Seattle.
For Moe, life after Whitman is a replay of life at Whitman. “It was all about how many things you could latch onto,” he said.
Moe grabbed more than a handful. He hosted a radio show. He wrote a humor column for The Pioneer. He hung out with politics students. He was the first winner of the Harper Joy Theatre one-act play competition 18 years ago.
So what did he do after leaving Whitman? Moe worked in theater, pursued radio, followed politics and wrote in earnest. It was as if four years of undergraduate life crystallized “before my eyes.”
“Before college, nothing was happening,” Moe said. “There were some meals eaten, a shower taken, a mall occurrence. The Puyallup Fair was a big deal.”
Moe grew up in Federal Way, where the ’80s amounted to Camaros and Iron Maiden at high decibels. “I came to Whitman and about the first thing I heard spoken was ‘K-Dub’ (KWCW). I said, ‘What’s K-Dub?’ The next thing I knew I had a radio show. OK, so it was from 2 to 4 in the morning. The fact that I could be on the air was amazing to me.”
Moe still has tapes from shows he hosted during his sophomore year. “And sophomoric they were,” he said. “We’d go to 7-Eleven before we went on the air, buy snack foods we’d never heard of, and do on-air taste tests. Salsa Rio Doritos come to mind. What stayed with me from those times wasn’t so much the right way of doing things but the possibility of doing things.”
Buildings at Whitman have changed — “some germinated overnight apparently,” Moe noted — but the essence of the place is still the same for him. “At the end of the day there’s still an elegant simplicity to student life here,” he said.
Naturally, an inelegant question occurred: Did Moe weep after leaving Whitman?
“Yes. Absolutely,” he said, tormented and smiling. “The summer after I left was awful. What made it stranger still was that I went straight to graduate school — in acting — and only made it through two years of the program. I didn’t want to be an actor in New York, so I went and tried to be an actor in Seattle.”
For a while he was, albeit in bit parts on stage and Lotto commercials on television. “At a certain point I decided that I was a writer,” Moe said, “and I figured the best way to do that was to unilaterally declare to anyone who would listen that I was a writer. Then, you see, they’d start to think that I was, and then I’d fool myself into thinking that I was.”
The trick worked. Moe wrote plays. He wrote humor pieces for an online magazine. He wrote freelance pieces for NPR (KUOW). Eventually, he went to work full time for the radio station, writing, reporting and generally jumping through all manner of occupational hoops with glee.
His discipline at the desk bore fruit. Moe’s “Conservatize Me” was published in 2006 and received excellent notices, including a book-jacket plaudit from McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers: “[Moe’s] stuff is sophisticated, literary even, while still managing out-loud laughs,” Eggers wrote.
The book’s subtitle distills how Moe’s literary escapade came to be — specifically, what he did to write it. It reads: “How I Tried to Become a Righty With the Help of Richard Nixon, Sean Hannity, Toby Keith, and Beef Jerky.”
In his not-so-lonely hour upon the stage at Kimball Auditorium, Moe read three excerpts from the book. Then he bravely went where most alumni would not go, turning the calendar back to share a few excerpts from his writings for The Pioneer. He did not dwell.
Before taking questions from a generous audience, Moe shared his short list of advice — “things I wish someone would have told me while I was at Whitman.” From the back of the hall, it did not appear that he wept as he shared them.
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