The Actors from M*A*S*H on Alan Alda's "Clear + Vivid"

Alan Alda had his old pals from M*A*S*H on his latest Clear + Vivid podcast. What a treasure. I was in sixth grade when the last episode aired in 1983, so I’m the perfect age to have lost count of the number of times I’ve seen every episode. Those plots and scripts are so embedded in my brain that hearing these slightly-aged voices on the podcast just sounded like a bunch of old friends telling stories.

My favorite part was right up front, around 3:55 (via Overcast):

Alan Alda:

Something happened while we were doing M*A*S*H that really made a deep impression… it changed the way I worked as an actor, and it was the beginning of changing the way I even related to other people in real life, and it was the way we sat around in our chairs between shots, and didn’t go back to our dressing rooms, and just sat there, for an hour sometimes at a time, making fun of one another and laughing. And often, we’d go over our lines together, but the most valuable thing to me was that relating that we did, and laughing together, and then we would walk — when the lighting was ready — we’d walk to the set, and the same connection that we had as people carried over into the scene. And I remember times when we didn’t even stop the kidding until right before the first person had a line to say.

This is what I call a Desert Island Podcast Episode, where you download the mp3 and hoard it before it slips away.