When Rachel Maddow spotted her celebrity doppelgänger backstage at the “Friends for a Benefit” event on Sunday night, she let out a cry. “I could have worn my glasses!” she yelped. The two were about to share the stage for a Q&A. “I didn’t know you had a beard. I was so worried it would be tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum. And I would be the dummie.”
Ira Glass had just returned from Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, D.C., where he interviewed Glenn Beck disciples, and brought Maddow a water bottle as a souvenir. She thanked him — one thing you may not know is that Maddow actually considers Beck something of a professional influence. “Glenn Beck was my favorite person of all time in radio. When he was in talk radio God wasn’t speaking to him,” she said. “He was funny and much more performative than anyone. He’s amazing in talk radio. He was a political guy. It was him ranting and raving and you sort of felt he didn’t take it seriously.”
“When I got hired by Air America they asked who I like in radio and I said I like Ira Glass, This American Life, and I really like this guy Glenn Beck,” she said. “And I shit you not, the guy who was sort of leading the interview, he didn’t last long at the company, said, ‘We’re going to be a liberal channel.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m pretty confident in my politics.’”
Maddow has less nice things to say about the Curbed blog, which last month published the address and floor plan of the West Village apartment where she and her girlfriend are moving. “They may get a lot of page views for that, but I think they would have gotten just as many page views if they had redacted my address and considered my safety and privacy. Whoever at Curbed decided the actual address and floor plan was necessary to get those page views, I hope they die in a fire.”
