HTDE: Peter Sagal the Sausage

0:00The Novelizers podcast where we turn classic films like The Matrix and Dirty Dancing into hilarious audio books narrated by guests like Rachel Dratch, Ira Glass, Samantha Bee, Will Forte, Wayne Brady, J.K. Simmons, and more. Listen to the Novelizers podcast hosted by me, Dave Hill, from Cincinnati Public Radio and the NPR Network. Hey guys, it's Peter. This week we are back with another episode of How to Do Everything, made by Wait Wait producers Mike Danforth and Ian Chillong. And I have to tell you, honestly, this is one of my favorite episodes so far, because I'm in it. Now, long-time listeners may remember that back in the day, Mike and Ian used to drag me in to eat usually some terrible food.

0:40And this is, no spoilers, food related. And it really was one of the more fun things I've ever been able to do. Once again, listeners, remember, this show will not be in this feed forever. So be sure to get out of here and go listen to How to Do Everything on their own feed. And enjoy this latest episode of How to Do Everything with Peter Sagal.

1:04About 10 years ago, the town of Espo, Finland, had a problem with thousands of young people gathering on the beaches and committing crimes, some of them very serious crimes. Inspector Hanu Vaninen had an idea to stop it. Can you tell us about that? Yes. In Finland, in central Finland, they had used classical music in a shopping mall. The youth didn't like the classical music, so they evaded it. And then I'm a little odd in this police station. I suggested to the superiors that should we try to play the classical music at the beach. And we played it. Usually they gather there around 6 p.m. or 7 p.m.

1:55until 1 a.m. the whole night. And we started the music at 4 or 5 p.m. So there wasn't youth already there. and the youth, they did come in small groups, but they started to move one by one, one step, two steps, three steps away from the music. It wasn't loud, they could talk, but I'm not sure what's the problem with the classical music. But they did move. It sounds like you just kind of changed the vibe of the beach to a place they didn't think was cool anymore. Yes, something like that. Am I right that the vibe there, that the scene at the beach with the classical music would almost make it perfect for a romantic picnic?

2:44Well, yeah, if you like Bach or Mozart or pan flute music, then it's okay. And the people, some of the older people came and they enjoyed like a pizza and wine or something with the classical music. I guess that would be a danger that you would, by playing the classical music, you could be attracting too many old people. Well, they warned us about that. My superiors also warned me about that. But that's not the case yet. Yeah. Do you, in your private personal life, do you listen to classical music? Not much. Sorry about that. So it kind of had the same effect on you, didn't it? Well, it might have.

3:26It might have.

3:30This is How to Do Everything. I'm Ian. And I'm Mike. On today's show, How to Fix the Net at Your Basketball Game. But first... We got an email from Brian, which he sent from his seat at a minor league baseball game. Said he needed some help. Brian, what can we help you with? Yeah. So right when I was watching a mascot race at the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs baseball game here in Allentown, Pennsylvania, they do a mascot race in the middle of one of their innings. I just thoroughly enjoyed it. And I was like, how can I do this? And how hard are these costumes to run in? What are the mascots that are racing?

4:11So it's all pork-based characters. My favorite is crispy bacon. P period bacon. That's a slice of bacon. Diggity is a hot dog. Hambone is a slice of ham. Hambone always loses. There's barbecue. That's a pulled pork sandwich. And then they added somebody recently, ribby. It's a rack of ribs. So there are five. Well, that actually raises a question that I have, Brian. So for Hambone, what is the shape of Hambone? If ham bone always loses, is that an issue because aerodynamically ham bone has more surface area? That's a good point. I mean, ham bone is kind of what you would think. It's like a hock of ham.

4:57Harder to move in that than, say, like a vertical hot dog. Although, I mean, you could argue that the hot dog could be hard because it could be very top heavy. I've always wondered if it's rigged. Like if somebody at the top of the organization says, you know, today it's you, Crispy Bacon. Really? Like to what end do you think, though? Is it just like to give Crispy Bacon his due or her due? Yeah. You all think that it's a real fair contest. I think there are occasions when it's fair. But now that you say it, I mean, with the rise in sports gambling, you have to wonder if there's like an underbelly here.

5:34Well, Brian, I think we have somebody who can help us here. The most treasured of all the mascot races is the Johnsonville famous racing sausages race at Milwaukee Brewers games. Online with us now is their Italian sausage. And we've been told, I'm being completely serious, in no uncertain terms, we've been told not to reveal the human identity of this sausage. So Italian sausage, how long have you been doing the sausage race? oh uh i've been doing it for close to 15 years so i've lost track of how many races i've run yeah wow yeah i mean i'm i'm typically the italian i i'm partial to the italian it's it's the costume i won my first race in but we switch it up sometimes i'll hop into the bratwurst or the hot dog we also have the polish and the chorizo so is it it's always you and is it the same three or four other people in the other sausage costumes no so we actually have um anywhere from 30 to 50 people uh that do it yeah i mean it would be crazy to to commit to every every one game like that yeah yeah but no we do mix it up you know one of the most common questions we get is uh well is it is it fixed is the race predetermined and i can tell you that absolutely not we try it is it is legit it gets competitive we are out there racing our butts off and it is it's exhausting it's a i don't know the how long it is but it's you know we go from the opposing dugout to all the way past the home dugout on the camera well well into the outfield and it's yeah in the summer months it get it is hot it is sweaty it is a physically demanding experience what what italian sausage which of the sausages has an advantage generally we would say the four that are not chorizo because the chorizo has the sombrero oh that adds some extra weight um and some aerodynamic um implications that that you have to factor in sure if you had the power to animate i'm sorry if you had the power italian sausage to animate all five sausages you were given the gift which of the five sausages real sausages would win a race i would have to say hot dog because it's the most slender yeah not a lot of extra you know weight to it.

8:12Now, Mike, a second ago, accidentally said your name, which we've bleeped out. And it was very clear as we were setting up this interview that we were only to refer to you as Italian sausage. We are to protect your identity, which we're happy to do. I am curious why, though, why that's important. Are they afraid that somebody is going to try and influence the sausage race by finding you in your human life? I think it goes back to just sort of mascot code in general. You go to Disney parks and they're always in character. That's sort of how we look at it. Do you have a rival, either a rival sausage or a rival human inside of the sausage costume?

8:58Is there somebody you always want to beat? Yeah, there have been some rivalries. I had a run-in with the chorizo once. It was the, gosh, 20th anniversary of the sausage race or something. It was, it was, it was a landmark day. It was a big deal and tried to take an aggressive turn around, around home. And Chorizo is, he's kind of in the same line and we bump and I fall and still managed to get back on my feet and finish third. But I happened to make it on sports centers, not top 10 for, for this. How'd that feel? You know, it felt like something I wanted to share with everyone. Like, it didn't matter, you know.

9:44And I asked people, like, okay, on the not top 10, do I want to be higher? I was number eight. Oh, yeah. If I'm going to be on the not top 10, don't I want to just go all the way for number one, right? Yeah. Additionally, they had me fill out an injury report because I scraped my knee a little bit. So I had to fill out this injury report for, you know, the club policy. Yeah. And there's this questionnaire. It's like, you know, was another employee involved in the incident? And I said, yes, incidental contact with Chorizo. I mean, I have to just I have to ask, how can Mike and I get in a sausage race?

10:23How do we do it? We will be there at the drop of a hat. Yeah. You guys just say the word and we'll get you booked.

10:35I got to be honest, I didn't think that last part was going to work, but we are going to Milwaukee to be sausages. You'll know we're there when we start speaking in hushed tones. All right, we're at American Family Field where the Milwaukee Brewers play baseball. We're starting out at the tailgate. And I should say we invited Peter Sagal to join us here in Milwaukee. He is, of course, usually our taste tester. I figure climbing into a sausage costume that has been worn by countless hot, sweaty people running as fast as they can, that counts as a taste test. There will be a flavor within. It's definitely a sensory experience.

11:23Like, you're going to sense things and smell things, probably, and maybe even taste things, depending on what you're doing in there. I am extremely excited about this. This is, in fact, I'm so excited about it, it's almost like a weird thing that you invited me to do it. Because usually my attitude is dread, but I'm very excited. You think we're going to trick you at some point? Oh, yes. Yeah. I mean, it can't be this great. I mean, there has to be a catch. Okay. We'll find a way to meet your dread, I think. Okay. So we're about to go back there. we've sat through three innings of this game looking at the field on which we're about to run uh what are what are you all feeling about it uh growing anxiety you feel nervous well yeah not just because of the game there are a lot of people here and you'll note that during every sort of interstitial moment everybody's paying a lot of attention like they had that you know find the coin or the whatever the ball under the baseball hat animation everybody was playing Everybody was shouting out their answer.

12:29They're going to be watching us. Here's the thing. And if you didn't know this already, they're not going to know it's us. I'm well aware of that. But you still might fall down. That's exactly it. What if I, as whatever sausage ended up being, fall down? People will be telling for years. They'll say, oh, did you see that night? The Polish fell down. I was there that night. What do you guys think? I'm not nervous. I have no expectation. I just want to finish. Hina, how are you feeling? Yeah, growing anxiety. I'm just, like, dancing my chair a little bit more than I used to be. There are a ton of people here.

13:03The sausages also are, like, everywhere. What sausage do you want to be? Not chorizo. Anything but chorizo. What do you want to be? Anything but chorizo, which probably means I'm going to end up being the chorizo. Peter, would you like to be the chorizo? I would not like to be the chorizo. Well, I'm sorry. We can edit out where he said not. We have some bad news, Peter. I figured. Let me show you a text that I sent to my friends. I was told to avoid the chorizo because you can't see them from under the hat. So I'll probably get the chorizo. I don't want to be the chorizo. Okay, let's get to it.

13:39They take Hina, Mike, Peter, and me, they take us all down beneath the stadium to get our costumes on. And this guy gives us this big spiel about the rules. A lot of it has to do with the mascot code. Yeah, apparently, and I hadn't really thought about this. In retrospect, thinking back about my encounters with mascots, it makes a lot of sense. The thing they're most concerned about is breaking the illusion that the, in this case, the sausage is in fact a sausage rather than a person in a sausage suit. Well, I think we should reveal, so we're about to go out on the field here and actually do this race and see which of us triumphs.

14:16It's the four of us and somebody from the Mets who was, he took the role of hot dog. I was Italian sausage. Ian, you were bratwurst. I was Polish. And that means there's only one person left to be chorizo. Can we let the listeners guess who that was? Just for a moment. Should we do that? All right, fans. Time now for the Johnsonville Famous Racing Sausage Race. Wearing number one, it's the Johnsonville bratwurst. Number two, we have the Johnsonville Polish sausage. Wearing number three, the Johnsonville Italian sausage. Wearing number four, the Johnsonville hot dog. And number five, it's the Johnsonville chorizo.

14:58All right, sausages, on your mark, get set, go. They're up and racing the hot dog, taking an early lead with the chorizo to the inside in second. It's the Polish at third. The Bratwurst moving up now with the Italian trailing the field. They make the turn, and they're heading down the stretch. At least the hot dog is. He's all by himself tonight. It's the hot dog all alone at the wire. Obviously, the hot dog, the one of us that was not, the one person who was not one of us jumped out to a huge lead. If you're watching it on the Jumbotron, after about five seconds, none of us were even visible because he was so far ahead of us.

15:40I was like, is that a false start? Did I miss the start? Because it just seemed so unlikely. Yeah. That's exactly what I thought. You saw him too? Oh, yeah. I saw him running so quickly that I was like, there's just simply no way that they actually said go. You know why I don't think I saw anybody? Because I was in last place. I just saw you guys. All I saw was Hina, and I just knew that I had to beat. I couldn't be last. Ultimately, that's where the drama for the crowd was, was who was going to be last between Mike and Hina. because it was neck and neck for the bottom. And I think I've seen video, and I do think we tied.

16:22The hot dog guy smoked us. Completely. We were smoked sausages.

16:34Hey, if you have any questions you want us to answer, you can send them to us at howto at npr.org. That's our email address. and we promise we look at every email we receive. If your question is that you are currently stuck inside of a Bratwurst costume, I'll just tell you right now, just bend both of your elbows the other way, unlock your hips, and rotate your head 360 degrees.

17:04This message comes from WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart. Get wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply.

17:25You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker. So join us every week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

17:52There is a lot of fear these days that AI could be a bubble. So, Nick, is it? I don't know. Right. It is hard to tell. But there are some clues that economists say might kind of sort of help us predict bubbles. On the Planet Money podcast, the dark art of bubble detection. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:18This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. You'll see your favorite actors, directors and comedians on late night TV shows or YouTube. But what you get with Fresh Air is a deep dive. Spend some quality time with people like Billie Eilish, Questlove, Ariana Grande, Stephen Colbert, and so many more. We ask questions you won't hear asked anywhere else. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY.

18:48Hey, we got some listener mail, some correspondence from you all that we would like to acknowledge. First up, we got something from Madeline. Just wanted to report back that I have never seen the movie The Champ. And when I heard the short snippet from the movie you played in the archive episode, I didn't cry. But when I heard Mike start crying, I unexpectedly started crying with full tears. I also have young kids, so maybe that's it. Madeline, I feel your pain. I inspired your pain. You caused your pain. I caused your pain. I caused your pain with my pain. I have not watched The Champ in the years since we recorded that episode.

19:28Have you, Ian? Well, no, I haven't. But I'll say, listening back to our podcast episode, in which I did not cry, which I was completely stonehearted, I cried when I heard you cry. I did. I have kids. I didn't have them when we recorded that episode. Yeah. But you also caused my pain. Oh, well, you're welcome. Here's another one. This is from Oliver. And he's responding to our recent episode about things that are world famous. He's writing from Australia. He says, I will preface that I'm from the East Coast of Australia, but here we call the event of a hot dog sale a sausage sizzle. And we call a hot dog itself a snag.

20:13Okay. I don't think I would ever do that. I don't think I'd be comfortable ordering a Chicago style snag. I can say that I was just moments ago completely humiliated by a very fast snag. Yeah, see, when you said that, I wasn't sure if we needed to mark this episode explicit or not. Oh, we also want to point out one of our reviews on Apple Podcasts. This is from Hydro Flask Water Bottle who asks, do you guys actually read these? I think the answer is obviously yes. We are currently doing so. Yep. Hydro Flask Water Bottle.

20:52The Cocoa Beach High School basketball team was playing a game, and the net went up through the hoop and got stuck. The players kept jumping up to try and knock it down, but nothing was working. The game was stopped. The game could not go on. So Bella Haley Jatana from the Cocoa Beach High School cheerleading squad, can you tell us what you did? Well, we were just sort of cheering like we would normally do, and then the game just sort of stops. It's like we were just watching them struggle for like a fat minute until we sort of realized like, wait, when we do pep rallies and stuff, my head goes past the rim.

21:29So we decided to, you know, show off one of our skills and solve the problem at the same time. You know, it was easy peasy. OK, for Mike and I who don't know a lot about cheering, can you describe what you did? So there was three of us. We had a back spot and two side bases. Okay, that's fresh vocabulary for us here. Backspot, side bases. So the girl that is the backspot, she is behind holding ankles. Okay, so basically what they're describing here, none of the boys on the basketball team could fix the net. So the cheerleaders did, you know, we've all seen it, kind of a basic cheerleading pyramid with one of them way up in the air, and she untangled the net.

22:14Yeah, it looks awesome. It was like actually tangled up in there, but they got me high enough, So I was able to clearly be able to untangle it. How did the crowd react? Because it, you know, it looks like you're just kind of doing your thing. I think for a second they didn't like some of them didn't really realize what was going on. And then like you heard one kid from the other side go like, oh, and like then people started like clapping and stuff. So we were like, oh, wow, this is fun. did the uh did the boys on the team did you sense that you had bruised any egos when they were unable to help and you were i mean they just sort of went back into their game and sort of just let it go yeah sweep it under the rug like it never happened yeah there you go a funny piece of information is bella's brother is actually on the basketball team so his sister had to come out for the rescue pretty high.

23:09He was just standing there helplessly. Bella, does your brother feel bad that you can probably dunk better than he can? I don't think so. He's actually, he's pretty close to dunking right now. So I think he's fine with it. How many side bases does it take for him to dunk? Maybe one or two. There you go. There you go. Have you all any other time in your life when you're not at a game cheerleading? Have you used your cheerleading skills to help out in other ways? I actually use it sometimes at work. Instead of there being like, you know, three bases, it's just me and the person that needs to, you know, grab something from the top shelf.

23:47I just kind of make the same hand motion and just like lift them up a little bit. Wow. It still works like to help them up. Awesome. Well, this has been so much fun. Thank you guys. Thank you guys for having us. Thank you. Well, that does it for this week's show. What'd you learn, Ian? I learned that the mascot code is very real. And people take it very seriously. Did you, let me just ask you, was there ever a point when we were on the field, we're giving high fives, or we're doing our best to give high fives? Because the fact is, because we have no peripheral vision, and because I didn't feel comfortable turning, I couldn't actually turn to look at the people I was giving high fives in the stands.

24:28So there were a lot of, It was like there were a lot of phantom high fives. I there, you know, all the fans are leaning through the netting that is up to catch foul balls. I was giving every high five I could. I got very nervous that my costume was going to become entangled in the netting. I saw it all happening that that then it would tear the costume from my body. My human self fell to the ground. Children everywhere. The mascot code would be broken. and children would see that there was a man within. There would just be tears. That's not a real bratwurst. You think that's what people would say.

25:06He's not the bratwurst we thought he was. How to Do Everything is produced by Polish sausage Hina Srivastava. Technical direction from Lorna White. Our intern this week is the hot dog that beat us in the sausage race. Congratulations, hot dog. Get us your questions at howto at npr.org. I'm Ian. And I'm Mike. Thanks. Thanks.

25:38So, did you watch the sausage race? Yes. What'd you think? It's pretty funny. Yeah. Who was your favorite sausage? The chorizo has always been my favorite. Yeah. So, this guy right here was the chorizo. Oh, really? Yeah. What happened? What happened? You're asking me what happened? I came in third. Look. I won my age group.