Gary Vider might have the ultimate childhood anecdote. When he was young, Gary’s father Manny Vider would take him down to Madison Square Garden. Posing as a reporter (Gary) and photographer (Manny) for Sports Illustrated for Kids, the pair would blag their way into the press seats for New York’s biggest basketball and ice hockey games. This led to Gary meeting and interviewing all of his favourite sports stars, even giving the great Michael Jordan a hard-hitting interview on the topic of his favourite food (steak). And this went on for years.
Fun right? The thing is, this was not Manny Vider’s first rodeo. Described by Gary as a lifelong conman with schemes and lies littering four decades, Manny brought chaos to his young family’s lives. He got in trouble with the police, with insurance companies, with his own customers, and with his wife, Gary’s mother.
Now grown up, a stand-up comedian with a son of his own, Gary’s thoughts about parenthood have inevitably led him back to thinking about his father. They haven’t spoken since he cut him out of his life at 15. Remarkably, he hasn’t even come up in conversation with Gary’s mother once since the day their divorce was finalised. Feeling betrayed, Gary cut off contact with his older sister when she decided to reopen contact with their father.
But now he’s thinking about doing the same thing. In an ideal world, Gary wants his father to be part of his life and to be able to watch his son grow up. At the very least, he wants to find out if anything has changed about Manny in the 24 years since they last spoke.
It’s a compelling story. Gary is a warm presence who does a great job of conveying the conflicting emotions he’s dealing with. The scope and scale of his father’s lifestyle is genuinely remarkable to behold; upon unblocking his father on Facebook, Gary sees a profile picture of Manny standing next to Joe Biden. You desperately want some kind of happy resolution for Gary that allows him to come to peace with the turbulence that he accepts shaped him as a person. The most valuable conversations are with a counsellor who teases out his complex emotions for us in a way that enables the listener to grasp how this relationship affected him and continues to impact his life today.
At ten episodes, it’s definitely long. Everything I’ve heard from the first three episodes should really have made two at most and the decision to commit to another seven feels like a lot when there’s so much other great stuff out there to listen to. The great thing about podcasting is the freedom to run as long or short as the content needs, so ten episodes could be great if there was no filler. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of repetition, a lot of points from previous episodes being hammered home, and frequent trailers for other iHeartRadio podcasts. Six shows is the typical runtime of many of these series and that would fit nicely here.
Nevertheless you can’t help but wonder how it’s going to turn out. Episode three ends on the ringing of Manny’s last known phone number. I simply can’t not know what happens if, when, he picks up.
