Correct me if I'm Norm

By Radio Free RhinecliffSociety & Culture

Correct me if I'm Norm episodes

May 26 Tate and Ola Rubinstein: A Family, A Fair, and 45 Years in the Hudson Valley
Norm sits down with Tate and Ola Rubinstein, the husband-and-wife team behind Quail Hollow Events and the 45th annual Woodstock-New Paltz Art and Crafts Fair, returning to the Ulster County Fairgrounds Memorial Day weekend,
Tate grew up at the shows his father Neil and uncle Scott founded in 1982, and Ola, an art historian by training, took over day-to-day direction after the couple moved back from New Mexico in 2017. They talk about the road back to the Hudson Valley, life in Placitas under the Sandia Mountains, raising two daughters who are serious gymnasts, and the meditative pull of tennis (with a few words about Jim Morrison's on-court personality for good measure).
Norm gets to what it actually takes to put on a fair this size: 220 juried exhibitors, a 30-person staff drawn largely from SUNY New Paltz, the puzzle of laying out the grounds without putting two jewelers next to each other, and the diligence required to make sure every maker is really making their own work.
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
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1 hr 1 min
May 22 Bard, Boona, and Bob Dylan: An Evening With Terence Boylan
Norm welcomes singer-songwriter Terence Boylan, who lives just down the road in Rhinebeck. Boona shows up with homemade margaritas and a lifetime of stories.
He talks about the night he and his buddy stole a 1961 Corvette and drove from Buffalo to Greenwich Village at 15 to find Bob Dylan, and ended up lighting Dylan's cigarette outside the Gaslight. The next afternoon they were swapping songs at Izzy Young's Folklore Center.
He played the New Folks Concert at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival on the same bill as Bob Dylan, Tom Rush, and Ian and Sylvia, hugged Joan Baez through her stage fright, and loaned Dylan his harmonica.
He talks about getting signed to MGM at 17 by walking into the A and R office unannounced with his guitar, recording his first album Alias Boona with Bard classmates Donald Fagen and Walter Becker before they were Steely Dan, and the comedy and music album Playback under the name Appletree Theatre that John Lennon named one of his favorite records of the year.
There are stories about his older brother John, who put together the band that backed Linda Ronstadt and went on to become the Eagles, and was just inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame. There are stories from Albert Grossman's kitchen with George Harrison and Paul Butterfield, hanging out at Adolph's near Bard with Dylan and Bobby Neuwirth, a David Geffen contract with more zeros than he had ever seen, and the chance turn that landed him in the house on River Road.
Plus some songwriting advice from the muse, a new EP in progress, an invitation to tour Japan, and three Boylan songs: Who Do I Think I Am, Tell Me, and County Fair.
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
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1 hr 1 min
May 14 Liza Donnelly on Women, Humor, and The New Yorker
Norm sits down with longtime New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly for a conversation about her more than four decades in cartooning. Liza talks about tracing James Thurber cartoons as a kid in Watergate-era Washington, the two years she spent submitting to The New Yorker before Lee Lorenz bought her first drawing in 1979, and her parallel life as a digital live-drawing journalist for CBS News, CNN, and The New Yorker, covering everything from the Oscar red carpet to the second E. Jean Carroll trial. She also gets into Cartooning for Peace, her research for Funny Ladies and Very Funny Ladies, and her new documentary Women Laughing, co-directed with Kathleen Hughes. For upcoming screenings check https://www.womenlaughingfilm.com/screenings
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
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1 hr 5 min
May 03 From Chicago to Brooklyn to Google to a Rhinebeck Front Porch: The Elliott Malkin Story
Norm sits with Elliott Malkin, a parrot lover, artist (Graffiti for Butterflies), writer, podcaster, comb-over aficionado, and father who has taught cool shit at Bard, NYU, and Columbia and done cool shit for Google and so many others. Elliott takes Norm from a Chicago suburb bordering the famously targeted town of Skokie to a Brooklyn-to-Rhinebeck COVID migration that, like a lot in his life, he came to understand only later as part of a much bigger wave. They get into Lose Your Religion in Five Easy Steps, his genealogical art project tracing his family's path from a Hasidic ancestor to unaffiliated descendant, his stints at the New York Times and Google designing the productivity software you stare at all day, and what it was like to walk away from corporate tech this fall after nine years. Elliott also opens up about being diagnosed with autism at fifty, the relief of finally getting dialed down from eleven to eight, and raising kids in a neurodivergence-friendly household. Figuring out what's next, he's volunteering with Rhinebeck's College Connect, writing short stories nobody has read yet, and quietly working out what an artist becomes when he's not making art anymore.
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
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1 hr 2 min
May 03 David Scheer on the ACA, Scuba Diving, and Sibling Diplomacy
Norm chats with David Scheer, a long-time pro in healthcare and employer health plan implementation and management, an analytical mastermind and conversational gem. As a senior consultant at Willis Towers Watson, David spends his days helping enormous employers untangle the financial and strategic mess of providing health benefits to tens of thousands of workers, and he makes the whole thing genuinely fun to listen to. He and Norm get into why healthcare costs are climbing faster than they have in twenty years, what the Affordable Care Act really did, why the lapse of expanded subsidies is about to hit everyone in the wallet, and the curious tale of how his firm quietly bought naming rights to the Sears Tower. Off the clock, David talks scuba diving, his ever-growing Brooklyn wine fridge, the perfect fish taco, and life as kid brother to RFR's own producer extraordinaire Jen Hammoud.
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
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1 hr 1 min
May 03 Erika and Mark Murphy of Rhinebeck: Helping Kids Take the Wheel and Helping Elders Let Go
his week's guests are husband and wife: one helps youth who are just starting in life and the other helps those who are further along life's path. One is boss of his own company and the other is boss of Rhinebeck Rotary. Norm welcomes Erika and Mark Murphy.
Mark is the founder of Grip Tape (griptape.org), a nonprofit that helps teenagers find purpose and agency by handing them the keys. No application, no gatekeeper, no adult telling them what to learn. Just a 10-week challenge, a small pot of funding, and a champion who believes in them. He explains how a former Delaware Secretary of Education ended up rebuilding learning from scratch with 10 teenagers in 2015, and what happens when a 16-year-old in Montrose, Colorado decides to 3D print his own fly fishing reel. Nearly 5,000 young people across all 50 states later, the model just launched in India.
Erika is a 25-year veteran teacher and school administrator turned in-home caregiver and end-of-life doula, currently certifying through INELDA. She tells the story of her Aunt Joan, the Manhattan delivered to the nursing home, and why she calls holding someone's hand as they pass the most intimate moment of her life. She also runs the Rhinebeck Rotary Club, where she got drafted by Gary Bassett over a coat drive.
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
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1 hr
April 13 How Hollywood Gave Andy Tennant to Rhinebeck
Norm chats with filmmaker Andy Tennant, a dancer turned writer turned director who studied under the legendary John Houseman at USC, about moving from Chicago and Los Angeles to Rhinebeck, influenced by his wife, daughter, East Coast kids, and the Los Angeles fires. Tennant discusses raising triplets plus a fourth child while working internationally, then recounts the turbulent production of Anna and the King: losing Thailand locations due to government demands, rebuilding massive Thai sets on a Malaysian golf course, monsoon challenges, sinking sets, ballooning budgets, and the career fallout he calls "director jail." He explains residuals, union membership, and long-term collaborations with editors, composers, and crew, plus cutting 12 minutes from Hitch after audience feedback. Tennant shares early work as a dancer in Grease, his writing deal with Simpson and Bruckheimer, experiences during 9/11 while scouting Sweet Home Alabama, changes in Hollywood, current writing goals, family updates, and the short "Cat Story" that launched industry attention. According to IMDb, he is also very tall.
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
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1 hr 1 min
April 05 Lost in Austin, Found in Rhinebeck: A Conversation with Our Own Alex Hannaford
Norm sits down with Alex Hannaford, a London-born, dual U.S.-U.K. citizen journalist who covers America for foreign publications and whose writing has taken him from the death rows of Texas to the pubs of east London. Rhinebeck's own, Hannaford traces his path into journalism through a gap year teaching sailing and an internship at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, where he found his voice as a features writer.
The conversation moves from pub culture and Indian food to the weight of capital punishment, including Hannaford's firsthand account of witnessing an execution in Oklahoma amid growing controversy over lethal injection drugs and the systemic failures, racial bias and inadequate legal representation, that plague the system. He also discusses making the animated documentary "The Last 40 Miles," which follows the transfer of a condemned man from Texas death row to Huntsville.
Closer to home, Hannaford talks about volunteering on Thames RNLI lifeboats, launching a youth sailing program in the Rhinebeck-Kingston area through Culture Connect and the Hudson River Maritime Museum, and his book "Lost in Austin," a ground-level look at how climate, explosive growth, and cost-of-living pressures have transformed one of America's fastest-changing cities.
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
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1 hr 1 min
March 26 David Hoffman on the Life You Build When You Keep Reinventing Yourself
On Norm's birthday episode, guest David Hoffman looks back on a life shaped by curiosity and reinvention. He recalls early radio days in high school, studying engineering at Case Western, earning a third-class FCC license in Detroit, and landing at Vassar, where he fell in love with both '60s music and the college's carrier-current station. From there, Hoffman found his way into filmmaking, including a short inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, a documentary on Vassar's history, and festival screenings, before moving to New York to work in film and animation on an Oxberry stand. Then came the 1981 IBM PC and Lotus 1-2-3, which redirected his career entirely toward consulting and writing for PC Magazine, where he met his editor and future wife, Jane. Norm and Hoffman also share a laugh over a tennis mishap that inspired Norm's birthday gift. In closing, Hoffman describes his volunteer work as treasurer and bookkeeper for the Ulster Immigrant Defense Network, which provides food pantry access, legal aid, transportation, school coordination, and emergency rent assistance to those in need.
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
Send comments to [email protected]
1 hr
March 26 This week's guest is coming up on her 25 year anniverary at the helm of one of my favorite restaurants, Gigi Trattoria, which she co-founded in 2001. She's a dietician/ entrepreneur an absolute delight: Laura Pensiero.
This week's guest is coming up on her 25 year anniverary at the helm of one of my favorite restaurants, Gigi Trattoria, which she co-founded in 2001. She's a dietician/ entrepreneur an absolute delight: Laura Pensiero.
Produced by Norm Magnusson, Jennifer Hammoud, and Matty Rosenberg @ radiofreerhinecliff.org
Send comments to [email protected]
1 hr 1 min

About Correct me if I'm Norm

From the publisher's feed

“Correct Me if I’m Norm” is a good-natured, Rhinebeck (New York) focused, one-on-one (mostly) free-formish interview-format program, covering all topics from the personal to the universal. It’s hosted by Norm Magnusson, who is an artist and father of three and an active member of his community in the small town of Rhinebeck, NY. Every week, he interviews folks who live and/or work in Rhinebeck about who they are and how they got here and what they’re up to. “I’m very interested in collecting the stories of the people who made this town what it is and those who are continuing to do so”, he explains, adding that he’s deeply appreciative for all the people who come to the Nook @ The Epicurean to talk with him and thanks the Epicurean and RadioFreeRhinecliff.org for making it all possible.