Peter Riegert’s

Peter and Karen met during auditions for Animal House. On the road to that moment? Two hands seen typing all winter through a distant apartment window, a four-hour play in Polish, a road trip to South America, and a widely ignored index card tacked up inside a Manhattan theater school’s front door.

On the set of “The Good Wife” in 2012, Peter told fellow actor Kevin Hogan about his recent fascination with Abraham Lincoln’s favorite Shakespearean, James H. Hackett. “You have to meet my writer pal, Matthew Goodman,” replied Hogan. “You guys both tell amazing stories.” A subsequent lunch sparked years of Peter and Matthew trading favorite historical details. Here, the pair discuss Matthew’s third non-fiction book The City Game, a basketball tale so iconic it’s the reason sportswriters first employed the phrase “A Cinderella Story.”

Carey (director, playwright, author, and kickass warrior for cultural excellence) first met Peter when she cast him as the seductively sinister Goldberg in her first New York revival of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. The two discuss language, wit, doom, humor, childhood dreams of archaeology, telegrams from “Monty,” and how the communal catharsis of fine theater helps us
all survive catastrophe.

On the eve of Watergate in 1972, 31-year-old Liz Holtzman became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Defeating Judiciary Committee chair and 50-year-incumbent Emanuel Celler, she hit the ground running. Holtzman became the only Judiciary Committee member gutsy enough to ask Gerald Ford whether he’d pardoned Nixon as a quid pro quo, then filed suit to halt our illegal bombing of Cambodia. Her insights into current political catastrophes are equally keen and incisive. She’s never been one to pull a punch.