A shtick that stuck
Photos by Tom Burton
In the early 1980s, a college-fresh reporter interviewed with Jim Philips. The radio news director didn't have a job for Lynn Levine but said she could call back. She called a lot.
``I hired her to get her to stop talking,'' Philips says dryly during a commercial break of his Philips Phile afternoon talk show on 104.1 (WTKS). The plan didn't exactly work. Today Levine is across from Philips, sitting on her tuchis, ready to start yakking again.
Levine is better known on air as ``Moira,'' the chatty yenta sidekick with a Bronx accent who plays den mother for four hours of radio schmooze. Moira's chutzpah keeps a lid on cockamamie ideas as she holds her own in a business of deep-voiced men.
Moira, using plenty of Yiddish slang, conducts a listener poll called the ``Oy Vey Survey'' and on Fridays is the expert for ``Ask a Jew.'' She sounds like a bossy, Jewish grandmother.
``Most people think I'm 60 years old and 200 pounds,'' says Levine, a woman who is only a smidgen past the halfway point of both figures. But she can live with the misconception. ``They pay me to talk! I can't believe it,'' she says.
Moira wasn't always in Levine's career plan.
``I never would have dreamed about doing this shtick'' when she was a reporter, Levine admits. But when her radio station changed formats, she found herself looking for work. She had dinner with Philips, who was by then a good friend and a big macher with his own talk show. He needed someone to read the news on his show, but did she have a gimmick?
``What would you do? Jewish-Mother-of-Two News?'' Philips asked her, says Levine. Of course! ``Moira'' started reading the ``Lah Dee Dah'' news in 1994.
On the air, Moira is borderline combative with Philips and is motherly stern with Brian and Oddo, the twentysomethings on the show. Her catch phrases are often argumentative, all delivered with roller-coaster inflection; ``Shut UH-up ... That is not true ... Stop it!''
This dysfunctional family wouldn't work if Philips and Levine didn't get along off the air. The Moira bit worked immediately because they had been friends first.
``We didn't have to learn to like each other,'' says Levine of their on-air relationship. It's become a perfect situation for kibitzing.
A version of this story published in the Orlando Sentinel on April 26, 1998. It was also fun to use so many. Yiddish words in one story.
By Tom Burton
“I am very disappointed.”
“This is not what I expected.”
Lynne Levine was complaining that the photo made her arms look fat.
She wasn’t talking directly to me. She was talking into a microphone and broadcasting her despair to tens of thousands of people listening to the highest-rated radio program in Central Florida.
It wasn’t really Lynn Levine talking. It was “Moira,” a loud-mouthed sidekick that she portrays on the “Philips Phile.” Levine had been commenting on the A&E Gallery that featured her. . Moira was upset. It would be a while before I found out how Lynn felt.
I rarely edited film with thoughts of keeping the people I photograph happy, and it was just as rare to hear from them after the story published. My first priority is presenting an accurate and interesting story for the readers. I do keep the subject’s feelings in mind, but I also temper that with the knowledge that, in some cases, the subject will never be happy.
The difference this time is that Levine was a radio personality who had the last word. She could use her radio medium, where she controled the microphone, to blast the photographer for amusement and entertainment. After all, jabbing at the town’s big media outlet — the Orlando Sentinel — was always good for ratings.
The photo that ran, and is with the story at the top of this post, shows Levine sitting across from Jim Philips, the host of the show. They are in the middle of the banter that drives the program, and the photo shows that aspect of their relationship. Typically, I might have chosen a tight face shot of “Moira” as she screamed into the microphone — like the one below — but for the A&E Gallery feature, I tried to edit differently.
Although Levine might have been surprised at the time, I did edit with her arms in mind. I thought they looked fine, and I don’t think anyone else would have noticed if she hadn’t made such a fuss. I also seriously considered the photo above of her in the office before the show, looking like the friendly and cute Lynn I met rather than the coarse and combative Moira. We had never shown her in the newspaper before this, and it seemed more important to show her radio personality rather than the woman behind the scenes.
Moira did say on the air that she really liked the story. In fact, she said I should stick to writing and shouldn’t mess with the pictures. Ouch! It almost made me want to dial in to become a “long-time listener, first-time caller.”
Sometime later, I saw Lynn standing at the back of a banquet room at another event. I walked up, smiled, and said “I know Moira didn’t like the photo, but what about Lynn?” She smiled back and Lynn liked it just fine.
A version of this behind-the-scenes originally published on April 30, 1998 on digitalstoryteller.com
After the story above printed in the Orlando Sentinel, I listened to “The Philips Phile” on the radio while driving to another assignment. Moira had some thoughts. ~ TWBurton