JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Every week, a guest draws a card from NPR's Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. The comedian Marc Maron recently announced the end of his popular "WTF" podcast. He's focusing on his original passion - stand-up comedy.
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MARC MARON: I never stopped doing stand-up. It was always the priority. Once people started to know me from the podcast, it drove me nuts that they didn't necessarily know my stand-up.
SUMMERS: Maron has a new HBO special out. It's called "Panicked." He talked to Wild Card host Rachel Martin.
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RACHEL MARTIN: When do you feel connected to the people you've lost?
MARON: Sometimes it's random. With people who are my peers that have died - and there's a lot of them, and so many of them were funny people. I can think about their funniness, their jokes, my experience with them, you know, and then they become alive again, you know, pretty quickly. With a deeper one - and there's really just one primary one, with Lynn Shelton - you know, it's just thinking about, you know...
MARTIN: This - for people who don't know, Lynn was your longtime friend, collaborator and then love - big love in life.
MARON: Yeah. Yeah. With her, it was just, you know, that feeling of the way she kind of saw me, that - you know, her belief in me and her kind of, you know, almost obsessive, you know, love for me, you know, that when I was in the light of that, I really felt like I was my best self. So if I can think of her just, you know, watching me, you know, do whatever it is I do, you know, that's when I feel connected. And I also have, like, a few things of hers that are around, so she's always kind of around.
MARTIN: Yeah. It took me a long time to give away my mom's clothes. I kept them in my closet for probably much longer than - well, there's still some things in there.
MARON: Yeah, I kept a few things. I kind of distributed a lot of stuff to people that loved her, and then her friends kind of took a lot of stuff. But I have a few select items. And, you know, for a while there, maybe a couple of years, you know, in my - the main hallway when you walk into my house, there's a coat rack. And I had her hat and this leather jacket that she loved, hanging, and then her red cowboy boots. But it was almost like - you know, it was almost the size of her. So, like, I'd walk in, and it'd just be those things, which defined her in a lot of ways. Eventually, I had to move it. And I eventually gave the jacket to somebody who loved her and who I thought, you know, would really appreciate it.
MARTIN: Yeah.
MARON: It was kind of a big moment. I gave it to Rosemarie DeWitt, who was in one of Lynn's films, and it fit her, you know? And I was like, that's - you know, that should be yours.
SUMMERS: You can watch a longer version of that conversation with Marc Maron on YouTube. Just search for Wild Card with Rachel Martin. "Panicked" is out now on HBO. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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