If Zombie food trucks are your thing, or you really care abour how you’ll celebrate National Coconut Cream Pie Day, chances are you might have tuned in to WMPG on Tuesday nights to hear “Dining with the Duleys,” a local radio show that is food-centric and yet isn’t entirely about food.

It’s kind of like sitting down at 7:30 for dinner with friends, not knowing where the conversation is going to go.

“It’s a dinner conversation, and it can take any spin,” said Joe Duley, who hosts the show with his wife, Charly. “but we always focus on some type of culinary event or some type of food, beverage or eating ritual, if you will. What’s the one thing that everyone in the entire world has in common? We all eat.”

If you haven’t heard the show yet, well, here’s your last chance – for a year, anyway. The Duleys are putting their 4-year-old radio show on hiatus for a year so they can concentrate on other things for a while. For Joe Duley, a creative consultant, that means working more, “catching up” on technology, and developing his other creative outlet, Joe Duley's Blog and Grill. For Charly Duley, it means focusing more on her voiceover work.

They say they will be back on the air in April 2014. For their last show before their sabbatical, airingTuesday night (March 5, 2013), they’re not planning anything special. It will be craziness as usual.

“I think for the last one we will be doing what we always have,” Charly Duley said. “I actually feel very sad to be even thinking about our last show, I have to say. Both Joe and I really enjoy doing it, and even on the evenings when we feel tired or there’s the snowstorm outside, once we get there we absolutely love it.”

The Duleys do little to prepare, and they never rehearse.

“Charley is like the pilot. I’m the co-pilot.” Duley said. “She’d grab a news story or some interesting topic and say, ‘Oh, this week I have something saucy,’ and then we wouldn’t talk about it until we got on the air.”

They both confess they cannot look at each other on air, or they both start laughing. Their favorite show is the one where Joe started talking like a certain Latin movie star.

“I was doing the weather like Antonio Banderas, and Charley was laughing so hard I actually had to read the underwriting tag, which you can’t mess around with because it’s a legal thing,” Duley said.

The couple say they will miss chatting with each other and having the rest of the world listen in.

“We were really well received and accepted,” Joe Duley said. “I guess the thing for me, almost getting emotional, is the amount of support that we’ve gotten from people saying they listen to us every Tuesday. The UPS guy, the Fed X guy. Our postman said that the dudes in the post office listen. It’s just been really cool. They’ll bring up stuff that we talked about two months ago, or they’ll quote something we said.”

Duley said they’ll continue to keep the Dining with the Duleys Facebook page active. 

You can hear archived episodes of their show here.
 

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About the Author

Meredith Goad has harvested oysters on the Chesapeake Bay, eaten reindeer in Finland and sipped hot chai in the Himalayas. She writes the weekly Soup to Nuts column and enjoys a good cocktail.

Meredith can be contacted at 791-6332 or mgoad@pressherald.com
On Twitter: @meredithgoad

Susan Axelrod's food writing career began in the kitchen; she owned a restaurant and catering business before turning to journalism more than a decade ago. To relax, she bakes, gardens and hikes with her husband and their two dogs. A newcomer to Portland, she is an online content producer for the Press Herald.

Susan can be contacted at 791-6310 or saxelrod [at] pressherald.com.
On Twitter: @susansaxelrod

Wendy Almeida and her family have a smattering of livestock and a summer garden. After 10 years of her kids being involved in 4-H, she's finally accepted the term "hobby farm" to describe her family's work at sustainable living. These days her morning starts with milking a goat before heading into the office for her day job as an assistant editor for features.

Wendy can be contacted at wea [at] mainetoday.com or on Twitter @wea1021.

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