Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos honored a niche national holiday on Monday’s Live with Kelly and Mark — and took the chance to dial in on the younger generation and school them on a pivotal piece of technology.
The co-hosts noticed “a lot of kids” in the audience due to many schools being on their spring break this week.
“Welcome, children, to your parents’ favorite show,” Ripa quipped. “You’re going to watch this today and understand why your parents are as weird why they are.”
Consuelos added, “You’re going to understand why they do what we do.”
Ripa replied, “Exactly. We’re going to break it down for you.”
Minutes later, Ripa acknowledged “National Telephone Landline Day,” noting that she was “so glad there [were] kids here” to hear of its significance.
“So I’m going to explain it to you in a language that you will easily understand,” she joked. “In the show Stranger Things, when Winona Ryder runs to the wall and picks up the thing and holds it to her ear, that is a landline.”
Consuelos elaborated, “Yeah, there used to be a phone number that your family would have, and people would call. Like the school. If you skipped school, they would call your house.”
He asked Ripa if her family’s landline “had a long cord,” which she confirmed, noting that “it was all tangled.”
Consuelos continued, “Usually they had these little coils and these nice little rings, but every now and then the coil got messed up and it would turn into a big, long one and all the little short ones.”
As Consuelos recalled being on the phone and “trying to get it back” to its original shape, Ripa teased, “Of course you did.”
“I was trying to understand the physics of, like, I couldn’t get it to do that,” Consuelos said.
Ripa said, “You would have had a mental breakdown in my house. Because it wasn’t just the one, you know, unspooled cord. It was a multitude of stretched out — from the telephone being dragged up the stairs, dragged into the basement. I knew if my mom was in the basement and the door was closed, something was going down.”
Consuelos chimed in, “Something bad was happening, yeah.”
Ripa continued, “Something was happening with her friend Liz. It’s always, always her friend Liz. And then, you would hang up the phone, and it would be in a ball. An absolute ball. Well, we reflect today.”
She highlighted that on this day in 1876, “Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call.”
“He did it with soup cans tied to a string! Just kidding,” she joked.
As for how you can celebrate National Telephone Landline Day, Ripa read that “they want you to celebrate this by making a list of people you know who still use landlines.”
Consuelos said, “We have one, but we don’t use it.”
Ripa added, “If it would ring, I would think it was Stranger Things.”
Live with Kelly and Mark airs on weekdays. Check out their website for your local listings.
The post Kelly Ripa Uses ‘Stranger Things’ To Explain What A Landline Is To Children In The ‘Live’ Audience appeared first on Decider.
