Wertheimer is accustomed to people telling her they feel they know her from "All Things Considered."

"I suppose it's because we exist in an intimate setting," she says. "We're in your car, we're in your kitchen."

And Sunday, she's in your town, if you live in Medford. Wertheimer speaks at 7 p.m. in the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater. Tickets are $14. Call 779-3000.

Wertheimer, 56, acknowledges what many listeners suspect: She has the world's greatest job.

"Whatever I'm interested in on a given day, I can spend time learning about it," she says.

It wasn't always thus. Before she joined the show in 1989, she covered politics for many years, also for National Public Radio.

"I enjoyed politics, but this lets you branch out all over the world," she says.

Wertheimer was NPR's congressional correspondent in the early 1970s. In 1976, she became its political correspondent. She covered the Capitol, four presidential elections, Watergate and Iran-Contra (41 half-hour shows, for which she won an award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting).

Still a political junkie, she says the biggest changes she's seen in politics over the years have been huge increases in partisanship, hostility and money.

"A lot of people have turned away, and who can blame them?" she says.

She wonders about politicians, too.

"What are the things that happen to the souls of politicians if they have to do a sustained grovel to get so much money that they become absolutely unbeatable?"

Wertheimer grew up in Carlsbad, N.M., and went to Wellesley College on a scholarship.

"I was a smart-mouthed, brainy kid," she says. "It was a time of extraordinary optimism, the middle American moment. I think we all grew up thinking all things were possible."

She worked for the BBC and for WCBS in New York City after graduating from college in 1965.

"That was before women were able to take the role I have," she says. "Really the bad old days. They told us, `Women are not credible doing the news.' There were no women in the newsroom."

But a couple of things came into play. One was, as Wertheimer says, that "I had been brought up to believe I could do whatever I wanted to."

Two, "The 1964 Civil Rights Act was litigated with regard to gender, and some walls started coming down."

NPR was different from the rest of the industry, she says.

"Public radio was a place where women did get on the air. Now it's not the only organization that's half women. They're editors. They're at all levels. It could not be more different."