Thursday, April 23, 2009

THIS AMERICAN LIFE


Paul and I went to a live satellite broadcast of the radio show 'This American Life', this evening.  It was so good.  If you've never heard this show you really should give it a listen.  It's on public radio stations across the country every week and produced by Chicago Public Radio.  It's a hard show to describe without making it sound boring. Every week there is a theme and 3 or four unrelated stories that in the end are never as unrelated as one might think.  For instance, a recent show that I heard, which was called, 'Last Words' had stories as varied as a couple who were married for 50 years and died a day apart, a story of a bank robber and the man that he's shot and what he thinks about before he dies and an interview with a man who wrote a book about the last words of people from the black boxes on doomed airplanes.  A little morbid sounding, I know, but somehow it is not.  The themes are as varied as are real American lives.  Many of the shows are very upbeat and hilarious, like the show from last Halloween called, 'The Call Was Coming From The Basement'.  This show focused on things that are really scary, not movie scary, but real life scary.  In it there are some touching and sad stories, but also funny and real.  The show is hosted by Ira Glass, a truly excellent interviewer. 
This show we saw tonight was different in that it was visual experience instead of just audio one.  It was broadcast live from a theatre in New York to 400 movie theatre across the country.   It was really good.  It was called 'Return To The Scene Of The Crime'.  It will be rebroadcast in many theatres across the country on May 7th.  It's a wonderful show that really gets you thinking about things.  I think you'd like it too.
Check out the 'This American Life' website here.  The show is available as a free weekly podcast with all of their shows since they started in 1995 archived here.

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