This financial crisis is real. The news of layoffs feels very close and very concrete. This weekend on Weekend America I’ll share a couple recordings of recent phone calls to my mom.
Let’s just say she’s not driving this forklift anymore.
UPDATE: Seems like it’s public now. The irony that this story is airing the week that Weekend America got the news that they are being cancelled is not lost on me. It continues to be a sad time in public radio.
A couple of old stories of mine are running this weekend.
The first is a story about Kerouac’s On the Road for Studio 360 that my me and my wife Hillary Frank put together back when we could still be referred to as newlyweds.
And even further back during another election I talked to a bunch of college students and then producer Barrett Golding shaped all those voices into some beautiful silky, sonic cloud. That piece is re-airing as part of the newish Hearing Voices show over the next week on these stations.
A couple months ago I took my cat to the vet near the corner of 28th and Girard here in Philly. Things were taking longer than I expected (which really, c’mon you should always expect things to take too long in any kind of medical office), so I had to run out and feed the meter. I was standing on this area of the sidewalk made up of a bunch of cobblestones when I looked down and noticed this.
I called a couple businesses near the memorial when I got home, but none of them knew anything about it. So I went back with a tape recorder. The result is airing this weekend on Weekend America.
