Coming to you from WBEZ Chicago…

 My love affair with This American Life began about three years ago in the office of a non-profit, where I worked as an evening Office Assistant.  They kept the radio tuned at NPR, which I wasn’t very familiar with at the time.  For nearly a year I simply tuned it all out, not ever having been a fan of talk radio and not caring for monotone news briefs.

The turning point came at the end of October 2008, when a co-worker sat in the lobby with me to listen to TAL’s Halloween broadcast.  That was the first time I actually listened to what was coming from the cheap CD boombox in our window sill.  And from that moment on, I looked forward to Thursdays at 6PM, when our clients were locked away in their sessions and I had the lobby to myself.  I let myself get lost in the extraordinary, heart-wrenching, and often, hysterical experiences of everyday people, and I always came out with lots to think about.

When I later moved on to another office out in the country, I sifted through the online archives during downtime. When I was home alone, I listened while making dinner or cleaning the bathroom, although admittedly it’s hard for me to follow the stories unless my focus is on them 100%.  My alone time now at the office is prime time to break out the latest episode.  I can’t seem to get enough, and I still haven’t gone through all the archives! I’m rarely in a position to listen as it airs, so online is the only way I can keep up with it now.

A few years ago, TAL actually aired two seasons of TV on Showtime, which I own DVD’s of.  Finally, there were faces and scenery to put with the stories. Episodes Reality Check and God’s Close-Up are my favorites from Season One, while Season Two’s John Smith is probably my favorite episode of all.  This one follows different men by the name of John Smith throughout different stages of their lives, in an attempt to document a person’s entire life in a single episode. I’m bummed that the series wasn’t taken any further, but I’m thinking that most fans would rather use their imaginations over the airwaves.

 If you’re not a listener yet, I think you’d better start. Being inherently inattentive, easily-bored and usually able to blow these things off as pseudo-intellectual, hipster crap, I never imagined that something like TAL would take hold of me the way it does.  Here’s a list of my favorite 7 episodes to start with:

•  House on Loon Lake - This is exactly the sort of stuff I love.  This is the story of a kid who happens upon an abandoned house wherein it looks like the inhabitants dropped everything and vanished.  He sets off to find out what really happened to them.
• Switched at Birth - Two girls born in the 1950’s are actually switched at birth and grow up with the wrong families.  You might be surprised at what happens when it all comes out, much later..
• Home Alone - The title pretty much says it all.  My favorite act is about a 12 year-old boy who secretly lives on his own for five months while his mother is hospitalized, to avoid being taken away by Child Services.
• My Pen Pal - Unusual and unlikely pen pals. Favorite act here is about a 10 year-old American girl who actually becomes close pen pals with a foreign dictator.
• 24 Hours at the Golden Apple - This is what happens in a 24-hour span, in a diner that never closes…
• And the Call was Coming from the Basement - The Halloween broadcast that started it all!
• Prom - A never-before-seen take on prom, where some high school kids in  Kansas leave their prom to find out their small town has been demolished by a tornado.

There’s of course many memorable moments that I’ve ganked from separate other episodes, and I’m sure this list will get longer the further I delve into the archives. Not to seem shallow, but I don’t find everything TAL fascinating.  Episodes with exclusively political and economical themes bore me so much that I skip them.

#ira glass,  #this american life  #npr  #tal  #wbez chicago  #radio shows  #talk radio