May 20 2008
Scenes from Childhood: I Must Be from Another Planet
The first public radio series I ever produced was made possible by the first grant I ever got, from National Public Radio’s Satellite Program Development Fund in the mid-eighties. As I remember, the award totaled $10,000 and the project took three years.
I love this series, but I am still mortally embarrassed by the name I came up with: Skip Through the Shadows: Scenes from Childhood. I’ve always sucked at making up titles. You see, I was trying to convey the idea of both the agony and the joy of childhood.
I gathered well over a hundred hours of interviews around the country, mostly with everyday people but also with a few luminaries. My strangest pairing of interviews consisted of an afternoon with John Waters in Baltimore and a meeting in Pittsburgh the next morning with Fred “Mister” Rogers.
I also interviewed Appalachian singer-songwriter Jean Ritchie, blues legend Brownie McGhee, Big Bird’s inventor Kermit Love, Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, and some others. Another of my heroes, Dr. Benjamin Spock, wrote a little testimonial about how much he liked the series.
Producing these programs was a true descent into— I don’t know, but it was very dark in there for a couple years. I guess that’s why I made up the project in the first place. It’s the anti-Hallmark look at childhood in all its despair and magic.
There are ten programs, each about seven-minutes long. I was lucky enough to get them all to air on NPR’s All Things Considered, most of them even in the prime spot: the closing piece of the daily ninety-minute show.
I also won a couple awards, including an Ohio State.
Here is the first program, called I Must Be From Another Planet. You will hear many voices, including a few from my own private life: my grannie, my first-grade daughter reading a story that I wrote in first grade, my dad interviewing three-year-old me about my imaginary friend “Tinna,” and me singing with my friend Maria, accompanied by Dad on guitar. Here’s a secret: you won’t ever know it while listening because of the tapestry of voices, but it’s really all about me and my own pain. T’is the artists’ prerogative.
