There's the time when you know something is happening, but you're not sure exactly what. The illness before it's diagnosed. The era, before it's been given a title. And something changes when the name is given. Stories of that transformation...between what it is now, and what it was before it had a name.
Prologue
Rod Hudson grew up on a dairy farm in New Hampshire. When his father retired, Rod ran his own operation on his dad's property and did just fine until the mid 1980's when something strange started to happen with the cows. A series of strange things started to happen actually, beginning with their hooves. (6 minutes)
Mr. Boder Vanishes
In 1946, a man named David Boder started to investigate the Holocaust before it was known as the Holocaust. He dragged a primitive recording device around Europe and gathered the first recorded testimonials of concentration camp survivors. But his research was largely ignored, and his recordings forgotten for decades. The tapes are broadcast for the first time nationally on tonight's show. Carl Marziali tells the story. (31 minutes). Listen to Boder's recordings, or read transcripts, at their official home on the web.
Of Course I Remember Your Name
A short story about the moment when we suddenly learn the name of something that has heretofore been unnamed for us...and about the difference between knowing the person, and knowing the person's name. Heather O'Neill is the author of Two Eyes Are You Sleeping, a book of poetry. (6 minutes)
A Bad Day For Plates
The story about what happens when you discover the medical reason your mother was such a bad parent all your life. Laura Tangusso tells the story of how she and her siblings learned the name of something they'd always wondered: What was wrong with their mother? (14 minutes)
Song:
“What's the Good Word” by Jackie Reinach/Mel Poretz
You Call That Love?
There is that moment when you're falling for someone, before either of you says the word love...but when you both FEEL it. But then once the word love is applied to a feeling...is it possible we're all actually referring to different feelings? Jonathan Goldstein tells a story about what if the word love didn't exist. He's the author of the novels, Lenny Bruce is Dead and Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!. (5 minutes)
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Act Three: I Found Your Letter
Davy Rothbart reads from letters, notes, scraps of paper and school papers, which have been lost by their original owners.
Act Four: Resurrection
Writer Brady Udall with another story about what animals can take the place of, in our lives and in our homes—this one involving an armadillo.
Act Four: Every Unhappy Family Cleaning Supplies Business Is Unhappy In Its Own Way
Hillary Frank explains how an invitation to a business meeting, sent through the mail in 1963, kept two sides of a family from speaking to each other for most of the second half of the 20th Century.
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All kinds of little stories that we ordinarily can't use on the radio show because they are just too short.