Radio producer Scott Carrier quit his job at a low moment in his life. His wife left him and took the kids. And he got a job interviewing schizophrenics for some medical researchers. After doing it a while, he began to wonder if he was a schizophrenic himself. And more stories.
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Chris Ware
Act One
The Test
Radio producer Scott Carrier quit his job at a low moment in his life. His wife left him and took the kids. And he got a job interviewing schizophrenics for some medical researchers. After doing it a while, he began to wonder if he was a schizophrenic himself. Scott is the author of Running After Antelope. (18 minutes)
Act Two
Tribe
This American Life associate producer Peter Clowney visits a modern-day touring company of Hair. They don't just believe they're doing a job as professional actors. They're living as a modern-day tribe of hippies — with all the tensions of any communal living. (10 minutes)
Act Three
The Port Chicago 50
The story of the worst stateside disaster during World War II, at Port Chicago, an ammunition dump for the navy just north of San Francisco. Black workers were assigned to load ammo onto ships under such unsafe conditions that on July 17, 1944, two ships blew up, killing 320 men. When 50 survivors of the blast refused to return to work under the same unsafe conditions, they were court-martialed and sentenced to up to 15 years of hard labor. There have been many attempts to clear the names of these fifty men, including one in 1944 by then-civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall. Dan Collison spoke with five survivors of the blast about what really happened. See the Long Haul Productions website for more. (20 minutes)
Act Four
Orientation
Even the most innocent office job can take over your life. A story by fiction writer Daniel Orozco about one such job. Originally published in the Seattle Review. (7 minutes)
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Act Two: Striptease
A story by therapist Lauren Slater about a case she had with a tough man obsessed with porn and how he changed.
Act Three: I'm An Orphan; Don't Tell My Mom
When Starlee Kine was a kid, she wanted to be a child star so badly that she signed up for an acting class with a famous acting teacher named Kevin McDermott.
Act Five: What Peacetime Forgets About Wartime
A few years back, a writer named Lee Sandlin wrote a story for the weekly paper The Chicago Reader about what makes wartime different—how a country's perceptions and logic during war are fundamentally different than during peace.
Staff Recommendations
Act V
A group of inmates at a high-security prison stage a production of the last act of Hamlet.
Simulated Worlds
Civil War reenactments, wax museums, simulated coal mines, fake ethnic restaurants, an ersatz Medieval castle, and other re-created worlds that thrive all across America.