Stories from acclaimed storyteller Spalding Gray and others.
Ski Lesson
An excerpt from Spalding Gray's monologue It's a Slippery Slope. Gray has been called "America's premiere storyteller." His monologue Swimming To Cambodia was made into a feature film. This story is about finding the zen of skiing. Note that this piece is not included in the streaming audio version of this show. (16 minutes)
Swimming Lesson
Scott Carrier's wife and mother-in-law insist that Scott's three-and-a-half year old daughter enroll in swimming classes. This story was produced by Jay Allison. (10 minutes)
Shooting Lesson
Kitty Felde explores the mystic link between boys and guns when her cousin's husband, a liberal in Berkeley, gives her lessons in his newest toy: a gun that shoots potatoes 450 feet in the air. The "spud gun" has a special property: Any man who sees it instantly wants one. (10 minutes)
Found Tape
Excerpts from lessons found on old record, especially a Helen Gurley Brown disc called How to Love a Man, which instructs men on how to have an affair. (8 minutes)
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Act Two: Gangster's Daughter
Susan Berman, author of the memoir Easy Street, the True Story of a Gangster's Daugher, reads from her book about her father Davie Berman, a Jewish gangster and one of the men — with Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel — who created modern Las Vegas.
Act Three: Good Blacks, Bad Blacks
Writer Malcolm Gladwell, reads from a story that he first wrote for the New Yorker magazine about his cousins, who immigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica 12 years ago.
Commandments One, Two and Three: Honor God
As a boy in religious school, Shalom Auslander is informed that his name, Shalom, is one of the names of God, and so he must be very careful not to take his own name in vain.
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Three Miles
What happens when of a group of public school students in the Bronx goes to visit an elite private school three miles away.
Lower 9 + 10
We go to the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans to talk to residents about what matters most to them ten years after the hurricane.