Act Four: Ritual
Camp Lake of the Woods holds a fake Indian powwow during the summer. This kind of fake Native American-ness has been a part of camping in America since organized camping began a century ago.
Prologue
Host Ira Glass talk with Claire, who obsessed over a Chilean friend — and then started to tell people she was Chilean herself.
Prologue
Host Ira Glass describes what thousands of people do all over America on our holiday weekends: we go to historic sites with our kids and stare at bricks and statues, trying to feel some connection with the past. It's not easy.
Prologue
We ask 18-year-old Chana Wiliford and her father in Texas if they'd be willing to have a conversation on tape in which each of them gets to ask the other the questions they've never asked before. In the conversation, Chana is half his child, half his peer.
Prologue
Ira reads from an editorial from a 1957 newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. It tries to scare white southerners about the NAACP by describing a Chicago human rights campaign called "Take a Negro Boy Home Tonight." The idea behind the campaign? "Racism can be combated by intimate relationships between Negro boys and white girls." No such campaigns really existed in Chicago.
Prologue
Durrell was a professional musician. He toured Asia, Brazil, Canada, gigs in Paris.
Prologue
Host Ira Glass talks with a guy who hit the road after his mother's death, hoping for some experience that would change him and shed light on what just happened. This never happens to him, or to most of us.
Prologue
Ira talks about those ephemeral, thrilling radio moments that you happen to catch in passing on stations far away that you never find again. Flipping through the channels.
Prologue
A high school student named Rebecca tells the story of a friend of hers who changed over the course of four years from a preppy alternative kid to a member of the Latina clique to a ghetto girl to a Clueless girl (a girl who models herself after the girls in the film and TV show Clueless). It's hard to imagine many boys changing style this quickly, this willfully, this many times.
Prologue
Pierre, a ten year old who boxes in an amateur team on Chicago's south side, and what Muhammad Ali had to do to psych up to win a fight.
Prologue
Ira and the movie Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Advertised as wacky, it is anything but.
Prologue
Host Ira Glass with Jan Tomare, who spent three years in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Prologue
In the early stages of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, there was a period when one of the questions raised by the whole affair had to do with monogamy. Around that time, Roy Romer, the Governor of Colorado and Chair of the Democratic Party, admitted that for 16 years he'd had a relationship with an aide that his wife and family knew about.
Prologue
Host Ira Glass with Brooklyn schoolteacher Melissa Cantor, who reads from a how-to manual written by a sixth-grade student. It's about how to protect yourself against unwanted visitors.