Every Wednesday at 10 PM I turn my Philadelphia radio to 90.9 FM and wait for that voice that I love more than any other voice in the world: the voice of Ira Glass. Maybe it's the beauty of spoken stories. Maybe it's the perfectly-chosen filler & background music. Or maybe it's the simple fact that a group of totally captivating stories that belong to someone else can be mine for one hour every week. My point? ... If you're like me and you find This American Life so delectable that you now respond to it with more affection than a mother to her new-born baby's giggles, than I sincerely hope you listened last night.
In the name of Valentine's Day, they did a piece on star-crossed lovers. At the start of the show, Ira (yes, we're on a first name basis) talks with Amy Dickinson, writer of a popular advice column called "Ask Amy." She describes how most of the love-related requests she receives most definitely fall in the category of "doomed," and are quite sad, really.
The second part of the show is the real meat & potatoes. An Armenian man called Shant Kenderian reads a section of his memoir 1001 Nights in the Iraqi Army: The true story of a Chicago Student held as a POW by the Americans During Desert Storm (long book title). Shant, who was born in Iraq (but raised in suburban Chicago), decides to return to Iraq in 1980 to visit some family and arrives just in time for Suddam Hussein to declare war on Iran. The borders close, Shant gets stuck there, he gets drafted into the Iraqi military against his will (twice), gets captured by some American soldiers and becomes a POW, then falls in love with a beautiful red-haired female American soldier. I can't - and won't - tell you any more about his story, but I will say that listening to it made 23 minutes feel like seconds...or maybe years, depending on how you look at it. It's beautiful.
In the third section, a teenage girl called Catalina Puente tells her secret story of how she moves from one obsession to another very unexpected obsession. This surprising love of hers changes her life by opening a door to a part of herself she never thought she would open - especially not to her family.
Finally, a wonderful new short by the uniquely fantastic David Sedaris who tells a story of star-crossed rodent love -- or as Ira put it, it's a story "about a squirrel, and a chipmunk, and a love that could never be." Through the telling of this peculiar tale, Sedaris deals with a not-so-unusual phenomenon that I'm sure we've all experienced at some point - a phenomenon that can best be described as love that gets sweeter the second you realize it's gone.
Yesterday's show was a nostalgic masterpiece. Its beauty and intrigue is best expressed in this sentence: "Somehow the fact that they can never be makes their love seem all the more intense," all the more blindingly romantic.
For a free listen of last night's one-hour program, click the Real Audio icon below. Happy listening.
