May Audio
A selection of Hearing Voices audio hours, with specials for Mother’s Day and Memorial Day.
Mothers Day
All Mom Radio (HV-010)
Whistler’s Mother: Anna McNeill Whistler painting by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Musée d’Orsay
Maternal tales from producers around the country: “Travels with Mom” follows Larry Massett and his mother to the Tybee Island, Georgia of today and of the 1920’s, as recalled by Mrs. Massett. Writer Beverly Donofrio joins her mom for “Thursday Night Bingo,” produced by Dave Isay of Sound Portraits. In Nancy Updike’s “Mubarak and Margy,” a gay man returns home to care for his mom, and to the “cure” his family plans for his homosexuality. And comedian Amy Borkowsky shares her hilarious phone “Messages from Mom.” [more…]
Motherly Love (HV-058)
Melissa Rodriguez, in 1996, with her son Issaiah and, in 2013, with sons Issaiah and Tyron (photos: Radio Diaries and David Gilkey/NPR)
The Radio Diaries of “Melissa, Teen Mom” move her from foster home to starting her own family. Muriel & Walter Murch compose “A Mother’s Symphony” from womb sounds. Amy Jo, single mother of two toddlers, is “Surrounded by Lights” (producer: Erin Mishkin). Myra Dean tells StoryCorps of the day her son was killed. Ben Adair takes his mom in search of “Family Baggage.” Toronto musician Charles Spearin with his neighbor “Mrs. Morris,” in The Happiness Project. Katie Davis admits “I Live with My Mother.” And Jake Warga’s “Far Side” calendars make metaphor and memories of his mother’s life and death. [more…]
Memorial Day
For the Fallen (HV-012)
World War Two Coast Guardsmen saluting the grave of a fellow Guardsmen who died in action in the Ryukyu Islands. Benrud, ca. 1945
Green Beret and poet, Major Robert Schaefer, US Army, hosts the voices of veterans remembering their comrades: We talk with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, reading their emails, poems, and journals, as part of the NEA project: “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.” We hear interviews from StoryCorps, an essay from This I Believe, and the sounds of a Military Honor Guard, recorded by Charles Lane. And we attend the daily “Last Post” ceremony by Belgian veterans honoring the WWI British soldiers who died defending a small town in western Belgium (produced by Marjorie Van Halteren). [more…]
War Memorial (HV-059)
Lance Corporal Michael A. Baronowski in Vietnam
Two stories recorded in Vietnam: In 1966, a young Lance Corporal carried a reel-to reel tape recorder with him. He made tapes of his friends, of life in fighting holes, of combat, until, two months later, when he was killed in action. His friend and fellow marine remembers him in “The Vietnam Tapes of Michael A. Baronowski” (by Jay Allison for Lost & Found Sound). And host Alex Chadwick’s first trip to Southeast Asia was as a soldier in the Sixties. Two decades later, as a journalist, he makes a “Return to Vietnam” to find what has and hasn’t changed since the war. [more…]