35: Fall Clearance Sale
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Ok, so I'm standing here on Navy Pier in Chicago, and can I just ask you to describe the outfit you're wearing? Just a pair of slacks with a knit top to go with it. And the color of the slacks? The slacks are white. White. After Labor Day. Was it time this woman, Hazel, would not have dared wear white after Labor Day, she says. But that tradition of autumn is long dead, so long dead it's barely even worth commenting on. That's right, there's only one tradition. Anybody like Hazel still follows. Come September. Oh yeah, go to clearance sales, especially at the end of the summer when they've got all the winter clothes out, and you're looking for all the goodies that's left over, or you can't miss that. You've gotten anything this year like that? Yes I did. I did. What'd you get? I got a beautiful pink sport jacket at Carson's. Yeah, we've got a nice dark bargain on it. Welcome to WBZ in Chicago, it's this American life of my red glass, and today on our program, we clear out the inventory for fall and pass those savings on to you. Over the last six months we have commissioned on our program a number of stories and found a number of stories that we, on the little radio staff, love, but have not been able to figure out a way to fit into any of the actual shows we've put on the air for you. That's the problem of working with a theme every week, and so we just thought, we love these stories, you will love them, let's just put them together, get them on the air. In this hour, Act One, David Sedaris, in the nude. Act Two, haiku at the scrimmage line, stories from Scott Carrier, one of our favorite contributors. Act Three, animal lover, that's a piece of found writing. Act Four, grandma and easy. I know by the way that some of you may have heard promos saying that our show today was going to be about a hot dog stand, and our program about the hot dog stand was not ready for you. It was not up to our standards, and so we are bringing you the program that we had planned for next week, which is in good shape, it's tomorrow's stories today, stay with us. Act One, in the nude. So we're going to kick things off with this story from David Sedaris, David is a sometimes commentator and ampere's mourning edition, a frequent contributor to this American life, author of the book, Barrel Fever, and he is working on a new book of stories called Naked. And for the title story in that collection, he decided to spend a week at a nudist colony. David is not somebody who likes being naked, as he's written, he doesn't even like walking around the house barefoot, much less nude. He doesn't sleep in the nude, and so this was his personal challenge to himself. During the summer, he read a portion of the story with his sister, Amy, at a club called KGB in New York City, and as you're going to hear, these are just anecdotes from a larger story.
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