Fertile Field of Radio Drama

Driving home late on a sunday night, on one of the public radio stations, we heard 2 radio dramas and a spoken word piece. Blogging about them might be futile. You kind of had to hear it. Fortunately for you, I found that you can listen to some in RealAudio format off the KUNM wesite.

The first we came in in the middle. The protagonists seemed to be a male and female investigative reporter. They were investigating a factory where a foriegn sounding man was training "biobots," lured out of the moutains with food, to work in his factory. It was kind of a mishmash of animal rights and socialist commentary. The reporters, in the end, "freed the slaves." Bad to the point of perversly fascinating.

The second item was a spoken word performance, "Letter to a Blind Farmer." The narrator had seen a picture in the paper of a blind farmer named Ivan getting married in Siberia. He wrote him a letter. Rambling, non-linear, again bizarre to the point of mesmerizing. We laughed. We lifted our eyebrows. We gave each other quizical looks. The commentary on the story of Oedipus was a high point. Through it all you had the nagging suspicion that this was exactly the kind of correspondance you'd get if you were unlucky enough to be featured in a tabloid. This one they have the RealAudio. Follow that link and search for the keyword "blind" in the page, and you'll find it.

The 3rd piece was the final installment of, well, something. Many of the characters were "cyber-enhanced" animals, including ferrets and bears. The bear at one point exhaltingly declairs that from now on he "will be Resplendent." He was taking "Resplendent" as his name.

At this point we had been sitting in the car in the driveway for awhile. We turned off the radio and came in before the end of this epic.