Rumble Strip

This is the second episode of a periodic series I’m making called Life of Kaye. Making Rumble Strip is the closest I can get to understanding what it’s like to be someone else. But what would happen if I wasn’t standing around holding a mic and asking a lot of questions? For the last year I’ve been asking my friend Kaye Phipps to record voice memos on her phone and send them to me. I love listening to these recordings. It feels like looking at a whole life through a keyhole. Life of Kaye isa show about someone getting through the day…with all the funny and boring and sad and surprising things that make up day to day life. But edited a lot. In this episode: health insurance and karaoke

My friend Jesse had a birthday party. I attended but spent the entire time lying down upstairs in the guest room. I asked people who attended the party to send me voice memos about the party. This is a show comprised of these recordings. And whales. Happy birthday Jesse.

I stopped in to visit with Forrest Foster about his barn project. Here's our conversation.

A couple weeks ago my friend Susan Randall came to visit. She’s a private investigator and we’ve been friends for thirty years and every now and then we get together and compare notes on our lives, and on what the hell is going on. Sometimes we talk about her work, sometimes our kids, once we made a show about a dead owl. This has been a very difficult year for Susan. In this conversation, we talk about her health...and the federal government.

This is a conversation with Jay Allison about the recent attack on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Recently, Congress passed a rescission bill that eliminates $9 billion in previously allocated funding, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which effectively defunds public media, which includes NPR, PBS and member stations around the country. This is a conversation about what that means and what we stand to lose. Jay Allison has been working in and around public radio since it’s beginnings a half century ago. He's been an independent public radio producer, journalist, and teacher since the 1970s. He is the founder of Transom, where I learned to make radio, and 25 years ago he founded WCAI, a public radio station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Jay's work has won most of the major broadcasting awards, including six Peabodys. He produces The Moth Radio Hour and was the curator of This I Believe on NPR.

This is the last episode in season 6 of What Class are You?, a periodic series I make for Vermont Public. Susan Ritz grew up in a wealthy family in Minnesota. For the past 36 years, she's lived in central Vermont, where she writes books and is an active philanthropist. In this episode of "What class are you?" we talk about the surprising complexities of having more than most.