For years I’ve been wanting to make a show about the terrible cultural divides growing in our country, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it without getting into boring conversations about politics. So I backed into an experiment. I asked my editor at Vermont Public if I could drive around and ask people, ‘what class are you?’, just to see what would happen. And he said, ‘sure.’ So I did. This is the series that came of that experiment. And even though these conversations took place in rural Vermont, I think they are indicative of what people are thinking and feeling all over the country. And maybe we should all be having these conversations? I don’t know. Here is the series, What Class Are You?

This series was produced for Vermont Public, and I am grateful to them for allowing me to share it with the Rumble Strip audience. #ftg-2828 .tile .icon { color:#ffffff; }#ftg-2828 .ftg-items .loading-bar i { background:#666; }#ftg-2828 .ftg-items .loading-bar { background:#fff; }#ftg-2828 .tile .icon { font-size:12px; }#ftg-2828 .tile .icon { margin: -6px 0 0 -6px; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-block .text-wrapper span.text { font-size:12px; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-outside .text-wrapper span.text { font-size:12px; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-block .text-wrapper span.title { font-size:14px; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-outside .text-wrapper span.title { font-size:14px; }#ftg-2828 .tile { background-color: transparent; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-block .text-wrapper span.text { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-block .text-wrapper span.title { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-outside .text-wrapper span.text { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-outside .text-wrapper span.title { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-2828 .tile .ftg-social a { color: #ffffff; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-block { transition-timing-function:linear; }#ftg-2828 .tile .caption-block { transition-duration:0.25s; }#ftg-2828 .tile .tile-inner:before { background-color: #000000; }#ftg-2828 .tile .tile-inner:before { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); }

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Mary Lake is a sheep farmer and sheep shearer and itinerant slaughterer. She is a tall, muscular woman in bib overalls and a baseball hat and dangly earrings she carved out of a ram’s horn. She wears a chain around her waist with a scabbard full of knives. And she loves sheep, which is one reason she participates in their slaughter. This is a story about where food comes from.

** The first version of this story aired on Vermont Public. I am grateful to Vermont Public for allowing me to share this story with Rumble Strip listeners!

Mary Lake’s business is Can-Do Shearing in Tunbridge, Vermont

Thank you magazine.com/2022/08/12/sylvan-esso-diva-interview/">Amelia Meath!!

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This is a re-run of a show but it’s TOWN MEETING DAY SO I’M RUNNING IT AGAIN! LONG LIVE TOWN MEETING!

In most of New England, town citizens become legislators for one day a year. They get together in school gyms and town halls and vote in person, and in public. This centuries long practice of towns doing the slow and hard work of disagreeing and arguing and compromising on how to govern themselves—this has a profound impact on a place, and what it means to be from a place.

Sometimes it’s contentious. Sometimes it’s boring. But it’s always the most interesting and authentic and civilized social event of the year. Always.

This is a show about where I live, which is maybe not where you live, but we’re all living through a time of awful division. There aren’t a lot of opportunities anymore to disagree civilly, in public, or to make decisions with people who are hugely different from ourselves. And maybe there should be. So I made this show to inspire us all. And you’ll hear a lot about trash removal.

Credits

Music by Brian Clark. In addition to being a fine musician, he is also a fine woodworker.

Featured photos by Terry J. Allen

Endless thanks to Tobin Anderson, Kelly Green and Amelia Meath for their help on this show.

Susan Clark is the co-author of Slow Democracy, a wonderful book on self governance and rediscovering community.

Thanks to Brattleboro Community TV and Mount Mansfield Community TV for their recordings of town meeting and all the brave people who get up and talk in those meetings

Moderators in this show are: Stephen Magill, Moretown. Paul Doton, Barnard. Gus Seelig, Calais. John McLaughry, Kirby. Bobby Starr, Troy. Susan Clark, Middlesex. Kelly Green, Randolph

Click on images below for better view. Most of the good pictures here are by Terry J. Allen of East Montpelier.

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Sheila LaPoint wrote a post in Front Porch Forum asking if there were anyone in town who could turn her grandmother’s fur coat into a teddy bear. She didn’t want to spend a lot of money. She can’t wear the coat anymore. But she wants something that will help her remember her German grandmother. My friend Clare Dolan lives down the road from Sheila, and when she read Sheila’s post about the teddy bear, it called to her. Clare is the maker of the Museum of Everyday Life, which celebrates the many critical and underappreciated objects we use in our daily lives. Clare loves well used and long loved objects, so it seemed like a good idea to help Sheila turn one loved object into a new object to love.

Also it’s a show about seasonal depression.

Clare’s Museum of Everyday Life

Thank you Amelia Meath for your help.

Tom Mustill is a conservation biologist and he makes beautiful films about where nature and people meet. He’s worked with Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough, he’s been shat on by bats in Mexico, and recently he finished a book called How to Speak Whale.  It describes the very real possibility that someday, maybe even in my lifetime, we’ll begin to understand the complex language of whales–and all this would imply.

I interviewed Tom for hours and I didn’t want him to stop until he’d told me every last thing he’s learned about whale behavior and every story he could remember. He was polite about it. I don’t know why I felt this insatiable need to hear every story. Maybe it seems that if we could understand whale culture a little bit, everything would make a little more sense? Anyway I recorded Tom for as long as he’d let me.

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Links

Tom’s website

How to Speak Whale

Roger Payne’s website

Under The Water, song by Hand Habits and Amelia Meath

Whale photo above is a screengrab from one of Tom’s films

It’s been too long since I reported on some of the many crimes we’re facing here in central Vermont. I apologize for this lapse. It’s time for me to be honest about some of these challenges. So here is a show about crime.

This important report was read by Scott Carrier, host of Home of the Brave.

Here are pictures of the tiny horses who have been entangled with The Law more than once here in Vermont.

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Jay Allison makes the kind of radio that made me want to make radio. It isn’t news and it doesn’t really have a beginning middle and end but it’s personal and surprising and you get to fall in love with strangers and that’s what I wanted to do. We got together and talked about getting old and irrelevant, because that’s what I think about a lot. We also talked about what radio stories can do in a time when people are inclined to hate each other, or what we really hope stories can do.

Thanks to Tobin Anderson and Vicki Merrick and Amelia Meath and Scott Carrier for their help on this show.

 



Forrest Foster was loading up the tractor with kindling for deer camp, two days before rifle season. I was over there visiting and helping him with his night chores. I like Forrest. I like being around him, and I always learn something from him. And on this day we rode the tractor down to the deer camp and sat and talked about hunting and caretaking and walking with goats and horses. And loneliness. Pretty much all the stuff people end up talking about at deer camp.

 



Nick Paley is a writer, editor and director for film and TV, and a co-writer on the recent film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which stars an adorable one-inch tall shell who wears shoes and is looking for his long lost shell family. Nick is from Vermont, and he’s working on a new TV series set here, so when he was in town I dragged him to a matinee of Marcel the Shell…the same movie theater where he used to clean the bathrooms. And then afterwards he let me ask him ten million questions about what it’s like to work in the film industry. This show is a bit of both.

More:

• Nick’s website
• News on Nick’s upcoming TV series, Phony, and a picture of him in a cardigan
• Link to Marcel the Shell trailer
• Interview about the making of Marcel, with Nick Paley and Dean Fleischer-Camp
• Broad City Episode Nick directed

Vaughn Hood was a 118-pound barber when he was drafted into the Vietnam War, and in Vaughn’s war, most men didn’t survive their first three-month tour. In honor of Veteran’s Day, here is the story of an extraordinary American life.

This story is co-produced by Larry Massett and Erica Heilman. It first ran in 2015. To read the comments on this story from over the years, click here.

An interview with Erica about the show, by the excellent people at The Third Coast

50 Best Podcasts of 2015, The Atlantic Monthly…#16

Music in this show:

Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten–Arvo Part

Tabula Rasa for 2 violins, strings and prepared piano–Arvo Part

Speigel im Speigel–Arvo Part

Under the Weather Mix–Steve Reich

Clapping Music–Steve Reich