Showing results by publisher "Jay Allison Productions"

A couple of years ago, Annie was volunteering at a public radio station. The reporters who trained her told her that asking people what they had for breakfast was a good way to set your recording levels and make the interview subjects more comfortable. To Annie, what people had for breakfast was the most interesting part of the conversation. In this season of feasting and family, and the anxiety sometimes associated with it, we have a featured program about eating, and not eating-precisely, about Anorexia.

These are public radio stories made in recent months and over many years by acclaimed producer Jay Allison - working together with friends, colleagues, neighbors, strangers and whoever would take the loan of one of his tape recorders. They are stories about life as we find it, and record it.

The first of three half-hour radio documentaries on one woman's experience of a nervous breakdown. This Peabody Award-winning radio piece blends reality and fantasy - her poetry and music, real and imagined scenes, and interviews with her family and friends.

Writer Margy Rochlin wonders why they're tearing down her favorite buildings in Los Angeles. Come to think of it, why is her family selling her grandmother's house in Arizona? The things we keep that remind us of who we were are the subject of this documentary produced by Jay Allison and Christina Egloff.

This is a story of war and sanctuary, of beasts and obsession. It is the story of one Vietnam veteran, writer James P. McMullen, whose own salvation came through his struggle to save something else. McMullen lives in the Everglades, and devotes his time to tracking and protecting the endangered Florida Panther. He uses this mission as a way to make peace with his memories of the war.

The second of three half-hour radio documentaries on one woman's experience of a nervous breakdown. This Peabody Award-winning radio piece blends reality and fantasy - her poetry and music, real and imagined scenes, and interviews with her family and friends.

This half-hour radio compilation chronicles one woman's experience of a nervous breakdown. This Peabody Award-winning program blends reality and fantasy - her poetry and music, real and imagined scenes, and interviews with her family and friends.

In 1966, a young Marine took a reel-to-reel tape recorder with him into the Vietnam War. For two months, until he was killed in action, Michael Baronowski made tapes of his friends, of life in foxholes, of combat. And he sent those audio letters home to his family in Norristown, Pennsylvania. 34 years later, his comrade Tim Duffie brought those tapes to radio producer Jay Allison, as part of the Lost & Found Sound series.

The third of three half-hour radio documentaries on one woman's experience of a nervous breakdown. This Peabody Award-winning radio piece blends reality and fantasy - her poetry and music, real and imagined scenes, and interviews with her family and friends.

This radio series is a collection of short pieces reflecting on life, love, and death among the species. It contains monologues, montages, portraits, and dreams. Some are funny, some are strange, some enlightening, some sobering.

Dan Gediman tells the story of how he was cast, at age 10, in the public TV show Zoom, which aired from 1972 to 1979. He was cut from the cast before the show ever went on the air, so for years, he lied about it. He let friends believe he was on Zoom. In this special half-hour story, Gediman tracks down the original Zoom cast members to find out what his life would've been like if he had achieved his childhood dream of being on Zoom.

This is the diary of Esme Raji Codell, a first-year teacher at a Chicago public school. Codell describes the frustrations - incompetent administrators, abusive parents, gang members and, at times, her own insecurities - she encountered when she began her teaching career in this inner-city school and the unique ways she approached them. As Codell puts it, she has "Thirty-one children. Thirty-one chances. Thirty-one futures, our futures. Everything they become, I also become."

Radio producer Dan Gediman's story about his older brother, "Alex Jones," who he idolized when they were kids. After many unsuccessful attempts to become a rock star, Alex finally made it in music, as a Tom Jones impersonator. This story was produced by Jay Allison with Ginna Allison, as part of Jay's Life Stories series.