Drive My Car

"It's not true I had nothing on... I had the radio on."
~ Marilyn Monroe

I have to drive a lot for my job. I don't mind! At least road construction (my main source of delay or frustration) is better than the snow and ice with which I have yet to deal. HOWEVER, I really quickly grew tired of the radio. And even though I do enjoy music, my CD collection is modest at best (most would say sparse). So my next venture was into audiobooks. I listened to Brave New World, a novel I had studied in school, and started Ella Enchanted (I had not read that one, but had seen the movie some years ago).

BNW was really good, read by Michael York, but EE was kind of grating (read by a youngish girl). I also found both of them somewhat hard to follow, as I was (in university) formally diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder (long story short, I can hear fine, but the information I hear gets jumbled up in my brain like gibberish so that I can't always understand or remember what I hear). I regularly lost track of what was going on, forgot what a character said, and had to backtrack several times to get back into the story. Then I re-discovered radio plays.

Old-Time Radio (OTR) plays! Have you heard them? They used to be the biggest thing, and I remember listening to a couple of them after taking a university course all about Orson Welles (War of the Worlds and A Christmas Carol were the ones I enjoyed). You can download them or stream them for free from lots of sites (try here, here, here or here). I have downloaded a few and burned them onto CDs, and BOY am I enjoying listening to them while I drive! They're fairly short (30-60 min each, on average), include a lot of fine acting and sound effects, so it's more like listening to a movie where they cleverly provide the "visuals" through the dialogue. I am probably going to listen to many more of these delightful shows, adding a new "review" section to the blog. Check them out! They are a cool compromise between audiobooks and movies. If you are sick of the radio but aren't into long narratives, you might be pleasantly surprised by what OTR has to offer.

Be forewarned, however, these plays ALWAYS include the old commercial breaks (generally a single 1-minute ad by the show's sponsor, like Campbell's Soup or Lux Soap or what-have-you). It's funny, even though they are shamelessly heavy-handed in their advertising scheme, getting the star of the show to tell you how soft their skin has become from using Lux Soap, etc., the ads themselves are a little blast from the past that I enjoy more than I like to admit.

All I want to watch/listen to now is stuff from the 1930s-50s! Love that stuff :-D

FILMS
Roman Holiday (1953) ****

OLD-TIME RADIO SHOWS
The Count of Monte Cristo (CBS: Mercury Theater on the Air, 1938) ****
Arsenic and Old Lace (NBC: Best Plays, 1946) ****
The Wizard of Oz (CBS: Lux Radio Theater, 1950) ***
Now Voyager (CBS: Encore Theater, 1946) ***
Dark Victory (CBS: Encore Theater, 1946) ***