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This American Life for September 25, 2007
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
[Program Website]
Today's Highlight: "Twentieth Century Man"
One thing that makes our country different from most others is this idea that you can recreate yourself as someone you'd prefer to be: sell everything off, head out West, start a new life. But what happens if you're too good at it?
Over the course of his life, Keith Aldrich was a child of the Depression in Oklahoma; a preacher-in-training in booming California; an aspiring Hollywood actor; in the 1950s, a self-styled Beat writer, and then a man in a gray flannel suit; in the 1960s, a member of the New York literati, and then a hippie; in the 1970s, a denizen of the suburbs with a partying, Ice Storm kind of life; and a born-again Christian when the Moral Majority helped put Ronald Reagan in office.
We devote this entire episode to the story of Keith's life, as told by one of his nine children, Gillian Aldrich. Keith's life is not only a history of most of the major cultural shifts in the second half of the Twentieth Century. It's also a case study of the question, "What happens if you're too good at transforming yourself?"
This American Life is an award-winning critically acclaimed weekly program describing and documenting contemporary American life. Each week a theme is chosen, and host Ira Glass and a variety of writers and performers share stories in a range of styles: monologues, documentaries, short radio plays, “found recordings,” and original works for radio. Music underscores many stories.
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