Showing posts with label weird towns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weird towns. Show all posts

Can't Get There From Here

If you're looking for podcasts about strange stuff happening in small towns (and you've already listened to S-Town and taken an audio tour of Woodstock, Alabama) then you can't do better than these two:

1) Hysterical . . .  this one investigates a spate of oddball symptoms-- tics, verbal outbursts, twitching, spasms-- that spread virally through the girls in an upstate New York high school in the town of LeRoy-- and the question is: was this mass hysteria, otherwise known as conversion disorder? or was it due to toxic chemicals or something environmental? a great one if you love The Crucible and the Salem Witch trials;

2) Cement City . . . two journalists stumble into a dying Pennsylvania town-- Donara, home to the Donara Smog Museum, which memorializes the Donora Smog of 1948, an air inversion containing fluorine that killed twenty people-- and they buy a house? a house made completely of concrete? and  they get caught up in town politics and what it's like to live in a place with no bank, no grocery store, and no school, but a whole lot of camaraderie;

and while I recognize that these podcasts are presenting a very thin sliver of what it's like to live in a place that does NOT feel like it's the center of the world, and these podcasters have cherry-picked extremely interesting narratives of truly oddball events and these small towns just happen to be the setting, it's still really interesting to inhabit places like these, places that I will probably never truly understand, because I live in a fast-paced, densely populated, and expensive region of the country, with all the amenities and conveniences and ethnic restaurants and parks and high-end grocery stores and sky-high real-estate prices and even if I were to move to an out of the way rural kind of place, I'd never be able to pass as a local . . . you can take the guy out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of the guy.

A New Sentence Every Day, Hand Crafted from the Finest Corinthian Leather.