September 7, 2011
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Stuff that Changes Your Life
I’ve been meaning to write this entry for several months now. I think I’ve been delaying it because it’s about some events that were very important to me but that when I start talking about them in public it will just make me sound like a mega-geek. Oh well, must be done.
Back in 1973 when I was a straggly, pimply teenager, I used to play hookey at the main branch of the Saskatoon Public Library. Well, it wasn’t really hookey — I only went there when I had spare periods so I never missed any classes. How lame is that? Taking my youthful rebellion to even greater extremes, I used to sit at the record players, headphones on my ears, listening to classical and baroque music. I mean, how did I get away with it?
Then one day, instead of some obscure Archive recording of completely unknown (and not very interesting) Bach organ fugues, I played the library’s recording of the War of the World radio broadcast. Then everything changed for me. Up to that point in my life the real life zone and the drama/story zone were very separate things. The drama/story zone only existed on stages, inside books or on TV and cinema screens. The real life zone was everything outside the covers, stages or screen; it was in 3D but since I was living in Saskatchewan it didn’t make muck difference.
Yeah, the Welles broadcast was dated some but that just gave it an historical veneer that made it feel all the more authentic. And the first time in my life I knew that stories and life could be connected — affect and reflect — each other in some very powerful and unexpected ways. Suddenly the whole world was a much more exciting place. Even Saskatchewan.
A few months later I found a copy of The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic in my high school library. Here a Princeton social psychologist did a systematic survey of who panicked and who didn’t when they heard the W of W broadcast. This was also supremely cool! Not only were stories and life connected in some really bizarre ways — we could employ scientific methods to better understand how these connections worked.
So in 1973, the course of my intellectual life had essentially been struck. Almost every serious project I’ve undertaken has been (to a greater or lesser extent) informed and inspired by my teenage War of the Worlds experience.
Last spring we went to Harbourfront’s Enwave Theatre to see a re-enactment of the 1938 Panic Broadcast with three fantastic actors, a Foley artist with period equipment and a chamber orchestra — who prefaced the experience with a medley of film scores by Bernard Hermann. Mr. Hermann was also the musical director for the Mercury Theatre and wrote and conducted the music for…you guessed it…
It was a fantastic production! I was worried that it would be stagey and played for cute nostalgia factor. Nope, the artists really understood the significance of the material and the production served as a unique view into the creative process of live radio production and the profound sociological consequences of the work they were performing. (I know, not only am I a geek, I’m a social science geek).And it was wondrous to be able to return to the roots of my muse for an afternoon.
