|
Shep and Other Master Story Tellers
Date: 01-16-2011
By: tdd1956
|
New to this forum. A Shep listener of seven years. Although I grew up in the days of his radio show, Shep's voice didn't carry as far as Des Moines, Iowa. Loved ACS from the first time I saw it and found Ollie Hopnoodle as well in the early nineties. But the radio shows came to me in an indirect fashion.
A local talent, Paul Berge, produced and wrote an hour long radio show entitled "Rejection Slip Theater" beginning in 1993. It aired for four or five years on WHO AM radio, a fifty-thousand watt station that can be heard around the globe at night when the cionditions are right.
This imaginative show boasted stories supposedly sent in by listeners with an attached rejection slip, and turned into radio plays by the show's producers and actors. It's a little scetchy as to whether this was really the case or the real talent behind the scenes was writer Paul Berge. Whoever was responsible for the fantastic story telling doesn't really matter, but the reason I and my young son always tuned in on Sunday nights was the weekly visit to Westwood New Jersey to soak up the antics of "Artie Azzetti and Me"!
Artie Azzetti and Me was written by Paul Berge and focused on growing up in the sixties, going to catholic school and generally being a kid. The stories were laugh-out-loud funny nostalgic and often touching. They were the kind of stories you could relate to because after all, what kid didn't try to put as many caps together as he could and hit them with a rock to see if they would make a huge explosion?
But the episode that changed my life was the story of a New York Radio personality who convinced the kid to paint the words "FLICK LIVES" on the side of his father's garage. This of course was Jean Shepherd. I bought the MP3's on ebay and have never looked back.
Paul Berge and Shep - in my world and for so many others, story tellers of the same calliber as Garrison Kiellor, Mark Twain, and George Aid. Yes indeed, FLICK LIVES!!! |
0 |
