Think about all the things you love about radio and podcasts — the suspense, the characters, the drama and humor — Back Pocket Media takes all of those elements and puts them live on stage.
For eight years they have gathered stories from magazines, podcasts, investigative journalism, and friends of friends to produce a show that has been in 20+ cities.
On today’s episode, Back Pocket Media co-founders McArdle Hankin and Ellison Libiran guest host the California Report Magazine and play three of their favorite stories from their last San Francisco event. The theme of that event was Taste of Then: stories about food and memory.
Their next event In a Silent Way: stories about music and tension is coming to the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco on Friday, June 21st.
What I’d Cook for Love
Most people who’ve had a job at a workplace, which is to say almost all of us, have at some point developed an office crush. You see the person day in and day out. You know you can’t make a move but you secretly want to. Secretly you wait for some sort of signal or opening. Well, for storyteller JP Frary, that opening…. Is Dungeness crab.
The Fruitarian
People have always come together around shared taste in food, but in contemporary culture it’s just as likely to see communities – and even identities – formed around the foods we don’t eat. Storyteller Don Reed takes a specialized diet to a new extreme.
When the Forest Goes Quiet
This story was told to the audience over the phone… That’s because the storyteller is currently incarcerated in San Quentin. Kelton O’Connor starts his story in the yard of a different prison. It’s the middle of the day and he’s walking up to a tall barbed wire fence — a fence that is the only thing separating him from the outside world.