Making Lemonade in the Berkshire Hills
In three speedy, busy days, Dan and I will move to North Adams, the littlest city in Massachusetts and home to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. One of the things I will NOT miss is the commute—but listening to podcasts is a commuter habit I have developed and hope to keep.
There are so many good podcasts out there: Selected Shorts, TEDTalks, StoryCorps, The Moth, Harvard Business IdeaCast, Slate’s Political Gabfest, Writer’s Block, and many others. Although I don’t listen to all of them every week, they have saved my life.
Selected Shorts is a podcast I started listening to early on. A few weeks ago, host Isaiah Sheffer introduced Edith Wharton’s story “The Eyes,” which they recorded in the Berkshires. In the introduction, Sheffer romanticizes the Berkshire experience—lemonade out under the tall trees in back of Wharton’s carriage house—saying “it’s all very different” from Symphony Space in Manhattan.
His comments reminded me of the shock and delight New York theatermakers had every summer I was at the O’Neill Theater Center. Some, like Adam Rapp, returned almost every year and made the O’Neill experience an essential part of their creative process. Others didn’t write much at all, but used their time “under the trees” to think and talk about big ideas.
I am looking forward to the thinking, the talking and the writing. But I will miss my podcasts.
Tags: Observations