Ok, so I was listening to my ipod today, and today I decided not to listen to music but to listen instead to This American Life from my NPR podcast. And I thought it might be a really great place to look for a story. Say we have a basic story we want to follow, then grab text from lots of places, and then add a musical liturgy to add on top of that, and it could create a really neat structure from which to work. Just adding another option to the table. Also recorded sound I think is great to use and layer with physical action.

The episode I was listening to (which I wasn't crazy about, but it is what triggered this post) was about a woman who, with her husband, planned her own death for about the last 20 years of her life. She wanted to take a bottle full of pills, lie down on her bed, place a plastic bag over her head, tie the plastic bag around her neck with a scarf, and fall asleep and wait to die. Her husband died unexpectedly, however, and so she asked her son to help her. You see, she wanted to kill herself before she died of natural causes because her mother had died in very late stages of dementia, and this woman feared that was going to happen to her. She was already starting to forget things, like how to make a pot of coffee, etc. So she needed her son to help her rehearse her own suicide. He would come over, have dinner with her, and then walk her through the steps, minus the pills and actually keeping the bag over her head. His brother kept trying to take her out to dinner, make her more excited to live, but she said the problem wasn't being depressed: she was just ready to die before her mind escaped her. And so after months of practicing, writing down instructions for herself in case she forgot, and notifying family members that she was going to do this so they could say their last good-byes, she called the son who had been helping her to tell him she was going to do it. So he came over, helped her get all of her "tools" laid out, said goodbye, and left. He went to the supermarket, just drove around for a couple hours, and when he came back, she was dead. So he called the police and then got ready for her funeral.

You guys can get this episode on itunes for free. Just search podcasts for This American Life and subscribe. This story is Act II of an episode called "How to Rest in Peace" and it's about how people deal with murdered loved ones.

yes, let's try to hang out tomorrow, bed, theatre, sexiness, saw and all.

love,
gedney.