Super frustrated this week!

Every time I had time to listen to the DS106 radio, there was either weird music or a story. The stories were interesting, but I always seemed to miss the first half. I eventually made it to two stories this week.

Listening to DS106 Radio

I was going to use another story that I listened to earlier this week, it was The Children of Sodom and Gomorrah Show. I tweeted about this one, and one of my DS106 friends got excited and thought it was live (her Twitter is protected, though, so can’t post the response to that!)

@ds106radio These stories are really gripping. Getting inspiration! #ds106

— Brooke Parker (@bparker5) February 9, 2013

But today, I started listening to it again, and caught another story.

This time, I related a lot more to the story. There was no title, though. Luckily, at the end of the show, a woman came over the radio and said,

This is Barbara Harrison, and this is Outfront.

This soft-spoken woman was narrating. She was speaking about her relationship with her father who had Alzheimer’s. She narrated points of the story, talk about how her father doesn’t remember how terrible their relationship was once, and how that is a blessing. He remembered her as a wonderful and loving child and didn’t remember the problems he had with her or her with him. Then the story went to that moment. We heard her father telling her how happy he was to see her and how he wanted to do what she wanted to do all while they sat in his house.

Similarly, when she took her father to her mother’s grave. She first narrated how she and him visited her mother’s grave once a year–that it was not a sad event, but a happy one. The story then shifted to that moment. We heard the birds chirping and the cars passing as they visited her mother’s grave. You could imagine her pointing to the grave, describing her mother’s name to her father to make him understand that this really was the grave of his wife.

Now this wasn’t the happiest of stories, but I’m surprised at how much I liked it. After reviewing the videos for this week, I feel like this is what Ira Glass meant when he said you shouldn’t  have a terrible, “all about me” personality when hosting a show. While this story was about this woman, it was also a story about her relationship with her father and how he had come to see her differently and how she, too, had forgotten their disagreements in the past and had come to love him now.

I feel like this in-and-out method of narrating then putting the listener into the story is common for DS106 radio. The Sodom and Gomorrah show did the same thing. Of course, they used “You are walking down the steps. You hear something..” which is a different format.