March 19, 2002
Contact: Susan Gwynne
(805) 893-2098
e-mail: gwynne-s@sa.ucsb.edu
Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, performs Lies, Sissies and Fiascoes: Notes on the Making of a New Kind of Radio at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Ira Glass
- Lies, Sissies and Fiascoes: Notes on the Making of a New Kind of Radio
- Host and creator of public radio’s This American Life
- This American Life has nearly one million weekly listeners on over 400 radio stations nationwide
- Friday, April 26 / 8 pm
- UCSB Campbell Hall
- General: $20/$15, UCSB students: $15/$13
- Tickets/information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Ira Glass, host and creator of This American Life, will move and amuse the audience with his performance Lies, Sissies and Fiascoes: Notes on the Making of a New Kind of Radio on Friday, April 26 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. Since This American Life’s inception at Chicago radio station WBEZ in 1995, the show has earned a Peabody Award and is now public radio’s second most listened to program behind A Prairie Home Companion. In Time Magazine’s “America’s Best” Issue (July 9, 2001), Glass was named Best Radio Host and playwright/director David Mamet claimed, “Glass seems to have reinvented radio.”
This American Life is a weekly program that features documentary, fiction and the gray area in-between. Each episode is built around a theme—in fact, the title of Glass’s performance comes from three of the most popular episodes, “Lies,” “Sissies” and “Fiascoes.” As host, Glass is the personality who holds the show together: open, observant, wry, inquiring, but never judgmental. The show’s website (www.thisamericanlife.org) describes the program as follows: “Its mission is to document everyday life in this country. We sometimes think of it as a documentary show for people who normally hate documentaries. A public radio show for people who don’t necessarily care for public radio...What we look for in putting the show together are stories that we love, truly love.”
Those stories are painstakingly edited by Glass, as he does all he can to get meaning out of every pause and vocal tic of his reporters and writers. He also spends much time choosing the music to back each “act,” as he calls the segments of an episode, crafting them into compelling narratives that revive old-fashioned storytelling. Fan of the show Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air, says, “There’s this absolutely direct connection Ira makes. It is carefully thought out, and as casual and direct as if he’d just thought of it.”
Born in Baltimore, Ira Glass went to college at Northwestern and Brown, where he studied semiotics. His first radio work was selling one-liners to a shock jock in Baltimore. He started working in public radio in 1978 when he was 19, as an intern at National Public Radio’s Washington Headquarters. Over the course of the next 17 years, Glass worked on nearly every NPR news show, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered, in a wide variety of production jobs: he was a tape cutter, desk assistant, newscast writer, editor, producer, reporter and substitute host. He moved to Chicago in 1989. From there, he did several long-format documentary series about public schools and about race relations for NPR. One feature followed a group of sophomores at Lincoln Park High School over a span of three years. Yearlong projects documented school reform at Taft High School and tracked life at Washington Irving Elementary School. These reports won him numerous plaudits, including awards presented by the National Education Association and the Education Writers Association.
Glass began Your Radio Playhouse, the precursor to This American Life, in 1995. The show quickly picked up stations around the country and became a phenomenon, landing Glass on Late Night with David Letterman and helping to launch the careers of writers like David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and David Rakoff. Glass explains the show’s modus operandi: “What we’re looking for especially on This American Life are stories that are narratives, that describe a person or persons in certain situations where some bigger something is at stake that we all can relate to, where something happens that we haven’t heard before, and where something is deeply felt and means something in a broader way.”
This performance by Ira Glass is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and sponsored by KCLU Public Radio. It is funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Tickets are $20 and $15 for the general public and $15 and $13 for UCSB students.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
Susan Gwynne at (805) 893-2098.