A Holiday Gift

Filed under: Julie's Writings | By DrHGuy | December 6, 2006 at 6:07 am

You may not be surprised that today’s post is a holiday offering. You may or may not be surprised, depending on how familiar you are with my posting pattern, that the holiday is Halloween.

Julie And WBEZ

In rifling through the archives, I happened onto a forgotten 1996 e-mail exchange between Julie¹ and staff from WBEZ (the Chicago NPR station responsible for “This American Life”) in which Julie responded to a NPR producer’s request that she perform one of her pieces on the program by adapting a segment of her short story, “A Christian Education,” into a freestanding reading appropriate for the show’s Halloween theme.

The reading opens with these lines:

I was raised in west Texas as a Southern Baptist so I always knew that I was a sinner. But it wasn’t until Halloween Day in the fourth grade that I thought of myself as a sinful being. Before that, sin was something that could be overcome through hard work, prayer, reading the Bible, thinking of a way out of coveting Tommy Sue Bailey’s new Madame Alexander doll. Afterwards, I knew sin was a part of me, in every molecule of my body, and I could never get rid of it.

I was very excited about going to school on Halloween Day …

The Audio

The Halloween reading can be accessed through this MP3 player:

If streaming audio is preferred, the 1996 Halloween show of “This American Life” is available from the NPR archives:
This American Life: Halloween 1996

Footnotes

Julie Showalter was the fiercely intelligent, sexy, and loving woman and prize-winning author, with whom I had a outrageously wonderful 20 year marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie Showalter FAQ. ~back~

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