816: Poultry Slam

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

During the highest turkey consumption period of the year, we bring you a This American Life tradition: stories of turkeys, chickens, geese, ducks, fowl of all kinds—real and imagined—and their mysterious hold over us.

Prologue: Ira Glass talks with Scharlette Holdman, who works with defense teams on high profile death row cases, and who has not talked to a reporter in more than 25 years. Why did she suddenly end the moratorium on press? Because her story is about something important: namely, a beautiful chicken. (2 minutes)
Act One: Scharlette Holdman's story continues, in which she and the rest of a legal defense team try to save a man on death row by finding a star witness — a chicken with a specific skill. (10 minutes)
Act Two: Yet another testimony to the power chickens have over our hearts and minds. Jack Hitt reports on an opera about Chicken Little. It's performed with dressed-up styrofoam balls, it's sung in Italian and, no kidding, able to make grown men cry. (14 minutes)
Act Three: Ira accompanies photographer Tamara Staples as she attempts to photograph chickens in the style of high fashion photography. The chickens are not very cooperative. (15 minutes)
Act Four: Kathie Russo's husband was Spalding Gray, who was best known for delivering monologues onstage—like "Monster in a Box," and "Swimming to Cambodia." On January 10, 2004, he went missing. Witnesses said they saw him on the Staten Island Ferry that night. Two months later, his body was pulled out of the East River. Kathie tells the story of the night he disappeared, and about how, in the weeks following, she and each of their three children were visited by a bird, who seemed to be delivering a message to them. (9 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	When I talked to Charlotte Holdman, she'd spent 35 years working with defense teams on death penalty cases.
0:05.6	And CODI's a very high profile cases. But she hadn't given an interview to the press in decades.
0:10.0	Ever since an incident where she had a few drinks with a reporter and said some things she was unhappy to see him print.
0:15.0	It was so embarrassing and I thought well I either have to quit drinking or quit doing interviews and I wasn't ready to quit drinking yet so I quit doing
0:23.2	interviews. So this interview is a very rare event for me. I haven't done any kind of
0:30.3	of interviews with the media since 85. And you are ending the moratorium in this one
0:35.3	instance for this story. Why? Well, a fluffy red-combed leg horned,
0:47.0	leg horn deserves his moment in the sun. I mean just the image.
0:56.9	And I'm not talking about any chicken.
0:58.6	I'm talking about, you can just picture it this beautiful leg horn, his tail perked up and that red
1:06.2	comb sitting at kind of a rakish angle on his head and his head kind of cocked to
1:10.0	the side and he looks at you with his little eyes. That's what this story is about.
1:17.0	That is not just what this story is about. That is what a lot of today's radio show is about.
1:25.0	Back in the early days of our radio show, once a year, during the highest poultry consumption time in the country,
1:31.0	which is of course, if you think about this for a second you can guess the answer to this it's the weeks that begin with
1:35.4	Thanksgiving and go through Christmas and New Year's. I mean during that period for
1:39.6	years on our show we had a tradition here we would devote an entire hour of our program
1:43.4	to stories of chickens, turkeys, ducks, foul of all kind and an homage to Chicago's
1:48.2	poetry slams which was spread across the country but were created at the Green Mill
1:51.3	Bar on the north side by poet
1:52.7	Mark Smith we named these programs poultry slams poultry but I just want to be
1:58.1	clear before we begin the word slam we are using that with no malice toward any bird of any kind at all.
	...

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