Big Block of Cheese - Bonus episode
the memory palace
Nate DiMeo
4.8 • 7.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2018
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary, story-driven shows.
This special episode was originally made for a live episode of The West Wing Weekly. To hear a live version of this story (and the rest of a particularly delightful TWWW episode), visit thewestwingweekly.com.
Music
- Moonbow by aAirial
- Two from scores by Marcelo Zavros: Wipe the Slate Clean, from The Beaver and Awkward Ride from his score to Please Give.
- Justine and Sami from Nathan Johnson's lovely score to The Day I Saw Your Heart.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is Nate and you are about to hear a special episode, a bonus, I suppose. |
| 0:05.1 | A little while back, my friends, Richard Cage, here we, and Josh Malina, who host the West Wing |
| 0:10.9 | Weekly, a fellow radio topia podcast, about the TV show The West Wing and about the politics |
| 0:16.9 | and bedding in each episode, and a lot more. It's a cool show. We're doing a live show in San Francisco. |
| 0:24.1 | And they invited me to write and perform a memory palace episode specifically for their show |
| 0:29.3 | about a bit of history that popped up in a couple of West Wing episodes, something that has |
| 0:35.7 | become known as Big Block of Cheese Day. It thought it would be fun to do, and it turned out |
| 0:40.4 | it really was fun to do. It was both fun to perform and be part of their show, but it was really |
| 0:44.0 | fun to write. The episode was kind of like a delightful throwbacky, funny thing. And I figured |
| 0:51.3 | I'd share with you guys here. So this is the memory palace. I'm Nate D'Ameyo. |
| 0:58.7 | Colonel Thomas S. Meacham was an actually a Colonel. There are no records that he ever served in |
| 1:08.3 | the military. He was born in the 1790s, so we're talking after the Revolutionary War, |
| 1:13.6 | and then he was too young for the War of 1812. But it seems that he was a big fish in the small |
| 1:18.7 | pond of Sandy Creek, New York, a respected businessman, a successful dairy farmer, and now in |
| 1:25.1 | the local militia there would do some drills they'd march about the town green, and they would |
| 1:29.2 | have meacham shout out orders to the younger man. At some point he just started insisting that |
| 1:33.7 | people call him Colonel, even though he wasn't no way an actual Colonel. And folks went along with |
| 1:39.3 | it. And so he became Colonel Thomas S. Meacham. And why not? It was 1835. The American experiment was |
| 1:48.1 | a tremendous success. This was a brand new nation. A place where a white middle aged dude of property |
| 1:54.6 | could be anything he wanted to be. And this new nation needed new heroes. Men of intellect and |
| 2:00.4 | ingenuity, men who could bring prestige to these newly united states and help it seize its place |
| 2:06.0 | in the world stage. Colonel Thomas S. Meacham wanted to be one of those men. So he made a big block |
... |
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