Hey everyone, welcome back to Bodies. I'm Allison Varringer.

We're going to do something a little different this week.

I'll be playing three short stories created by independent producers.

So some background.

As I mentioned at the end of every episode, Bodies is made with support from KCRW and NPR member station out of Santa Monica, California.

And the initiative that supports Bodies is called the Independent producer project.

And every year, the independent producer project puts on a competition called Radio Race,

where audio makers from around the world get 24 hours to create a short non-fiction story from scratch.

The theme this year was The New Normal and the winners were announced last week.

This year the radio race included a new category called The Bodies Award and I chose

three winning stories to air on the show today. Bodies stories typically take months to

research and report and

produce and edit and score.

And so I have so much admiration

for these three pairs of producers

who created in just 24 hours audio stories

full of intimacy and surprise and humor and tension and really

exquisite use of sound. To start us off in third place is a piece by Melanie Wong and

Virginia Marshall and it's about a girl named Elizabeth.

The creators wrote to me that we often think of the new normal as a sad sort of theme involving

loss.

But with Elizabeth's new normal there's joy, discovery, and surprise.

...