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Selected Shorts

Too Hot for Radio: Jen Spyra "The Ballad of Bagel Rat"

Selected Shorts

Symphony Space

Arts, Fiction, Books, Society & Culture

4.42.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Actor Busy Phillips reads a funny fable about the razor thin line between good attention and bad attention, as told by a rat.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Well, hello, Hotheads, and welcome to another episode of Too Hot for Radio.

0:07.3

This is your host, a parin and charla.

0:10.2

And if you know our show, you know we faithfully deliver the naughty short stories we wouldn't dare air on public radio.

0:18.4

At Too Hot, we pride ourselves on being simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow.

0:24.9

Average it out and the show is one steady middlebrow, like a Frida Kahlo portrait.

0:30.7

Or that reliable caterpillar of forehead fuzz, Neanderthals rocked back in the day.

0:36.6

Yes, yes, Neanderthals rocked. I see what I did there.

0:41.5

Now, I will smoothly segue back to two other extremes, fame and infamy. From a distance, these things

0:50.9

seem pretty different, but when you look more closely, fame and infamy are really

0:56.5

two sides of the same coin. If fame is making billions, infamy is stealing billions. Fame, playing

1:04.8

cops and movies. Infamy, impersonating police officers. Fame being pretty. Infamy, being pretty terrible. You get it.

1:16.5

And the difference between good attention and bad attention is sometimes razor thin.

1:22.8

Say you're trying to achieve your 15 minutes of fame as promised by Andy Warhol back in the 60s.

1:29.3

You may end up being asked to holler your catchphrase on command everywhere you go for the

1:35.1

rest of your life. Good or bad attention, it's attention, and that's what a lot of us want.

1:42.9

All of this brings us to today's story, which is about distinguished vermin.

1:48.5

It's about finding a schick and exploiting it.

1:52.0

It's about love, loss, and vomit.

1:55.6

I'm going to assume that some of you have heard of pizza rat

1:59.0

and the image of a grizzled rodent dragging an

2:01.5

entire New York slice down some subway stairs pops right to mind? If you don't know it,

2:07.5

Google Pizza Rat before you listen to this story and join the rest of us in our admiration and terror.

...

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