Beetdown Radio Collective

Here you'll find radio pieces from a group of producers who first collaborated on an affectionate parody of This American Life. The piece was about, among other things, beets.

Update: Beetdown is now podcasting. To subscribe to the Beetcast, paste http://www.lawrencelanahan.com/beetcast.xml into your podcasting software.

BRC production #1: Flowers From the Dead Earth - A short spoof documentary on the "actual social phenomenon" of community gardens that includes every known public radio cliché. Sez Ira Glass of TAL: "I loved this so much...so amazingly funny. I loved especially the guy talking to the plant." Produced by Andrea Appleton, Lawrence Lanahan, Jina Moore, Bree Nordenson, Bruce Wallace, and Daniel Weiss.

BRC production #2: The First Attraction - This submission to the Third Coast International Audio Festival's ShortDocs competition reimagines the myth of Narcissus through the eyes of the north pole of a magnet bar who tragically falls in love with the north pole of another magnet bar. Produced by Lawrence Lanahan and Bruce Wallace.

BRC production #3: Censor's Almanac - BRC fondly recalls an unusual 1985 meeting of the minds (and libidos) between Tipper Gore, Frank Zappa, and Prince.

BRC production #4: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 99 Ways - Another contribution to Third Coast Audio Festival's 99 Ways experiment: Bruce Wallace and Andrea Appleton look back at the Cold War. Scroll down to #77.

Individual radio pieces by Beetdown producers:

Lawrence Lanahan
Follow the Body - What happens after a person donates his body to science? Lawrence Lanahan follows the process from embalming table to medical school to waterfront plot.

Jina Moore
Translating U.N.-ese - The United Nations its own unique culture. At the heart of it is a formal, arcane form of English. Here's the story of that language and one surprising guy who turned it on its head.

Bree Nordenson
Don't Sleep on the Subway - You wake up. It's 4 a.m. You're in a glowing green hallway in an outer borough. You guessed it... you must have fallen asleep on the subway.

Bruce Wallace
The Beast is Made of Air - The 2006 national air guitar finals are in June in New York City. Bruce Wallace reports from the qualifying round.

Daniel Weiss
Life on the Hudson - Just blocks from Broadway, a community of river dwellers struggle to keep their "watery neighborhood" of houseboats afloat despite persistent rocking, raging storms, and limited space.