Liner Notes:

Women’s Football: Tamara Keith
Women across the country are smashing it up on professional football teams. It may not be as glamorous or popular as Monday night men’s football, but the women playing it are not complaining.

Punkin Chunkin: Matt McCleskey
At the World Championship Punkin Chunkin in rural Delaware, people build elaborate machines to make pumpkins fly – kind of like a sport and a science fair and Thanksgiving all rolled into one.

Pigeon Racing: Caitlyn Kim
When you think extreme, pigeon racing is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. But for the birds who fly hundreds of miles at speeds up to 50 miles per hour, it’s totally extreme. Just don’t call them rats with wings.

Rodeo: Emelie Gunnison
Unfortunately, in extreme sports, there’s always a certain amount of danger involved. Emelie Gunnison has this profile of a participant in one of the riskier sports – bull riding.

Emelie Gunnison, Tamara Keith and Mia Lobel.

Liner Notes:

Under God: Dave Gilson
Sacramento resident Mike Newdow to the pledge of allegiance to court because he thought it was wrong for his daughter to have to say “under God” in school. Earlier this year a court ruled in his favor and the calls started pouring in. Dave Gilson brings us a sampling of the messages left on his answering machine.

Small Talk: Emily Mudd
Emily Mudd tells the story of a suitor who skipped the small talk and decided to lay it ALL out – in a message on her cell phone.

Child Star: Tamara Keith
B-Side’s Tamara Keith was a child actress, Hollywood style. She was 6 months old when she got her first job modeling for a department store ad, and by the time she was 8, she’d been in more than 30 magazine ads and a TV commercial that aired during the Superbowl. There’s really no hiding that kind of exposure.

Everything Real Bitter: Emelie Gunnison
B-Side’s Emelie Gunnison recently dug up a tape labeled “Funny Stuff, Private, Keep Out” from her desk drawer, and now, it hits the airwaves.

This was a magazine ad for the Speak and Say.

Tamara is the baby on the right, in this billboard for the California Milk Board.

Emelie Gunnison reporting live.

Liner Notes

Family Minivan: Tamara Keith
Tamara Keith has the story of one family trying to make the best of a bad commute by turning car time into quality time.

Bad motor scooter. Peter Crimmins with his Vespa.

Meter Maid: Mia Lobel
On Mia’s search to understand why bad tickets happen to good people, she found Blanca Montoya who showed her what its like to be a much reviled meter maid.

Scooter Shopping: Peter Crimmins
For Peter Crimmins finding a method of transportation was a lesson in self-discovery.

Amy the Hearse Queen: Lyssa Mudd
Amy Shanafeldt drives her hearse everywhere – to the mall, to the grocery store, to the doctor. Hearses are her life.

Liner Notes

O Fallon, Illinois: Judson True
Re porter Judson True recently went back to his suburban origins in O’Fallon, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. When he got there, he found his hometown sprouting subdivisions the way it used to grow corn.

Group Home Life: Sarah Richardson
For a lot of people, home isn’t as easily defined as that house on the corner of Main Street and First. It’s hard to figure out exactly what home is when you don’t stay in any one place for more than a few months or even a few weeks. 16-year-old essayist Sarah Richardson doesn’t really have a place she can call home.

Casas San Miguel: Tamara Keith
In the Central California city of Fresno, some unlikely homeowners are experiencing that feeling for the first time. As B-side’s Tamara Keith reports, 32 immigrant farm worker families from an isolated Mexican village just moved in to brand new homes built just for them.

Remembering: Noam Birnbaum
B-side’s Noam Birnbaum grew up just blocks away from the World Trade Center, and though he has since moved away, he still feels a deep connection with the place. In trying to sort out the events of last fall, Noam took his mother on a walk through his old neighborhood to ask some hard questions about her past. But their conversation about remembering quickly turned into one about forgetting.

This is just a picture of a cute dog, because a show about pets should be accompanied by a picture of a cute dog.

This show originally aired in June 2002.  The theme was “pets” though in reality this should have been called the “dead pets” show.  It includes some B-Side classics and some really touching stories about pets – how they’re loved and how they’re lost.

Liner Notes:

Pet Cemetery: Lyssa Mudd
There are those who flush Goldie the goldfish down the toilet, and those who bury Fido the mutt under a shrub in the backyard without a marker. Others opt for pet cemeteries. For generations, San Franciscans have been burying their beloved family pets in a small, weedy plot at the Presidio, the city’s old army base.  B-Side’s Lyssa Mudd brings us this tour.

Losing Quincy: Emelie Gunnison
What happens when a pet runs away – or is lost without a trace, with no chance for a final goodbye.  B-Side’s Emelie Gunnison knows this experience all too well.

Pet Loss Hotline: Tamara Keith
When a pet dies, the grief can be just as extreme as with loss of a human relative.  As B-Side’s Tamara Keith found out, for people having trouble dealing with those emotions, help is just a phone call away.

Pet Sitting: Dave Gilson
There’s this theory that if people spend enough time with their pets they actually start to resemble their animals – or is it the other way around? Whichever it is, it can be amusing – and sometimes disturbing – to see how much pet owners have in common with their charges. B-Side commentator Dave Gilson recalls a pet-sitting job that revealed the stranger side of this symbiotic relationship.

Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: Mia Lobel
What if your pet escaped, found others of its kind, bred, and formed a whole new colony of wild animals? Believe it or not, it’s happened before, and Mark Bittner of San Francisco has proof.  Host Mia Lobel has his story.

Liner Notes

Parking Meters: Tamara Keith
Anyone who’s parked in Berkeley has seen them – meters flashing fail, fail, fail. A recent study found that about 80 percent of these failing meters aren’t broken, but jammed, by vandals.

Mr. Fix it Dad: Mia Lobel
Mia’s dad is one of those amazing people who can fix anything.  She went home to New York over the holidays to talk with him about his obsession with tinkering.

Curly Hair: Claudine Zap
Essayist Claudine Zap recently went to the salon for a trim but she got much more than she’d bargained for.

Free Khalistan: Lyssa Mudd
In India, the struggle for Khalistan has all but petered out. But in the Untied States — and here in the East Bay — this revolutionary movement is alive and well.

Esperanto: Dave Gilson
Esperanto is an artificial language that combines pieces of Spanish, French, Italian and a few other languages into a single language designed to promote world peace. The only problem is that it never really caught on.

Speed Dating: Gavin Tachibana
Looking for love in a hurry?  Speed dating might just be the answer.

Liner Notes

The Science of Memory: Mia Lobel
We all know we have memories, but how much do we really understand about how they work? B-side’s Mia Lobel talked with neuroscientists who are trying unravel the tricky science of memory.

Disney Memories: Amy Scott
What we remember can be real or imaginary – or somewhere in between. For B-side’s Amy Scott, reality and imagination come together in a certain place.

Alzheimer’s: Lyssa Mudd
If memories make us who we are, then what happens when people start to forget? Alzheimer’s disease is reaching epidemic proportions. And it doesn’t just affect the people who have it.

Writing on the Wall: Sarah Neal
Objects like old letters and t-shirts have an uncanny ability to trigger our memories. Commentator Sarah Neal tells us how certain objects – either kept or left behind – help her keep her connection to the past.

Adonistu and the Rejectoids: Dave Gilson
We’ve all done things we’d rather forget – or at least keep hidden from public scrutiny. But as B-Side’s Dave Gilson found out, when part of your past is captured on tape, there’s no escaping it.

Liner Notes
Chris and Caitlyn: Mia Lobel
A fairy tale ending isn’t something that any of the players in this story would have predicted.

Self Love: Noam Birnbaum
Guest commentator Noam Birnbaum takes a trip to Good Vibrations in Berkeley.

Getting Hitched: Claudine Zap
Claudine Zap just got engaged after a nearly decade-long courtship. She recently sat down with her friend Lisa Miya-Jervis who is an expert on getting hitched.

Speed Dating: Gavin Tachibana
Essayist Gavid Tachibana gives a review of speed dating.

Liner Notes:
Baby Carrots: Tamara Keith
They’re sweet, they’re crunchy, and they come conveniently packaged and ready to eat at any supermarket – but have you even thought about where baby carrots come from?

Small Sailors: Katy Shrout
Katy Shrout spents a lot of time with the grade school crowd as part of her job working for the Age of Sail program at Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco. She introduces us to a crew of small sailors.

Shopping Small: Claudine Zap
B-side essayist, Claudine Zap, found a simple solution to her little size problem and went from a size two to a size 12 without gaining an ounce. All she had to do was start shopping in the kids section.

Preemie Ward: Emelie Gunnison
Emelie Gunnison visited the preemie ward at Oakland Children’s Hospital with one of its many volunteers.

The Moss Brothers.

Rock Stars: Dave Gilson
B-side crew member Dave Gilson met some local musicians who are well on their way to hitting it big. The Moss Brothers have a combined age of twenty-nine and they’ve already appeared on MTV and jammed with members of Metallica. Please note, this story originally aired in 2002, so these kids are pretty much all grown up now.  

Here are some brief descriptions of the proposed shows.

Success and Failure: This suggestion comes from Claudine who says “How about goals — success and failure? Oversimplified, but I’m thinking of having goals and keeping them. Or failing spectacularly.  Maybe I’m thinking about this as I’m about to embark on my first half marathon. Maybe it’s thinking about our young president raking in awards like the Nobel Peace Prize, making all of us look bad, or at least very unaccomplished. I think this could work from personal to global.”

Awkward Moments: From Courtney: We all have them.  Like that time at dinner at a friend’s house when her dad’s chair just collapsed right under him.  There’s no way to make that not awkward, but laughing hysterically probably wasn’t the right response either.  What about running into an ex, and then being forced to have a long painful conversation?

Rules to Live By: Also from Courtney: Friends with rules to determine whether a guy is a jerk by the second date.  Guys who have their own special rules of poker.  The bible, the 630 Jewish mitzvah’s.  Rules that are never followed.  Unspoken rules that are always followed.

Roadblocks and Milestones: Ekene says “This a show could explore themes like the public works projects funded by stimulus dollars (both successful and otherwise). It could be a show that features little-traveled roads with unique markers alongside narratives of major turning points and setbacks in the progress of world or US History (i.e. the fall of the Berlin Wall), or groups and individuals fighting for a common cause. It could also feature individuals who have carved out a particular place for themselves in contemporary culture or in recent history.”

Run Ins With the Law: From Rob: “Anything from getting pulled over for a ticket to having to deal with someone in court, to suing someone, from unexpected lawyers, to quirky judges to police academies or lawmakers in DC. ”

Childhood Dreams (or maybe more generally Dreaming): From Kristin: This could be a show about many things, like:
- the way we all had them, about what we’d be when we grew up for example, what they say about us, how they metamorphose, or how we end up so far from what we once wanted so fervently
- how we value kids’ dreams, encourage them so much and then require adults to be more practical
- the differences between poor kids’ and rich kids’ dreams – what you see as possible is circumscribed by your surroundings
- some interesting psychological research being done now about how to help kids reduce and handle their nightmares

Corbb brings a couple of ideas:
Search and discovery – spouses, treasures, jobs, college majors, opportunities…
Dust yourself off, try again? – the process of starting over.

Please take the poll at the top of this page and then tell us why you like the theme you’ve picked and suggest possible stories by leaving a comment.