Tuesday, April 11, 2006

A Listener's Description of the Show

Radio Wednesday takes you inside daily life, gives you a glimpse of how two people with a small child and a few of their friends navigate the everyday to often stunning and revelatory effect. In conversation, as they do chores, in telephone calls, while driving in the car, we hear and feel the rhythm of the ordinary and witness how issues of faith, trust, behavior, expectation, courage, sadness, confusion, and longing give way to anger, questioning, seeking, resolving, and ultimately the exploration of a gentler paradigm for resolving conflict, fear, and pain.

By sharing the ordinary and observing where it takes them, the show uncovers our hopes, our fears, our confusions and the issues that block us from achieving peace, both within ourselves and in the world at large. In the process of holding a mirror (and a microphone) up to human interaction, Radio Wednesday manages to peer beneath the surface of our lives, gaining a fresh perspective as it peels away surfaces. This exercise in "being here, and being heard" leads to sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, sometimes painful, but always heartfelt revelations and insights. The show manages to impart a powerful message, one that advocates caring about one another, and that validates the ongoing struggle to heal and to connect.

This window on real people allows us to empathize, to understand how alike we all are. It illustrates how it is possible to face our pain, our confusion, our hurts and our fears and take steps toward resolving, rather than perpetuating conflicts. In it's search for meaning and understanding the show unites us in a supportive effort to gently seek answers and resolutions in a loving and healing way. Yet, we are given the opportunity to accept difficult realities as well. Life can be hard, not all issues are easily resolved. The show illustrates the struggle to come to grips with difficulties and seemingly insurmountable obstacles using the tools at our disposal, sometimes with humor, other times with anger or frustration. Whether we dissolve into tears, or shut ourselves down, whether we mask pain with laughter, lash out at ourselves or others, even whether we believe or not there is always a healing path to take.

Always seeking the loving solution, the non-violent way, even on the violent path, the show demonstrates (shows us rather than tells us) how to reach out, for help. How to be helpful to others. How to facilitate personal growth, and aspire to a happier existence. The format of the show is simplicity itself. Amy, her husband Ken, and their daughter Shuggie, go about their daily lives, eating, driving in the car, talking on the telephone, gurgling at one another, discovering one another, exploring the world around them, laughing, arguing, deciding what to do, asking questions, and in general feeling the range of human emotions, confusions, connections and disconnections as they crop up in daily life.

In an attempt to live loving, supportive, caring lives, and to contribute to the common good, the Radio Wednesday cast of characters open the doors to their lives and their hearts, as they attempt to find a path to personal and communal peace of mind. Ironically the show, in it's view of daily life, makes clear that, in a lot of ways we don't readily see, our daily lives are already much more blissful than we realize. The journey is as important as the destination. Radio Wednesday is most satisfying in it's depiction of a surprisingly blissful daily life carried out in the midst of what often amounts to chaos and confusion. The listener goes along for a deceptively simple yet powerful journey that leaves no one behind as it attempts to navigate, nurture and embrace the individual. In the process, the hope is to create a loving collective through mutual revelation, growth, transcendence, and understanding.

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