New Updates! Now with special bonus audio treat!

Grandma Doris Smith Kelly.

I am a proud Sonic Soiree groupie. "A Sonic Soiree is a potluck of the edible and audible, occurring monthly in living rooms throughout Greater Boston. We are a community of radio producers, sound artists and collaborators who come together to talk, eat, listen and then talk some more." I love that description written by Emily Corwin, a Sonic Soiree pal and PRX employee. Essentially, a bunch of audio types (a la yours truly) gather together each month to eat interesting food and listen to interesting audio work. Some people bring their own work in, some bring stuff they stumbled upon. 

One of the founding fathers (Ari Daniel Shapiro) asked if someone would make a website for our audio crew. I enthusiastically stepped up to the plate and created the following: www.SonicSoiree.com. I based it off my own website (which is very apparent if you're familiar with this ol' thing), with a few slight changes. Like the Who We Are page, for instance. I just recently put out the call for bios, so there are still many to be posted (our last Sonic Soiree was attended by nineteen locals). I'm very proud of how supportive this producers' circle is... in the relatively short time I've been involved (four months or so), I have witnessed all sorts of handy connections being made. This sort of thing seems key for us creatives.

I have had a project waiting not-so-patiently in my production queue for a few months now. I KNOW, I KNOW!!!! Nothing should ever be on the back burner that long. Scold me. Maybe it will help. I don't know why, but I have had zero motivation to work on it. But with the drop-dead-deadline approaching (next week!!), I must force myself to complete it. The plan is to polish it off on Saturday and put it in my Dropbox so it can be immediately downloaded. The project: a little over a dozen audio drops for a Compassionate Friends presentation. When my radical little niece died, my sister joined a Compassionate Friends support group. She is giving a presentation to her local chapter on the book Hello From Heaven. My sister selected various vignettes from each chapter and asked me to create audio companions to the stories. I'll post a bit of whatever I come up with. 

And now for the bonus audio treat! My father is coming upon all this amazing audio from my grandmother Doris. Grandmother Doris died when my Dad was fourteen. I have always had a bit of an obsession with her and I speculate on how life would be different had she lived. One of the audio bits I received was a long distance phone call from my Smith great-grandparents (i.e. Doris's parents) to the childhood home of my father in 1965. The entire call is fabulous, but one of the most fascinating things is HOW FREAKING LONG it takes to connect the two parties: FIVE MINUTES. So many operators, so many clarifications of who the Smiths are calling, etc. Fabulous! So, if you ever wanted to know what making a call to a home only a few states away was like in the '60s... check it out below.  

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