In a recent “Family Circus” cartoon, Dolly gives her little brother a history lesson: “Before TV, people got sound from radio, but they had to think up their own pictures.” Perhaps because of TV, today, almost everything comes with pictures, even if it’s just the text of some routine talk projected on the screen as a PowerPoint.
But I like to think that the omnipresence of pictures you see hasn’t diminished the power of the pictures you think up. I remember my eightyear- old self sitting in bed with my paper dolls, spellbound in the sinister aura of a shadowy garden teeming with deadly plants. Years later, I read Hawthorne’s short story and realized I’d heard a radio dramatization of “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” I still remember the terror those distant voices brought me.
Radio brought a whole range of other experiences in those days, including comedy, detective stories and, of course, westerns. Of those, my favorite was “Bobby Benson and the B Bar B Riders.” The riders were a galloping collection of stereotypes, and the adventures were tame and predictable. But the hero was a kid like me, and that made all the difference.
Over the years, KZSM has brought you pictures to think up. In 2020 and 2021, Garrett Buss, Mitchell Oden and other Texas State Theater graduates created a series of improvisational radio dramas offering new twists on traditional genres like noir detective stories and westerns. On “Roscoe Taylor: The Tallassee Tween,” the hero and his talking horse Checkers Justice wandered through a landscape Bobby Benson would not have recognized, righting wrongs and chasing villains.
“Since it’s an audio production, we can do anything,” Garrett Buss (Roscoe) reflected. “We can make horses talk; we can make a tumbleweed 300 feet tall plug up a tornado. We give the sound effects, but the rest of it is all up to your imagination.”
More recently, our radio dramas have been limited to occasional live readings on “Bookmarked.” Every Christmas, I coerce KZSM family and friends into reading an adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.” This Tuesday, March 25, at 4 p.m., we’ll present a live reading of Susan Glaspell’s 1916 feminist murder mystery “Trifles.” We’ll help you think up a picture of a cold Iowa farmhouse where a man lies dead upstairs and two women find the truth amid quilt pieces and broken jars. Tune in to find out what really happened!
