Click the video link above or go to the PocketBear YouTube page to set a reminder (sign in to your YouTube/Google account and click “set reminder” on video) to watch the YouTube premiere of BARZINI TO THE RESCUE, my latest hybrid collaboration with PocketBear productions.

BARZINI TO THE RESCUE goes live on YouTube on Friday 14th August at 8pm (Eastern Time).

I began “Barzini” as an antidote. I’d just finished “Four Stories From the Quiet,” a first-person narrative about a disturbed child, abandoned by death and disease. I wanted a palate-cleanser. So I resurrected a family from an earlier story, “Uncle Louis.”  For reasons now lost to me, I had “killed” Louis’s parents  (Ev and Myrt, the retired vaudeville team Bolo and Yolanda) in a car crash before the start of that story. Eager not to waste such potentially wonderful characters, I decided a prequel was in order. Same Mom and Dad, same narrator son (but back then a wise child of six). I remember thinking, “This will be fun to write.” And it was, at first: San Francisco’s Sutro Baths, the island city of Alameda, Ev and Myrt and their vaudeville routines. Many, many, many drafts and years later (I kept losing the narrator’s voice; almost lost a friend who gave me some excellent critical advice at which I took umbrage), the story helped get me my first grant. Some years later, it was published in the journal Lindenwood Review.

And now, here it is, alive, thanks to PocketBear. 

We decided—thanks Covid-19 Pandemic—to leave it as a story being read aloud, with actors as characters. Not a podcast, not a radio drama, but rather a "Story-Theatre-Hybrid" for our time. The actors worked remotely: Minnesota, New Jersey, New York City’s neighborhoods of Chelsea, Mid-town West, Mid-town East, and Greenwich Village, each of us using whatever equipment was available to each. 

Barzini to the Rescue is a story of what happens when soaring imagination rubs up against the hard facts of family existence. We hope you enjoy the journey. 

ALSO, a NEW PocketBear Radio Play is NOW LIVE on YouTube.

Click Here to Listen to Noggin and Spoon
Performed by Robert Moulthrop and Kate Whitney.

Noggin and Spoon is the latest "piece" of OnGoing, a PocketBear radio series.