Northwest Institute for Social Change: The Blog

Portland: That’s not out of my league at all

On the eve of our audio documentary final deadline (1pm tomorrow, but in all practicality, 10:20am, since we’re taking a tour of city hall that will consume the rest of the morning), and with our documentary choppy-sounding and still a minute and a half too long (which is, believe it or not, a triumph in of itself – we had 20 minutes of interview clips when we started work this morning), I was feeling rather resentful for the early part of today.

“What? We have to talk with the producer of Live Wire! [ local live radio variety show]…What?? we have to go to her house? Urgh, it’s so far away! And I have no cash for the bus …and then we have that city hall tour all day tomorrow??? What are they doing to us, don’t they know we need that time to work?” (I like to think that I sound less whiny and melodramatic in real life.)

I honestly sounded like the quote that my project partner Rachel and I have been trying to edit:

“Gosh I have so much going on, I work how many hours a week, I’m a single mom, I don’t have time for this!!”

It’s funny to look at my opinions of this morning now after having spoken with Kate Sokoloff, co-creator and co-producer of Live Wire! and Courtenay Hameister, associate producer/head writer/host at Kate’s house over in the Northeast. The visit with them turned out to be exactly the opposite of a waste of time. We left her house feeling so inspired by the discussion that we had had about public radio funding problems, how it’s possible to manipulate the system and make artistic pieces about subjects that we ordinarily might feel compromise our values (for example, working with commercials) and work around systematic rules, what are good ways to elicit interesting information from interviewees, etc. As I walked down her steps and gushed, “Wowwww that was sooo goooood!!!!” Rachel turned to me and said, “I never thought I wanted to do this kind of thing, but I really want to do a college radio show! This really motivated me to do something with it.” And I felt the same way. It was so great to get to know these people a little and talk with them about interesting and useful topics, but it also just made me feel like “Wow! I really want to work for them on their show! And now I know them, so maybe someday I will.”

Here’s surrounding context of the quote that Rachel and I have been editing. I look at it now in a completely different light.

“It just might be that they didn’t connect that dot or know that they already had the skills, they just thought maybe because (31:44) ‘Gosh I have so much going on, I work how many hours a week, I’m a single mom, I don’t have time for this…After going to the workshop, they get empowered with (31:58) “Oh, I can do that! That was simple, not out of my league at all. And so, it usually just turns them on and empowers them…”

And…that’s why we’re here.

-Emily