Meet eighteen-year-old Pablo who parks cars. His asphalt jungle of a parking lot could be in the Big Apple or the City of Angels. That it happens to be in the city of the broad shoulders, Chi Town, emphasizes the hog-butcher-for-the-world ambience of this gritty drop-in. In our Declaration of Independence the words "all men are created equal" refer to an ideal democracy. Everything that separates Pablo from his patrons who drive Jaguars and BMWs defines the huge inequalities between the working and middle classes in our good old U S of A.

Public radio listeners know this. But the narrator Pablo, with the faintest Latino lilt to his voice, drives this point home (all puns intended). In his glass-case booth he rummages for the right Acura car key among a bunch of look-alikes, scurries to find four parking spaces when there are only three available, and encounters a car owner who announces, "I am going to yoga now, actually. Thank you very much indeed."

If ever there were a street-corner monologue about what E.M. Forster famously described as our need to "only connect," this piece, produced by the gently sardonic young man Pablo Ponce for Curie Youth Radio, wins the prize. Pablo is as cut off from his car owners as Cabrini-Green is from the Gold Coast. Yet when he finally announces, "I hold their [his customers'] keys," he is speaking symbolically about how "key" his job is, as well as "opening up" and "connecting" with strangers. Despite a sound track nattering on and off like crickets in the background, this piece deserves a wide audience, especially now that we're double-parked in 2007, looking for ways of unlocking new doors.