Piece Description

Portrait of a guy who picks up dead animals for a living for the DC Dept of Sanitation.

This was first produced in 1989, for Weekend All Things Considered. It ran on This American Life in 1997.

I use it often in reporter seminars because it was a quick-turnaround feature (5 hours of reporting; 2 days to write and produce) that still has a lot of personality. It's funny at the beginning and sort of wistful at the end, though saying that doesn't capture it either. It's just one of those lucky stories with lots of surprising little moments. In reporter seminars, I always point out how, like any good feature story or interview, at some point someone's got to say something big and universal about what's happened in the story. This one does it in the easiest way possible: after all the action, there's 2 1/2 minutes of the guy and me just talking about what the hell it all means. Many reporters aren't sure exactly how to make a scene work on radio, and this story uses every trick in the book: I narrate a lot of the scenes ON SITE, while gathering the tape (like the first scene, where I explain, while running across a highway, that we're running across a highway). There are also incredibly short scenes, sometimes as short as one sentence of setup script and one line of tape. Also, there are lots of tape-to-tape transitions and unusual transitions from one scene to the next. It's a good story to illustrate all the ways to avoid the rut of doing acts&trax&acts&trax, over and over. It's entirely airworthy still, I think. Fun to listen to. Gets laughs. It's one of my favorite stories, out of everything I've produced in over twenty years.