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.

The Hidden World of Girls
Two New Hours from The Kitchen Sisters and NPR

With Host Tina Fey

The Hidden World of Girls, two new hour-long Specials hosted by Emmy Award-winning writer and actress, Tina Fey. Stories of coming of age, rituals and rites of passage, secret identities—of women who crossed a line, broke a trail, changed the tide. 

Host Tina Fey, star of 30 Rock, author of Bossypants and Saturday Night Live alumna, takes listeners around the world into the secret life of girls—from the dunes of the Sahara to a slumber party in Manhattan, from the dancehalls of Jamaica to a racetrack in Ramallah—and reveals some of her own hidden worlds.  

These two new specials are produced by the Peabody Award-winning Kitchen Sisters, in collaboration with NPR and independent producers from around the world.  Inspired by “The Hidden World of Girls” series heard on Morning Edition and “All Things Considered”, these specials feature the best stories from that series as well as new, never before heard features, interviews and music.  

Lively, sound-rich, evocative, “The Hidden World of Girls” is two hours of stories and more. Stories of girls and the women they become. 

As part of this international collaboration, The Kitchen Sisters opened up The Hidden World of Girls NPR phone line and invited listeners to share their stories of groundbreaking girls and pioneering women. Calls poured in from around the world and these stories and messages thread throughout the hours. Stories in this hour include:

• Horses, Unicorns and Dolphins—a story of girlhood fantasy and aspiration.
• From Afghanistan we enter The Hidden World of Kandahar Girls—girls and young women going to school, working towards careers, standing up to the threats of the Taliban.
• We explore the mysterious universe of women’s bodies in the story, Chicken Pills: The Hidden World of Jamaican Girls where homegrown cosmetic treatments and changing ideals of beauty are part of a national debate going on in the music, in the dancehalls and on the streets.
• Nigerian writer, Chris Abani tells the story of his English-born mother, Daphne Mae Hunt, who enlists him at age 8 to be her translator in rural Nigeria as she goes door-to-door into the villages teaching women the Billings Ovulation Method of birth control.
• In San Francisco, we step inside the secret identity of Theresa Sparks.
• We visit Tiina Urm, a young Estonian environmental activist who spearheaded a one-day clean up of her entire country.
• We meet Amira Al-Sharif from Yemen who came to New York City to document the lives of young American women.
• We go back stage with singer Janelle Monae and hear about her songwriting process.

Major Funding for The Hidden World of Girls comes from The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes a great nation deserves great art. And from listener contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions.

BILLBOARD :59
Incue: We call it the garbage map of Estonia.
Outcue: I’m your host Tina Fey.

NEWS HOLE: 1:00-6:00

SEGMENT A: 12:29
Incue: From The Kitchen Sisters and NPR, Welcome to the Hidden World of Girls.
Outcue: Back in a moment.

BREAK: 19:00-20:00

SEGMENT B (18:59)
Incue: You’re listening to The Hidden World of Girls.
Outcue: Back in a moment with stories from Yemen, the Fillmore and Kingston, Jamaica.

BREAK: 39:00-40:00 

SEGMENT C (18:59)
Incue: NPR’s Hidden World of Girls continues.
Outcue: With The Kitchen Sisters, I’m Tina Fey