Also this issue: Smoke and Mirrors -Howard Altman School Dreams Letters to the Editor Letters to the Editor

July 12-18, 2002

loose canon

One-Minute Parables

by Bruce Schimmel

Stick a microphone in anyone’s face, ask about a complex issue and even the brightest subject will sound a little silly -- especially if the response is trimmed to a sound bite. Imagine, then, how foolish someone might sound if asked to talk for a minute about something as nuanced as their personal philosophy of life.

Yet that is what I have been doing for several months, and the results have been gratifying to my subjects and beautiful to behold. That’s because we cheat.

The project is called Life on Delmarva, a series of 1-minute audio portraits of people who live on that vast and still rural peninsula south of Wilmington, Del. Subjects are asked to talk about something important in their lives -- an interest, a vocation, an aspiration. By January, we should have a hundred such audio portraits, which will be broadcast on public radio every hour.

At 9 a.m. you might hear about a clock maker who says that he will live on for hundreds of years through the life he gives to the old clocks he repairs. By the end of his piece, you realize how this is true. (www.schimmel.com/clocker60s.mp3)

At 10 o’clock, an old woman says she is a grandma to 700 children. Sister Rosa, a Carmelite nun, works with pregnant Hispanic women and their children. She cannot imagine why she is so loved. But you do, because love like hers is invisible to those who love so selflessly. (www.schimmel.com/sisterrosa.mp3)

The next hour, there’s Stella, who cares for over 260 cats. A little wacky? Perhaps. But listen carefully to what she says, and within her philosophy, what she does is very human and humane. And actually reasonable. (www.schimmel.com/cattery60s.mp3)

In the world of news, these pieces are like vox populi sidebars -- opinions from the man in the street -- or like lifestyle pieces, features about people who are either strange or vaguely heroic.

But these little works are not news. They are meant to be heard many times, over a period of several months, and, like a poem, must stand up to repeated listenings.

Compressed into a single minute, the best of these stories echo like parables.

To achieve this, my subjects and I discuss, script, rehearse, cut and rearrange until they’ve distilled their devotions into a cogent philosophy.

If this were journalism, we would be cheating. But this isn’t journalism. And is it really cheating if the listener recognizes the craft involved? After all, I am only furnishing my subjects with the kind of media advice that is ordinarily available to all kinds of public figures.

Only here, with a little help, ordinary people with deep passions reveal that they have something significant to say.