To go, or not to go, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of one’s high school or college reunion, or to sit it out, especially if you were Mr. or Mrs. Nobody.

You might have been a pimply geek then, but now you’re a millionaire dot-commer, and you want to show it allll off — the clothes, the car, the babe. Or, maybe you’ve got better things to do with your evening than spend it with a group of people who wouldn’t give you the time of day a quarter century ago.

For better or worse, the way we were is NOT the way we are. Even for cheerleaders. And you can choose to spend the reunion weekend telling the truth about your failing business ventures, or you can reinvent yourself when you meet up with your former boyfriend, the teacher who flunked you, or the roommate who wouldn’t loan you 50-bucks. What ARE you going to wear?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, and Edith Wagner, Editor in Chief of “Reunions Magazine.”

What Ted Conover discovered working as a Sing Sing prison guard as a Corrections Officer was that the prison wasn’t about correcting anything.

It was about care, custody and control of men in confinement, with care defined down to calling the ER when an inmate was bleeding from a shank wound. “Newjack” is Ted Conover’s tale of a school for violence in which some of the star students are the men in uniform.

Ted Conover is a writer who’d lived in the past with hoboes on trains, and with illegal Mexican immigrants. His mission in a new disguise this time was to see a modern American growth industry from the inside: the prison world of 1.8 million inmates and nearly a quarter-million guards, figures three to four times larger than they were in the early 80s.

Prison as he describes is a pressured experience of emotional chaos, where men are invited to confirm their worst fears about themselves. Guards too.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ted Conover

In Michael Ondaatje’s new novel the characters’ mission is to reconstruct from a skeleton the story of a terrorist murder-on the theory, in the hope, that the truth of one death will let one victim speak for multitudes.

Titled “Anil’s Ghost,” it will remind you a lot of the Ondaatje novel that became the Oscar winning movie, “The English Patient.” We’re in another war-broken world, watching shattered strangers from someplace else do meticulous work, collect their life memories, and fall in love.

We’re hearing again the influence of Ondaatje the poet on Ondaatje the novelist. We’re feeling the flow of painterly and cinematic images as the motive force in his writing; the plot is rather a minor excuse for the prose.

But Anil’s Ghost feels like a deeper, darker, greater effort than “The English Patient,” not least because the time is almost now and the setting, Sri Lanka, was Ondaatje’s first home.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Michael Ondaatje

George Orwell worried about Big Brother, but in the world post-1984, the real worry is little brother – and millions of them.

Credit card companies, banks, supermarkets, video stores, HMO’s, and hackers; they’re the new, all-knowing powers. From online cookies to debit-card swipes our lives are being tracked purchase by purchase and click by click. They’re watching you even when you’re window shopping.

A whole information industry offers up documents about you online: your phone number, property value, previous addresses, even your housemates and neighbor’s names.

If privacy is the unspoken cornerstone of the US Constitution, what’s going on today may be downright un-American. Benjamin Franklin worried famously about privacy: “Three may keep a secret,” he said, “if two of them are dead.”

If he worried about it back then, shouldn’t we, now? Privacy–on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Ellis Smith author of “Ben Franklin’s Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the Internet”, and Simpson Garfinkel, author of “Database Nation.”

Audra McDonald can’t set foot on stage, it seems, without someone handing her a Tony Award.

In 1994 she won the first of her three Tony’s for her role as Carrie Pipperedge in “Carousel” – a “colorblind” casting coup – and she’s just been nominated for her fourth for her performance in “Marie Christine,” a musical written expressly for her.

McDonald’s the youngest performer ever to win so many. Not so surprising to her perhaps, since as a child she practiced her Tony acceptance speeches in the bathroom.

She’s been compared to Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and to Ethel Merman – and is a Broadway star who inspires writers in much the same way Mary Martin once did.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Audra McDonald

Mothers who cook know how to do at least fifty things with a can of tuna.

They’re always there with the straight talk when a 40 year old child phones home for advice on how to roast a leg of lamb. Years of cooking stains tenderize the index cards with her handwritten recipes for cabbage soup and manicotti. One whiff of Mom’s beef stew, and you’re tied again to her apron strings.

The day she told you how to make green tomato pickle, she told you how her mother used to make it. And then she told you about the first time she disagreed with her mother. A Mother’s recipe is more than a sum of its ingredients.

It’s a time capsule of family stories, and pots and pans and ways of cutting and mixing that makes the gumbo taste just right. So, after you’ve had your fill of braised rattlesnake infused with a mango sauce and garnished with albino truffles, there’s always Mom’s dependable, delectable meatloaf and chicken liver.

Cooking with Mom, in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Grace Young, food editor at “Home” magazine, and author of “The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen: Classic Family Recipes for Celebration and Healing,” Teresa Barrenechea, author of “The Basque Table” and proprietor of the restaurant “Marichu” in New York City, and food writer and cook Lora Brody, author of “Cooking with Memories.”

After hearing young violinist Yehudi Menuhin’s Berlin debut, Albert Einstein exclaimed, “there is a God in Heaven!” What he heard was transcendent, more that the action of a bow across strings producing a quality sound.

A good performer knows more than the score a strong player relates physically and emotionally to the demands of his instrument. Violin lessons can go beyond music theory if they begin with a teacher who inspires confidence, sensitivity and precision.

One such teacher is Eric Rosenblith who’s been guiding conservatory players through double stops and false harmonics for fifty years. “I breathe, therefore I teach,” he says.

In his studio that means every student is an individual, there’s no room for rote learning, and technical wizardry must be tempered by self-expression. There’s more than a four-octave scale at play here.

Life Lessons from the violin, in this show.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Eric Rosenblith

A hundred books about Marilyn Monroe and uncounted photos don’t seem to have exhausted the questions about the power or the meaning of the iconic blond actress.

Groucho Marx saw her as “Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep all rolled into one.” No fool herself, Monroe once wrote:

“Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl people expect to find dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.”

We will never have enough of the story, Daphne Merkin wrote, because we “never tire of hearing about the native sadness behind the construction of glamour.”

This is what the tireless novelist Joyce Carol Oates set out to understand: not the icon we saw but the soul peering out of it: the desperate, hopeful cast-off child; who came to look like sex but seemed oblivious to it; who thought love would give her safety, and got neither.

Joyce Carol Oates and “Blonde” – in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Joyce Carol Oates

Peter Senge is a rock star among management consultants; he’s the original change agent.

Ten years ago his mega selling book “The Fifth Discipline” became a bible for business and launched a worldwide movement promoting humane workplaces, companies built around learning and the language of change.

Does your organization have a learning disability Peter Senge was famous for asking. Senge has modified his corporate crusade for the new century and for those crusaders who don’t like change as much as Senge does. His newest manifesto “The Dance of Change” is a distillation of what he’s learned about learning.

He’s thinking of himself as a garderner to big corporations nowadays. Companies aren’t machines, separate from nature he says, they’re living organisms connected to nature. The original Agent of Change – Peter Senge – in this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Peter Senge

Eric Lander; Completing the Human Genome Map

Guests: