In celebrating the official last week of 2011, State of the Re:Union’s staff members share their five favorite episodes, stories or moments found in the SOTRU’s 2011 seasons. (Click here for a SOTRU reference guide, or just to hear your favorites again.)

Sacramento Episode: All Hands On Deck

 The ever-awesome, awe-inspiring and talented Brie Burge keeps SOTRU on track and things running smoothly as SOTRU’s business manager, info hub and multimedia producer. Brie gave us not only her fab five, but what made them endearing to her: 

Las Vegas - Gave me a different look at the Vegas most of us know.
Birmingham –  Al’s writing is amazing in this episode, giving us a real look at race.
The Bronx - People that don’t give up and work hard to make their neighborhood a better place (Hetty Fox and Jahlove)
MS Gulf Coast - Gives us a picture of the long-lasting effects of the oil spill, after the national media has packed up and left town.
Sacramento – The Kings story is my absolute favorite of the entire season. Also love the Winter Sanctuary/homeless pedicures story.

One of SOTRU’s producers extraordinaire is the incredibly fantastic Tina Antolini. She helped create not only some awesome episodes, but Tina contributed posts and updates on some of the people, places and stories explored in the episodes. Anyone who can make pigs brain appealing - all right, maybe she sold me more on the pots de creme -  has to be phenomenal. (You can find out more from the Cleveland episode.)

Las Vegas Episode: Tina Antolini working on the Las Vegas episode

 Tina’s fab five are:

Las Vegas
Utica, NY
Birmingham
The Bronx
Miami

We will be sharing some fan favorites on the last Friday in 2011!  (That’s in three days, just in case anyone has lost track due to early celebration.) Use the box below to tell us your fab five. If you would like to tell us what makes ‘em special to you, we would love to share. Cheers!

One of State of the Re:Union’s very own producers, Tina Antolini, gives a peek of behind the scenes action you’ll hear about in our newest installment of the fall season episodes, just click to listen: Cleveland, OH: Entrepreneurs at Work.

I have an exercise for you. If you were trying to describe what Cleveland, Ohio, tastes like, what would you say? Have any idea where to start? Maybe those of you familiar with the Polish or Italian heritage in the city might inch towards pierogi or salami territory. But, after a week of reporting there for SOTRU’s episode, I have a whole other idea of what Cleveland tastes like, and I can say with 100 % certainty, it is nothing like I’d imagined. Try this: buttered. popcorn. pots. de. crème.

The last of Greenhouse Tavern's Buttered Popcorn Pots de Creme.

This was the capstone to the kind of meal everyone should have when they go to a new city, a meal of abundant revelations … One that showcases the bounty of the region, but in a way that’s never show-offy. Such is the meal SOTRU host, Al Letson, and I had at Greenhouse Tavern in downtown Cleveland. Greenhouse Tavern is the baby of chef Jonathon Sawyer, a Cleveland native who spent years in the NYC kitchens of famous chefs, only to come back home when his kids were born and open Ohio’s first certified green restaurant. At the Tavern, that doesn’t just mean highly efficient low flow toilets and a compost pile out back (though they have those), it means efficiency in how animals are used, and sustainability in how ingredients are sourced. It was no accident that nearly every dish we tried featured pork in some form or another; when you’ve got a whole local pig to butcher on a regular basis, you better get creative in how to use it (one staff member told me you end up with 20 to 30 pounds of pure fat each time. And that can only mean… lots and lots of sausage.).

The ingenuity with which those pigs are used is what impressed me: pig tongue dolmas, for example. Greenhouse Tavern has a whole roasted pig’s head on the menu, but they have to remove the tongue, because it cooks more quicky than the rest of it. Hence the dolmas, which are not recognizable as anything even slightly resembling a tongue. Instead, they just taste like very moist minced pork, mixed with raisins and spices, and wrapped in romaine leaves that have been lightly pickled. Another example: the appetizer that I might champion as one of the best bar snacks ever: pork cracklins tossed with crisp fried hominy, pickled red onions, lime juice and cilantro. Porky, crunchy, and pickley, all at once.

The Tavern even has a daily changing menu item called “the fifth quarter,” which is a play on the butchering technique that divides an animal into four quarters, and whatever extra falls out—the intestines, the brain, what have you—well, that’s the fifth quarter. The night we were there it was rabbit spanikopita, and, let me tell you, if that’s produced from leftovers, we should all be so lucky to scraps lying around.

But back to the dish that has indelibly stamped itself into my memory of Cleveland. The story behind the buttered popcorn pots de crème is that they emerged out a of a quasi-joke one night. Greenhouse Tavern’s pastry chef, Matt Danko, saw a bag of stale popcorn in the restaurant, and said offhand that they should make a caramel corn flavored custard. The chef told him to go for it, and then he turned out not to be kidding. Matt makes the pots de crème by whipping up a batch of popcorn and then infusing cream with it, turning that into custard, and adding a topping of caramel and sprinkle of sea salt. What you get is what caramel popcorn would be if it had been transported into some sort of ethereal realm. Light, evoking the best buttery popcorn you’ve ever had, but with the dark “roastiness” of caramel and spike of salt. If this is what Cleveland tastes like, it tastes damn good.

The New York Times published an article yesterday titled, “As the Mountaintops Fall, a Coal Town Vanishes.” It discusses the devastating effects of mountain top removal mining, in this case, on Lindytown, West Virginia. In our 2010 Fall Season, we visited Lindytown for the Appalachia Rising episode and discussed in great detail the toll that the town, and the surrounding area, had taken and continues to take as a result of mountain top removal mining.

The thing that really stood out to us at SOTRU, was learning of the passing of Lawrence Richmond who so graciously invited us into his home and spoke to us during the recording of the episode. Rest in peace Lawrence and our deepest sympathies to the Richmond family.

Radio Producer Tina Antolini’s post from October of 2010, about her time in Appalachia seemed appropriate to share upon hearing this news:

Abandoned Home in Lindytown, WV

We all know what it’s like to be homesick—that bittersweet pang of longing for a place so familiar it feels part of us. Estranged from it, at certain moments it seems almost as if we are estranged from ourselves. But what’s it like to feel homesick when you’ve never left home? When, instead, your home has changed around you? (more…)

State of the Re:Union’s creator, host and co-executive producer, Al Letson, is currently performing his one-man show, Summer in Sanctuary off-Broadway at the Abingdon Theatre. We are extremely excited to share some of the early reviews of the production.

You can buy tickets and find out more about the show at the official SIS website and keep up with news and updates at the official SIS Facebook page.

Show Business Weekly Review:

In addition to being the host of the innovative NPR program “State of the Re:Union,” Al Letson is a gifted performance poet with a resume that boasts performances on national and local stages as well as on HBO. Now New York City gets a chance to see Letson’s many talents in action through Summer in Sanctuary, an autobiographical piece told through monologue, poetry, song and multimedia.

Photo: Kim T. Sharp

The show chronicles Letson’s experiences working at a summer camp in an economically challenged area of Florida. Don’t worry — Letson doesn’t imagine himself a hero a la Freedom Writers or Dangerous Minds. Instead, he is incredibly honest and vulnerable, freely recounting his challenges and failures for a brutally accurate description of how difficult the job really is. What is most touching, however, is his love for the campground kids, emanating through his monologues, accounts of experiences, and funny yet charming impersonations.

Letson is an exceptional performer, and he succeeds in making the show nuanced and diverse despite the fact that he is alone on stage. At times, his monologues are airy and natural, as if he were talking with a few friends, but he is equally capable of delivering a pointed and downright tear-jerking monologue. He is also extremely adept at impersonations, creating characters with specific voices and physicalities, and then effortlessly transitioning between them. It is no surprise, however, that the strongest points of the show are his performance poetry pieces. His body morphs into whatever he needs to be while his energy rockets through the roof. The show features multiple pieces of poetry intertwined throughout, including his well-known “The Ball the Rim and Him” and another about the word “Nigga” — “it is the sound of our teeth / pressing against this / fleshy fruit that names us.”

…..Summer in Sanctuary is laugh-out-loud funny at times, intriguing and intellectual at others, but it ultimately communicates the profound truth that a little bit of love goes a long way. It doesn’t take a superhero to make a difference, and Letson proves that sometimes the experiences we consider personal failures are those that have affected others in ways we could never imagine.

BACKSTAGE Review:

“Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can’t you see?/Sometimes your words just hypnotize me,” croons Pamela Long on the hook of Notorious B.I.G.’s 1997 single “Hypnotize,” which plays at the end of Al Letson’s one-man show “Summer in Sanctuary.” A self-admitted fan of the hip-hop pioneer, Letson also has something in common with him: the ability to make words spellbinding. In the late ’90s, Letson made a name for himself by competing on the poetry-slam circuit. More recently, he has employed his prodigious skills as a wordsmith in his playwriting and as host of the public radio show “State of the Re:Union.”

“Summer in Sanctuary” refers to the months Letson spent in Jacksonville, Fla., nominally working as a creative writing teacher at a summer camp for inner-city youth. But when the kids firmly displayed their resistance to writing during summer vacation, Letson’s roles at the camp expanded to include mentor, coach, storyteller, videographer, chauffeur, and therapist. The performer is the son of a Southern Baptist preacher, and his family background is evident in his ability to bring out the music in his words: playing with their tempo, building to a crescendo, driving a point home in an explosive cadence.

He adopts the rhythms and jives of the different students, moving between personalities with the ease of a great character actor. Although he spends most of the play with the boys of the camp, his brief forays into the girls’ territory are both enlightening and hilarious; the back-and-forth between Letson and the queen bee, Danita, is particularly remarkable….

Image of the famed Fabulous Las Vegas sign courtesy of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, www.lvrj.com

Next week, SOTRU host Al Letson and I head out for a reporting trip to Las Vegas, a city of abundant nicknames. Most of them have to do with the Las Vegas that is a veritable icon of American culture: the glitz (City of Lights), the sleaze (Sin City), the celebrity (Entertainment Capital of the World), or a mixture of all of these (Glitter Gulch? Apparently, that’s downtown Las Vegas, according to some…). There’s a new candidate, though, attached to the newly minted version of Las Vegas, post-recession: Foreclosure City. (more…)

In the relatively small public radio documentary world, there is one event that serves as a kind of combination Oscars/family reunion/Christmas morning (at least regarding level of excitement): the Third Coast Audio Festival.  Several hundred of the most enthusiastic radio producers in the country (plus a few international folks too!) descend upon Chicago for a couple of days of workshops, listening sessions, and drinking bourbon (well, perhaps that’s an unofficial part of the conference). Just having returned from this year’s festivities, I’m riding on the thrill of connecting with all these other folks who are just as big radio dorks as I am. (There are others out there! Thank God!) (more…)