Julia Sweeney is the rare celebrity I admire. She's done sincere and thoughtful work on what she has called her "beautiful loss of faith story," soon to be published and/or released in numerous forms, one movie and two audio versions, and a somewhat different book. I attended an early workshop of the stage presentation she calls "Letting Go Of God," coming up on two years ago, at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood. (Steve Allen was publicly, but quietly, a non-religious person, and among the products of his Zappaesque personal industry was The Center For Inquiry West, where the Steve Allen Theater presents music and lectures throughout the year.) LGOG was excerpted for a longish segment of Ira Glass's public radio program This American Life, bringing unprecedented listener response to the broadcast. Julia's web site and web log experienced a spike in traffic, and listeners responded to her story in overwhelming numbers.

Julia erupted in a flurry of broad-ranging response to this passionate and divided audience, writing daily for a while in her otherwise leisurely web log. She's now devoting herself to the shaping of her story into what promise to be complementary but different takes on the story of her painfully funny transition from devout Catholic to godless disciple of reason. Her many archived blog entries are very good reading, intimate without oversharing, guileless but not without their art.

In the "Get A Load Of This" section of her web site Julia has posted a loving tribute to her late father, Bob Sweeney, who has figured irreplaceably in her monologues. There's a slide show of family snapshots of Bob as she likes to remember him, and I was honored to give her the go-ahead to use some of my 'ukulele music as a soundtrack.

Give that man a microphone: Neal Cassady

It was 1978, and I was a proselytizing fan of Al "Jazzbeaux" Collins and his all night free association on AM radio. A picking pal handed me a flexidisc phonograph record of Neal Cassady freestyling with the Grateful Dead, saying, "this guy's crazy, but he mentions Jazzbeaux." I listened to this recording rather a lot, I now realize, but imagine my thrill to encounter today, quite unintentionally, a scrupulous transcription, speciously footnoted, of every word he said. I found it here, at the Grateful Dead Lyric And Song Finder.

Neal Cassady Rap - The Dead 09/67 - Straight Theater

Harry Shearer has a gift for using political and social satire to reveal greater truths about the world we're given to misunderstand. In the context of the comic/dramatic audio play, he's created mercilessly funny encounters among public figures that have taught me a lot about the use of power in our world.

This past Sunday, December Four, marked the twenty-second anniversary of his weekly hour-long public radio program, Le Show, originating from the Santa Monica studios of KCRW-FM. Toward the end of the program came a new segment of Dick Cheney Confidential, his noir radio fantasy said to emanate from the deep remove of the Vice President's undisclosed location. This installment is one of the very best, and its highlight is a motivational conversation Cheney initiates with our ambitious Secretary of State.

Harry's own web site offers an overview of his diverse comic talents and the hardy perennial that is his long and fascinating career. There you will find a big handful of entertaining extras to support your gleeful waste of time, but more empoweringly, there is a searchable archive of Le Shows dating back to the mid-nineties. My humble suggestion is that you search for episodes of his hilariously brilliant series, Clintonsomething. In a just world the series would have earned him a Pulitzer.

Dick Cheney Confidential - Operation Push Back (Written and performed by Harry Shearer)

Web site of Harry Shearer