Actor in the News: Amanda Mehl

Interviews

Amanda Mehl, actor and co-founder of the Public Citizen Theater (PCT) in Portland, Oregon, is our special guest today on AudiblySpeaking.  She has acted in several productions for the PCT since 2016, including “The Maids,” by Jean Genet (directed by Aaron Filyaw).

 

In our conversation Amanda talks about the challenges of acting in the time of Covid, the ways in which citizens expand on the theater opportunities available to them, and the innovative moves she has made to build a voiceover repertoire with Librivox.org 

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Music Guest: Rebecca DuMaine

Music Reviews

On this special episode of the podcast, I speak with Rebecca DuMaine, an exciting jazz singer with the Dave Miller Trio, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We talk about the musical genre in which she and the Trio specialize, and how it speaks to us in good times and in Covid time, as well as her journey toward her musical life.

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“The Crooked Man,” A Sherlock Holmes Tale

Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Crooked Man” appeared in 1893 and subsequently in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. It was one of the 19 most popular stories in Doyle’s catalog of favorite Holmes tales. See my audio review of this book on AudiblySpeaking either before or following your listening to this story. And now, experience the story of “The Crooked Man–” if you dare.

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Coming Soon: “The Adventures of the Crooked Man”

Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote “The Adventures of the Crooked Man” in 1892. It turned out to rank 15th on his list of 19 favorite short stories. My audio narration of the story will appear soon here on AudiblySpeaking. In this introduction, I analyze and critique the structure of the story and its qualities in terms of the expectations inherent in the mystery genre of storytelling.

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FDR Fireside Chat, December 9, 1941

FDR

In this classic Fireside Chat, FDR rallies the Nation two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One of his finest Fireside Chats, Roosevelt cleverly ties the mission to retaliate against Japan with the effort, not yet widely shared by Americans, to halt the march of fascism in Europe, represented by Hitler and Mussolini. The next day, December 10, Hitler would clear the way for FDR to accomplish this goal by suicidally declaring war on the United States.

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Sherlock Holmes Explains the “JFK Assignment”

Conan Doyle

In this “tongue in cheek” audio narration, Dr. Reiman portrays Sherlock Holmes as he would have sounded had he lived in 2021, and had he agreed to help my students understand their big assignment of this summer semester. Of course, our course site contains the complete instructions for the assignment. I hope that this will help as well. If you like this narration, check out my two other, “real” Sherlock Holmes stores below, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and narrated by me.

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First Fireside Chat, The Banking Crisis, March 1933

FDR

Roosevelt’s first “fireside chat,” delivered just days after being sworn in as president, was one of his finest.  The entire banking system had collapsed prior to the speech. His task was to reassure Americans that their deposits were safe.  More important, he had to assure them that the government knew what it was doing in reorganizing and certifying the soundness of banks that were to reopen in days, so that the panic of the days before the shutdown of the banks would not be repeated.  Calling the closure a “bank holiday” was a delightful rhetorical slight of hand.  But the entire speech, and Roosevelt’s warm delivery (addressing “My Friends”) engendered a sense of confidence in his listeners that Hoover had been unable to engineer. The day the banks reopened, deposits exceeded withdrawals in all the major cities in the country. 

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