War of The Worlds

3/20/14

Some time between fourth grade (when I started listening to the hometown's AM station during a snowstorm that canceled school for a week and let me clean my room thoroughly for the first time and read Robin Hood) and sixth or seventh grade, the local FM station played Orson Welles' "The War of the Worlds" radio play on Halloween.

Like, it was long enough ago that I taped it with a blank cassette tape in my clock radio that also had a cassette player. (I was so excited that I could set it to start playing when my alarm went off; I used the first track on my Lion King soundtrack cassette tape. It and my Space Jam tape were my first tapes.)

Anyway, I turned off the lights and wrapped myself in a blanket and listened to the radio play. After the intermission, the play starts out with the narrator asking if anyone's there. There's no background noise, no music, nothing that seems like the flurry of activity from the news reports prior to the intermission (during the active invasion). In fact, the narrator is utterly alone. I remembered wondering how being alone like that would feel, whether or not the narrator was actually alone (he wasn't; he meets some other man, who gets all suspicious and runs away).

I know how that feels now.