Bob Edwards Weekend
December 11-12, 2010
HOUR ONE
When Classics professor Tom Payne noticed that his students were more interested in current celebrity scandal than in Homer’s epic poetry, he started weaving millennia old themes of fame and celebrity into his lectures. Payne examines the similarities of then and now in his book Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About our Cult of Celebrity.
Bob talks with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer John Mellencamp about his early career, the music from his latest album No Better Than This, and about Mellencamp’s politics.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, we hear the essay of Cindy Lollar, a writer living in College Park, Maryland. Lollar and her partner Greta have been together for almost 25 years. She says the struggles they have faced and overcome together allowed them to feel married, long before they were allowed to legally marry.
HOUR TWO
We continue our Nashville series with Craig Havighurst, author of Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City. He discusses the history of the Nashville radio station launched 85 years ago and still going strong today. Then we visit WSM’s historic and unique broadcasting tower for a tour from chief engineer Jason Cooper. The station’s studios were damaged in Nashville’s May flood and for the past seven months, WSM broadcast from its cramped transmitter building at the tower.