Hear Me Roar!
Greetings and salutations, WAMC Land. It’s the time of year that we groan when we see the white stuff falling from the skies, the negative temperatures make us feel like 20° is a day in Hawai’i, and nothing is better than hunkering down in the house with a cup of tea. Well, we have a great month of specials and events to keep you company and warm you up.
In celebration of Women’s History Month, on March 5th and 6th at 11AM on both days, we’ll be bringing you a new two-part series entitled The Hidden World of Girls. Groundbreaking writer, actress and comedian, Tina Fey hosts the program. From the dunes of the Sahara to a slumber party in Manhattan, from the dancehalls of Jamaica to a racetrack in Ramallah, Tina Fey takes us around the world into the secret life of girls and the women they become.
Sound-rich, evocative, funny, and powerful -- stories of coming of age, rituals and rites of passage, secret identities -- of women who crossed a line, blazed a trail, changed the tide. These specials are produced by Peabody Award-winning producers, The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva), in collaboration with NPR reporters and foreign correspondents, independent producers and listeners around the world.
On March 20th at 11AM, we’ll go back in time with She Wrote the Song: Women Composers of Early Popular American Music. The program highlights standards written or co-written by women composers who, in the early decades of American popular song, had to struggle for the limelight, as women had to in so many areas of American life. Some of the highlights from the program are Dorothy Fields partnering with Jimmy McHugh and Jerome Kern to give us classics such as "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" and "The Way You Look Tonight", and Una Mae Carlisle, a teen protege of Fats Waller who went on to score hits with "Walkin' By the River" and "I See a Million People" (recorded by Peggy Lee with Benny Goodman).
And it doesn’t stop there! Not only do we have specials on air, but we have two Women’s History Month events that WAMC and 51% are a part of. On March 8th, the station and 51% are community sponsors of One Woman, One World, which is celebrating the 104th International Women's Day in Saratoga Springs, New York. 51% host Allison Dunne will be there conducting behind the scenes interviews, I’ll be at our table to talk about the station, and an amazing group of female intellectuals, authors, and politicians will be conduction “TED-style” talks throughout the day. Anyone interested in attending can learn more by going to nycelebrateswomen.com.
Then, two days later on March 10th in partnership with the New York Council for the Humanities, we’ll explore the upcoming 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New York State. The public is invited to The Linda to attend this panel discussion moderated by 51% host Allison Dunne. During the event we’ll learn about the origins of both women’s and black suffrage in our history.
So, I do hope you’ll enjoy our specials on and off the air this month.