Saltcast -- 12/14/09 -- Pizza Time!

The Show

So, if you've never heard of the Saltcast, it's one of the most instructive podcasts out there. It comes out of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. Rob Rosenthal is an instructor there, and an independent radio producer himself. Each week, he picks out a piece one of his students in the documentary journalism program has done and presents it, along with a bit of dissection. Well, dissection's good, but nothing compared to VIVISECTION.

The piece in this episode is called Pizza Time!, produced by a student named Alex Malmude. We get some caveats from Rob at the beginning--this piece was something of a rush-job, and there's no story. More on that later. Now the piece.

It starts with a ringing phone. A pizza dude answers and...hey! it's about a pizza delivery driver. I was a pizza delivery driver. I can RELATE to this story. How BOUT that? The pizza dude (his name is Tom) finishes taking the order and, in classic delivery-driver fashion, says "Let's rock and ride." (How many permutations of that phrase are there, by the way? There's rock and roll, lock and load, rock and ride, load and rock? what else is left?) Tom introduces himself, saying he enjoys long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners, and we know, from this, that he is a "character." His first trip of the story takes him to an Econo Lodge, where he effectively chats up the buyer, and gets a nice tip. Tom is good at getting tips. "You gotta be their best friend in like 30 seconds," he says later. Ah, so that's how you get tips. I thought silent spite was the trick. As Tom rides around he doesn't really talk about much. He enthuses about pizza ("Everybody likes pizza. Pizza is an anytime food. I could eat pizza all the time") and how to avoid getting mugged in shady neighborhoods ("Just gotta walk tall.") and the quality of other drivers ("Nobody here knows how to fucking drive.") As Rob warned us, there isn't much story, but he says it's captivating enough just with the ambiance and the character. I'm not sure I agree. This piece does have one classic rush-job characteristic, which is no narration. Not many pieces can be carried without narration, or really well-considered interview questions, so that the subject tells the story himself. This piece has neither, but it is entertaining. And it brought back good memories, of cheese, of crust, of hot boxes of cardboard that greased your hands on warm summer days. Ah, memories.