April 3, 2015

Stuck in the Middle

People caught in limbo, using ingenuity and guile to try to get themselves out.

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Transcript

Download the hold music, Opus No. 1, from Act One.

Prologue

Rachel has two kids. Elias, age seven, is a vegetarian. Theo, age five, is not. But Elias wants Theo, and everyone else in the house, to be vegetarian too. So Rachel and her husband are in the middle of negotiating the desires of two very strong willed kids. (12 minutes)

By Ira Glass; Produced by Jyllian Gunther

Act One

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Sara Corbett's father-in-law Dick is 81. And he's become obsessed with a limbo most of us hate – the music he hears whenever he's on hold. (14 minutes)

Sara is co-author of the book A House in the Sky.

The hold music, Opus No. 1, was composed by Tim Carleton and Darrick Deel. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Amazon.

By Sara Corbett

Song:

“Nowhere to Go” by The Four Freshman

Act Two

Sunrise, Sun-Get

Mark Oppenheimer reports on agunah in the Orthodox Jewish community. An agunah is a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce – in Hebrew it means "chained wife." If you're an Orthodox Jew, strictly following Jewish law, the only real way to get divorced is if your husband agrees to hand you a piece of paper called a get. Without the get, women who want out of their marriages can stay chained to their husbands for years. In New York, a couple of rabbis were recently accused of using violence to force men to give their wives a get. (17 minutes)

Mark’s latest book is Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood.

By Mark Oppenheimer