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1001 Afternoons

“You may sometimes notice when you sit on the back porch after dinner that there are other back porches with people on them,” says Ben Hecht at the opening of his short story Grass Figures.

He then goes on to notice that wherever he goes and whatever he does there are the inevitable other people also there, also doing the same thing: shopping, lying on the grass, going to the theater, you name it.

In a flash of solipsistic insight he decides that the whole city is a “vast, broken mirror giving him back garbled images of himself.” He then thinks if he can figure out what it is he’s doing with his life then by extension he’ll know what other people are doing with theirs and maybe find the secret to everything.

But he isn’t doing anything with his life but waiting he says, and so that must be what everyone is doing: waiting.  Life is “a few years of suspended animation,” and nothing more. But there’s no story in that, better forget it.

Hecht was a young man in Chicago when he wrote those words. Despite his pessimistic tone, (which would only get worse in later years reaching its peak in his screenplay for the original Scarface) Hecht wanted nothing more at this time than to unlock the secret of people.

He had an uncanny ear for dialogue and for writing people of all backgrounds exactly as they actually talked.  His first major project was to convince his editor at the Daily News to let him write very short stories inspired by people he saw on the streets of Chicago.  They ran in the paper every day for a year and have since been collected as 1001 Afternoons in Chicago.

Back in 2014 ACM collaborated with Strawdog Theater to adapt six of the very best of these stories into a radio play for voices and music.  My colleague Amos Gillespie and I wrote the music and I’m really excited to announce that we’ve finally made a digital release of the album.  I’m truly not sure what took us so long to do this.

I’m very proud of how this turned out and hope you can give it a listen! Just click on the image below.

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