CAAF: This big hill

For the past year my exercise regime has been to walk to a big hill near my house and then walk up and down it as long as I can last. It’s Nature’s elliptical! I take the dog and, in an arrangement we’re both probably too comfortable with, she gets carried after the second trip up the hill, looking, I imagine, like a tiny, disagreeable sultan riding on an elephant.
Somewhere on the 1,000th trip up the hill, I exhausted the music on my iPod and so I started listening to downloads of old episodes of “This American Life” instead. I know the show’s been around forever, etc., but I’d never really listened, and now I’m a little addicted.
Three of my favorite episodes:
• “Fiasco!“: Listen for the opening story by Jack Hitt about an amateur production of “Peter Pan” that goes terribly, terribly wrong. As readers of Tingle Alley know, I have a great weakness for the “amateur theatricals gone awry” genre of anecdote — traceable to a formative viewing of “Sweeney Todd” during which the prop knife kept misfiring, squirting gobs of prop blood as far as the fourth row — and this one is a doozy. (The first time I listened to this story I had to sit down mid-walk because it was so funny.)
• “Act V“: Another story by Jack Hitt, this one about a prison staging of “Hamlet.”
• “My Brilliant Plan“: Listen for the “Second Act,” about Ron Mallett’s decades-long quest to build a time machine in order to see his dead father again. His first time-machine model, built when he was only 11, was based on an illustration he found in a comic-book version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.