This episode first aired in October 2002 and it is by far one of our favorites.  The show won a Silver Reel from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters – quite an honor. Please enjoy these priceless moments caught on tape – from childhood recordings to less than subtle phone messages. The B-Side crew is caught on tape whether we like it or not.

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Liner Notes:

Under God: Dave Gilson
Sacramento resident Mike Newdow to the pledge of allegiance to court because he thought it was wrong for his daughter to have to say “under God” in school. Earlier this year a court ruled in his favor and the calls started pouring in. Dave Gilson brings us a sampling of the messages left on his answering machine.

Small Talk: Emily Mudd
Emily Mudd tells the story of a suitor who skipped the small talk and decided to lay it ALL out – in a message on her cell phone.

Child Star: Tamara Keith
B-Side’s Tamara Keith was a child actress, Hollywood style. She was 6 months old when she got her first job modeling for a department store ad, and by the time she was 8, she’d been in more than 30 magazine ads and a TV commercial that aired during the Superbowl. There’s really no hiding that kind of exposure.

Everything Real Bitter: Emelie Gunnison
B-Side’s Emelie Gunnison recently dug up a tape labeled “Funny Stuff, Private, Keep Out” from her desk drawer, and now, it hits the airwaves.

This was a magazine ad for the Speak and Say.

Tamara is the baby on the right, in this billboard for the California Milk Board.

Emelie Gunnison reporting live.

On this episode of B-Side from September 2002, we bring you stories about transportation and the sometimes unusual ways we get from place to place.  We’re calling this one: You are What You Drive.

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Liner Notes

Family Minivan: Tamara Keith
Tamara Keith has the story of one family trying to make the best of a bad commute by turning car time into quality time.

Bad motor scooter. Peter Crimmins with his Vespa.

Meter Maid: Mia Lobel
On Mia’s search to understand why bad tickets happen to good people, she found Blanca Montoya who showed her what its like to be a much reviled meter maid.

Scooter Shopping: Peter Crimmins
For Peter Crimmins finding a method of transportation was a lesson in self-discovery.

Amy the Hearse Queen: Lyssa Mudd
Amy Shanafeldt drives her hearse everywhere – to the mall, to the grocery store, to the doctor. Hearses are her life.

On this edition of B-Side from August 2002, stories about going home – what home means, how home feels, and how home can change.

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Liner Notes

O Fallon, Illinois: Judson True
Re porter Judson True recently went back to his suburban origins in O’Fallon, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. When he got there, he found his hometown sprouting subdivisions the way it used to grow corn.

Group Home Life: Sarah Richardson
For a lot of people, home isn’t as easily defined as that house on the corner of Main Street and First. It’s hard to figure out exactly what home is when you don’t stay in any one place for more than a few months or even a few weeks. 16-year-old essayist Sarah Richardson doesn’t really have a place she can call home.

Casas San Miguel: Tamara Keith
In the Central California city of Fresno, some unlikely homeowners are experiencing that feeling for the first time. As B-side’s Tamara Keith reports, 32 immigrant farm worker families from an isolated Mexican village just moved in to brand new homes built just for them.

Remembering: Noam Birnbaum
B-side’s Noam Birnbaum grew up just blocks away from the World Trade Center, and though he has since moved away, he still feels a deep connection with the place. In trying to sort out the events of last fall, Noam took his mother on a walk through his old neighborhood to ask some hard questions about her past. But their conversation about remembering quickly turned into one about forgetting.

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This is just a picture of a cute dog, because a show about pets should be accompanied by a picture of a cute dog.

This show originally aired in June 2002.  The theme was “pets” though in reality this should have been called the “dead pets” show.  It includes some B-Side classics and some really touching stories about pets – how they’re loved and how they’re lost.

Liner Notes:

Pet Cemetery: Lyssa Mudd
There are those who flush Goldie the goldfish down the toilet, and those who bury Fido the mutt under a shrub in the backyard without a marker. Others opt for pet cemeteries. For generations, San Franciscans have been burying their beloved family pets in a small, weedy plot at the Presidio, the city’s old army base.  B-Side’s Lyssa Mudd brings us this tour.

Losing Quincy: Emelie Gunnison
What happens when a pet runs away – or is lost without a trace, with no chance for a final goodbye.  B-Side’s Emelie Gunnison knows this experience all too well.

Pet Loss Hotline: Tamara Keith
When a pet dies, the grief can be just as extreme as with loss of a human relative.  As B-Side’s Tamara Keith found out, for people having trouble dealing with those emotions, help is just a phone call away.

Pet Sitting: Dave Gilson
There’s this theory that if people spend enough time with their pets they actually start to resemble their animals – or is it the other way around? Whichever it is, it can be amusing – and sometimes disturbing – to see how much pet owners have in common with their charges. B-Side commentator Dave Gilson recalls a pet-sitting job that revealed the stranger side of this symbiotic relationship.

Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: Mia Lobel
What if your pet escaped, found others of its kind, bred, and formed a whole new colony of wild animals? Believe it or not, it’s happened before, and Mark Bittner of San Francisco has proof.  Host Mia Lobel has his story.

It seems after 7 months of producing B-Side, we were ready for a break.  This episode of B-Side pulls together some of our favorite stories from past shows.   It first aired in June 2002.

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Liner Notes

Parking Meters: Tamara Keith
Anyone who’s parked in Berkeley has seen them – meters flashing fail, fail, fail. A recent study found that about 80 percent of these failing meters aren’t broken, but jammed, by vandals.

Mr. Fix it Dad: Mia Lobel
Mia’s dad is one of those amazing people who can fix anything.  She went home to New York over the holidays to talk with him about his obsession with tinkering.

Curly Hair: Claudine Zap
Essayist Claudine Zap recently went to the salon for a trim but she got much more than she’d bargained for.

Free Khalistan: Lyssa Mudd
In India, the struggle for Khalistan has all but petered out. But in the Untied States — and here in the East Bay — this revolutionary movement is alive and well.

Esperanto: Dave Gilson
Esperanto is an artificial language that combines pieces of Spanish, French, Italian and a few other languages into a single language designed to promote world peace. The only problem is that it never really caught on.

Speed Dating: Gavin Tachibana
Looking for love in a hurry?  Speed dating might just be the answer.

This archived edition of B-Side is all about love including everything from telephone psychics to the story of how one couple got together.

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Liner Notes
Chris and Caitlyn: Mia Lobel
A fairy tale ending isn’t something that any of the players in this story would have predicted.

Self Love: Noam Birnbaum
Guest commentator Noam Birnbaum takes a trip to Good Vibrations in Berkeley.

Getting Hitched: Claudine Zap
Claudine Zap just got engaged after a nearly decade-long courtship. She recently sat down with her friend Lisa Miya-Jervis who is an expert on getting hitched.

Speed Dating: Gavin Tachibana
Essayist Gavid Tachibana gives a review of speed dating.

On this way back archive edition of B-Side we take a look at the way things work, everything from vacuum cleaner repair to broken parking meters. We’ll also get a lesson in dumpster diving and meet a dad who takes tinkering to a new level. Plus, fearless B-Side crew members crawl under a 1991 Honda Accord and attempt to change the oil without professional help.  Hosted by Lyssa Mudd.

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Mia gets down and dirty looking for Sparky's drain plug.

Liner Notes

Dumpster Diving: Dave Gilson:
The Bay Area is one of the country’s most expensive places to live. But you can save and even make some money if you don’t mind sneaking around in the middle of the night and picking through trash. B-Side’s Dave Gilson presents: the art of dumpster diving for fun and profit.

Vacuum Cleaners: Claudine Zap
Vacuum cleaners are one of the great conveniences of modern life. Until they stop working. Claudine Zap finds out how – and why – vacuum cleaners suck.

Parking Meters: Tamara Keith
Anyone who’s parked in Berkeley has seen them – meters flashing fail, fail, fail. No matter what the problem, if there’s a malfunctioning meter south of campus, there’s one man who will end up fixing it. B-Side’s Tamara Keith talked with him and brings us this glimpse at what makes parking meters work – and not work.

Mr. Fix-It Dad: Mia Lobel
B-Side’s Mia Lobel went home to New York over the holidays to talk with her dad, who can fix anything, about his obsession with tinkering.

Tamara tries to loosen the bolt, as Mia and Lyssa give not so helpful advice.

Mia is ready to change the oil, the car just wasn't ready for her.

On B-Side’s third episode, we looked at how people survive the challenges of every day life and the things they do to get by – financially, emotionally and even linguistically.  Oh, and we visit a nudist resort.  This episode is hosted by Dave Gilson.

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Liner Notes:
Getting By Without Sight: Emelie Gunnison
Spend an afternoon with a woman in Berkeley finding out about the other side of being blind.

Learning English: Ruxandra Guidi
Learning a new language for survival is an entirely different experience than learning it for pleasure. Take a look at learning English the hard way.

Getting By After the Bust: Mia Lobel
While many former dot commers are struggling to adapt to their newly slashed incomes, Mia Lobel says you can’t miss what you never had to begin with.

From Welfare to UC Berkeley: Claudine Zap
Meet a woman who came to Cal after being on welfare and out of school for 20 years. Now she’s bringing her experiences into the classroom.

A Vow of Poverty: Lyssa Mudd
Brother Brain Delessey is a twenty-six year old Catholic priest in training.

Getting By Without Clothes: Tamara Keith
Sometimes getting by requires a radical change of lifestyle. That’s what happened to some relatives of B-side crewmember Tamara Keith.

This was B-Side’s second episode.  At the time, we were all living in or near Berkeley and that city certainly shaped this show.  It was also put together in the weeks immediately following 9/11 and that had an impact as well.

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From Esperanto diehards to high-school idealists and Punjabi separatist taxi drivers, we bring you a show about revolutionaries in our midst.

Liner Notes:

Free Writing: Mia Lobel
The assignment: write for 15 minutes straight. The topic: revolution.  The thoughts of high school students in Mia Lobel’s creative writing class.

Peace in a Time of War: Tamara Keith
With more than 90-percent of the country coming out in support of the war against terrorism, we look at how the peace movement is trying to sway public opinion.

One Woman Revolution: Katy Shrout
You’ve probably seen her on the freeways. You might think she’s a maniac, but in fact, Katy Shrout is a revolutionary.

Free Khalistan: Lyssa Mudd
The “Free Khalistan” movement is alive and well on the streets of Berkeley, but how’s it doing in Punjab?

Saluton, Amikoj: Dave Gilson
Esperanto, an artificial language created 80 years ago as a way of fostering international understanding and of course, world peace, never really caught on, but there are still some diehard esperantists out there, including a bunch in the East Bay.

For the next several months we’ll be restoring the B-Side online archives, starting with our very first episode.  This show first aired on KALX in September 2001.  Yup 2001!  These early shows were produced with a flurry of creativity and enthusiasm and you can certainly hear it coming through.  B-Side was hatched in the summer of 2001 right after the original B-Side crew members graduated from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.  There were lengthy brainstorming sessions at cafes and Thai restaurants, late nights with wine and ideas flowing.

We hope you enjoy this jaunt down memory lane.

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Liner Notes :

Praying Off the Pounds: Katy Shrout
Visit New Generation Church in Richmond where participants have added God to their diet regimen.

Portrait of a Nail Worker: Aryn Baker
Like many women in the nail biz, manicurist Jan Bwee is a Vietnamese immigrant.  In this personal reflection, She says helping others beautify their nails is helping her live out an American dream.

Roller Setting: Lyssa Mudd:
As the days of bouffants and behives grow more distant, it’s become increasingly difficult for older women to find stylists who even know what hair setting is.  Meet one woman who’s been roller setting hair since the 1950s.

Hair Braiding: Mia Lobel
Hair braiding, in the intricate styles often worn by African American women can take as many as 12 hours.  We visit African Traditions, a salon where braiding is the style of choice.

Curly Haired Essayist Goes Straight: Claudine Zap:
Not long ago, Claudine Zap visited the hair salon for a trim.  She was shocked, shocked, when her stylist asked her if she wanted to blow dry her hair straight.  From that experience, we get this personal essay.

The final product: five fabulous pedicures.