In this episode, we explore inheritances’ many forms and unexpected outcomes. “You’ll hear the forgotten tales of hand-me down clothing, stories of family exploits that keep ancestors alive, how your genetic inheritance can define you…for better and for worse, and how even our values can get passed down from one generation to the next.”
Host: Rosie La Puma
Producers: Rosie La Puma, Luke Soon-Shiong, Hadley Reid, Jake Warga, Claudia Heymach, Christy Hartman, Annina Hanlon, Benjamin Philip Suliteanu, Jonah Willihnganz, Ethan Chua
Featuring: Rosie La Puma, Deborah Wicks-La Puma, Deanna Wicks, Luke Soon-Shiong, Brooke McEver, Claudia Heymach, Marisa Heymach, Sierra Freeman, Matthew Porteus, Devon Cajuste, Amalia Saladrigas, McGregor Joyner, Emma Rothenberg
Show music: Proliferate by Podington Bear
Image courtesy of Rosie La Puma
Release Date: 1 February 2017
Intro Story: Alice
“For my mom and myself, taking care of Alice means taking care of a part of my grandmother, and her mother, and her mother before her.” She’s over a century old, but still the size of a toddler. Meet Alice, the inherited family member that has been handed down for five generations of daughters.
Producer: Rosie La Puma
Featuring: Rosie La Puma, Deborah Wicks-La Puma, and Deanna Wicks
Music: Proliferate by Podington Bear
Image courtesy of Rosie La Puma
Story 1: The Stories We Wear
Brooke McEver, an MFA student at Stanford sets up a free store where people donate clothing along with a handwritten tag that explains the story behind the clothing. When someone takes that clothing, they respond to the story on the other side of the tag. We explore what this means for understanding inheritance as a choice.
Producers: Luke Soon-Shiong with help from Hadley Reid and Jake Warga
Featuring: Luke Soon-Shiong, Brooke McEver
Music: Bensound.com
Image courtesy of Brooke McEver
Story 2: Abuelita
Twenty years ago, Claudia’s mom created a book of family history based on interviews she taped with Claudia’s late great-grandmother. Claudia listens to the tapes for the first time and explores what it means to collect family history and receive it.
Producer: Claudia Heymach
Featuring: Claudia Heymach, Marisa Heymach, Rosie La Puma
Special thanks: Kate Nelson
Music and Sound: Afterglow by Podington Bear, gunfight sound effect from Freesound
Image courtesy of Marisa Heymach
Story 3: We’re All Okay
A young woman comes to terms with a potentially lethal condition that runs in her family. “‘Is he okay, is he going to be okay, is the surgery going okay?’ Maybe they were just tired of the same sentence, rearranged. We want to know, is he going to be …”
Writer: Sierra Freeman
Producers: Claudia Heymach, Christy Hartman, and Rosie La Puma
Featuring: Sierra Freeman
Music: Jackson Roach on mandolin
Image via Flickr
Story 4: CRISPR-Cas9
A Stanford Lab develops gene editing tools to fight disease, and in the process challenges whether our destiny is predetermined by DNA.
Producers: Claudia Heymach with help from Annina Hanlon and Rosie La Puma
Featuring: Claudia Heymach and Matthew Porteus
Music: Dark Waters by Podington Bear
Image via Wikimedia
Story 5: Father to Son
Live from StoryNight 2015, Devon Cajuste tells the story of how his father told him that he has five years left to live. “You don’t know what to do when you’re thirteen years old and your dad tells you that he has five years left to live … and I count and that’s my freshman year of college.”
Producer: Rosie La Puma
Featuring: Devon Cajuste
Image courtesy of StoryNight
Story 6: Call Me by My Old Familiar Name
Non-narrated story of three Stanford students who share something in common: they lost their fathers. “You can be angry about death for a very long time but it’s not really worth. I think death just makes you look at life in the face. Even when he was sick, he was still very much trying to live his life …”
Producer: Benjamin Philip Suliteanu
Featuring: Amalia Saladrigas, McGregor Joyner, Emma Rothenberg
Music: Original song by McGregor Joyner
Image via Flickr