Director's Notes: Ep 220 - A Radio Jupiter Holiday Special

There is a kitchen store near my house that has a name that sounds a bit like “War on Christmas”, and so we call it the War On Christmas Store. “Do we need anything from War on Christmas?” one of us will say, as we drive by it.

I hate Christmas. December is probably my least favorite month. As a Jewish person, Christmas is a time to be constantly reminded of the hegemony of Christianity in our culture, a hegemony so complete that people will tell you “oh, I’m not Christian, it’s not about religion, it’s just a nice holiday” because the influence of Christianity on them is so complete that it is invisible to them. I don’t find holiday decorations cheery. I don’t find holiday music nice. There is exactly one good Christmas song, and it’s “The River” by Joni Mitchell, and that’s probably all we need.

But still we do a holiday special every year. I don’t know why. Maybe because when something has so much total control of our culture, it feels like cheating to not acknowledge that influence. So instead, I try to find ways to make the format of a holiday special, a format I find very boring, interesting to me. For instance, one year I challenged myself to write a version of A Christmas Carol (one of my least favorite stories of all time) in which no one learned anything and there was no moral. This year, we went into the holiday special only with the concept of “A Radio Jupiter Holiday Special” and not much more.

Robin Virginie, who plays Radio Jupiter, is exactly the combination we look for in an actor: someone who is both a talented performer, and a delight to work with. The character was originally a one off, but I enjoyed both her performance and also writing in Radio Jupiter’s specific voice enough that we have brought her back a few times, and will almost certainly bring her back again in the future. I can’t quite tell you what the rules are for Radio Jupiter’s voice, but I know it when I write it. There is a certain amount of repetition, a rhythm to it that is specific to her, and a kind of intentional tautology, seeing how much I can use the same word in reference to itself (“after the after, beyond the beyond”).

This is a story about holidays as loneliness, which I think is an honest story about the holidays. The thing about any season of mandatory happiness is that, if you are not part of it for whatever reason, the isolation is twice as much. No season can be happy for everyone. This one’s for the folks who aren’t, but are making their way through December anyhow.

The post-weather monologue by Radio Jupiter is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever tried to write for this show. It was tough to try to create actual emotional meaning under the constraints of writing alphabetically, and I provided Robin with a plain text translation of each line so she would know how it was intended to be performed. My original draft did have a few words that weren’t alphabetical, and Jeffrey rewrote it to follow the guidelines more strictly. I think this was the correct decision, although probably it made the actual meaning of the monologue even harder to follow than my own already hard to follow version. I hope that, even if the exact literal meaning of every line isn’t understood, the music and feeling of the text will carry the listener along.

Happy holidays, and see you again with a new episode in February.

Joseph Fink