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Our Anniversary Show - Today - a live-ish special mixed with some highlights from those formative years. We pulled together just a few hilarious and moving moments with a few of the 10,000 guests since Sedge Thomson's West Coast Live first broadcast January 8, 1994 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco. West Coast Live succeeded his successful West Coast Weekend, which began in October 1984, following a year of Breakfast Jam he began in September 1983, both produced live. Yikes, 27 years of live radio!
The theme today turns out to be Voices -- voices still here, some gone, voices produced through other forms -- of instruments, history, emotions. We start with the first :30 prior to the first broadcast from the Cowell Theater, before we went live to air, and the opening moments from January 8, 1994, with DIANE HIDY at the piano. You are there!
In the First Hour we begin with a conversation with the inimitable JULIA CHILD about food and eating and love, from 11/16/1996 when she was 84, doing her best Meryl Streep impersonation. We reveal her favorite hors d'oeuvre.
From 10/221994, TERRY JONES of MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS expounds of falsettos, and how comedy is made in Life of Brian. What fun we can have in a live, spontaneous show with a lively audience!
Later, on 11/25/2006 at the Plush Room, LAURIE ANDERSON and the Tuvan Throat Singers CHIRGILCHAN came in and we persuaded the TUVANs to teach the renowned a capella group THE BOBS how to throat-sing. First you imitate a Harley-Davidson....
MIKE GREENSILL plays the brief interval break,
then the 2nd Act begins with THE STRING CHEESE INCIDENT from 8/31/1996 as they were on their way to acclaim
From November 11, 1995, as we celebrated the reopening of the Legion of Honor Museum, STUART CANIN demos with a Bach fugue the Guarneri Del Gesu violin Jashcha Heifitz played and donated to the museum. And he recreates the beginning of the FRED ALLEN - JACK BENNY feud of 1936 with the :45 Bee.
STUDS TERKEL, the late, great Chicagoan waxes on the horrors of solo violin music, except for STUART CANIN, JASCHA HEIFETZ, and FRITZ KREISLER and how his mother always wanted him to play like MARVIN, his upstairs neighbor. Then we here about the importance of stories that make political movements human and personal.
MIKE GREENSILL and WESLA WHITFIELD updated the 1952 LOUIS JORDAN jazz classic as Greensill for President for Nov. 1, 2008, a story of political adventures that are the same, but different, and still the source for great lyrics.
And we close with a high-energy song from the 6/8/1996 show with TAJ MAHAL joining with JIM CAMPILONGO and the 10 GALLON CATS for a festive fishing and libation number. We had to retrieve TAJ from the end of the Cowell Theater pier, where he'd gone to hang out that beautiful morning with the Russian fisherman using cuttlefish and cut fish as bait and spark plugs for weights.
The closing credits from that day features DIANE HIDY rocking out with her classical verve
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