Up in the Air with Radiolab

Selected Shorts - Symphony Space

A special collaboration between Selected Shorts and Radiolab explores the theme of flight through four imaginative short stories. Featuring

Key takeaways

• The boundary between flying and falling is fragile and often defined by perception rather than physics.

Main topics

• The metaphorical and literal meaning of flight

Notable quotes

"The line between falling and flying... is precariously thin." – Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser

Conclusion

Through a blend of imaginative storytelling, scientific curiosity, and emotional depth, this

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:07) Get ready to fly. Nope, you won't need feathers or even a seat on an airplane. Just lend us your ears and the next hour as Miranda July and Margaret Atwood bring us fiction about flight in a special collaboration with WNYC's Radiolab. I'm Meg Wolitzer, and this Selected Shorts is about to take off. Buckle up and hold on tight. Speaker 3 (0:30) You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Speaker 3 (0:43) Birds make it look easy. One second, they're perched immobile on a branch. The next, they're aloft, soaring over grass and trees, seemingly unconstrained by gravity. Maybe humans would feel differently if we had wings and just flew to the 7-Eleven to get potato chips. Maybe we wouldn't dream about flight or list it as one of the best possible superpowers. As it is, we Earth-bound creatures are fascinated by flight. and not only with what it would feel like to fly and feel the wind lifting our wings, but also getting off the ground. How does that work? What happens if we exhaust ourselves and start to dive? And what about stopping? The whole process seems mysterious. Thankfully, there are people who are just as curious about it as we are. We recently partnered with one of our favorite public radio shows, the science-loving and sonically adventurous WNYC's Radiolab, to help curate a night of stories. It was our second collaboration with the show, and our first with its new hosts, Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. They were energetic and dedicated collaborators, and once we'd collected some favorite stories, we found the thing that connected them was the idea of flight. I am a Radiolab listener, so this joint venture is a special delight. The night of our live show, recorded at our home in Symphony Space in New York, just a quick subway ride from their home at WNYC Studios, was by turns playful, incisive, and whimsical. The Radiolab team was so playful that they decided to include several costume changes. Check out our website to see Miller and Nasser's bright and colorful matching shorts for their evening at Selected Shorts. Here are Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser of Radiolab talking about the possibilities provided by falling, floating, and flying. Speaker 2 (2:35) I am Lulu Miller. I'm Latif Speaker 1 (2:38) Nasser. And Speaker 2 (2:39) we are the co-hosts of the New York Public Radio Show Radiolab. Speaker 2 (2:48) And if you've ever listened to Radiolab, you know that we love falling down rabbit holes. Speaker 3 (2:52) So pop some Dramamine, because this evening we are going to take you on a fantastical parabolic flight. Speaker 2 (3:00) It's going to be like that. And as you go up and down and up and down and up and down, we hope that you might consider the ups and downs in your own life. Maybe think about them a little bit differently, because what we noticed as we read and reread these stories... is that the line between falling and flying, between a huge feet and a flop, is precariously thin. Speaker 3 (3:27) That was Radiolab's Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller on stage preparing the live audience at Symphony Space for a wild night of flying and falling. The stories you'll hear in this hour are from that show. One piece is a fable-like story of romance and interstellar travel. One tackles longing and celebrity at 30,000 feet. A third yearns to comfort those who have fallen. And a fourth reveals the unseen lives of bats. Our first piece in this hour is The Lunatic's Eclipse by Randa Gerar. Gerar is the author of the novel A Map of Home, the short story collection Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, and the memoir Love is an Ex-Country. This fabulous and feminist tale is performed by Abu Bakr Ali, who made his lively shorts debut during Our Night with Radiolab. Ali is a regular stage performer who has also appeared in TV series including Grendel and the film Anything's Possible. And now he brings us The Lunatic's Eclipse by Randa Gerar. Speaker 4 (4:39) The Lunatic's Eclipse. The neighborhood got its first dose of Qamar the summer of her ninth birthday, when she sat on the rooftop of her Alexandria apartment building for ten days and waited for the moon to come down. She did it for her neighbor, Metweli. He promised he'd be hers forever if she only brought him the moon. Metweli was 24, and he had no idea that Qamar would take his pledge to heart. The first night on the roof, Qamar sat on a long chair with a rope in her hand. The people began to wonder, and when midnight came and she was still there, they informed the baweb, the super, and asked him to go check on her. Too lazy to climb the nine stories, he yelled up from his post at the front entrance of the building, What's with you, Qamar? I want the moon, she yelled. A collective sigh was broadcast from the audience that now gathered in the street. The moon's expensive, the people yelled back at her. It cost ten nights, ten whole nights of staying up, and you can't nod off, not even for a second. Palomar stayed up the ten whole nights, and the moon was descending. Everyone agreed that it was. Palomar had developed dark crescents under her eyes, and her hair was dreading. On the tenth night, the moon vanished, but the people never agreed on how it did. Some said that Qamar nodded off and the moon shot back up into the vastness of the sky, so high that no one could see it anymore. Qamar said she only fell asleep for an instant, and when she opened her eyes, the moon was gone. And she insisted that Zaynab, the evil neighbor girl who'd had her eyes on Mithweli for weeks, filch the moon during that short instance. How else could one explain what happened next? Metuelli fell in love with Zeynep, and ten years later they lived in a flat on San Stefano with six children. Mithweli was Zaynab's forever, and Qamar was a stranger. It made a small sidebar in all the papers, Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, even at Sharq al-Aswat. That was how Hilal knew of Qamar. He had read the story in Al-Ahram ten years before. Hilal himself had appeared in the paper twice. The first time was for being number one nationwide in the secondary final exams. And the second time was for turning down the president's offer to send him to London for free medical training as a cardiologist. Upon receiving the offer, Hillel wrote to the president, Sir, I have no interest in hearts or in how to mend them. Can you send me to Houston? Speaker 4 (7:19) You see, Hillel had been trying to figure out a way to get to the moon since he was four years old. His father, a fisherman in Alexandria's East Cui, once caught Hillel dangling his foot out the boat and casting a net over the reflection of the moon. When he got older, he heard that men could walk on the moon's surface, and when he looked into it, he took the tram out and visited the American embassy, the Russian embassy, the visa office. He realized that jumping to the moon would be more realistic than obtaining a visa and traveling to Houston for astronaut training. Here's what the president had to say about NASA instruction. Son, our country has no interest in the moon or how to walk on it. However, we do need a bright young man like you in our nuclear weapons development facility. You might wonder why Qamar's parents let their child sit up on the roof for ten nights in a row and for a boy. You might think Egyptian parents don't let their little girls get away with things like that, and you'd be right. But Qamar's parents were different. They were actors in the theater at Alexandria. Her mother was Sophia, and her father was Farid Hafiz. You may have heard of their summertime performances at the Corniche Theater, the pink hieroglyphed open-air venue resembling a conch shell. Sofia and Farid performed musical comedies on that stage, their only child watching behind the velvet curtain every night. And when she was five, she told them she wanted to dance. They desired that she have credibility as a performer, so they enrolled her at the Conservatoire for ballet lessons. By her 13th birthday, she was one of Egypt's top ballerinas, the Russian Allied government sending her to St. Petersburg for exclusive performances. When Qamar was 15, her parents were run over by a van in St. Petersburg as they were crossing the street to see her dance at the theater. The van's passengers, who were sticking their heads out of the window and peering into monoculars, distracted the heavy-footed driver. Looking up into the sky, he saw the cause of their excitement, a lunar eclipse. Her parents were killed instantly. Now, if she hadn't been a ballerina, she wouldn't have gone to St. Petersburg. If she hadn't gone to St. Petersburg, her parents would have never crossed that cursed street. If her performance had been on a different night, the driver would not have been distracted. If many years ago, Dulles hadn't thought Nasser was bluffing, Egypt would never have found an ally in Russia, and her performance may have been held in Washington, where van drivers rarely hold romantic sentiments about the moon or any other heavenly object. Speaker 4 (9:59) Her guilt made her quit ballet. Ever heard of anyone dying of a split? She hadn't, so she immediately began working as a tightrope walker for the Cirque de la Lune, a French circus based in Alexandria. The tent was attached to the St. Mark's School for Boys. You could see her walking the big brown bears in the early mornings, berating them for being so lazy. They always moved a bit faster for her. She wore her tightrope walking suit, shiny green leotard, and a lime green tutu speckled with tiny silver stars. Her tights were sheer gray, her feet bound in pink ballet slippers. She would have all nine bears on leashes and walk them in circles around the circus courtyard. On Speaker 2 (10:45) point. Speaker 4 (10:47) First time Hilal glimpsed Qamar, he was riding the dirty street tram and staring out the broken window. He caught the same train to work every morning to the nuclear development plant downtown, and one morning he saw her walking the bears. She looked to him like the sun of an entire cosmos. He felt as though his spirit were spilling out of his speeding tram's window, and for weeks he tried to work up the courage to get off at the St. Mark's station and visit her. He didn't realize that she was the nine-year-old who had been in the newspaper. Speaker 4 (11:24) Later, Hilal rummaged through his drawer for his journal and found the yellowed paper with the old headline, Girl Makes Moon Disappear. He decided to use part of his weekly salary to go to the Cirque de la Lune and see Qamar's Hirewire Act in person. Qamar had found out 48 hours after her parents' death that she must marry Omar, a family friend who would be responsible for her in lieu of them. The final blow had sickened her so much, she had recently decided to present her show without a safety net. At first, this had made Laurent, the circus ringleader, get an ulcer, but it eventually brought the show good publicity, so he let her do it. She began walking the wire, on point, performing flips and splits, plies and twirls, all the while hoping to fall off and break her neck. She never did. Suspecting it would take riskier moves for her death wish to come true, she incorporated a pigeon, a vulture, and a cat, a tiger, into her act. Hillel watched her from the front row, his heart drumming like a tattered tubla. After the show, he followed her home. She knew who was trailing her, so she walked through the stranger's courtyard under banana trees and their huge leaves in and out of other people's buildings and hid behind jasmine trellised walls, her heart beating hard, until she lost him. Once home, she sat out in the balcony and soaked her bloody toes in ice water. The building, over 70 years old, had balconies that were covered by a mashrabiya. From her balcony, she could see Cleopatra Beach and a broken moon in it, the obelisk in the middle of the square, a leftover piece of history. The archaeologists had come and looked at it the previous summer. They said the ancients strategically placed it there and that it lined up with a constellation, like a finger pointing up to the heavens. Qamara's bed was on the balcony. She hadn't moved out there after her parents died. She began sleeping in a black nightgown, mourning them in her dreams. Hilal believed that she had the courage he lacked. That was why he thought he loved her. He would never be able to walk on the moon, but he formulated a plan. He received a lot of freedom at work. The president let him dabble with anything as long as it didn't have explosive capabilities. And that was fine. with Hilal. His rocket didn't need to explode. On the night of the mulid, the celebration of the prophet's birthday, Qamar, depressed and with only a few weeks of freedom remaining for her wedding, went out to join the festivities. That night, all of Alexandria was a circus. There were colorful celebrations in every major street. Sufi dancers in white robes twirled around in red and white calligraphy-colored tents. There were 12 dancers in all, and they weaved around themselves and in a circle perfectly synchronized like the planets. Hama remembered one mulid in particular. Her father had taken her to the pastry shop, and they had bought Aruset el-Mulid, the traditional doll of the Mulid. The doll was made entirely of bright pink sugar, and Tamar used to think that it looked like a ballerina. She refused to eat her doll and kept it on her bookshelf, and the next morning she was horrified to find only part of the doll's dress left, and even that was covered in the small black