Pledge Drive 2000-01-29

Series
The Other Side
Original Broadcast Date
1/29/2000
Cast
David Rapkin, Ryan Cutrona, Frederique Jolie, Joe Frank
Format
Pledge Drive, 69 minutes
Preceded by:	At Last
Followed by:	Two Women
Not available

Is it true that any creative work that questions people's premises and makes some of them so upset that they write angry letters and make passionate phone calls threatening to cancel their subscriptions is worth supporting?

Pledge Drive 2000-01-29 is a program Joe Frank produced as part of the series The Other Side.

Synopsis

Is provocative art worth supporting? Joe reads a fictitious complaint letter to the station manager condemning the program: a man is compelled to listen, becomes obsessed to commit crimes, reports having been impressed by Joe in person at a party, and threatens to commit ritual suicide during the program in protest. Another letter: an elderly Jewish man with an antisemitic car stereo praises Car Talk and insults Joe's grammar. What is the purpose of art? Telephone conversation with David Rapkin who tries to convince people to pledge by telling them he is held prisoner in Joe's closet. Pledging compared to saving a child from a burning car, puppies from a waterfall. Pledge gifts: the self immolation kit, the whirling dervish kit, the rabbi package. Joe is called into the general manager's office. We hear a complaining telephone message from a guy who condemns Joe's perversion, claims Harry Shearer could whip Joe in a fight, demands that Joe be prosecuted, and pauses repeatedly to yell at his kids. Joe is told to seduce the angry listener in order to keep him pledging. A dream: Joe gets a phone call from his dead father, picks up an ex-girlfriend on the way to work, gets told by his doctor that all his health problems were a mistake, comes to work and is swamped by calls. The crazy preacher character gives out the phone number. An actress pretending to be Ruth Seymour says that she has been Joe's lover and offers the audience a vote on the future of the program. An alternate take of the complaining phone call. If Joe came to your house, you'd take him to dinner - why not pledge instead? Joe performs research for the program by living with zoo animals, proposes a program produced from within an isolation tank. An inoffensive telling of the crisis scenes from movies populated with nondenominational robots compared to Joe's program. ("There are no Jews in Hollywood.") A phone call from someone who admires Joe's work but doesn't admire him personally. Joe reads a fax from someone who regrets having been misled by him. Joe describes the sacrifices he's made to radio.

Music

• "Papa Don't Take No Mess (Part 1)" - James Brown (from Papa Don't Take No Mess, 1974) | YouTube [Intro]
• "School Boy Crush" - Average White Band‎ (from Cut The Cake, 1975) | YouTube [27:17]

Additional credits

The original broadcast credits state: "I want to thank Arthur Miller, David Rapkin, Ryan Cutrona, and Frederique Jolie. Music supervision: Thomas Golubić. Production assistance: Esmé Gregson. And very special thanks to Bob Carlson for his outstanding, superlative, and great work engineering this show."

Miscellanea

• This program is not available at joefrank.com.