Brothers

Brothers[1]

Series
The Other Side
Original Broadcast Date
November 26, 2000
Cast
Jerry Klein, Mannie Klein, Meryl
Format
Found Tape, 1 hour
Preceded by:	Mystery
Followed by:	Bitter Pill

"Well how do you know it's from you? maybe she's getting her period."

Brothers is a program Joe Frank produced as part of the series The Other Side. It was originally broadcast on November 26, 2000.

Synopsis

Phone conversations involving Jerry, his brother Mannie, and his ex-girlfriend Merle who is now dating Mannie.

• Mannie is ejaculating blood, Jerry urges him to go to the hospital.
• Merle and Jerry catch up with each other and talk about answering personal ads and her mother believing that they loved each other.
• Jerry questions Meryl's father about removing a her from the hospital and checking her into a halfway house, accuses him of keeping her against her will.
• Jerry talks with a Mannie and Meryl about having sex in a raft, drinking a condom, being a bad lover.
• Jerry and Merle talk about sleeping around.
• Jerry asks a man for a psychiatrist recommendation, talks about being afraid of going outside.
• Jerry talks to Merle in the middle of the night about her decision to leave him, calls her selfish, begs for another chance, insults her.
• Mannie tells Jerry's father that Jerry will die if he doesn't get help, that he's living without lights or telephone.
• Merle and Jerry negotiate a resumption of their relationship.
• Apparently months or years later, Merle talks to Jerry about why she doesn't call him, pausing to interact with her kids.

Shared material

• Jerry's World

Miscellanea

During a KPFA fundraiser telephone interview Joe was asked who Jerry was, and what it was all about. His response was "Jerry was a man who lived in New York City. He lived in an apartment, alone and was very depressed; and what he did was record his phone conversations, with everybody, for years. and when people came over to visit at his apartment he'd record them, too. He became so depressed he couldn't leave his apartment. His brother Mannie (who you also hear in that show) would come to his place with food, to keep him alive; and ultimately he died, a relatively young man in his early forties, of a brain aneurysm. After he died, his brother had all these tapes, hundreds of tapes of these phone conversations and he knew that his brother Jerry had been a fan of my program and he thought 'Well, maybe Joe can use some of this material; maybe he'll put it on the air.' So he sent me excerpts ... and I found this material very compelling and decided to make a radio series based on those recordings. So what you hear in 'Jerry's World' is Jerry, who is now dead, and his brother Mannie who very much admired him... and this girlfriend earlier of Jerry and then of Mannie and now she was going out on her own, and her name was Meryl, and there was another woman involved, but these were all tapes of real conversations and real life being played out from various times in the life of a man who died rather tragically."[2]

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