Jerry's World (Part 1)

Jerry's World[1]

Series
In The Dark
Original Broadcast Date
1994-12
Cast
Jerry Klein, Mannie Klein, Meryl, Theresa Nolan
Format
Found Tape, Real People, 30 minutes
Preceded by:	Anthology Of Love (Part 2)
Followed by:	Jerry's World (Part 2)

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

Jerry's World (Part 1) is a program Joe Frank produced as part of the series In The Dark. It was originally broadcast in 1994.

Synopsis

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

• Manny 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.

Music

• "Sunray Dub" - Babble (from The Stone, 1993) | YouTube
• "Buried At Sea" - MC 900 Ft Jesus (from One Step Ahead of the Spider, 1994) | YouTube

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 a 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]

The three parts of this program are available joined together into a single program on joefrank.com.

Commentary

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