Episode 0 - The Pitch

"The signpost up ahead. Your next stop. The Twilight Zone" - from Season 2 Intro

This is not the first episode of the podcast but rather a pitch, an short introduction, an explanation, of why I am wanting to do a podcast about The Twilight Zone. It is just a taste, like the small taster spoons from a numerically-based purveyor of ice cream.

Give it a listen and if you like it, come back soon for the first episode soon. Subscribe through iTunes or your favorite podcast app of choice to get it as it released.

Cheers.

Episode Transcript:

Progenitor
  
Something that begins the development of something else. <Merriam-Webster> 
  
I was sick the first time I remember watching the Twilight Zone. I may have seen it before this time, but I have no memory of it. Some of the details are fuzzy, some are very clear. I was somewhere between 6-8 years old. My room was lit by the glow of a small black and white TV my parents had brought in to comfort me after putting me back to bed. I had woken up in the middle of the night feeling sick and ran to the bathroom across the hall. It was not long before my mother came in to be with me until the spasms in my stomach subsided. She washed my face and hands and got me a room temperature 7-Up she kept in the pantry for times like these. In the meantime, my father brought in the aforementioned TV and a blue and white plastic humidifier. I wasn’t congested but I remember the sound made me feel better. The light of the black and white TV was diffused into an eerie glow by the blue walls of my bedroom. It was in this setting, without any input as to how I should respond, enveloped in the glow of the TV and the sounds of the house muted by the humidifier, that I discovered the Twilight Zone. 
  
I think it was past midnight because the late night shows were over. I would have watched Johnny Carson (look it up kids) not because I understood the jokes but because it made my dad laugh. I don't remember what episode, or rather episodes, I watched because apparently it was a marathon but I remember the effect. No, it might be better to say that I am still feeling the effects today. In these stories was the idea of another world, not next door to ours, but rather around the corner or behind the curtain that you might innocently pass through and in to. The notion of another universe, often hiding in plain sight, seemed to strike a cord with me. The idea that behind one door in an apartment building was a family having dinner, behind another, a man was making a deal with Mr. Cadwallader, and behind a third, a scientist found that he had brought forward in the time the wrong kind of man, was in line with how I, an incubating writer who told stories at sleepovers, looked at the world, the way I wanted the world to be. 
  
The mundane world, the world as we all assume it to be, did not hold enough wonder for me as a child. I needed to fill in the details where reality had dropped the ball. If there was a coat askew among a row of undisturbed ones, I needed there to be a man hurrying past, running from a terrible decision who nearly knocked it off in his haste. A unopened envelope fallen behind a desk wasn't a discarded piece of junk mail but rather a letter confessing a dark secret that needed to be pushed away before it was discovered. It was never just a wrong number. 
  
The Twilight Zone made this into a reality for me, or at least something external that I could see, something outside of my head. I sometimes wonder if I thought this way before the Twilight Zone and that's why it appealed to me so much or sparked in me something previously unlit. Chicken and the egg, I suppose. 
  
When I first thought about doing a podcast on The Twilight Zone, I imagined that I needed to do ton of research before I could get started. I began building a wish list on Amazon of episode guides and biographies. I planned spreadsheets of cross-referencing directors and writers and episodes.  I was considering segments, bumpers, themes and then I realized something else was happening. I was shinning lights at the shadows in the corners of rooms and finding only dust-bunnies. I was looking behind paintings and finding only walls. What I loved about the Twilight Zone wasn't the details of production but the production itself, the stories, the places I was taken. What I want is to not to autopsy these episodes but to try to find a way back to that room, lit by the glow of a black and white TV, being told of the world that hid in the corner of my eye. 
  
I imagine these will be slow to start as I get my bearings. My hope is that inertia will build and along with it frequency. For some time, mine will be the only voice. Hopefully, others will join. Until then, 
  
Welcome to The Signpost.