This story in the New York Times Magazine got me thinking about the topic of "Woodridge, Illinois". I didn't change much about the scenario at all. I did shift the city two suburbs over to one where I partially grew up, and shifted the malady the family is dealing with to autism....
To that end, my autism research included reading a few books - notably the second edition of Uta Frith's fantastic Autism: Explaining the Enigma, and the much-more-fun book Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's.
For frivolous personal reasons, I included Victor singing to himself a chunk of a pretty obscure Monty Python song, from off of their Contractual Obligation Album, called The Decomposing Composers. And of course, as Victor tells us 32 times in the story, the main piece in "Philosophy of Mind" is Haydn's Symphony No. 22, nicknamed "The Philosopher".
WFMT is the major classical radio station in Chicago. I checked their lineup, and listened to some podcasts - Elbio Barbilari does, in fact, host a program of Latin-world classical music every Sunday at 6pm, called Fiesta!. It's a really good show! I recommend listening to it.
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A note from 2021 about the thumbnail image for this episode (the text above was written in 2016, when the podcast was made).
This is a strange collage made using the current Google Street View image of the home where I lived i~1979-81 in Woodridge, Illinois, with a score page of Haydn's "Philosopher" dropped in, as well as an image of my own family, taken sitting in that same lawn ~1979-81. The ghostly nostalgia seemed to fit the story, loosely. Mainly it was that I went through old photos looking for a picture of our house. Couldn't quite find one, just part of the house with us in the lawn; and then decided to fuse that picture with GSV when I saw that the house looks remarkably unchanged today, Someone redid the windows. A little bit of landscaping.
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