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Author Donna Ciocca has achieved one of life's impossibilities: she's written books that makes kids laugh out loud. Her most recent work, Tavern Tales tells the semi-autobiographical story of being raised by her strongminded grandmother who ran a tavern in Missouri. Donna will talk about writing humor and will clarify what's fact and what's fiction in her new book.

We close tonight's show with a song that takes place in a bar, but this particular story doesn't share the light-heartedness that characterizes many of Donna Ciocca's tavern tales. Ted Sink is a musician from Portsmouth. He joined us on the Front Porch back in February of last year, and we talked with him about his late-blooming musical career and about his own battles with alcohol abuse. We'll hear a bit of that interview and his song "One Last Time".

We kick off our series Granite State Stories with Thornton Wilder's classic book and play of Our Town. Simple and powerful, it's the story of life in the fictional town of Grover's Corner's, New Hampshire. Although Wilder wasn't from New Hampshire, it was his 9 summers he spent at the McDowell Colony in Peterborough that helped inspire Our Town. Wilder paints an idyllic New Hampshire in his masterpiece and Grover's Corners has become almost metaphoric as to how New Hampshire used to be or should be… quant town centers, booming church steeples and townsfolk who are neighborly in the truest form… but does that still exist today? As we grow, as giant McMansions pop up and small towns transform into suburban and urban areas, can we still find that Our Town look, that Our Town feel or that Our Town way in our state? Laura's guests are David Watters, Granite State Stories Scholar, Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and director of its Center for New England Culture and Tappan Wilder, Nephew and Literary Executor of Thornton Wilder.
*This show was originally broadcast on 8/19/05*