10.22.15: Incognito, Finding the "Wright" House, & The Case Against Apple Picking

Michael Fosberg grew up in a middle-class white family – and didn’t discover until his early 30s that his biological father was black. Today, a conversation about race, identity and personal discovery with actor Michael Fosberg.   Also today, autumn habits gone wrong. We’ll talk to a writer argues that apple- picking is a big fat scam. And, after more than twenty years of carved pumpkins and big crowds, Keene, New Hampshire will be quiet this weekend. We’ll ask residents how they feel about the loss of a long holiday ritual. 

Listen to the full show. 

Incognito is a one-man play about Michael Fosberg’s discovery that after growing up in a middle-class white family, his biological father was black. The play raises questions of race and identity at a time when protests over the deaths of unarmed African-Americans and #BlackLivesMatter are fueling what some are calling a new civil rights movement.

Fosberg is performing Incognitothis Sunday at East-West University in Chicago to benefit Literature For All of Us, a program for under-resourced kids and adults in the Chicago area. 

Linda McQuillen is a math educator living in Madison, Wisconsin. Her home, which she bought in 1989, was recently discovered to be a Frank Lloyd Wright design hiding in plain sight for nearly a century.

If you play music, does that make you a musician?  Or do you have to make a living from your art to be given the title? Day Job is a podcast about how musicians pay the rent, produced by Joshua McNichols. This episode introduced to Kari Kirkland, who like many artists, is trying to balance two professional lives.

You can listen to this story again at PRX.org. 

Apple picking is a rite of passage for many children certainly, but Daniel Grossshatters that illusion in his article decrying apple picking as a scam. Daniel is a longtime contributor to Slate, where he originally published the article “Against Apple Picking” and who resurrects it each fall to new outrage. His most recent book is Better, Stronger, Faster.

After riots broke out last year at Keene State College, disrupting the annual Pumpkin Festival, the city voted against hosting the event this year. So this weekend, for the first time in 25 years, Main Street will be quiet the weekend before Halloween. Producer Megan Tan walked around Keene’s downtown and asked residents how they were feeling about the absence of the Pumpkin Festival.