The PopCulteer
December 21, 2018

Your PopCulteer has a confession to make. I’ve been lazy this week. Instead of writing heavily-researched and well-sourced articles about pop culture topics and bringing you the latest news, or making new videos from my recent trip to Chicago (there are more coming), or even making new Christmas specials for The AIR (they aren’t going to happen), I have simply been re-posting old holiday episodes of Radio Free Charleston from the last twelve years of this blog.

Part of it is a bit of year-end burnout. That 25,000-word PopCult Gift Guide really took a lot out of me, and hopping the rails to Chicago immediately after wrapping it up didn’t really give me much time to catch my breath.

Part of it is also due to a special surprise project I’m planning for PopCult before New Years Day, too.

Part of it is also losing an entire work day because somebody within a couple of blocks of my house had some kind of loud yard work done that made it impossible to concentrate, or do voice-over work. Seriously, it sounded like they were chucking Volkswagons into a wood-chipper, and it went on for almost six hours.  That day and the next I was like the nervous guy in the classic cartoon Quiet Please, directed by Tex Avery.

But mostly it’s me being distracted by Christmas, which I believe is going to be very special and fun for me and my lovely wife this year. We are four days out, and I want to savor the holiday this year. It’s weird, because for a few years there I fell in with the “Christmas is overblown–I prefer Halloween” crowd, but now that’s reversed. I am really burned out on Halloween and just want to get it over with so we can get on to Christmas. That may change in a couple of years, but for the time being, I’m enjoying this holiday and all its trappings.

At this point, the country is plenty enough divided by our current elected officials, and we don’t really need any more words written about whether Halloween or Christmas is a better holiday. So rather than go on and on and on about that topic, how about for this week’s PopCulteer post I just give you some more cool Radio Free Charleston Christmas shows? Today we’re going to bring you a load of shows with music from the Contemporary Youth Arts Company crew and their productions of the Mark Scarpelli/Dan Kehde Charleston tradition,  MARY: A Rock Opera.

In 2010 RFC went caroling with CYAC and also brought you highlights of that year’s production of MARY. We posted this the other day, but it was such a fun show we wanted to give it the top spot today…

Two years before that, we didn’t produce an entire show because I had been in a car wreck in early December. We did manage a “Christmas Treat,” mini-show, featuring Molly Means performing “Child, My Child” from MARY,  plus some of the UUC Winter Solistice drum circle…

A few weeks before we first posted the above 2008 Christmas Treat, we had brought our readers a “half-show” of Radio Free Charleston, devoted to MARY, back in the days when YouTube clips had to be under ten minutes long…

In 2013 we brought our readers up to date with a new RFC MINI SHOW recorded at rehearsals for that year’s production of MARY.

Finally, we bring you a trailer for MARY that we produced in 2014…

You can find even more snippets of MARY in some of the episodes of Radio Free Charleston that we posted here earlier this week. We couldn’t make the schedule work to record any of the show this year, in their new performance space at The Charleston Town Center, but the show had several sold-out performances and I’ve heard nothing but raves about it.

And with that, we call it a PopCulteer. We will have fresh content and all our regular features every day, even Christmas. I know because I’m going to write and schedule them all right after I finish this. Check PopCult, enjoy the holiday and be good to each other.