JeanShepherd

=WINTER BREAK PROJECT=

__PART ONE__
//On a blank sheet of paper, briefly describe a single present you once wanted someone to give you—a holiday or birthday gift you wanted so badly, you thought you would feel incomplete unless that gift was finally yours. Briefly explain what you tried to do to convince others to give you that gift. Did you receive it? If so, did it live up to your expectations? If not, do you still harbor any ill-will?//

Every year, from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day, basic cable’s Turner Broadcasting Station airs the movie __A Christmas Story__ (1983) on a twenty-four-hour loop. Forty-million Americans annually tune in over the course of the marathon and watch the film’s protagonist, Ralphie Parker, attempt to convince his Mother, his Old Man, his friends, his grade school teacher and even a belligerent Santa Claus to leave a Red Ryder Carbine-Action 200-Shot Range Model Air Rifle ("with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time!") under the Parker family’s skewed holiday tree.
 * __PART TWO__**

__A Christmas Story__ takes place during the Great Depression, an era in which a parent giving a child a BB gun as a gift was considered “a rite of passage.” (Red Ryder Air Rifles were once sold on Sears and K-Mart toy shelves!) The movie features Ralphie’s misadventures with nostalgic pop-culture icons from the 1940s (Little Orphan Annie radio programs, Ovaltine, Decoder Pins and Nehi Soda Leg Lamps—to name a few). However, the film is //not// about these icons. Ralphie thinks an air rifle is the perfect holiday gift and does what he can to convince others to think the same; his conflict drives the narrative. A two-hour movie explicitly about an air rifle would bore audiences to tears. __A Christmas Story__ uses a series of vignettes about the gun (and other emblems of 1940s pop-culture) as symbols of the society changing around Ralphie. (For more information on the film and its cultural impact, click [|here] to read an article written by your teacher and published on the movie's official website.)

__A Christmas Story__ is based on short stories from the collection [|In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash] by Jean Shepherd. The short stories were based on monologues Shepherd performed on the air during his tenure as a New York radio personality. Shepherd worked for WOR 710-AM from 1956 through 1977. There, he invented talk radio. Rather than spinning records or reporting weather and traffic, Shepherd sat before a microphone and, shortly before midnight, spun sometimes sarcastic, sometimes whimsical stories about growing up east of Chicago’s Southside, around the steel mills of Hammond, Indiana. Sometimes Shepherd broadcast his monologues from a New York night club called The Limelight. He found fans up and down the east coast. Regular listeners set transistor radios up at their bedsides and fell asleep listening to their old friend, “Shep.” Famous mass communication scholar Marshall McLuhan once wrote that Shepherd used radio “as a new kind of novel that he writes nightly.” Shepherd also found a fan in a young Jerry Seinfeld, who once told a reporter, “Shepherd really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd.” (Seinfeld even named his third son “Shepherd.”)

//Here are a few of Shepherd’s original radio monologues, including his “rough draft” of the Red Ryder BB gun story. **All of these audio links are public domain properties.** Please read past the audio links and downloads; the rest of this assignment awaits!//

THE OLD MAN'S MAJOR AWARD
media type="file" key="03 The Nehi Orange Contest.m4a"

FLICK'S TONGUE, PART ONE
media type="file" key="04 (1) Flick Tongue.m4a"

FLICK'S TONGUE, PART TWO
media type="file" key="05 (2) Flick Tongue.m4a"

media type="file" key="05 _Ralphie, how do the piggies go__.m4a"
 * //Use the links below if you would like to download individual Shepherd tracks to your computer for use with an MP3 player or to burn them to a CD.//**

[|01 Earliest Version of BB Gun Story.m4a] [|02 The Old Man's Major Award.m4a] [|03 Little Orphan Annie.m4a] [|04 Flick's Tongue, Part I.m4a] [|05 Flick's Tongue, Part II.m4a]

PART THREE
//Answer the following questions with well-developed paragraph-length responses.//

=Mandatory Question #1:= //Listen to Shepherd’s earliest version of the BB gun story. Now reread the brief description you wrote of the perfect holiday gift. How is Shepherd’s quest for the perfect Christmas present comparable to your gift pursuit, as decribed in your answer to Part One of this assignment? What themes (meanings, morals or messages established by the narrative’s motifs) are similar to the lessons you learned from your own life experiences? Link your interpretation of Shepherd’s narrative and its intended themes to the life experiences you brought to the story as its listener. **Your response is worth 15 points.**//

Mandatory Question #2:
//Listen to either “The Old Man’s Major Award,” “Little Orphan Annie” or “Flick’s Tongue.” If you can, attempt to simulate the experience of typical Shepherd listeners during the monologist’s broadcasting days: wait until near-midnight, turn the lights low and listen to Shepherd as if he were saying goodnight to you. Pretend that either your computer or iPod is a transistor radio. The next day, write a descriptive paragraph recounting the images Shepherd painted in your head. Did they look like scenes out of __A Christmas Story__, or were they unique unto you, relative to your own similar childhood experiences? (In other words, did Shepherd’s buddies, Brunor and Flick, resemble your friends? Did Shepherd’s grade school and the “culture of kiddom” remind you of your own grade school days?) Using specific, vivid adjectives and the literary terms we learned throughout the semester, describe the quality of Shepherd’s storytelling. In your paragraph-length response, you may briefly explain why you think listeners in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s were engaged by Shepherd’s special brand of radio storytelling. **Your response is worth 15 points.**//

Extra Credit Question:
//Shepherd hated commercialism. In Shepherd’s stories, the protagonist is consistently hurt or offended by commercial products or emblems of consumerism. (Note what happens to Ralphie when he finally receives his Red Ryder… or when he finally decodes one of Little Orphan Annie’s secret messages… or when he finally sits on Santa’s lap and asks for consumer goods …) After Shepherd passed away in 1999, an array of products relative to __A Christmas Story__ (action figures, commemorative BB guns, tree ornaments, decoder pins, leg lamps, board games) hit store shelves worldwide. Do these consumer goods (inspired by Shepherd’s anti-consumerism themes) distract from or ironically prove Shepherd’s point? Compose your paragraph-length response in such a way that it highlights your understanding of Shepherd’s themes and the definition of the term “irony.” **Your response may be worth up to 10 points.**//