No Decaf, No Drama, Respect the Music

Los Angeles-based artist and baker Christine McConnell (previously featured here) just finished decorating her parents’ house for Halloween. What was once a charming and inviting home has now been transformed into a spooktacularly awesome Monster House! McConnell cut and painted foam-core insulation board to make the monstrous eyes and vicious pointy teeth.

The house looks even more incredible at night when it’s lit by an eerie green light and there’s smoke pouring out of the ferocious mouth.

But no matter whether it’s day or night, never turn your back on this house. Approach slowly, trick-or-treat, and then carefully back away…

Photo by Emily Kask for NPR

For writer Jesmyn Ward, Mississippi is a place she loves and hates all at once.

She grew up and still lives in the tiny town of DeLisle, Miss., close by the Gulf Coast, where, she writes, African-American families like hers are “pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism.”

Those struggles, hinging on race and class, run all through her writing, from her novel Salvage the Bones, which won Ward a National Book Award in 2011; to her searing memoir Men We Reaped, published in 2013; to her new novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Ward, 40, has chosen to return to DeLisle and raise her children there, despite her profound ambivalence about what the town represents. NPR’s Melissa Block visited her there, to talk about place, belonging, and telling the stories of the silenced.

Because sometimes what you need most is to see a toad wearing a hat. Self-described “toad milliner” Chris Newsome recently began making awesome little hats for this toad who’s been hanging out on his porch:

“The toad that hangs out on my porch needed a hat. I decided to enter the world of toad millinery and help the little guy out. Foam paper seemed like a toad friendly material.”

After the fancy pink top hat with a feather and monocle came this sporty purple cap, complete with a T for Toad:

Then Newsome made both a western hat and a paper lasso so his amphibian visitor could play cowboy:

Behold the aural awesomeness of the iconic Doctor Who theme performed by the Pisces Rising orchestra along with the added intensity of a German choir, the Junges Vokalensemble Hannover, performing lyricized vocals “based on a mix of Sanskrit, faux Latin and various Doctor Who planets/references.” It’s a geektastic symphony of epic proportions.

We’ve headed to the deep south for the second leg of our road trip! We’ll be spending most of our time in the Mississippi Delta, a part of the state I’ve never been to but have always wanted to explore. A book I just bought calls the Delta “the most southern place on earth.” Rich history, blues, hot tamales, and river adventures: can’t wait to find and tell these stories.