Send us a text NARRATOR (GEORGE): The Toy Museum never really sleeps. It sighs. It settles. It adjusts its labels. But somewhere, between the glass cases and the security cameras, the night gets… strange. Previously, the Night Watchman met a bear who smelled like home. Tonight, he’s walked into a different kind of dream— one made of high heels, sequins, and an alarming number of tiny pink shoes. [Footsteps slow. A light switch clicks. A faint, glamorous “whoosh” of spotlights.] NIGHT WATCH...
Send us a text NARRATOR (GEORGE): The Toy Museum KNOWS how to roar. It has dragons that eat cars, tiny metal racers that dare gravity, and shelves of toys that glow and beep and shout. But sometimes, the museum does something much quieter. It turns the dullest errands of adult life into a stage for children. Tonight, the Night Watchman has wandered away from speeding cars and plastic teeth, into a corner of the museum that feels… suspiciously like a grocery store. [Footsteps sl...
Send us a text NARRATOR (GEORGE): The Toy Museum has currents, like an ocean. Soft shelves, hard shelves, loud shelves, quiet ones. Last night, the Night Watchman nearly fell asleep leaning against a Squishmallow— no-questions-asked softness in pastel colors. Tonight, the current drags him somewhere else. Somewhere harder. Sharper. Louder. Footsteps NARRATOR: He’s entered the vehicles area. Rows of tiny cars. Trucks. Motorcycles. Helicopters frozen mid-rescue, race cars mid-victory lap. A...
Send us a text NARRATOR (GEORGE): The Toy Museum has its quiet corners— where Squishmallows wait to be hugged, and where a teddy bear smells like home. Tonight is not one of those corners. Tonight, the Night Watchman has wandered into the game aisle— the place where toys don’t just sit and get held. They demand players. They demand rules. They demand noise. [Footsteps on carpet, then a slightly hollo w thunk as he bumps a shelf.] NARRATOR: Board games stare at Mr. Smith from every...
Send us a text Ebenezer is back. This is the second night for Ebeneezer Smith as the new night watchmen at the Metropolitan Museum of toys and childhood artifacts KEY in lock. DOOR opening.] EBENEZER (muttering to himself): Well, I’m here. Again. This time I doubt I’ll meet any human beings I can talk with… The toys might be a different story. But honestly? I don’t understand what happened last night. I have no idea if that conversation with Slinky was a one-time...
Send us a text Hello my name is Ebeneezer Smith Thank you for staying with me.(mutters to himself) All right. Let’s see what kind of neighbors I’ve got. There is a set of plastic building bricks. There is a board game whose box I remember arguing over with my cousins. And in the “Comfort and Companions” section, a bear that looks suspiciously like something I once slept with every night until I was far too old to admit it. [SOUND: Footsteps slow.] And I admit this is the kind of atmosphere t...
Send us a text Our story tonight doesn’t start in a toy store. No bright aisles. No sales. No blinking “Buy One, Get One Free” signs. Instead, we begin on a quiet city street, just after closing time, in front of an old stone building most people walk past without ever truly seeing. During the day, it’s a respectable institution: The Metropolitan Museum of Toys and Childhood Artifacts. But tonight… it’s dark. The front doors are locked. The lights are dim. And a slightly nervous job applic...
Send us a text Now today’s episode is a little different. Usually, we spend our time tracking the lives of composers, musicians, and artists—people whose names end up in history books, or on album covers, or carved into theater walls. We talk about how they changed the sound of a century, or rewired what pop music could be, or turned their lives into performance. But for a while now, I’ve been quietly working on something a bit… stranger. For December, I’m moving us into a different kind o...
Send us a text In this series, we’ve been spending time with artists who didn’t just make hits — they rewired popular music itself. Some of them crashed. Some of them burned out. Some of them never got old enough to figure out who they might have become. In the previous episode, we talked about Michael Jackson — a man whose genius was wrapped in pressure, pain, and dependency, and whose life ended in an overdose in a rented mansion in Los Angeles. Today’s story easily could have ended the ...
Send us a text Today, we’re going to spend some time with a figure who shaped pop music, dance, music videos, and the idea of celebrity itself—only to become a tragic warning about what happens when that level of fame collides with a fragile human body and mind. Michael Joseph Jackson was born August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana—a working-class steel town in the Midwest. He was the eighth of ten children in the Jackson family, packed into a small house where money was tight, tempers could be h...
Send us a text Today, I want to put two lives—and two mythologies—side by side. Not as gossip. Not as tabloid spectacle. As a question: What happens when two Black artists rise from a Houston salon and a Brooklyn housing project to a place where they can rewire the business, the sound, and the story of popular music—and do it as a partnership? Let’s start in Houston. Beyoncé Giselle Knowles grows up in a middle-class Black family. Her mother, Tina, runs a salon. Her father, Mathew, works i...
Send us a text In this current series, we’ve been living in the neighborhood of giants—artists who didn’t just have hits, but re-wired what popular music could be. Today… someone different again. A man who refused categories, ignored rules, blurred gender lines, shredded guitars, whispered falsettos, wrote anthems for other people in his spare time, and turned a small Midwestern city into the center of a new universe. Prince. Not “Prince the nostalgia act.” Prince the problem. Prince the...
Send us a text In this series, we’ve spent time with giants—singers, songwriters, bands, entire movements. Some of them changed my life from a distance, through vinyl and radio and the accidental sacrament of a TV set in the living room. Today’s subject changed my life at arm’s length. Not in a stadium, not in a Broadway theater, not on a movie screen, but in a small brick house in Richmond, Virginia—the Edgar Allan Poe Museum—where a visiting diva looked across a desk and aimed one very sha...
Send us a text This is the story of Bruce Springsteen—“The Boss”—a kid from a working-class town who turned everyday American lives into epic songs, who built a career on sweat, loyalty, doubt, faith, and three-hour marathons onstage that left entire arenas wrung out and grinning. Let’s walk through where he came from, what shaped him, how he broke through, who he’s influenced—and why, decades in, Bruce Springsteen still matters. Picture central New Jersey in the 1950s and 60s. Bruce Freder...
Send us a text Today we are stepping straight into four decades of controversy, choreography, and calculated control. Madonna. Not just “the Queen of Pop,” but an artist who has treated her own life as a long, shape-shifting performance about power—who gets it, who’s allowed to keep it, and what happens when a woman refuses to sit down, shut up, or age politely. I’m George Bartley. Let’s begin. Madonna Louise Ciccone was born August 16, 1958, in Bay City, Michigan, and raised in the Detro...
Send us a text If you've been following this series of modern day musicians, you may remember a concert I mentioned with the Rolling Stones. It is true that the Stones were able to hold the audience and follow their hands, so to speak. But even before Mick Jagger strut out on stage, the opening act was Stevie Wonder = a living definition of a hard act to follow. If I had just seen his opening act, I could've left knowing that I had seen a great show = but I admit I would've definitely been di...
Send us a text Today, we’re going to spend some time with a figure who shaped pop music, dance, music videos, and the idea of celebrity itself—only to become a tragic warning about what happens when that level of fame collides with a fragile human body and mind. Michael Joseph Jackson was born August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana—a working-class steel town in the Midwest. He was the eighth of ten children in the Jackson family, packed into a small house where money was tight, tempers could be h...
Send us a text Today, we turn to an artist who never seemed entirely earthbound.David Bowie.For some listeners, Bowie is the sound of discovery: that first moment you realize a song, a costume, a performance can make the world feel bigger than the town you’re standing in. For others, he’s a gallery of snapshots: Ziggy Stardust in orange hair and stardust makeup. The Thin White Duke in a waistcoat and a stare like a searchlight. Jareth in Labyrinth, juggling crystal balls and rewiring childhoo...
Send us a text Tonight we turn to a musician whose name has become shorthand for guitar mastery, blues devotion, and, depending on who you ask, the very idea of the rock “guitar hero.” Eric Clapton. For some listeners, he is the ultimate guitarist: the Yardbirds prodigy, the “Clapton Is God” graffiti on London walls, the molten solos with Cream, the aching beauty of “Layla” and “Tears in Heaven,” the tasteful bends and vocal-like phrasing that defined what an electric guitar could say. For...
Send us a text In this podcast episode, we’ll walk through where they came from, what shaped them, how they crashed into the United States—and then spend some real time inside Tommy: not just as an album, but as a story that refused to stay put, leaping from vinyl to concert halls, movie screens, and the Broadway stage. Imagine that it is Post war England and you are in West London Bomb sites are turning into parking lots and playgrounds. Teenagers caught between their parents’ memories of w...