The Snapping of Carrots
in Radio Drama

by Kendra L. Levin

When Valerie Henderson asked me to be the production assistant for the recording of "The Flight of Betsey Lane" by Sarah Orne Jewett, I really had no idea what to expect. I had never worked in radio before; I had never even been in a recording studio. I knew that I would work; I knew how much I was to be paid. What I did not realize, and did not discover until after the dramatization was recorded and edited and finished, was that I was to become a small vessel in a complicated body that I would belong to now and always.

Upon arriving my first day, I received my first assignment: I was dispatched to buy carrots to be used to create the auditory effect of snapping beans. I remember the small thrill of exhilaration that rippled over my skin in the grocery store. I was a Production Assistant now. This was work and I was a professional. These were the carrots of a Production Assistant.

Admittedly my zeal was a bit extreme. But as I sat in the studio later and listened to the soft undercurrent of snapping that accompanied the dialogue, I could not help thinking that that sound, somehow, was mine. Though my job was small, I felt part of a greater whole. For the purposes of recording, the director broke the scenes up into segments: Scene 1A, 1B, 2A etc. The actors would rehearse and record each segment separately, to be melded later by the sound engineer. I felt a bit like one of those segments: a small part of the works that nevertheless had its place in the scheme.

After my engagement as Production Assistant was over, I thought little about that time I had spent on the Betsey Lane project until one day, several months later, I received a small package in the mail from the Public Media Foundation. Its contents did not even occur to me until I felt its shape: it was the tape, the final recording of "The Flight of Betsey Lane". I popped it into the tape player and pressed play, and though I knew what I would hear, I held my breath a little. I sat, spellbound, listening to those fragments that had been combined so smoothly to produce a story, a life. The voices, the music, the pacing, all so familiar-and when I heard the sound of the carrots snapping under the rhythm of the actors' voices, I felt like part of the larger world.

Kendra L. Levin is a student at Walnut Hill High School, Natick, Massachusetts.

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