Tell Me a Story #9: Jeanette Gonzalez
by Blayde Alcabes
“Tell Me a Story” is a series spotlighting individuals on the York College campus as well as in the wider community of York. They tell a story that’s unique to them — we publish it so that you can get a glimpse of their lives. Each piece includes an unedited transcription of their response.
“So, I’m not typically into podcasts, because I find it hard to just listen to people talk about a designed subject, but I’m really into one podcast called Welcome to Night Vale. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s this almost philosophical podcast, but it’s told in a story [format] through the eyes of this guy named Cecil who’s a radio host in Night Vale.
I had the opportunity to go see the live show twice — they do a tour where they record a brand new script, usually around a certain topic. I went to one called ‘Ghost Stories,’ and it’s really fun because when you listen to the podcast, it’s just kind of enticing to listen to because it’s so odd and it’s so strange and very creative.
They have this whole world … there’s these shadow people, there’s a glowing cloud that no one knows why is there. It’s just so in-depth, and so when you go to one of their live shows, they touch on everything that they’ve ever ever created, and they are really big on audience involvement. They’ll speak to the normal podcast — it’ll be the normal video you hear on YouTube, but it’ll be directed to the audience, and they expect you to play along, and they have these lights going on in the background that really set the ambiance, and it’s just really cool to go to.
The ‘Ghost Stories’ one … Cecil was talking about how he was alone in the radio station, but he kept hearing something coming towards him, and Cecil has guests on his radio show … he’ll have all these different characters come, and some strange thing will happen that will either cause them to leave or [will] happen in the radio show, and they’re just going through it, but they expect the audience to go through it as well, so they expect audience reactions, and when they tell you to look somewhere, they expect the audience to look with them …
There was another one that was a murder mystery, and the entire time they told you to pick somebody in the audience to look at, so they told you to look around and to choose one person to focus on, and you had to focus on them through the entire show, and then as the story progressed in the live podcast, the story progressed with who you thought was the murderer …
It’s really cool to go to — they have breaks in between each part of the script called ‘the weather,’ and it’s a live … band that comes, and you basically sit through a concert in the middle of each part of the script. So, I don’t like podcasts, but I really enjoy Welcome to Night Vale, because … it’s just so cool.”
