Episode 672
Rick Steves and The Lullaby Project
Legendary travel writer Rick Steves reflects on his days adventuring down "the hippie trail" from Istanbul to Kathmandu... and we discover why you might find him eating at McDonald's in Paris; plus The Lullaby Project brings together singer-songwriter Stephanie Schneiderman and the Oregon Symphony to perform a song co-written by an incarcerated mother for her child.
Rick Steves
Travel Writer
Since 1973, Rick Steves has spent about four months a year exploring Europe. His mission: to empower Americans to have European trips that are fun, affordable, and culturally broadening. Rick produces a best-selling guidebook series, a public television series, and a public radio show, and organizes small-group tours that take over 30,000 travelers to Europe annually. He does all of this with the help of more than 100 well-traveled staff members at Rick Steves' Europe in Edmonds, Washington (near Seattle). When not on the road, Rick is active in his church and with advocacy groups focused on economic and social justice, drug policy reform, and ending hunger. To recharge, Rick plays piano, relaxes at his family cabin in the Cascade Mountains, and spends time with his son Andy, daughter Jackie, and his grandson... baby Atlas.
The Lullaby Project
Musical Collaboration between the Oregon Symphony and Path Home
The Lullaby Project is a collaboration with the Oregon Symphony and Path Home that brings together professional singer-songwriters with parents experiencing homelessness. Through this partnership, participants work with symphony musicians to create personal lullabies for their children, fostering connection, healing, and creativity. The lullabies are professionally recorded and shared with the larger community at a concert. Path Home, a nonprofit that empowers homeless families with children to get back into housing and stay there, provides outreach to identify and support parents to participate, while the Oregon Symphony contributes its artistic expertise to bring these heartfelt songs to life. This project aims to empower families and nurture emotional bonds through the transformative power of music.
Show Notes
Best News
Elena’s story: “The ‘world’s most famous amphibian’ will deliver commencement speech at the University of Maryland”
Luke’s story: “Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards Go Viral in Rural Japan Town”
Another source: Fuji News Network article in Japanese
Rick Steves
Rick’s latest book is called On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu & the Making of a Travel Writer.
He discusses the creation story of On the Hippie Trail, which not only includes writing but also film photos taken by Rick himself and scans of journal entries (and yes his handwriting really is that good!)
Live Wire Listener Question
What's the most unexpected thing that happened to you while traveling?
Station Location Identification Examination
This week, Luke and Elena talk about the town of Harbor Springs, Michigan.
The Lullaby Project
Members of The Lullaby Project perform the song “Connected,” which local singer-songwriter and activist Stephanie Schneiderman co-wrote with an incarcerated mother for her child.
Learn more and support The Lullaby Project from the Oregon Symphony here.
Learn more about their partner organization, Path Home, here.
List of symphony players involved in this performance:
Peter Frajola (Violin)
Inés Voglar Belgique (Violin)
Amanda Grimm (Viola)
Kevin Kunkel (Cello)
Jason Schooler (Bass)
Zach Galatis (Flute)
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Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire! This week, travel writer Rick Steves.
Rick Steves: I work with 100 people up in Edmonds, and our mission is to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando.
Elena Passarello: With music from The Lullaby Project.
Stephanie Schneiderman: They see their parent in a powerful place, and then I think it becomes like their anthem.
Elena Passarello: And our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank!
Luke Burbank: We have got a jam-packed edition of Live Wire for you this week. Regular listeners to the show probably know a couple of things, and that is we do read the news, and we do usually have to give ourselves an eye bath after doing that because it's brutal. But also, what they know is that we have found that there are at least each week, Elena, two good news stories that happen in the world. Sometimes it's exactly two. [Elena: Yes.] And we search for those, and we bring them to you in a little segment we like to call. The best news we heard all week. All right, Elena Passerello, what is the best news you heard all week?
Elena Passarello: I worked really hard on this, I felt like you needed me to come up with something real good for you, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: I did, I did. I'm having a week.
Elena Passarello: Let's start with a question. Did you go to your college graduation?
Luke Burbank: I did not.
Elena Passarello: Okay, so do you know who the commencement speaker was?
Luke Burbank: No, but I know the guy from the Tim Allen show, the tool time guy. Yeah, the other guy that gave me the beard. The other guy, I think he might have been the speaker.
Elena Passarello: That's good, I like that, that's pretty good. Well, the University of Maryland does have you beat. They have just announced to their 2025 commencement speaker is going to be, and do you know who it is? I don't. It is, I'll give you a hint. He's green, and it's not easy being him.
Luke Burbank: Kermit the Frog.
Elena Passarello: Kermit the mother truckin' frog is delivering the commencement address at the University of Maryland, who I believe are the Terrapins. Which is a form of, it's another kind of, no, they're reptiles. So the reason for this, other than the fact that everybody wants Kermit the frog to deliver every address ever. Is because Jim Henson graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in home economics. In 1960, and I think his legacy is very deeply felt. Apparently Kermit the Frog gave a Dean's lecture there a couple of years ago. [Luke: Okay.] So they're just like inviting him back.
Luke Burbank: They already had the special podium built that you could hide a puppeteer in. They were like, let's get our money's worth. [Elena: What the what?] Oh yeah, I'm sorry, nothing.
Elena Passarello: I'm just going to ignore that comment. And when asked about why he decided to agree, Kermit the Frog, who is a real living frog, said, if a few encouraging words from a frog can help the class of 2025 leap into the world and make it a better place, then I'll be there. I know. Isn't that great? It's good. Good news. But so it had me thinking, I think Kermit Frog is one of the best muppets to do this job. But which muppet would be the worst? Animal. Animal I think the worst one would be beaker
Luke Burbank: Well, let's be honest, they defunded Beaker like two weeks ago.
Elena Passarello: Yeah.
Luke Burbank: There's no...He's not even allowed anywhere near the campus anymore for practicing science. The best news that I heard this week, Elena, it was kind of what I needed to hear as a guy who is approaching 50, approaching middle age, or maybe I'm already there. And it involves a town in Japan called Kawara. It's about 10,000 people. And the town of Kawara has this trading card mania that's going on there. All of the kids are obsessed over these trading cards. They're buying them, they're collecting them, they're trading them. They don't feature though like baseball players or Pokemon or anything, they feature real middle-aged guys from the town. This is a set. Of 47 playing cards of guys who are middle aged and elderly in the town of Kawara and the kids are going crazy for these. It was started by a woman who runs a community center there. And one of the things in Japan that's been noted is that you have a lot of folks who might be older and you don't have a lots of younger folks. And there's a pretty wide sort of distance between those two groups. And so this woman thought this would be a way to get some of the younger people thinking about some of them more senior folks in the town.
Elena Passarello: To collect them.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, to collect them. Well, yeah. And so she thought, we'll have these cards. This will just be a way for the kids to identify these different middle and older age people. The kids, though, figured out a way to make the cards fight each other. Like Pokemon. So like, one of the real guys from this town is a retired fire brigade chief and he can strike opponents for 200 fire damage. There's another guy on there who's a local electrician. He also has the ability to do damage with his electricity. [Elena: Oh, nice.] The kids are fighting the cards against each other. These guys are becoming celebrities. There's a guy who's named the Soba Master. Mr. Takashita, he's an 81-year-old soba noodle maker. There's Mr. Fuji, a 67-year-old former prison guard turned community volunteer whose card is so sought after, kids are approaching him on the streets to get him to autograph the cards. [Elena: Oh, this is so cool.] It's really heartwarming. I am, and I've been through all 47 of these cards. None of them are a middle-aged public radio host. Oh, no. Who can defeat the firefighter by staging a public radio pledge drive. Yeah, and putting them to sleep.
Elena Passarello: What about, like, nunchucks, but it's tote bags?
Luke Burbank: Something.
Elena Passarello: You know.
Luke Burbank: I feel like this is a good start. They need to integrate in some things from my life into it, but all in all, it's a really cute story. The participation in this community center by youth in this town has more than doubled because of these trading cards, so.
Elena Passarello: That's fabulous.
Luke Burbank: Absolutely. The middle-aged and elderly folks in Japan getting their due in this town, that, my friends, is the best news I heard this week. All right, let's get our first guest out here. Since 1973, he's spent a minimum of four months every year exploring Europe on a mission to learn one thing. How does the metric system work? He's still trying to solve that. But in the meantime, he has also helped hundreds of thousands of people travel to Europe in ways that are fun, affordable, and culturally broadening, not to mention the millions of viewers to his public television shows. And listeners to his radio show, plus readers of his travel books, the latest of which is the story of his time on the so-called Hippie Trail from Istanbul to Kathmandu in the 1970s, which launched his lifelong love of travel. Please welcome Rick Steves to Live Wire. Rick, welcome to Live Wire.
Rick Steves: I'm still trying to figure out how tall I am in metric.
Luke Burbank: You know, you and I were chatting backstage and you were talking about the kind of celebrity that you enjoy, which is either people have no idea who you are or they are obsessed with you and your work. And I think we have encountered door number two here at Benaroya Hall.
Luke Burbank: What do you think it is about your TV show and your writing and all the stuff you do that causes such a fervent response from your fans?
Rick Steves: A lot of times, I think people have a great trip and they just want to thank somebody for it. I get thanked for Malta, and I've never been there. You know, somebody comes up out of the blue, I've ever seen them before, and they go, we had the greatest time in Malta. Thank you so much. So what am I supposed to tell them? I just say, you're welcome.
Luke Burbank: Come on. I really enjoyed this book of yours, On the Hippie Trail. I was also reading it while traveling, not in the manner that you do in the book, which is pretty Spartan, but it was just such a fun book to be traveling with and reading and thinking about travel. I'm curious if you could take me back to when you wrote this, although I guess at the time you didn't realize you were writing a book. You were not a famous TV host. You were a recent college grad piano teacher who was going from Istanbul to Kathmandu. What were you doing on this trip?
Rick Steves: Well, first of all, this is my newest book, but it's also my oldest book. I wrote it when I was one third the age I am now. I was 23, and I had been to Europe several times, and I just wanted something more, and I whispered into my friend's ear, go east, young man, you know? And we both got together, me and my travel buddy, Gene, and we headed east from Istanbul to Kathmandu, and that was the... That was the road, the ultimate road trip back then in the 60s and 70s. The Beatles were hanging out with the Maharishi and Yogi, you know. And it was just like the ultimate trip. And I wrote this thing for myself. As you said, I was just a piano teacher. I had no idea I was going to be a travel writer. And I diligently wrote a 60,000 word journal filling up an empty book that's just like that, a hard bound 200 page book with beautiful penmanship. I cannot read my writing now, but for some reason then.
Luke Burbank: I thought that this, you had a graphic designer transcribe your actual, you know, chicken scratch and make it, this is your handwriting.
Rick Steves: That's my handwriting, yeah. But Luke, that book was when I wrote it, and then you know, you get home and you get onto other stuff, and I basically, I may have read four or five pages of it in 40 years. And then during COVID, I got a chance to do some things I didn't have time to normally, and reading that journal was like, it was like an anthropological dig into a 23-year-old version of myself that I had mostly forgotten about, and it was so cool to be able to look at that and see it as this coming-of-age trip is kind of the... The compost pile of experiences from where I would grow out of as a travel teacher.
Luke Burbank: Cause it was, you know, a lot of time on buses and in a lot kind of overnight situations in places that were pretty Spartan. Did you have moments on that trip where you thought maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew or maybe I'm not really cut out for this sort of life?
Rick Steves: It was a long long long road, and when you leave Istanbul heading east in 1978, there's no internet, you know, you've got some travelers checks in your money belt, no parents to bail you out. It occurred to me when I headed east from Istanbul, there is not a soul between here and Seattle that even knows I exist, and I didn't know anybody between there and Seattle, and we were going that way, and there was no information back then. Now we have too information almost, but back then it was tough to get information, so... You know, we didn't know where we were gonna be tonight or anything like that. We are naive, relatively wealthy, American, easy targets for all the con artists along the way. And on the hippie trail, it was said, everybody knew there was two kinds of travelers, those who knew they had worms and those who didn't knew they have worms. And we kept going deeper and deeper behind the dark side of the moon, basically. And we keep thinking. In one way, it was like a fantasy, and in the other way, it was just miserable, and we thought, it's not too late to turn around and go back to Santorini, where all the kids were having a great time at the youth hostel. And we got farther and farther away, and we kept thinking, in four days of hard travel, we could be back in the Greek Isles. But we kept going, and then we finally got to Afghanistan, and, we realized, this is why we're here. It really got magic, and we reached the point of no return, and then, we crossed into India, and... It was one of the great high five moments of my life, just to cross that border and do a high five with my buddy. And then we went to the end of the hippie rainbow, Kathmandu, and you gotta read the book to know what's happening in Kathmandus.
Luke Burbank: Legally, we can't even talk about it on public radio. In fact, legally, we have to take a break. This is Live Wire from PRX. We're at Benaroya Hall in Seattle this week talking to Rick Steves about his book On The Hippie Trail, Istanbul to Kathmandu and the making of a travel writer. Quick break and then we'll be back with much more Live Wire in just a moment. Hey, welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. We're in Seattle at the Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya, and we're talking to Rick Steves about his latest book, On the Hippie Trail. One of my favorite things about this book are the photographs that you took. I mean, they're just so vivid, and I mean they just depict these places that many of us maybe will never go to. But also you had to ration your photographs, was 10 photographs a day, that was the amount of film you could carry.
Rick Steves: Well, it's hard to even conceptualize that now. I mean, younger people don't realize that. There was a day when it was an actual physical thing. You have 36 frames in a canister of film, and you're on the road and you've got a dozen canisters and that's 20% of your luggage, you know, it's a headache to carry that around. And you figure out, we got about 10 or 12 shots a day. And if you're overshooting it, you're gonna run out. So you have to be careful. And then you don't know if it's gonna turn out until you get home. So you bring it home and you send it down. There's only one address I remember in my whole world from the 1970s, and that was Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, where we sent our Kodak film, you know, and and then you know it came back and either was a celebration or a sad day because yeah all of your memories are dark, or in this case they turned out just great. But yeah that was the last year you could do the hippie trail because the next year the Shah was overthrown and Khomeini came in and turned Iran into a theocracy. And the next year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and turned that into war zone. And I happened to have this weird condition where I wrote everything down in this journal so diligently. And I happen to have filmed it, and I'm no great photographer, but I put a lot of effort into it. I had a wonderful Pentax K1000, and the photos are just beautiful. And then to put it all together, discovered it during COVID when I had some time to read it, and it just, it made sense to write the book. It was that. It's quite a surprise, because I didn't even know it was part of me, and now it is.
Luke Burbank: What about the sort of current state of photography while traveling? Because you do so much traveling and you're in so many places where there's gotta be throngs of people with their camera phones and things. Like, how does that impact? And is there an etiquette piece of that that you would like to encourage people around? Just phone usage as a camera.
Rick Steves: Well, any travel teacher, any tour guide, anybody that really cares about being in the moment in their travels understands what a problem it is for all of us to be so focused on our screens. And everything can translate, it can measure, it can identify, it could photograph, it can tell you your altitude, everything. And as a tour guide I really find that this is a problem for people trying to have those magic moments. That's what we have when we're on the road is magic moments and what I do as a tour guide for example. Recently I was in Portugal with the group. Just slap the phone out of their hand? Throw the camera down. No, but if everybody's in, you got a great musical entertainment for your dinner, and everybody's crawling over, everybody's just taking photographs, and they just say, wait a minute, we're gonna all take photographs on one song, and then you're gonna put your cameras away, and out of respect to the musicians, and so that you can really appreciate this, we're going to be in the moment. So we have to, as travelers, be in the moment more, and that means no screen.
Luke Burbank: Can we be in the moment? Can we be in the moment in places where they know that we are in fact from America? Because that seems dicey right now. What's your advice to folks that are looking, they're excited to be traveling abroad, but they're also operating under the weight of our, let's just say, reputation?
Rick Steves: Well I was just in Istanbul a week ago and Rome two or three weeks ago and I was tuned into that because this is an understandable concern. Yeah. It is, you know, I always say the mark of a good traveler is how many people do you meet, not how much do you check off of your bucket list, and those people experiences really carbonate the trip. And we Americans need to make a point to travel in a way where we're accessible. We should assume we're interesting. I mean, my whole career is built on that. Well, we just got more interesting on the road because of what's been happening in our country. Well, okay, I see. And I would say there's, a lot of people are worried, do I want to go to Europe? Everybody's going to be mad at us. Well, they're not mad at, they may be mad at our government and that's happened before, it comes and goes, you know. But it's great when we travel because they get to better understand us and we get to understand them. I always think if everybody had to travel before they could vote, we would not be in this jam right now.
Luke Burbank: We only have eight more minutes with Rick, please. We can't waste it with this ballyhoo. Something I was struck by in this book On the Hippie Trail, and you sort of alluded to it earlier, was that you and your travel partner were very far beyond the bounds of Western society and of kind of a part of the world where you could easily pick up a phone and call for help. And you're going through these places that became very sort of politically chaotic in the years after. And yet, I get the sense that you didn't feel unsafe. And you and I were talking this week off air and you talked about the difference between saying bon voyage to people. And saying, safe travels.
Rick Steves: Don't we miss the days when you said bon voyage? I mean, that was a positive thing. And now they say have a safe trip. And it just reminds me, as a society, we are riddled with fear. I never really thought much about Franklin Delano Roosevelt saying the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But he was pretty wise because fear, that's what makes us susceptible of people who want to capitalize on our fear and do bad things with our society. And I find that fear is for people who don't get out very much. And the flip side of fear is understanding, and we gain understanding when we travel. And I just feel like it's so important that we get away from our home and look at it from a distance. We learn more about ourselves and our home and our country when we leave it and look it from afar. I love the idea that Muhammad said, don't tell me how educated you are, tell me much you've traveled. And me as a travel teacher, The whole idea is to not avoid culture shock, but to embrace it, to see it as a constructive thing, the growing pains of a broadening perspective. And if we're all so afraid that we just barricade ourselves behind walls, we'll never get to know the other 96% of humanity. So the irony is people wanna be safe by building walls and staying home. And I think that's the best prescription for being not safe in the future. We need to get out.
Luke Burbank: 30 more seconds, we lost people. When I've been telling folks that I'm gonna get a chance to interview you, something that has come up is people said, oh, how's his health? I know that you had been through cancer. How is your health right now?
Rick Steves: I am very thankful. Last July or something, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I was a typical guy my age that's pretty together and always trying to be healthy and just stupid about my family's cancer history. But I checked my blood, PSA through the ceiling, had my prostate removed, and it's a very powerful personal and emotional and spiritual experience to go through that. And got my blood test and I am cancer free, so I'm very thankful.
Luke Burbank: That one you're allowed to clap for, okay? Well, I don't want to be sort of corny, but I'm wondering if going through that has impacted what your experience is with travel, to be somewhere on the other side of this diagnosis and to look at something and to think, boy, if stuff had gone differently, I might not be in the position to do this. Has it in any way reinvigorate your relationship with seeing the world?
Rick Steves: You know, there's certain things that do make things twinkle, or make things come into focus, or saturate the colors, you know, and I'm kind of looking for that when I'm making a TV show, what makes things twinkled. And when you've had this brush with cancer, or when you have gone through a pandemic, or any number of things, all of a sudden you realize how fragile and beautiful the environment is, and all of the sudden you realize how important good governance is, and you realize the importance of community. And how community does not happen with people doing more than their share to contribute to it. And we can't have a win-lose approach to problems. Going forward, we need a win-win approach to problems because we're all in this together.
Luke Burbank: I was going to ask you, you probably get asked this a lot, but I was gonna ask you if there's somewhere in the world that you haven't been that you want to, but I now know you haven't been to Malta, and I'm wondering, did something happen? Are you on bad terms with the government there? Why have you not been to Malta yet?
Rick Steves: There are so many places I have not been and people think that all I do is travel but all I do is work on my books that cover Europe. So you know my favorite places would be Sri Lanka or India or Indonesia or Japan. I love traveling there but for the last 20 or 30 years I've just been focused on Europe. It's an exciting responsibility to have books covering these places and thousands of people saying what are we going to do for dinner tonight? Where are we going take the kids down to the beach or all that? So I just love that responsibility so If somebody gave me a luxurious, all-expenses-paid 10-day trip to Fiji or a safari or something that I'd love to do, my first thought would be 10 days, I really need those 10 days to update my Sicily book, you know, so I'm not complaining about it. I just love my work, I found my niche, and it's very gratifying to be able to help Americans travel. I work with 100 people up in Edmonds, and our mission is to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando.
Luke Burbank: Well, there goes our Orlando station. That was. I lost Orlando a long time ago with my show. This is Live Wire Radio, formerly on in Orlando, but still on in a lot of places. We're talking to Rick Steves about his new book, On the Hippie Trail. Now, Rick, you, of course, have guided millions of folks through Europe over the years. But as this latest book kind of shows, you were not always the savvy traveler, which got us wondering if you were ever of some of the classic tourist blunders. Faux pas, that means blunder in French. So we wanted to ask you about some travel transgressions to see if you have maybe committed them. This is a little exercise we're calling Rick Steves Never Have I Ever. Very contemplative game we're about to play. Rick, we're wondering if you've done any of the following. Have you ever bought souvenirs for someone once you were already home?
Rick Steves: No.
Luke Burbank: What is your souvenir sort of policy? Because you travel so much that if it became the expectation with people in your life that you were going to bring something home, I mean, that would be its whole own probably responsibility, right?
Rick Steves: I bought most of the souvenirs you can buy after the first five or six trips, and that was 30 trips ago. So now I just, the thought of a souvenir, a physical souvenir, makes almost no sense to me. But photographs and memories. Writing a journal is like netting butterflies, and you just catch all these butterflies and you write them down, these little magic moments that you'll forever enjoy. But souvenirs, yeah, I used to bring home after I'd finished all the tacky normal things that you'd buy, I started to bring home taxidermy, stuffed animals from different places. And it never went over well with girls that I was dating. So they're deep in a box somewhere and all my taxidermy. But I just don't do souvenirs. But when you read the hippie trail book, I was fixated on souvenirs and bargaining. You know, it's... Bargaining is fun.
Luke Burbank: Getting these like fantastic outfits that you were like negotiating on for days on end and stuff, right? All right, Rick Steves, have you ever peed in a bottle while in transit?
Rick Steves: I wonder if it is, yeah. That's the country. It was on the way to Iran, yeah, yeah. [Luke: So that's a yes?] I could write a whole essay about peeing in places other than toilets. I'll tell you one thing, on the airplane in India back then, and I had forgotten about this until I actually read the journal, but I went to the old propeller plane and I went back to the toilet, and I was just mesmerized by, you could see the farmland right through the toilet. And I was, I couldn't stop looking at, through the toilets, the monsoon soaked farmland. And then I thought, and now I'm gonna fertilize.
Luke Burbank: The producers and I were debating backstage whether or not to ask if you had ever been in the Mile High Club, but I think that's more upsetting. Have you ever, Rick Steves, pretended not to understand a language to avoid getting in trouble with the authorities?
Rick Steves: Many, many times. That's 101 for slumming around Europe in the old days, yeah. You would buy a ticket halfway to your destination and you would accidentally miss the stop and the conductor would say, you're supposed to get off back there and you'd just not know and you'll be traumatized and then ultimately he would kick you off in the city that you wanted to be in.
Luke Burbank: Alright, Rick Steves, have you ever hopped a train, as in, like, climbed into, sort of, I don't know if we use this term anymore, but let's just say, ridden the rails, hobo style.
Rick Steves: I've never done it hobo style but I've done it cheap student style which is just get on a train with an expired rail pass or something like that and just kind of try to keep when you're on a Train and I haven't done this for a few years but there's conductors that are coming this way there's one here and one here in there coming like this and you're trying to be right in the middle for the radio listeners his hands are getting closer and closer together and you are hoping that to get to your next stop before I see you run out of And that's... Thrilling, y'know?
Luke Burbank: I've been on a train before, this was just on the east coast of the US, but where they didn't come by and check my ticket and I was so disappointed I had paid. I felt like, what was that for?
Rick Steves: Well, Europe has evolved to the point now where they don't hardly check for public transit in a lot of countries, and everybody pays. It's government-subsidized, and Germans have these passes where, for a few bucks, you can go anywhere in the whole country by train or by bus or by trolley, and it's a beautiful thing to be able to ... It's like swinging from vine to vine, I always think. Around Germany.
Luke Burbank: Alright, last question, Rick Steves from Never Have I Ever. Have you ever eaten at a McDonald's in a foreign country, even though there was something local available right next door?
Rick Steves: I've eaten at a McDonald's, I will admit, because when I was on a real tight budget, it was located where you'd get a great view for the cost of a Coca-Cola, and you're sitting right next to these fans.
Luke Burbank: That's not eating if you just got a Coca-Cola.
Rick Steves: Yeah, there's McDonald's on the Champs-Elysees in France which has beautiful wicker chairs and they don't have golden arches, they have subdued white arches, you know. You know?
Rick Steves: And, um. And then as a tour guide, I have camped out in the very back of a McDonald's, assuming none of my travelers on the tour bus would come back there, because I told them not to go there. All right.
Luke Burbank: Rick Steves hiding in plain sight, I love it. The book is On the Hippie Trail. He's Rick Steves, thank you so much for coming on Live Wire. That was Rick Steves right here on Live Wire. His latest book, On the Hippie Trail, is available to read right now. Live Wire is brought to you by Powell's Books, a Portland institution since 1971. Powell's offers a selection of new and used books in stores and online at powells.com. Hey there. It's Luke. Did you know that Live Wire is also available as a podcast? Of course it is. Everything's a podcast now. And our podcast features the same engaging conversations, live music, original comedy, and all the stuff that you love about the Live Wire radio show. But now you can listen to when you want to, where you want to go over to livewireradio.org to download the podcast or get it anywhere. You get that kind of stuff. This is Live Wire. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Of course, each week on the show, we like to ask the Live Wire audience a question. And this week we were inspired by Rick Steves' many adventures around the world. So what did we ask the audience, Elena?
Elena Passarello: Oh, this is gonna be so good. We asked them to tell us the most unexpected thing that has happened while they were traveling.
Luke Burbank: All right, let's get into it. We actually recorded real audience members at a recent edition of Live Wire. Here is what they said. This person wanted to remain anonymous, Elena, which usually means- It's gonna be good. Generally a good story.
Audience Member: I'd bought all this sugar in Mexico when we were running around Mexico on this bus and the federales got on and I just kind of freaked out and said, I'm American and it's sugar.
Luke Burbank: How much sugar do you need to buy while in Mexico?
Elena Passarello: Yeah.
Elena Passarello: Are we doing some baking when we get back to the Airbnb?
Luke Burbank: I mean, you're kind of asking to get hassled, carrying around a white powder.
Elena Passarello: Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, exactly. All right, here's what Dan said happened to him once when traveling. It was a big surprise.
Dan: We're in the Czech Republic, and we're on a four-hour bus. And about one hour in, I had to use the bathroom badly. And the guy was like an old Soviet type, wouldn't stop the bus. And so three hours later, we got to a stop that actually had a visitor's center, maybe. And there was a restroom, and I bolted to the restroom, and I just made it. So now every once in a while, we'll say to each other, oh, I had a Czech Republic moment.
Luke Burbank: Poor Czech Republic!
Luke Burbank: I don't know how that person, three and a half hours he said, I don't know how in the world he was able to hold it for that long. What I think is illuminating about that is the number one reason to be in a relationship, really, is so you have inside jokes like that. Totally, yeah. Just like a shorthand, when you said I'm having a Czech Republic moment, the other person knows exactly what's going on for you.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, that and charades like nobody is better at charades than somebody that you've been with for 17 years.
Luke Burbank: Exactly. Here's what Matty had happened to them when they were traveling. And it was, well, let's just say surprising.
Matty: When I was in France a couple years ago, we were in a little garden maze, hedge maze, and we came around the corner, and there was a person of the evening entertaining somebody around the corners, and that was an unexpected thing to find at the Louvre.
Elena Passarello: At the Louvre! Okay? A little love at the Louvre.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, exactly. It's high class.
Elena Passarello: That's true.
Luke Burbank: I think i'm going to forever use the term person of the evening going forward
Elena Passarello: Yes, I liked the euphemisms very delicately handled by Matty there.
Luke Burbank: Exactly. Uh... So those are some unexpected travel stories from our listeners. Thank you to everyone who was brave enough to respond to our question. Our musical guests this week are part of a special collaboration between the Oregon Symphony and the non-profit organization, Path Home, and here's what they do, it's so cool, Elena. They bring together professional singer-songwriters with parents who are experiencing homelessness and through the collaboration, the participants work with symphony musicians to create personal lullabies for their children. Stephanie Schneiderman of the Lullaby Project joined us on stage at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon to talk about the project. Take a listen. Welcome to Live Wire.
Stephanie Schneiderman: Hello, thank you.
Luke Burbank: This is such an amazing project. Can you tell me kind of how it came to Portland and sort of what the response was?
Stephanie Schneiderman: Absolutely. It started at Carnegie Hall's Wiles Music Institute and they have about 60 partners internationally. So Oregon Symphony brought it to Portland about seven years ago and they partner with Path Home Family Shelter and now as a new addition Family Preservation which connects us with incarcerated moms.
Luke Burbank: What's the process like, where does the idea start? Just take me through how one of these songs kind of comes to be.
Stephanie Schneiderman: Absolutely. So the main purpose behind the Lullaby Project, I kind of think is two things. One is to amplify the parent-child bond. And, you know, music is the most natural way to bond with your kid. And the second thing is to empower the parent in a situation that's probably feeling powerless. And so one of the first things we do is we... You know, they get to make every choice along the way. A lot of times I've done this over the years now, seven years I've been part of the Lullaby Project since its inception with Oregon Symphony. And so I've written many songs with many parents, mostly moms, a couple of dads. And I'll always ask them, so how do you want to start? Like what feels most comfortable to you? Do you want to write a letter to your kids? Do you to write down some thoughts? Or do you wanna just talk and I'll write it all down? And most of the time. That's what they choose. And so for the first 20 minutes, it's this really nice connection where they're sharing their story, their hardships, their love for their kids, stories about their kids. Stories about their own upbringing. And I just like scribble as fast as I possibly can. And then I'll reflect it back to them. And you know, when I recently did this with a wonderful mom that I had the honor of working with named Lacey at Coffee Creek. A lot of the things that she said, they were so it was already so poetic because she naturally and naturally, I think that's that happens. And so when she was first talking about her son, she has two kids, she was talking about his son and she said you know, his breath is my breath and his smile is my smile and every tear we cry together was like just keep going. That's so good. And when I reflected it back to her, at the end, I said. Is there anything that's missing? Like, is there any message here that you want to add on? And she said, I want my kids to know their power. And we put that in there. That's one of the lyrics. We'll teach you to know your power. And it was an emotional moment where she said if I knew my power, my potential, my life would be different. And so it's such an honor to be in the position of like taking them. The medium of songwriting and recording and being a musician for all these years, all these decades, and then using it to have somebody else voice from their sense of melody. And a lot of times, we'll find melody just through speech or natural rhythm, our natural melody is comprised of two things. It's comprised of rhythm, and it's comprised to pitch. And so we just follow the natural melody, and that becomes the song. And so I think it's like helping a family create a family heirloom.
Luke Burbank: What's it like when the song is then performed for the parent and if the children are old enough to kind of understand what's going on, like that moment of the song being presented, I mean, there can't be a dry eye in the house, right?
Stephanie Schneiderman: It's just mind blowing and always really emotional and often times there will be some moms that want to sing it on their own and meaning that they want to record it with the symphony and you know backing them up and it's really just kind of elevates the whole experience for them and so their kids feel like swept up in this exciting opportunity and they see their parent in a powerful place and then I think it becomes like their anthem. I mean, I don't think that's an overstatement. It's really cool.
Luke Burbank: That was Stephanie Schneiderman with the Lullaby Project here on Live Wire, recorded live at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. We are going to take a very short break, but do not go anywhere. When we come back, Stephanie and the Lullaby Project will perform a beautiful piece of music that they wrote in collaboration with an incarcerated mother. Stick around, more Live Wire coming up. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. Okay, it is that time again in the show where we like to play a little station location identification examination. If you are unfamiliar, this is where I quiz Elena, our announcer, on a place in America where Live Wire is on the radio. She has to guess where that place might be based on these clues. Elena, are you ready?
Elena Passarello: Yes, ready but not confident because I feel like the hamlets have been getting smaller and smaller recently, so...
Luke Burbank: I believe your suspicions are correct. We're getting to some fairly out of the way places, including this place. It's known as a resort waterfront community on the North shore of Little Traverse Bay. It's also home to the deepest freshwater harbor in the Great Lakes.
Elena Passarello: Well, I would first say that it was Traverse City, but that doesn't sound right because it'd be too easy. So it's gotta be one of the other little towns up there.
Luke Burbank: Yes, it is. If you actually guessed the name of this place, I will be quite surprised, but it is, you're right. It's on, it appears to be on the water. How about this? A notable part about this town's history is that there was some hardcore clubbing that was going on during the Prohibition era. There was a place there called Club Manitou, which was an infamous Midwest summer resort nightclub casino that existed from 1929 to 1952. It was a speakeasy, it was a casino. It was well-known in the area as a place that you could get alcohol back in the day. Does that narrow it down for you?
Elena Passarello: I've narrowed it down to two places. Do I get credit if it's one of the two? Oh, hugely. Okay, it's either Petoskey, Michigan or Harbor Springs, Michigan.
Luke Burbank: It's Harbor Springs, Michigan, Elena, where we're on WHBP-FM. How do you know from Harbor Springs Michigan?
Elena Passarello: I used to vacation in Petoskey. I just couldn't remember which one was north of the other.
Luke Burbank: Every time I could not be more amazed with your skills, Elena Passarello. I've just lived too many places, I think. That is absolutely incredible. Shout out to everybody tuning in in Harbor Springs, Michigan.
Elena Passarello: Woohoo!
Luke Burbank: Okay, before we get to this performance by the Lullaby Project, a little preview of what we are doing on the show next week, we are going to be talking to New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Kathryn Schultz about her incredible book, it's called Lost and Found and it kind of gives the timeline of her father's death at the same time that she was meeting and falling in love with her now wife. Also we're going to talk to high school football coach, mentor and former Oregon duck player Keanon Lowe, who's going to tell us about the time that he actually disarmed a student at a school with a gun using a hug. It is a really moving, incredible story. Plus, we're gonna hear a song from one of our very favorites at Live Wire, John Craigie. That's all next week on the show. Do tune in for that. All right, before the break, we were talking to Stephanie Schneiderman of the Lullaby Project, which is an organization that collaborates with parents, some of whom are incarcerated, some who are experiencing homelessness, to compose lullabies for their children. So let's get back to that now. Let's hear this song from Stephanie Schneiderman and the Lullaby Project. This is with members of the Oregon Symphony. Recorded live at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. Take a listen. Now, the song that we're gonna hear, can you tell me the backstory on that?
Stephanie Schneiderman: So I shared a little bit, it's called Connected, and it was written with Lacey.
Luke Burbank: Okay, this is a woman that's incarcerated currently.
Stephanie Schneiderman: Yeah, so you hear those lyrics, you'll hear, your breath is my breath, your smile is my smile.
Luke Burbank: This is the Lullaby Project and Stephanie Schneiderman here on Live Wire.
The Lullaby Project: [The Lullaby Project performs "Connected"]
Stephanie Schneiderman: Thank you.
Luke Burbank: That was the Lullaby Project right here on Live Wire, featuring artist Stephanie Schneiderman and members of the Oregon Symphony, including Peter Frajola and Inés Voglar Belgique on violin, Amanda Grimm on viola, Kevin Kunkel on cello, Jason Schooler on bass, and Zach Galatis on the flute. You can learn more about the Lullaby Project right here in Portland by going to orsymphony.org/lullabyproject. All right, that's going to do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. A huge thanks to our guests, Rick Steves, Stephanie Schneiderman, and the Lullaby Project. Also, special thanks this episode to our friends Halle and Rick Sadle.
Elena Passarello: Woo-hoo, Halle! Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather de Michele is our Executive Director and our producer and editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our technical director is Eben Hoffer. Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our assistant editor and our house sound is by D. Neil Blake. Ashley Park is our production fellow.
Luke Burbank: Valentine Keck is our operations manager, Andrea Castro-Martinez is our marketing associate, and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house band is Sam Pinkerton, Ethan Fox Tucker, Ayal Alves and A. Walker-Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid.
Elena Passarello: Additional funding provided by the James F. And Marion L. Miller Foundation, Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff. This week we'd like to thank members Stephanie Kuo of Brooklyn, New York, and Rachel Murphy of Portland, Oregon.
Luke Burbank: For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to LiveWireRadio.org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire team. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
