Pixie's Primer

Norman Corwin is an outrageously imaginative young man who got his start in radio eight years ago by broadcasting an interview with the ashcan-rolling champion of Springfield, Mass. He fashioned 1939's most dramatic anti-fascist program, They Fly through the Air with the Greatest of Ease. He aired the by now classical radio drama about Curley the Caterpillar (TIME, April 15, 1940).

Last week, once more demonstrating that there is room for sensitivity as well as soap in radio script shows, crack Producer-Director Corwin put his hand to another feature called 26 by Corwin. In the first program, a bantering radio ABC, Author Corwin elfed blithely through both the alphabet and a broadcasting studio.

Kidding himself, breakfast foods, Mother, and "Orson," he sashayed through a primer that contained a lot of deft, well-timed writing. He produced some more than casually turned lyrics, and a good deal of information about what goes on in a radio studio. P:stood for Crossley ratings. M was for Mother ("All mothers are wise, and most of them speak with a sectional accent"). O was for Orson, celebrated in a lyric commencing "Who is Orson? What is he, that all the critics hail him?" and ending "All is well that ends with Welles." At Q, quizzes came up, "programs which make you feel good if you know the answers which the guy at the microphone doesn't, but if he does know the answers and you don't, well then you figure he's spent all his life reading encyclopedias, and who wants to do that, life's too short anyway."

Quizzes also provoked a song:

Who did it? Who done it?

The derby, who won it?

Who said it, who wrote it?

How far can you quote it? . . .

Where are the Antilles?

How dread are the Willies?

Who started the custom?

Whose father was Rustum?

How good is an army

That's fed on pastrami?

And if a tram traveling 80 miles an hour overtakes another train traveling 60 miles an hour on the same track, is that, I ask you, any kind of a way to run a railroad?

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