Every now and then, I get the chance to help out a radio producer from some faraway place by being their in-person proxy for an interview. I get directions, gather up my gear, and my only job is to listen really hard while the out-of-town producer conducts an interview on the phone. I love these assignments, because I get to be a fly on the wall for what are invariably amazing, rich stories.
That’s how I met Ron Jones, an actor and creator of the Black-Jew Dialogues, a theatre project aimed at advancing our understanding of cultural diversity and confronting our prejudices and stereotypes. Ron moved to my beloved Winston-Salem a few years ago. He met Samantha Turner and Joseph Anders at Krankie’s, a local coffee and cultural hub. Samantha and Joe were in a tough place in their lives, and Ron says he could tell that it wasn’t going to get better. So he made them an offer to share his home, and in exchange they would do things like go to school, get jobs, and learn to apply more self-discipline. This is their story, produced by Michael May for WBUR’s program, “Kind World.”