Parenting & Family Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

Nighttime radio turns childhood into a private theater of dread, and Hagedorn knows exactly why that matters. The line moves with the breathless precision of someone reliving a formative habit: waiting for 10 p.m., leaning in, letting the mind do the staging. Horror here isn’t just content; it’s a ritual. The “creepy sound effects” are almost tenderly remembered, less as cheap tricks than as proof that a minimal medium can still colonize the imagination. Radio’s limitation becomes its power: what you can’t see, you have to build yourself, and the kid becomes both audience and special-effects department.

The intent feels double-edged. On the surface, it’s nostalgia for an era when entertainment arrived on schedule and the dark was unavoidable. Underneath, it’s a quiet origin story for an artist who works in voice, timing, and atmosphere. As a playwright, Hagedorn is keyed to the mechanics of suspense: the set-up (late hour, isolation), the sensory trigger (sound), the payoff (self-induced panic). The best detail is the admission, “I just would scare myself to death,” which shifts the agency. The fear isn’t inflicted; it’s chosen, cultivated. That’s a kid practicing emotional extremity in a safe container, learning the thrill of controlled danger.

Contextually, it nods to a pre-streaming media ecosystem: communal programming that still produced intensely solitary experiences. The subtext is that art doesn’t only reflect life; it trains us for it, teaching how to sit with darkness, how to crave it, how to turn it into story.