Director's Notes: 174 - Radio Jupiter (Patreon)

Here in Upstate New York, the season of having coffee on my porch in the mornings is slowly coming to a close, as the weather gets crisper and the winds start to kick up off the Catskills. I love having coffee on my porch, because it means watching the local wildlife. Sometimes a chipmunk will run by my feet, squeaking at me on its way to raid my garden for food. Sometimes the blue jays gather in one of the trees, chatting about the morning news. And yesterday, a hawk and a crow chased each other around the sky. It was very dramatic, a lot of swooping, some of it very close to me, before the crow’s friends showed up and ran the hawk off for good. Which is all to say, things are going fine here, thanks.

Radio Jupiter came to me, as many Night Vale concepts come to me, as a word combination I found interesting and wanted to do something with. Words get stuck in my head like catchy melodies, and won’t go away until I’ve found a place for them in a story. In this case I started writing messages from this Radio Jupiter without quite knowing where that story was going, or what I wanted this Radio Jupiter to mean.

Robin Virginie, who ended up playing Radio Jupiter is, in the words of her website, “a Curaçaoan-Dutch actor, singer and writer based in New York City.” Like most of our performers, we met her through the New York Neo-Futurists, into which she was cast in 2018. She once wrote a play in which she sang an Adele song with the lyrics rewritten to be about diva cups. And then, as things go with the Neo Futurists, she was last minute required to perform that parody song in Dutch instead of English, and she did. It was very impressive. She’s a professional voice actor, and our sound editor Jon (who you know better as Disparition) told me that her recordings were the cleanest he had gotten in the entire history of Night Vale Presents. You can see more of her work here: https://www.robinvirginie.info/ 

This episode sees the continued saga of Susan Willman, who has taken over as villain of Cecil’s heart now that Steve Carlsberg is a friend. I don’t think Jeffrey had any grand plans for Susan when he wrote the recent episode about the obelisk, but the fact that Susan now holds some sort of godly power in her head seemed interesting to me, and I wanted to continue exploring that. I have some ideas on where that story will go, but I won’t spoil them here. Keep an eye on Susan, is all I’ll say.

We’re a little over a week from our live performance of The Sandstorm. This is going to be such a fun time. We’ve written at least ten pages of new material for this livestream, with guest parts for Dana and Steve Carlsberg and Deb the Sentient Patch of Haze and Tamika. This episode takes place early in the show, and so it’s been fun writing guest parts that are situated so early in the characters’ histories. You can (and should!) grab tickets over at https://noonchorus.com/welcome-to-night-vale/ 

And next on the podcast: a very special episode, the third in a series we’ve slowly been doing since 2014. I’m excited for you all to hear it, as we move from the warm breezes of summer into the fall crunch of spooky season. See you all there.