In this Story... with Joanne Greene

By: Joanne Greene
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  • Summary

  • Joanne Greene shares her flash nonfiction, each essay with custom music, showcasing tales and observations from her animated life. Her book, "By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go" is now available as a paperback, e-book, and audiobook from Amazon, Audible, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent book seller.
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Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • There's More Than One Boston Accent

    There's More Than One Boston Accent
    May 2 2025
    In this story, there’s more than one Boston accent. I’m Joanne Greene.
    For many, if not most of you, the words “merry”, “marry” and “Mary” are all pronounced the same way. Merry, merry, merry. But for me, born and raised just outside of Boston, they are three distinct words…Listen closely.
    “Merry” is generally associated with Christmas, as in MERRY Christmas.
    “Marry” is what happens at a wedding. She will MARRY her partner.
    And “Mary” is a name. Mary J Blige…Mary Oliver…Mary Quite Contrary.
    There’s nothing that gives me the heeby jeebies more than someone trying and failing to deliver an authentic Boston accent. And people do it all the time, in person and – worse – in movies.
    Insert example of bad Boston accent
    It’s a litmus test. Actors can master a British accent, a southern drawl, or Brooklyn speak with minimal effort but the real sound of any number of Boston accents must be and rarely is right on the money. Either the person is from Boston, has at least lived in Boston, or they haven’t. Case closed. Mark Wahlberg , Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, …..these actors can pull it off, precisely because they were, at one pivotal, formative time in their lives, proper Bostonians.
    Boston accents can be funny…or erudite…They can make one sound as dumb as rocks or as smaaaht as a very smaaat Hahvad educated cah.
    Insert excerpt of Smaht Cah commercial
    The subtleties are worth noting.
    Take the word horse, for example, HORSE.
    It’s “HAHSS”, if you come from, say, most of Boston proper
    In Southie, South Boston to the uninitiated, it might sound more like “HAWSS”
    Where I grew up, in Brookline, the mounted police (mounties, of course) rode a “HOOAS”.
    One common thread in all Boston accents is the dropping of the “r” sound…but don’t get too carried away with this rule as Bostonians also add an “r” sound, when it’s not there, to separate two vowels. For instance, “Rayna and Bob” in a standard American accent becomes “RayneranBob” in the mouth of a Bostonian. The nuances abound, which is why the accent is so tough to get right.
    When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and applied for an on-air job in radio, I was told that I had to lose the regionalism. What regionalism I questioned? Californians often mistook me for a New Yorker, but I assured them that what they were picking up was East Coast, possibly Jewish, energy and speech patterns. I went to a voice coach and worked on it, which is why I eventually did get hired to speak on the radio and why, today, only the most sophisticated accent detectors can pin me down as a gal from Brookline.
    I share all of this in the hopes of saving you the trouble, and avoiding the inevitable humiliation, of trying & failing to imitate a Boston accent. Maybe, just maybe, you can say “pahk the cah in Hahvad yad” but that’s it. Promise?

    Joanne’s book, “By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go” is now available from your favorite online book seller. Stay tuned to hear if Joanne will be speaking at a bookstore near you. If you’re interested in having her come to your local bookstore, contact her directly at joannergreene@gmail.com or get updates on her website at joanne-greene.com and make sure to sign up for her newsletter!
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    4 mins
  • My Relationship With Words

    My Relationship With Words
    Apr 4 2025
    In this story, my relationship with words. I’m Joanne Greene.
    When I was 2 years old, they couldn’t shut me up. I babbled with unintelligible sounds until I landed a few words and, from then on, it was Chatty Cathy. Continuous communication. By the way, Chatty Cathy was a doll in the late 50s early 60s who spoke when you pulled her string, a doll my parents would not let me have, for obvious reasons. They didn’t need more words. To save their sanity, they sent me to preschool at age 2 which, in 1956, was damn near revolutionary.
    Words have always been my jam. Numbers were taken by my math majoring siblings and bookkeeping mother. I, on the other hand, was excited to discover that bookkeeping has three double letters in a row (two o’s, two k’s, two e’s.) And that’s where my fascination with bookkeeping ended. I passed notes to my friends to get through long afternoons at Hebrew School, sent letters all summer to anyone whose address I’d snagged, and kept diaries from the time I could hold a pen. Words have always served me. I could turn them inside out, make them rhyme, and express my deep inner thoughts even when alone in my room. I fancied myself a writer, which was why, in high school, when I was NOT accepted into theAdvanced Placement Creative Writing class, I thought my future was shattered.
    The hopefuls were gathered into a classroom, after school, and given 20 minutes to write an essay, a poem, or whatever else based on a one-word prompt: CRYSTAL. That’s it? I gulped. Crystal? And then I got to work.
    Somehow, the lined notebook paper on which I wrote has survived all these years. At the very top, under my name, is the date: March 26, 1969. At the risk of hopelessly embarrassing myself and in the hope of giving the rest of you a good laugh, here goes:
    My Crystal.
    My crystal: a multitude of purpose
    A many-sided reflection
    A king of schizophrenic hypocracy (misspelled) of a cut up being
    An ice cube melts to droplets and, like my crystal, reveals transparency.
    I see the reverberating pierces of ambiguity (did I mean pierces or pieces?) and vision….through reality unto my dreams.
    Me as a whole is many times duplicated, and I begin to interpret…a bit.
    But then I re-look…re-see…and reconsider. (re-look is not a thing)
    Ah, it isn’t solely me who is cut up…and reappearingly formulated (also, incorrect)
    It is also my eyes.
    And since my tools of vision are reflected also, then I can’t see through to the end.
    My crystal is useless, for there is no meaning.

    You can see why I was rejected. Undaunted, I kept writing…and also correcting people who made glaring verbal grammatical errors. What’s worse, nails on a chalkboard, or having to grit your teeth when someone says “her and I went to the movies”? EEEEEE There’s a difference between your sandwich and you’re like a sandwich. A lot is not one four letter word. Than and then are not one and the same. You get the point. My nieces and nephew called me a grammar nazi. Thankfully, I was able to make the point with my two sons that incorrect grammar can lead to (obviously incorrect) assumptions about your intelligence, your education, your knowledge base. Their grammar, I breathe a sigh of relief, is not a problem.
    The thing about words…as wonderful as they are for expressing our thoughts, creating beauty and meaning, addressing societal needs, helping people to cope and move through challenging times, is that they, words, can heal and they can hurt. I’ve learned, over the decades, that sometimes…every now and then…it’s best if I just listen and keep my words to myself.


    Joanne’s book, “By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go” is now available from your favorite online book seller. Stay tuned to hear if Joanne will be speaking at a bookstore near you. If you’re interested in having her come to your local bookstore, contact her directly at joannergreene@gmail.com or get updates on her website at joanne-greene.com and make sure to sign up for her newsletter!
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    5 mins
  • Escaping Flames

    Escaping Flames
    Mar 21 2025
    In this story, I escape some flames. I’m Joanne Greene.
    It was 1979 in San Francisco, and I was flying high as a news anchor at the legendary FM radio station, K-S-A-N, affectionately called KSAN. I was in love with Fred Greene, morning show producer and part time jock, and my career was the envy of aspiring radio journalists. Metromedia, KSAN’s parent company, had brought in a new General Manager from Los Angeles to “right the ship.” He’d successfully turned big profits at KMET in LA and the suits in NY thought his approach would work in SF. However then, as now, LA and SF are very different beasts.
    It took one, maybe two, officious memos from the new GM, for the staff to start revolting, some more dramatically than others. On one particular day Thom O’Hair, longtime San Francisco air personality, had taken a tab or two of acid. He and my news partner Chris Stanley were on a tear about the new GM whom they’d renamed from L. David Morehead to El Nuclear Warhead. Taking their loud protestation outside the station, they quickly found themselves pounding shots at the Financial Corner, the bar on the next block.
    The combination of LSD and alcohol wasn’t new to O’Hair, but I was concerned that the results would be unpredictable at best, particularly since I was to anchor the news in his afternoon air-shift. They returned from the bar at 2:55 and Tom went directly into the studio to cue up his first record. As I walked into the studio to deliver the 3pm newscast, I saw something different in O’Hair’s eyes. He’d often displayed a mischievous glint, but this was something else - something maniacal, diabolical. Oh no. What’s he going to do? I held my breath, and my stack of papers. Would he turn on my microphone and let me do the newscast? Would I be able to do my job and leave the studio without incident? Instead, as the song was ending and I was gathering my stack of notes and miscellaneous wire copy from which I would tell rather than read the news as was our signature KSAN style, O’Hair grabbed my papers, flipped a Bic lighter which he pulled out of nowhere, it seemed, and set my news copy on fire.
    Oh. My. God. I was holding a torch. News flambe. My eyes doubled in size as my jaw dropped in shock. In a nanosecond, I started blowing and by some stroke of luck, I apparently had enough air in my lungs to turn my news copy into charred ashes just as the record ended. Tom opened my microphone and walked out of the studio chuckling. Somehow, somewhere, I found my voice.
    “It’s 3 o’clock and this is KSAN, San Francisco,” I heard myself say. And then I went on to ad lib a newscast. It wasn’t pretty, but I made it out of the studio five minutes later with a shred of dignity, a healthy dose of anger, and the knowledge that, like my ancestors fleeing persecution in Europe, I was a survivor.



    Joanne’s book, “By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go” is now available from your favorite online book seller. Stay tuned to hear if Joanne will be speaking at a bookstore near you. If you’re interested in having her come to your local bookstore, contact her directly at joannergreene@gmail.com or get updates on her website at joanne-greene.com and make sure to sign up for her newsletter!
    Show More Show Less
    5 mins

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