This is the first "Park Bench Chat" of the 2024 Summer Season – a production of Bar Crawl Radio. During the warming days of spring and summer, Rebecca and I sit at our favorite park bench in the “You’ve Got Mail” garden in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side and talk with our neighbors. Today’s topic--“grammar.” Ellen Jovin is a self-proclaimed “grammar nerd.” She has degrees from Harvard and UCLA in language-related subjects and has studied bunches of languages because she lives in NYC -- a multi-verse of languages. Ellen is a cofounder of Syntaxis, a communication skills training firm, and the author of several books on language. For this program we talked about her recent bestseller Rebel with a Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian (HarperCollins, July 2022). “Roving” because Ellen is the creator of a traveling, pop-up grammar advice stand called the Grammar Table, whose adventures serve as the basis of her book and a soon-to-be-released documentary of the same name. And this afternoon, Ellen set up her Grammar Table below the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument to talk with Sunday strollers about grammar.

Alan Winson

BCR Podcast Producer

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We rolled our portable audio studio down the big hill into Riverside Park and set up four mics -- one each for Becky, Alan, the author of "From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole" -- Kathleen Collins -- and our neighbors strolling by the garden featured in the final scene of "You've Got Mail." And we talked about the complex experience of streaming TV. We were approached by young and old and a former member of the Peanuts Gallery of "The Howdy Doody Show." You can never tell who will show up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

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