Today we have very long memories, especially in light of the shortsightedness of the news this week.

So we reach back to a text that has remained relevant and prescient for 170 years. The speech "What to the slave is the 4th of July?" was given by Frederick Douglass in 1852, but is read aloud in towns across the Bay State, including several in western Mass, through a program launched by Mass Humanities called "Reading Frederick Douglas together". We gather several of these readers together, the program's director Dr. Latoya Bosworth, Dr. Toni McComb, Javier Luengo-Garrido, Prof. Ousmane Power-Greene, and Anika Lopes, to share a bit of the work and talk about why it remains important.

We remembered that we have never tasted wine in Franklin County, and felt we needed to fix that immediately. So we head off to Ashfield Lake House, where proprietor Dre Rawlings comes to our rescue for the Tina Turner Memorial Wine Thunderdome. It is our second blind tasting, but in a neat twist, we only use wines from the restaurant's cellar.

And if you've enjoyed our opening theme music for the show, today's your lucky day because the band that made that song is our guest for Live Music Friday. Spouse plays Gateway City Arts on June 30th (right after the show in fact) but made a quick side stop to come in and play our theme music in studio. Spouse isn't the largest group we've ever had in studio, but they are the loudest and have the most gear, and we wouldn't have it any other way.