Great Outdoors

When I was a kid, my family took summer camping vacations in the Adirondacks. My parents packed a tent and sleeping bags and food and utensils and a deck of cards, and we drove five hours north from New York City to a kind of paradise with trees beyond counting, sweet, clear lakes for swimming, more stars that I’d ever seen before, and a crackling fire in a ring of stone. Instead of TV, there was conversation and stories of ancestors, and time spent gathering wood and water—time that was altogether different from what we shared at home. Those childhood memories shaped the course of my life—and my choice to settle in New York’s beautiful Hudson River Valley. For today's show, I've selected three stories about the Great Outdoors (not all as bucolic as mine); stories first performed for a live audience in a theater in New York City.