BEHIND THE SCENES with Jacob Fenston

What's the story behind this story? How did you end up making a documentary about the cultural and political implications of the T-shirt?

Sort of by chance I ran into a few people doing interesting things with T-shirts. I met one of the HOMEY guys, David Sanchez, at a Dia de los Muertos festival in Oakland, where he was selling T-shirts. I was struck by how passionate and serious he was about the ideas the shirts expressed in their quirky, funny way. I also liked that alongside the shirts of Emiliano Zapata and Cesar Chavez, he was also selling shirts of growling WWE wrestlers. I love this intersection of pop-culture and ideas. A little while later I was in a screen-printing shop in Berkeley that had been around for many years, with two walls covered with shirts spanning the decades -- rock concerts, social movements, company retreats. I thought it was an interesting way to look at history, though the evolution of this very personal yet public means of expression. So I started thinking more about these garments, and thinking about doing a radio doc, and everyone I talked to had some great story or some favorite T-shirt to tell me about. A friend told me about the Black Lava shirts . . . suddenly everywhere I went there were more T-shirt stories that I wanted to add

T-shirts are so . . . visual. Was it challenging to craft a RADIO story around them?

When I started the project, people would ask me that. And I had this theory, or hope, that somehow by talking about T-shirts without the visuals, I could take a more critical look at them. I mean, because they are so familiar, such every-day objects, we don't stop to think about them, but by removing the visuals and hearing people describe and talk about them, it would open up space to think a little more about something we take for granted. Anyway, that was my idea, and I think it worked out that way. Wouldn't a TV show on the same subject be just a little more prosaic? Because you would see the shirt, and immediately think, "oh, I've seen that," or "oh, I'd never wear that," or "wow, that looks awful on her." But without the visuals you maybe stop and listen to the person describing what it means to them. So I don't think it was really a challenge most of the time. For a few very visual shirts, the joke seems to get lost when you describe it. But for most, I think it is probably funnier to hear someone trying to describe it. Like Inez Brooks-Myers, curator at the Oakland Museum, reading the words on the shirt from the King Tut exhibit: "Don't. Touch. My. Tuts."

The sound design in My T-shirt is as much a part of the documentary as the story choice. Did you have a sense going into the piece of how you wanted it to sound?

No. But once I started collecting sound, I had all these voices of people describing their shirts, and they seemed to want to all say something. I'd spent many hours roving streets, malls, and college campuses looking for people wearing interesting shirts. The montage of these voices in the beginning reminds me of the experience of talking to them: me standing there with a microphone, surrounded by a swirl of T-shirts passing. I did have a sense from the beginning that I wanted the program to be fast-paced and have a bit of a pop-culture-feel somehow. I think the music does this, but so do the fast and surprising cuts between scenes and subjects. That abruptness mimics the abruptness of T-shirts -- the way a T-shirt's message hits you as its wearer walks by, then disappears.

The piece wanders in tone from playful (the museum curator woman) to feisty (Ryan from Black Lava) to inspiring (HOMEY!) to tragic (RIP shirts). Did you anticipate this emotional range between the stories?

I thought the whole thing would be more along the feisty and playful lines, because T-shirts tend to be feisty and playful. The HOMEY story became much more interesting and inspiring as I learned more about the group and the people making the shirts. At first I was a bit concerned that the RIP segment would be too different from the others, too serious.

If "My T-shirt Says It All" was, indeed, a T-shirt, what would it look like?

That's a hard question; there's a lot going on for one shirt! But it would be bright colors, maybe hand-painted or airbrushed. Abstract.

You produced this doc for a class at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Are you pursuing a career as a radio journalist or documentarian? If so, what draws you to this field? And what are you working on these days?

Yes. I'm working on masters degrees in journalism and Latin American studies. I'd like to get a job in radio, but if that doesn't happen right away I will continue freelancing, and try to think up some crazy documentary ideas (or start working through the list that's on my computer desktop). I've always liked listening to radio, I guess, because you can do the dishes or pull weeds while you listen, and because I love the variety of human voices, telling their own stories. I like producing radio because it's a lot of fun to be out in the world with a microphone, and be able to stop anyone in the street and say, "excuse me, um, I'd like to talk to you about your T-shirt." I've been doing shorter, newsier pieces as a freelancer (I interned at KQED in San Francisco this summer, and have done several stories for them since). Similar to "My T-Shirt" in style and pop-culture substance, is a piece I did for the California Report and Weekend Edition on scraper bikes. If you don't know what a scraper bike is yet, you'd better just go listen: http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R808081630/d