The Teresa Interview

In our final episode, we feature a portion of Teresa Carlysle’s interview with Alexander MacFarland. The eighteen-year-old Teresa was apparently very much attuned to current events as we can hear in her list of the “everything” that “sucks now.” We tracked down each of her references. (1) “India poisoned.” This is an apparent reference to the Bhopal disaster which took place in December 1984. A gas leak on the evening of December 2 into the morning of December 3 at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant exposed over 500,000 people to methyl isocyanate gas and killed 4,000 that night. It’s considered one of if not the worst industrial disaster of the twentieth century. (2) “Earthquakes in Mexico.” On September 19 and 20, just before MacFarland interviewed Teresa, earthquakes killed between five and eight thousand people in and around Mexico City. The earthquake began at the Michoacan seismic gap in the Pacific Ocean with first shockwaves arriving in Mexico City at 7:19am. (3) Although by no means a disaster, Teresa also makes reference to Jefferson Starship to frame her comments about rain. Jefferson Starship’s lead singers were Marty Balin and Grace Slick. Slick sings the lyrics to “Hyperdrive” from Jefferson Starship’s 1974 album Dragonfly: “Because I felt it I believe it / Because there are things I've never seen that I believe / So I'm going to place my face right in the triangle door / Till I can move right on through instead of just standing here looking at the floor. / And if it rains again tonight, I can think light years ahead…”