Love + Radio · Love and Radio | Daylight Media

A Girl of Ivory

January 12, 2023·42 min·3 clips

DaveCat plans to have his ashes placed inside Sidore's hollow head after he dies, with a plaque reading 'How beautiful it is to love something that death can touch.'

The room starts underground. City Club comes back as black walls, white paint, black lights, lint, a jukebox, a Doctor Who pinball machine, and ratty couches. The episode does not rush to explain itself. It lets the basement bar and the test-tube drink do some of the talking first, before the love story comes into focus. Then the arrangement arrives, plainly and a little sideways. The guest describes a relationship with someone male, someone female, and another figure he calls a mistress. The host asks the questions most people would probably ask, but without making a show of judgment. Who gets exclusive time? Who sleeps where? When does everyone fit into the day? The answers are oddly domestic. There are no group scenes. Each partner has separate time, sometimes while Dave Kett is at work or in the bath. The physical details give the story its strange tenderness. One figure has stiffer joints. Another is better suited to intimacy. Broken finger wires sit beside affection, almost like the household chores of this particular love life. The guest can sound funny without trying to be funny, especially when he moves from repair notes to real feeling in the same breath. Artifice is the hinge here. He remembers being drawn to it as a child, and the episode does not need to turn that into a big theory. The dolls are spoken of as companions with moods, limits, uses, and places in a life built around them. By the end, a voice is talking about kissing, tongues, and being changed for different kinds of contact, and the intimacy lands as playful, awkward, specific, and hard to file away.

As heard by us

A basement-set character study that keeps its strangeness and still lands as human.

The episode starts in a basement club that feels half remembered and half assembled from whatever was close at hand: black walls, black lights, a Doctor Who pinball machine, ratty couches, and a Purple Jesus drink served in test tubes.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want a slow, intimate story that turns a black-light basement club into a study of artifice and attachment.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Love + Radio