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Showing posts from August, 2026

St. Phyllis of Portland 4042

    St Phyllis of Portland Radio Play  By Michael McKenna    Narrator: If Phyllis Thaxter weren't on METV every other night, you'd never hear the tale I'm about to tell. Ironically, she insisted on calling herself the plainest heroine in Hollywood.   I was watching Perry Mason from my couch and fell asleep. No wonder, those scripts can be dull. It went off the air at 11:30pm. When I awoke, my eyesight was blurry and the tv screen was more or less a glare. Through these conditions Phyllis Thaxter appeared on my tv set, in an Alfred Hitchcock episode, I took notice of the halo I seemed to see around her.    In the morning I went online to learn about her. Born in Portland, Maine to a town that would look like any in the upper Midwest if they possessed a fleet of lobster boats on an icy blue harbor.    This fact lent itself to her speech. She couldn’t betray it on TV. To a Midwestern ear, her diction was perfectly annunc...