Alternative takes on "This American Life". Ranging from memoir to personal essay to autobiography, Getting There: Thespians, Two Cats, and Deliverance unfolds like weekly radio scripts of an excursion from small-town Ohio origins through schooling, Army service, inn-keeping, out-coming (ha ha), professoring, and marrying at an advanced age-with side stops on winning friends, losing friends, mortality, life's probabilities, and staying with the same person for a long, long time.