Between dinner and dusk on a summer evening in 1962, 8-year-old Jon Aaron sat on his best friend's porch on Crest Road in Mt. Washington.

He listened to his friend's parents and other adults as they talked about subjects he knew nothing about. He heard the words "Cuba" and "missile" and "bomb."

And he wondered how close to home a bomb could hit.

The Cuban missle crisis is history now. Aaron is 55. He lives in Owings Mills, where he teaches English and drama at McDonogh School. But the memory of that evening is as fresh as the grass was on The Triangle, a green space where he and his friends played most nights between dinner and dusk, and between innocence and adulthood.

Aaron will bring that memory to Center Stage on Friady, July 10, as one of the storytellers in "Baltimoored: Summer in the City," a live, oldtimey radio show (think Garrsion Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion.")

It's being staged over three nights July 9-11, with five stories a night, as part of the Stoop Storytelling Series. Among other storytellers are Maryland first lady Katie O'Malley; Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Pamela White; Larry Doyle, a former writer on the TV show "The Simpsons," and actress Rain Pryor, the daughter of the late comedian and actor Richard Pryor.

Many participants are from north Baltimore, including Pryor, of Charles Village; Doyle, of Mt. Washington, and Fred Lohr, an attorney who lives in Roland Park.

The show's general theme is about spending summers in Baltimore. It will look like an old-time radio show and will blend true stories with sketches, some of which are set in Hampden and Roland Park, said Laura Wexler, who created Stoop in 2006 with Jessica Henkin. Actors will be in period dress, standing at microphones, and there will even be a sound effects man.

"It has the feel of an old-time radio show, but it's going to feel very modern, too," she said.

The Stoop, named for the tradition of sitting on the front steps and telling stories, promotes itself as offering "old-fashioned storytelling for the 21st century."

Previous storytellers have included Mayor Sheila Dixon, mystery writer Laura Lippman and David Simon, creator of HBO's "The Wire."

Pryor, 39, who will appear in the show on July 11, won't be able to tell stories about long-ago summers in Charm City. She was raised in Los Angeles, where she spent her summers with her famous father, who was divorced. She moved to Baltimore in 2005.

But she can -- and will -- tell a story about meeting Michael Jackson the day before her seventh birthday in June 1977. Her dad threw a party and who should turn up but the Jackson Five, with their white suits and Afros.

"I thought it was my birthday present."

Actually, that came the next day, when Richard Pryor, on the spur of the moment, whisked the family off to France.

"That's how my dad was," Rain Pryor said. "Everything was last-minute."

Tickets to "Baltimoored: Summer in the City" are $20. Shows will be taped for a 2-hour broadcast in late July. For more information, go to www.stoopstorytelling.com.

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