225: Home Movies

Ira Glass

OK, you know the rules. No smoking in here. Cell phones off. No talking during the show. Ready? OK, let's roll the film. This is a home movie, and it looks like any other home movie. People at a summer resort. White cottages with screened-in porches and red roofs. There's a woman with an 18-month-old girl running around.

Ira Glass

Kathy Alexander is the 18-month-old in the film, now all grown up. What interests her in this film is the woman. Kathy is adopted, and she thinks that this woman, whose name she does not know, might be her real mother. The woman's face is mostly obscured because they're in the shade. It's fuzzy. The film's old, and Kathy strains to see the resemblance.

Ira Glass

She watches this minute of film over and over. She gives copies of it to friends the way that other people hand out pictures of their kids. It's one of the most important things she owns. But to look at it, you'd never know because all home movies look alike. When they mean anything, it's small and it's private. The pictures themselves don't tell much. You know what I'm talking about.

Ira Glass

Alan Berliner spent six years of his life going around finding old home movies and watching them and collecting them and finally condensing them into this amazing film that he called Family Album.

Ira Glass

Home movies are a family's way of preserving, forever, the thought, we were a nice family. We loved each other. Any feeling, any fact, about the family besides that fact, generally does not make it into the films. And that's as true, Alan Berliner says, of the black and white films that he's watched from the 1920s as the videos taken last month at his niece's birthday party.

Because all the images in everybody's home movies are the same, because the pictures are all the same, all the meaning comes from things that are not in the pictures, which makes them, I have to say, the perfect subject for a radio show. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Home Movies, what they say in spite of themselves. We bring you five movies for radio in five acts, including stories from David Sedaris and Jonathan Goldstein, a look at the cinematic output of 12-year-old auteurs, and what the producers of America's Funniest Home Videos know about America that you don't. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, The Big Night. We thought that we should begin today's program with one of the classic, typical kinds of home movies, a video of a holiday meal, a family meal. All the relatives sitting around the table. I'm sure that you have seen these at some point from Thanksgivings or Christmases. There are not many videos from the Jewish New Year dinner, Rosh Hashanah, a big family event, one of the big Jewish holidays, partly because Jewish law prohibits using a video camera or any other machine on that holy day. That did not stop Jonathan Goldstein's family from filming one.

Jonathan Goldstein

When I was a teenager, the Rosh Hashanah tape was the first thing I'd show any new girlfriend. It was a primer on my family that I felt they would need to see in order to best understand me. In showing them the tape, it was like I wanted to make them understand that no matter how messed up I was, all things considered, I really could have been a lot worse. It's been about 10 years since I've looked at the tape.

Jonathan Goldstein

The night begins with a feeling of expectation, everyone preparing for the big night. My mother clears stacks of laundry off the dining room table. With a great show of ceremony, she and my father moved the plastic-covered red velvet couch away from the wall and pull out the extra dining room table leaves from behind it. We'd only use the table twice a year.

Jonathan Goldstein

Later in the evening, people start to arrive. When I'd show this to girlfriends, I would freeze-frame on each of the cast and explain a bit about them. This is my uncle Lou, I'd say. On the night of his mother's death, he ate an entire brisket, so great was his grief.

Jonathan Goldstein

Placing the camera up to my eye and squinting into it like that felt good, the way it covered up my face like a mask and stuffed the whole Yiddish circus of my family into a tidy, manageable, little frame that I could fade in and out at will.

Jonathan Goldstein

Early on in the night, I filmed my mother in the kitchen.

Jonathan Goldstein

She dances around and sings for the camera while preparing dinner. My grandmother walks in at one point and asks her where the Kleenex is, and my mother tells her to use toilet paper.

Jonathan Goldstein

In our house, whether you were blowing your nose, mopping up spilled pea soup, or bandaging a head injury, it was toilet paper. As a kid, I was embarrassed by this. Toilet paper. It sounded so personal. And pulling it out of my lunch bag to use as a napkin in the high school cafeteria brought just enough of my family bathroom to the table to make those around me lose their appetite.

My mother singing and dancing around the house was another point of embarrassment for me as a kid. I felt like watching her sing "Let's Get Physical" while cooking pancakes was a mild form of child abuse. Watching her now on the tape, I realize she was singing, not because she was crazy, but because she was actually happy. Both her parents were still alive, so she'd let herself act like someone's little kid sometimes. I haven't seen her sing like that in years.

The presence of the video camera puts my great-aunt Simi in a time capsule-y kind of mood. She decides to tell this story about her son for posterity, so my father helps her shout the table down.

Jonathan Goldstein

When I was a teenager, right here is where I'd pause the tape. I would freeze-frame the image of my great-aunt Simi, mouth open, just about to pop in an olive. With that as my backdrop, I would tell the story of how, when I was a child, Simi would command me to pinch her buttocks. "You can't pinch it," she'd cry, "and that is because it is too tight. Go ahead." "Keep trying. Keep trying," she'd continue, her face all clenched like a fist, all determined to make her buttocks as hard as a cantaloupe. In her slippery, skin-tight polyester slacks, trying to get a piece of my aunt's ass was as elusive as pinching a helium-filled balloon. Now, watching the tape with friends a half-generation later, I'm not going to lie to you, that story still kills.

Incidentally, I should also say that Simi was the first person who ever really felt me up. Bored at my uncle Harry's Shiva house, she decided to check and see what was in the front pockets of my pants. She uncovered gum wrappers, old movie stubs, and a surprising amount of toilet paper, which she emptied out onto the kitchen table in three glorious scoops that I later referred to as my real bar mitzvah.

Jonathan Goldstein

I should probably also tell you that the entire Rosh Hashanah meal is consumed in 15 minutes flat. I mean the whole thing, the gefilte fish entree, the salad, the handmade coleslaw, the bean and barley soup, and the main course. 15 minutes. I remember the TV was on in the basement, and Jeopardy had just started. By the time it was Double Jeopardy, we were eating dessert. But then, paradoxically, dessert was something that lingered on and on.

Jonathan Goldstein

My grandfather ate dessert alone in the basement, so he could watch baseball. My grandfather was of the mind that no one up there listened to him anyway, so he pretty much stopped trying. He spoke through his actions, random outrageous incomprehensible actions. Like if he was tired and wanted you to get out of his house, he would come out wearing just his boxer shorts and sit right down beside you on the couch. You would collect your things, and you would leave.

This next part of the tape, of him and me in the basement, I never made jokes about. I was so embarrassed by my inability to make simple man-to-man chitchat with my grandfather that when screening the tape I would often just fast-forward through the whole scene because it pained me so. It was just around the whole Pete Rose gambling scandal.

This is what most of our conversations were like at the time. He would stare at the TV, and I would get all sweaty, trying my hardest to talk about anything I could think of that had to do with sports. Since I never watched them, nor did I play them, my talk revolved around the girlier aspects of sports, the scandals, the exorbitant pay raises, the poem I might have seen Muhammad Ali recite on The Mike Douglas Show. And all the while, my grandfather just sat there.

I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. Watching the video all these years later, actually 13 years after my grandfather's death, I realize in retrospect that this was around the time he was diagnosed with leukemia. No wonder he didn't want to talk. No wonder he went to the basement. At the time, except for my grandmother, he had told no one. Those kinds of personal things weren't ever talked about in the open. When we all got together, we argued about where the best place to buy a roast chicken was or what was on TV.

Jonathan Goldstein

No one gets to finish a story. Conversation is like this verbal game of murderball, back and forth, everybody shouting over everybody else, nobody really listening to anybody. But it goes further than even that. Here's my mother and her aunt Simi sitting side by side on the living room couch with my grandmother, all of them kind of staring off into space after the huge dinner. Then suddenly, apropos to nothing, one of them starts singing "White Christmas." Then the other one, as though sitting on a different couch in a different universe, as if the thought had just arrived from out of the blue, pipes up with the exact same song, never looking at the other, never acknowledging she's there.

Jonathan Goldstein

Let's not even get into the fact that, one, they're singing a Christmas carol in the middle of September, and two, it also happens to be the holiest night on the Jewish calendar.

What all this chaos leads to, the logical climax in consequence of the entire evening, is when, in the middle of dinner, my father gets it into his head that right now, at that very instant, he was going to fix the loose knob on the front door. The doorknob had been loose for years at this point, and why he decided to fix it just then, to this day, he cannot say. So my father goes downstairs into the garage to get his toolbox, which, to be fair, isn't actually a literal toolbox, but a plastic lunch pail which contains a wrench, a pair of rusty pliers, a plastic 12-inch ruler, and a screwdriver. The camera casually pans past a wall of neatly-stacked spare toilet paper on the garage shelves. My uncle Lou decides to help.

Jonathan Goldstein

Now, let me make this as clear as I can. When my father and Lou first started working on the doorknob, the time code in the corner of the video screen reads 6:27. They would only finish two and a half hours later, and almost all of which time my father spent on his knees turning the doorknob screw around and around, for the most part, in the same continuous direction.

Jonathan Goldstein

The other guests sing more songs, try on clothes, exchange recipes, take third and fourth helpings of dessert. And through all of it, my dad turning and turning like a Jewish Lady Macbeth, one who's abandoned murder for home repair. At some point, people start to funnel out the door to go home.

Jonathan Goldstein

They shuffle around his kneeling body and say goodbye, like none of this is at all strange.

Jonathan Goldstein

My father does not look up, still hypnotized by the turning of the screw. When I try to tear him away from the job, he tells me he can't help it. It's an emergency.

Jonathan Goldstein

So I thought this was the end of the whole thing. But having not seen the tape in over 10 years, I've forgotten that I also videoed the second night of Rosh Hashanah. So I keep watching, and then I see something that I have absolutely no memory of whatsoever. Sitting at the dining room table, sandwiched between my sister and grandmother, is this entire British family.

Jonathan Goldstein

There's an older Englishman, well-groomed and proper, sitting there sipping wine and actually sporting an ascot. There's his wife, an animated woman who chain smokes Virginia Slims, and their daughter, a woman who actually tells anecdotes about current events and expresses genuine interest in my video making.

Jonathan Goldstein

It's like they wandered off the set of a different home movie and into ours. And the strangest part of the whole thing is that everyone's acting like nothing unusual is going on.

Jonathan Goldstein

Tea. As well as drinking tea, we drink amaretto, and everyone is bumming cigarettes off the old British woman. All of a sudden, we're all having a grand time. Even my grandfather is. Instead of sitting in the basement, he's asking genial questions like:

Jonathan Goldstein

It turns out the British family were my Uncle Melvin's in-laws, who were in from out of town. The evening plays out like that old Disney movie, Song of the South. The British are what appear to be real normal people, and my family are like the cartoon bluebirds fluttering around them, trying in earnest to keep them entertained.

Jonathan Goldstein

I don't remember filming this, but I'm certain I identified with the normal people, not with the cartoon birds. I remember looking through the camera at my family and feeling like I was a million miles away, like I was looking into the large end of a telescope. It made me feel like less a part of them, like more of just an observer. But then there's one moment near the end of the night, where I hand the video camera over to my grandmother, a total old-country technophobe, so she could film me.

Jonathan Goldstein

And there I am, moving around with my tapered pants, jelly bracelets, and long moussed-up '80s hair, which, in retrospect, actually looked a lot like my mother's perm. Watching the video, I see the way my grandfather gritted his teeth when he stretched, or how he did this thing with his shoulders when he drank something that was too hot, and it's just the way I do it. Here I am, comparing wrist size with my father.

Posed against the British family or any other family since, there's no question as to what family I belong to.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the radio show Wiretap on the CBC and the author of the book Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bible!

[MUSIC - "YOU TALK TO MUCH" BY RUN-DMC]

Ira Glass

Act Two, The Kids Stay In The Picture. If children ran Hollywood, what sort of films would they make? Well, because of video cameras, we can actually answer that question. There are 11-year-old auteurs. When he was a little kid, Darren Stein organized the kids on a little suburban cul-de-sac where he lived in Encino, California to make movies. They made dozens of films. They shot all the time, over the course of years. Darren says that he remembers wanting to get control of the video camera and make a movie from the moment that his dad first brought a camera home. He was seven years old, and he quickly invented a film for everyone to do.

Ira Glass

They did a Holocaust film when he was 11. They did a film about the day after a nuclear war. In these early films, the high concepts were just excuses so that the main characters can run around and try to kill each other. There are a lot of gratuitous ninja moves. There's the prerequisite ketchup-as-gore. Because Darren was three years older than anybody on the street, it was easy for him to call the shots.

Ira Glass

This is Adam Schell, who lived on the cul-de-sac and appears in lots of the movies.

Ira Glass

Darren Stein and Adam Schell have collected their own movies and created a documentary about them called Put the Camera On Me. It's available on DVD.

Coming up, when America just leaves the camera running, what does it see? And a Hollywood teen movie plot comes to a home movie. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, home movies and the stories they tell, intentionally and unintentionally. We've arrived at Act Three of our program.

Back when home movies were actually movies, real movies on real film, they were expensive to make. The cameras were hard to use. You actually had to know how to work a camera pretty well. You'd run out of film in just three minutes. So most people really did restrict themselves to filming celebrations, babies, and vacations. But now that video cameras and videotape are so cheap, relatively speaking, people just leave the camera running for hours. And nobody knows this better than the producers of America's Funniest Home Videos, which has an archive of half a million video clips.

Todd Thicke is the co-executive producer of the show. Trace Beaulieu and Mike Palleschi have been writers on the program. They each watch hundreds of home video clips each week. They say that they have seen video where people just set up a tripod and film themselves watching TV. They have no idea why.

Ira Glass

Mike Palleschi, Todd Thicke, and Trace Beaulieu of America's Funniest Home Videos. You can watch that TV show on the ABC television network Sunday nights at 7:00, 6:00 Central. That was such an official-sounding thing to say on the radio. I've never said anything like that in my life.

Ira Glass

Well, Act Four. The Cinema Of Upward Mobility. The plot line of a home movie is usually more home than movie. These are not usually, as you may gather, the most cinematic stories being told. When she was a teenager, Susan Burton tried to do something that you see many teenagers attempt in teen movies, and she actually pulled it off. As luck would have it, the effort was caught on video, and we offer it here as a kind of alternative to the Hollywood version of the story. Her family's videos, I should say, begin inauspiciously enough.

Susan Burton

My dad videotaped a lot of things, all the typical stuff. My little sister Betsy's preschool dance recital.

Birthday dinners.

Susan Burton

Holidays like Easter Sunday, when we hunted for eggs the Bunny hid on the first floor of our house.

Until two weeks ago, I hadn't watched these videos for years. When I put them in the VCR, I couldn't believe that the world could exist like this again, that it could just pop up like a stage set, my parents still married, all of us together in our old house.

Susan Burton

When I was little and planning on becoming famous, I always used to imagine that my house would be turned into a museum of my life, an exact reproduction of my seat at the dining room table, the order of the dolls in a row on my cedar chest, the Ramona book marked at the place I'd stopped before going to bed. Having these videos is like buying a ticket and opening our yellow front door and taking the tour.

When so much of your childhood is documented, there are going to be moments you wish had been left out. For me, that moment is an entire era, middle school. It begins with a hike up Baxter Mountain.

Susan Burton

Every summer, my mom, my dad, Betsy, and I climbed Baxter together. Baxter's a good hike for children.

Susan Burton

In this video, Betsy's seven years old. She's adorable. She skips up the trail. She searches the trees for the soft, white semicircles of fungus we break off and take home as souvenirs of the hike. She throws up her tiny arms and beams at my father with giant, brown eyes. She pipes up with little observations about nature.

Susan Burton

When the camera pans to me, it's a different story. Allow me to describe myself. I'm 11, almost 12. I'm wearing a rubber snake around my neck. My t-shirt has a row of teddy bears across the front. Each bear holds a balloon with a letter on it, and together they spell the word "stickers." It is difficult to see my eyes, which are masked by enormous round glasses. I look like an owl, like something from science. I look like what I was at the time, which is a nerd. I regale my family with nuggets from my repository of random nerd facts. When my sister wonders if there are killer bees on Baxter Mountain, I'm ready with the answer.

Not long after the hike up Baxter, I started seventh grade at a new school in my Michigan hometown, Central Middle School. I'd gone to my old school since I was three and loved it, and now that I was at Central Middle, I missed it like crazy. Longings for it would well up inside me every Thursday night, when the "Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name" song played before Cheers. But it wasn't long before everybody knew my name at Central Middle.

Around Halloween, we received our first report cards in homeroom. My homeroom teacher was Mr. Bixler. He taught earth science and had a fondness for puns. He liked to add fake names to the attendance slip, like Eileen Dover or Justin Case. Mr. Bixler shuffled through the pile of report cards on his desk. Suddenly he held one up to the light, as if verifying its authenticity. "Susie Burton," he said. "Five A's and two A pluses."

The boy in our homeroom with Tourette's Syndrome let out a series of profanities and yelps. I wanted to flee, but my desk was surrounded. Kids were actually coming over to see my report card. "She even got an A in gym," one boy exclaimed.

I'd gotten off on the wrong foot at Central Middle. I had blind enthusiasm for spelling bees, book bowls, and science olympiads. I was the only girl in architectural drafting. My other elective was called brain teasers. I did the wrong things, and I looked the wrong way too. I had a short curly perm that hadn't come out the way it was supposed to, braces on my top and bottom teeth, and weird clothes like culottes. Everyone else at my school wore jeans and Reeboks. I wasn't allowed to wear either.

I'd had one pair of jeans in my life. I was permitted to get them for a school play. It was a one-act about a Michael Jackson concert, authored by a sixth grader at my old school. At the store, my mother pulled out dark blue Lee jeans with pinstripes. She said that my father might like this pair. They resembled business suit pants.

My parents didn't understand. My father said that the boys in architectural drafting teased me because they liked me, all 27 of them. My mother said middle school didn't matter, that college was where you met your real friends. I needed to improve. I needed a manual. So I got a subscription to Seventeen magazine. Seventeen gave advice on a lot of things, like fresh face makeup that would let me shine through, and what I should do if I was better looking than my best friend. But before I could apply any of it at Central Middle, my parents got divorced. My grandfather said it was because we all read at the dinner table. I disagreed, but it didn't matter. We were selling our house, and my mom and Betsy and I were moving to Boulder, Colorado.

My mother told me that she liked the idea of the west, of the frontier, of going there to make a fresh start. I liked the idea too. In the west, I would be popular. I would reinvent myself. Nobody would know that back in Michigan, I'd been a nerd. And best yet, I would attend Fairview High School, where a junior named Holly had just won the Seventeen cover model contest. I had the issue upstairs in my room, carefully filed in a little library of teendom.

By now, I'd been a student of popularity for two years. I did this with the intensity and seriousness with which I'd learned the migratory patterns of the killer bee. I had cassettes full of songs I'd taped off the radio. I'd accumulated the right clothes. I applied the scientific method to wardrobe selection. I typed up a list of my outfits on the Macintosh and posted it inside my closet. The list only applied to weekdays, and I did not deviate from the order. There were 16 outfits, so that there would always be an irregular beat built in, so that I wouldn't always wear Benetton rugby shirt on Mondays or the Guess overalls on Tuesday. The amazing thing is, the plan worked. We moved. I was popular. It was the fresh start any nerd dreams of. It was better than any article that had ever been in Seventeen.

I had a group of friends. We all sat together every day at lunch on our jean jackets in a circle in the front courtyard. We French braided each other's hair. We traded clothes. We had slumber parties. On weekdays, we'd often ride bikes until just before dark. One time, we were riding to the grocery store to get ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, and my shoe fell off in the crosswalk. It became a famous story. There was a famous story about me. The littlest things, things that probably didn't matter to anyone else, made me so happy. I saved any note anyone ever wrote to me in class. There was a girl in the house behind me named Shannon, and one night, we yelled to each other from our windows before we turned off our lights and went to bed. It had only happened that once, but I thought about it a lot. It was like something from a movie, like a dream life. And there's video documentation of this too.

This is me on the telephone in Colorado.

In this video, I have long, straight, shiny blond hair. I have lip gloss, contact lenses, and perfect braceless teeth. I talk on the phone so much my mother has subscribed to call waiting.

The rules of being popular seemed easy to me. Anybody could have done it. The main ones were, smile a lot. Wear good clothes. Giggle. Be a little ditzy. I started remembering to forget my lunch. But the main number one rule of being popular was, don't let anyone know you're smart. On US Government quizzes, I answered questions wrong on purpose.

But the notes we passed in language arts provided me with a real opportunity to shine. If my friend Joanna wrote, "Antigone sucks, and it's so cold. I wish we didn't have to walk home today," I would write back, "I know. I should of worn a sweater today." But I would spell "should've" like "should" and then the word "of," instead of the contraction for "should have." I'd continue, "Ms. C is totally on the rag today. She's bothering me alot." That's "alot," spelled as one word, no space.

Things were happening so naturally that I could almost convince myself that my life had always been this way. One Saturday night, a group of us went to see the movie, Can't Buy Me Love. The movie's about a nerd who decides that his senior year of high school, he's going to become popular at last. He pays the most beautiful girl in school to go out with him. It didn't even cross my mind to identify with the nerd. I was in so deep that I identified with the pretty blonde cheerleader.

Susan Burton

These last two weeks, watching video of myself from those days, I saw something that wasn't clear to me at the time. Here's a tape Betsy and I made for our dad for Father's Day, two years after we moved to Boulder.

I look exactly right, studiously plain hair, silver bracelets, pretty clothes. But I'm still a nerd. Here I am, explaining the music of the young people to my dad.

Susan Burton

I can't resist translating the name of the band.

Susan Burton

In this video, what I see now is how hard I'm trying. I've blowdried my hair and matched my socks to my shorts, even though it's a summer morning and we're just staying home. I'm sarcastic in a way I know is meant to mimic two of my friends from school. I make a show of talking about driver's permits, even though I was terrified of the day I'd eventually get behind the wheel. The popular girl is in this video. There's proof that she exists. But it's clear that the killer bee girl is right inside her.

Susan Burton

I didn't change that much.

Ira Glass

Susan Burton is a writer in New York City.

[MUSIC - "NEW LIFE" BY DEPECHE MODE]

Ira Glass

Act Five, Just Shoot Me. We end our program today with this story from David Sedaris, a story asking the simple question, why even bother to make home movies?

David Sedaris

It was the day before Thanksgiving, and my mother and I were at the Raleigh airport waiting for my sister Gretchen to return from Rhode Island. You could still smoke then, and so we sat beside the ashtray, passing the time as the plane rolled up to the gate. A young woman took a seat not far away, and when she pulled a camcorder from her knapsack, my mother groaned and prodded me with her elbow. "Oh, God, here we go."

The camera was new and sleek, and as she aimed it towards a doorway, my mother covered the side of her face. "They shouldn't allow people to walk around with things like that," she said. "I mean, really. There should be a law." Had the young woman been carrying a loaded rifle, my mother might have brushed it off. But she hated having her picture taken. "Whoever she's waiting for might have it coming, but what about us poor nobodies caught in the crossfire? I don't want to be in some stranger's piss-poor movie," she said. "I don't even want to be in my own."

The young woman overheard and looked our way with an expression reading, "Who would want to videotape you?" I smiled, and she left her seat to stand against a column.

"Why do people need to get everything on film?" my mother asked. "Are they that afraid they're going to forget something? And why do it here? Can't it at least wait for the parking lot?" The exit door opened, and passengers stepped out into the terminal. The young woman started filming, and my mother scowled as complete strangers waved into the camera. We were well out of range, but still she kept her hand to the side of her face, looking as though she were talking about the person seated next to her.

"Now, this is just ridiculous," she said. "I mean, what? Do you honestly think anyone's going to watch a thing like this? What's the point in making a movie when all anyone is doing is stepping off a damn airplane? It's not like it hasn't been done. It's not like there are any surprises here, so why bother with the $800 camera?"

My sister Gretchen stepped into the terminal and wondered why her mother was covering her face. "Do you have a toothache?" she asked. "Did somebody slap you?"

There were more video cameras awaiting us at the baggage claim. A grown man filmed a toddler pounding against the side of a suitcase. A teenage boy shot his father hoisting a golf bag. "I've got to get out of here," my mother said. And then she went outside to wait in the car.

Once, while at the beach, my father borrowed a movie camera and spent the afternoon following us around. We were young then and excited by the thought of watching ourselves projected onto a bed sheet. He shot us swimming and eating and piling on top of our mother who had tried in vain to escape. "This is going to be good," he said. "Come on, now. Pin her down, so I can get a good shot of her face."

My sister Lisa would later suggest that there had been no film in the camera, but I don't think our father had it in him to be that cruel. Most likely, he set it aside, meaning to have it developed, but never quite finding the time. Either that or our mother got to it first. She was good at destroying film.

After she died, we took turns holding her various belongings to our noses. Mom's coat, Mom's washcloth, Mom's pillow. This is what people do when they're left with such paltry iconography. They smell things, continuing long after the scent has faded, and it feels silly to stand in the living room sniffing your mother's hairbrush. She'd been dead for three years when my aunt sent a home movie she'd transferred to videotape. This was film shot in the mid-'70s, when she and my uncle had gone with our parents to the Virgin Islands.

My sisters and I put the tape into the VCR and watched as my father silently pleaded with a locked door. We witnessed our aunt and uncle strolling white beaches and merrily waving from the deck of a boat. It wasn't until the end that we finally saw our mother and then only briefly. Whoever shot the footage had caught her unaware, walking out the door of a restaurant and slowly moving into the sun. It was such a small thing, our mother snapping shut her purse and putting one foot in front of the other, but it seemed to us like a miracle, like the way the movies must have seemed when they were very first invented.

On seeing the camera, she covered her eyes and ran back inside. "Get lost," we imagined her saying. But this was the beauty of video. Our mother retreated into the restaurant, and, against her better wishes, we hit the rewind button, drawing her back out. She was ours now. And we sat there for hours, none of us speaking except to say, "Do it again."

Ira Glass

David Sedaris is the author of several books. His most recent is When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

[MUSIC - "PEOPLE TAKE PICTURES OF EACH OTHER" BY THE KINKS]

Ira Glass

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week.

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