261: The Sanctity of Marriage

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International.

Ira Glass

Ms. Hannah's Adult Living class, at Rock Island High School, near the Illinois-Iowa border, has as part of its curriculum a mock wedding. These happen in high schools all over the country. And if you're from a place where they have them, they don't seem like a big deal at all. Today, before Ms. Hannah's class can choose decorations and bridesmaids outfits, before they talk to florists and a caterer, they have to choose a bride and a groom. And the money-on favorite for groom is [? DeAndrew. ?]

Ira Glass

This is Kevin, another contender.

Ira Glass

This is Stacia.

Ira Glass

As for who will be the bride, [? Jackie ?] says the girls talked about it during gym.

Ira Glass

Ms. Hannah uses the overhead projector to walk the class through a budget for the wedding, which is $250, by the way, that the kids will have to raise themselves. Then she takes nominations. Everybody votes on little slips of paper that she hands out.

Ira Glass

AJ is sent to the chalkboard to tote the results as Ms. Hannah counts the ballots in a style that is less like the Illinois election commission and more like Jeff Probst from Survivor. She basically pulls out each ballot, unfolds it, and reads it.

Ira Glass

Even AJ looks surprised. But these early returns don't hold up, and in the end it is the predicted favorite, [? DeAndrew ?], who will be mock-marrying [? Jackie. ?] When the results are announced, [? DeAndrew, ?] who admits that he used to have a little thing for [? Jackie, ?] jumps up and sits next to her.

Ira Glass

Of the 11 juniors and seniors who showed up for class today, one has a baby and one lives with a boyfriend. She's engaged. I asked Ms. Hannah if the idea of this curriculum is to encourage kids to get married. And to my surprise, she says no. She's just showing them how, the same way this class shows them how to rent an apartment, or buy a used car. Even here in small-town Illinois hours from the big city, even the teacher who teaches marriage has complicated feelings about marriage itself.

Ira Glass

What it means to be married is up in the air right now, and not just because people are fighting about whether gays should be able to marry. The number of women getting married has dropped a third since 1970. People are getting married at a later age than ever before in this country. Fewer households have children, and a fourth of all children are raised by just one parent. The number of couples living together without marrying is 10 times what it was in 1960, over 4.5 million people. So today on our radio show, a look at what it really means to be married today. Our program today, in three acts:

Act One, What Really Happens in Marriages. Like the 15th century explorers and mapmakers, there is a generation of scientists mapping out what happens in marriages, finding out stuff that people did not know about before.

Act Two, The Defense of Marriage Act. Gay marriage can hurt straight marriage. One man explains how.

Act Three, I Want to Be a Statistic. Starlee Kine gets answers about her parents' marriage from her dad after a lifetime of mystery.

That is three, yes, three big acts, each one designed to make your family happier. Plus we have a real wedding band, the Doug Lawrence Orchestra, playing us wedding standards all this hour. Hit it, boys.

[MUSIC - "THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT," THE DOUG LAWRENCE ORCHESTRA]

Ira Glass

Act One, What Really Happens in Marriage. OK, here's something that, when you first hear about it, does not sound like it can possibly be true. So let me preface everything you're about to hear by saying that the guy that you're about to hear from is not some isolated crank, but part of a movement, that he and his colleagues, for decades, have been scoring million-dollar grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health. They publish their findings in mainstream scientific journals. Other scientists have replicated their findings. They've essentially created a radically different and eminently helpful way of understanding marriage.

OK, here's what we're talking about. Dr. John Gottman takes couples, wires them up to devices that monitor their breathing and their heartbeats, sits them in front of video cameras, and then asks them to talk about something that they disagree about.

Ira Glass

But that's not all. If he spends another hour or so, and asks them to talk about how they met, what kinds of things they share--

Ira Glass

I should be clear. He doesn't offer this as a service. You can't go to John Gottman, sit with your spouse for a 15-minute videotape, and then have him declare to you on the spot, this will be your marital fate. No. When he says that he can predict, he means it in a more sciencey way. What he does is he videotapes couples, follows their marriages for years, and then once he sees who stays together and who splits up, he goes back and tries to figure out what in the videos might have predicted that. And he has found a whole taxonomy of things that doomed couples do that happy couples don't.

I don't know about you, but when I heard about this, I wanted to understand exactly what Gottman was seeing on those videotapes. And so I went out to visit him in Seattle, to sit with him and watch some of America's unfunniest home videos.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

You might think it would be easy to spot which couples in these videos are heading down the tubes. But in a study where Gottman's videos were shown to clergymen, and therapists, and other people who you would assume would be able to identify this kind of thing, they were unable to predict better than random chance which couples eventually divorced. Take this couple in their early 20s, talking about their finances.

Ira Glass

Watching them, to me, it looks pretty bad. They just don't let up.

Ira Glass

The way Dr. Gottman turns what look like the most intimate, meandering conversations into hard data that can be analyzed is really pretty simple. After the video is shot, two women in a tiny room down the hall from Dr. Gottman score the thing moment by moment on side-by-side computers. Every time the husband or the wife on the video shows anger, sadness, defensiveness, disgust, humor, neutrality-- any of 20 different things-- it gets coded in the computer alongside data of their heart rate and their breathing.

Ira Glass

Elizabeth Schoettle and Katherine Schwartz spent months in training, learning specific facial expressions, particular kinds of behavior, before they became reliable-- reliable meaning in this case that their codes match those of fully-trained people. I asked them to name the codes that they were punching in out loud as they scored one of the videos.

Ira Glass

Every momentary interaction-- affection, anger, stonewalling, contempt-- gets assigned a number, one to four for the good ones, negative one to negative four for the bad ones.

Ira Glass

Gottman gets another video, and another couple comes up on the TV in black-and-white, split-screen, one camera is on his face, one on hers, a time code in the corner. They're talking about the fact that he is always late.

Ira Glass

So when Gottmann and his colleagues make a little graph of all the scores that the man and the woman are getting, as you might imagine, it drops lower and lower and then just never comes back up. Picture a chart in the newspaper of the Dow Jones Industrial Average heading down, and you pretty much have the idea.

This kind of fight, the kind which gets worse and worse, is one of Gottman's findings for couples heading for divorce. When they argue, it just escalates. They don't take a break, they don't see each other's side, they don't accept influence. That's a phrase that Gottman uses to mean that when one of them says something, it has influence on what the other one is thinking and saying.

Ira Glass

One of these studies had been going on for over a decade when Gottman and his colleagues started noticing a second group of couples from their sample getting divorced. And at first, the researchers could not figure out what was going on.

Ira Glass

Gottman says that when they started this research, they had no idea which factors were going to be the ones that would predict divorce. Nobody had ever observed couples so closely and then followed them over time to see who stayed together and who did not. Therapists and pop psychologists had all kinds of theories as to what would make a good relationship. They were all completely untested.

They thought that having lower expectations of marriage might make for happy marriages. Turns out to be untrue. They thought that good couples make "I" statements instead of "you" statements. Turns out, no. Many people thought-- including Gottman and his colleagues-- that anger would predict divorce. This idea is actually still around, that anger is destructive to any relationship, that it's against the scriptures, that it should be banned from marriages. In fact, the data shows, happy, stable couples get angry all the time.

Ira Glass

Marriage counseling had been around since the end of the second World War. But in a sense, until the 1970s-- until Gottman and this whole generation of researchers-- it was really a pretty ad hoc business. Therapists would give couples all sorts of advice. Sometimes it was useful, sometimes it wasn't. But it wasn't based on scientific research. Until Gottman's generation, nobody had figured out an effective way to observe real marriages-- successful and unsuccessful ones-- and figure out what the happy stable ones were doing that the unhappy divorcing ones weren't.

Ira Glass

Diane Sollee runs what amounts to the preeminent clearinghouse for marriage research and education, called Smart Marriages in Washington, DC.

Ira Glass

One of the most radical findings in the studies is that the studies threw doubt on the idea that couples should split up if they had irreconcilable differences. All couples have irreconcilable differences, the studies proved-- the ones that stay together and the ones that don't.

Ira Glass

In fact, the best couples in Gottman's studies-- when they bring up something difficult, they do it in a way that does not make the other person defensive. Even talking about their disagreements, there's laughing. There's joking. This is important because when somebody feels attacked, feels defensive, their heart rate goes up, and basically, Gottman says, reason gets thrown out the window.

Ira Glass

And so when Gottman watches these videos, he's intensely aware of when somebody criticizes and what it does to the other person's pulse. Like here-- this wife tells her husband that a guy that they work with also hates his lateness.

Ira Glass

As you might expect, after these researchers noticed all these techniques that happy couples use when they disagree, it didn't take long before they started to try to teach those things to the rest of us. They created marriage education courses, which explained how to bring up a difficult subject without completely alienating your partner, how to keep yourself listening when your partner is criticizing you, how to take breaks when things get too hot-- all the stuff that the good couples in the videos do.

Lots of course like this have sprung up. They generally take just 10 or 12 hours. And Diane Sollee says they get results.

Ira Glass

Reducing the divorce rate by 50%-- or really anything at all by 50%-- is the kind of track record that makes policy-makers take notice. And in fact, it is exactly these kinds of marriage education courses that President Bush's $1.5 billion Healthy Marriage Initiative is providing free for welfare recipients. The Army is spending $1.8 million in courses for military families, a program called Building Strong and Ready Families. The courses are also popular in churches. In fact, studies show that couples learn the techniques better if they're taught by their own clergy.

Some researchers say that this new interest and investment is great, but they caution that while Gottman's study and most of the other marriage studies get interesting results, they're still relatively small as research goes-- anywhere from 30 to 300 couples usually, small enough that you can get random results that really might not have much meaning. One researcher told me that it's not like science has killer airtight conclusions about marriage yet. It's more like we have decent preliminary findings, and the main reason these courses and government programs exist is not that the science is perfect, but that people want answers. They want answers now. They want help. And it seemed like we knew enough to act.

Gottman and a researcher named Bob Levenson have also done a 12-year study of homosexual couples. There were just 42 couples-- a small study for Gottman, who usually gets 130 couples of races and ages to match the demographics of Seattle.

Ira Glass

The study looked at 21 lesbian couples and 21 gay male couples, and compared them to 42 straight marriages of the same length of relationship and relationship satisfaction, as measured on a questionnaire. The researchers videotaped the couples talking about some issue that they conflict about. And they found that the homosexual couples were far better than the married heterosexual couples at bringing up an issue in a non-confrontational way, of listening when criticized. They were less defensive. They were more positive.

Ira Glass

Gottman still can't explain why the gay couples would be so different. He thinks part of the reason might be that, in general, it's just easier for men to talk to men and women to talk to women. The fact that they communicate so differently makes things harder in heterosexual couples.

Back when I started calling around to marriage researchers, I expected that as a group they would be people who think a lot about our country's 50% divorce rate, like the divorce rate is the Mount Everest that they're all aiming at not just assaulting, but ultimately blasting down into rubble. But in fact, every researcher I called was reluctant to speculate about what all this new research could mean for the divorce rate someday. Could they get it down to 30%? Or maybe 10%? It's just too early to know, they would say.

After some prodding, I did get Gottman to tell me that a significant portion, 15% to 20% of the troubled couples in one of his studies probably were people who should be divorced. Even before their marriages, he said, they never had a basic rapport where they could spend time together easily and comfortably, where conversation just flowed. For everything this research shows about how people can prevent divorce, for everything that it shows about how much happier couples can be if they master certain communication skills, for everything that he can quantify with his video cameras and his heart monitors, in the end, John Gottman still believes in chemistry.

[MUSIC - "BRICK HOUSE," THE DOUG LAWRENCE ORCHESTRA]

See, that's a wedding band. Coming up, it's raining lawsuits. A look inside them-- 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-- The Sanctity of Marriage, stories about what that might mean. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Defense of Marriage Act. When the White House proposed the constitutional amendment preventing gay marriage, the president explained why it was necessary this way. He said, marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. If activist judges insist on redefining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.

Well, Adam Felber says he knows just what the president is talking about.

Adam Felber

This gay marriage thing is tearing my wife and me apart. Because of activist judges in Massachusetts and overzealous officials in San Francisco, our union is hanging on by the thinnest of threads. Are Jeannie and I expected to treasure our union solely on the basis of our deep love, personal beliefs, public vows, and the government's blessing? Sorry, Judge Pinkypants, but that's just not good enough, not for us. We need to know that we've got something that's only available to 90% of the population.

Sure, some of us are criminals, murderers even. Some of us have committed rape, beaten children, tattooed swastikas on our bodies, abused animals, bilked the government out of millions of tax dollars, lied under oath, cheated on previous spouses, dishonored our fathers and mothers, failed to keep the Sabbath holy, mowed down pedestrians in our SUVs while intoxicated, coveted our neighbor's stuff, gotten ourselves put on death row, sold military secrets to the Chinese, urinated in public places, beaten up people who looked or sounded different than us, but we're straight. And that means we can get married. And that's special. Or at least it was.

Are some gay people serious about their commitment to each other? Sure, of course. That's not the point. Let me give you an example. Jeannie and I know this couple, these two men. They've been together for years and years, longer than we have. They live on a farm in Pennsylvania and treasure their time together. They are loved by their community, have saved lives as members of the local fire department, and have opened their home to youth groups from the city. They've built a life together based on love and trust. But-- and here's my point-- they're gay. They're both men. And if they're allowed to marry someday, where does that leave us, my wife and me? See what I'm saying? It would cheapen everything we have.

That's why we need a constitutional amendment that will protect marriage for straight people. Unless we have the right to enter that sacred union, violate it, exit it, and enter it again with somebody else over and over, regardless of what crimes we commit-- unless we have that right and gay people don't, then there truly is nothing sacred in the United States of America.

Ira Glass

Adam Felber is a writer in New York, sometimes heard on the radio program Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! His website, where this first appeared, felbers.net.

The opponents of gay marriage are vigorously pushing for state and federal constitutional amendments. And they are fighting in court. But sometimes it seems like they're in kind of a funny position. I don't know if you saw this. I saw them on Larry King the night that the president called for a constitutional amendment last year. And they were on there talking about the Bible, and quoting scripture, and saying that homosexuality is just wrong, that it's a values question. Not for everybody, but for lots of opponents of gay marriage, they think that gays just should not be such a big part of mainstream America.

And the problem is, you can't really argue that in court-- not in this day and age-- not and expect to get very far, anyway. And so we asked Matt Staver, who runs the Liberty Counsel and goes into court for them-- they're the group opposing gay marriage that went into court in California-- to briefly explain to us what arguments he is actually using in court, the legal arguments to defend a traditional marriage clause.

Ira Glass

In Massachusetts, the problem for people like Matt Staver who oppose gay marriage is that the court said, no, there is not even a reasonable case to be made. There is not a rational basis for the state to give preference to male-female couples in raising children. And the court did this in a kind of interesting way. They said, essentially, our hands are tied. We are bound by our own precedents and by laws that the legislature has passed. Under Massachusetts law, gay adoption is just as good as heterosexual adoption. Gays are equal to straights in custody cases. There is a network of vigorous gender-neutral laws that have already settled this question, and settled it by saying that in Massachusetts, gays are equal parents to straights. So the opponents of gay marriage have even started to lose this test of reasonableness.

The other problem for opponents of gay marriage is that a couple of state courts-- Alaska and Hawaii-- have said that keeping gays from marrying is the most serious kind of discrimination, just as serious as race or gender discrimination. Now, from Matt Staver's perspective, this is an outrageous kind of judicial activism, and here's why.

Ira Glass

Homosexuals may see themselves as a distinct group with immutable characteristics, but the courts haven't seen them that way in the past. Then Oregon ruled otherwise in 1998. And now that states are shifting on both the big questions like this one and some of the smaller questions, Matt Staver's job has gotten a lot harder. None of the arguments available to him is a slam dunk anymore, like they were in the 1970s.

David Cruz is a law professor at the University of Southern California who follows and writes about these issues.

Ira Glass

Hence the push for a constitutional amendment. 13 states banned gay marriage in their state constitutions this fall. And another 18 are considering it.

[MUSIC - "COPACABANA," THE DOUG LAWRENCE ORCHESTRA]

Ira Glass

Act Three, I Want to Be a Statistic. Well, John Gottman may videotape couples as they argue, but nobody observes marriage better than a couple's own kids. Starlee Kine has this story about what marriages stay together and which ones break up, and about her parents' vision of marriage back in southern California.

Starlee Kine

About three months ago, I received a postcard in the mail. On the front was a picture of a kitten staring out at me with big watery eyes. On the back was scrawled a handwritten note. "Dear Starlee, divorced and loving it. Love, Mom. "

My parents filed for divorce this past November. They had been unhappily married for 31 years. My earliest childhood memory is from when I was four years old. My family took a road trip to Oregon. I was sitting in the back next my older sister. My dad was pointing out the window at the trees saying something along the lines of, "Wow, these trees are really something. They're just so tall."

My mom whipped her head around, her eyes already in mid-roll. "For God's sake, Norm. They're not that tall." Then both my parents let out a long sigh.

It was at that moment that I can remember having a thought, maybe the first original thought I ever had. I recall looking up at my parents and thinking, "Well, this just isn't going to work."

Starlee Kine

I watched The Parent Trap all the time when I was a kid. It became a bit of an obsession. I regarded the plan the twin sisters came up with as a blueprint for how to deal with my own family, with one minor change. While the twins in the movie wanted to get their parents back together, I wanted to break mine apart. I'd watch the movie and try to notice how it was done.

It was like following directions somewhere, and then just doing the opposite to get back home. Where you turned right before, you now turned left. Where you turned left, you now turned right. Instead of tricking my parents into being in the same room, my sister and I would schedule my tap and her drum lessons at the same time, so only one of our parents would be able to pick each of us up.

And really, it didn't seem like breaking my parents up was something that should be that hard to do. They fought constantly. For my mom, everything about my dad seemed to irritate her-- the way he ate, the way he slept, even the way his feet were extra long so he had to wear specially sized shoes. All the stories she told of my childhood ended the same way. "I brought you home from the hospital. You were such a beautiful baby. And then your father carried the bags in and forgot to shut the front door. I remember it like it was yesterday."

My dad responded to my mom's irritation by withdrawing more and more from our family. Every day without fail, as soon as he got home from work, he'd get on the phone and talk for hours and hours. At first, they were just regular business calls to his associates. The conversations would be all about work. But then, as the hour grew later, he'd start asking about their kids, about what they were having for dinner that night or their plan for the weekend. He seemed more comfortable taking an interest in the lives of other people's families than in ours. I used to joke to my friends that half the time, my dad wasn't even talking to anyone at all, that if we were to go upstairs and pick up the extension, we'd hear nothing but silence from the other end.

For years, the biggest mystery in my life was how these two people ever managed to end up together. But over time, that question was trumped by a much bigger one, why they decided to stay together for so long. I can't really get the answer from my mom because, to put it mildly, she's a little off-kilter. She's never been officially diagnosed with anything, but even so, she does a lot of things outside the realm of normal people. And over the years, her behavior has become much more extreme. So that leaves my dad.

All my life, I have urged my dad to leave my mom, to free himself of all the unhappiness, and yelling, and erratic behavior. But not only has my dad refused to end the marriage, he's refused to even acknowledge they had any problems. It wasn't until after the divorce finally went through this year that my dad was able to gain any perspective on his marriage. My dad agreed to talk to me on tape to try and explain to me why he and my mom stayed together.

[PHONE RINGING]

Starlee Kine

I start off by asking him if there was ever a good time in their relationship, or was it really always as bad as I remembered it?

Starlee Kine

My dad has always been fond of this answer. Sometimes he likes to mix it up with a, "the grass is always greener" or a "you can't fit a square peg in a round hole." But this one was always a keeper. And as I got older and started asking him all the time why he stayed in such a miserable marriage, my frustration would just grow stronger with each "Y is a crooked letter" answer he gave, especially as my mom's antics became more and more pronounced.

Or as, for example, the day my mom finally took my dad to court, although it wasn't for the reason I'd always hoped it would be.

My dad was born Norman [? Slobodkin. ?] For the first few years of my life, that my last name too. Starlee [? Candy ?] [? Slobodkin. ?] Yes, it was hard to spell and clunky to say. But I could live with it. My mom, on the other hand, could not. In her mind, his name was the only thing that stood between us and a world of endless possibility. She held the [? Slobodkin ?] name personally responsible for all her problems. She'd lie on the couch, a hot towel pressed to her temples, and marvel at how her life had ended up this way. "How will I ever be a diplomat's wife now, with a name like that? And I can forget about First Lady. President [? Slobodkin? ?] Please. The press would eat us alive."

We'd try and point out my dad's lack of political aspirations. But our mom would just wave us away impatiently. And then finally, when she could not stand it a moment longer, she took action. She went to a judge and arranged to have my dad's name legally changed. My dad went along with it to keep the peace. And by the end of the day, my dad had gone from being Norman [? Slobodkin ?] to Norman Kine.

For a little while, this seemed to satisfy my mother. She would happily sign both her and his new name in big flowery loops. But then as time went by, and neither the marriage nor her life seemed to improve, she was forced to confront the real source of her unhappiness-- Norman.

"What kind of a name is that? Can you name one character from literature with that name? Or one great historical figure? I guess I'll have to accept the fact that I'll never be an astronaut's wife or own a fleet of ships. Commandeer Norman. It wouldn't happen in a million years."

And so, once again, a trip to the courthouse was made. When my dad came out, his first name was no longer Norman. It was Richard. He was now Richard Kine.

By the time I was in college, my parents seemed to lead altogether separate lives. My mom started to go to a lot of self-help seminars. And my dad now seemed to be working at all hours of the day. My mom got an apartment that my dad didn't know about. And most shockingly, she began seeing another man. They went on a trip to Europe together in secret, my mom telling my dad that she'd gone to Palm Springs to visit her mom.

They seemed to have perfected a schedule that entailed neither of them being in the same house for more than 10 minutes at a time. My mom went back to school and got her credentials to become a substitute teacher, which my dad also didn't know about. It was all so bizarre and extreme that I didn't even know where to start explaining it. I imagined calling my dad up in the middle of the night to break the news to him. "Dad, there's something I have to tell you. For the past few years, mom has been leading a double life. She has a secret apartment and a secret boyfriend. She is also a substitute teacher."

My dad, however, found out about it on his own. He hired a private detective and had my mom followed. And it was at that point that my father took what was, to him, the next logical step. Rather than putting an end to a marriage that he hadn't been happy in from the very start, he instead did the opposite. He put all of his energy into saving it.

My dad started buying my mom presents all the time. They went to museums and for long drives up the coast. They sat up late at night and made plans for the future. This would go on for a while. But then I'd hear from my mom that things weren't working out, and that they were definitely going to do it-- get a divorce.

A week later, I'd call my dad to see how he was holding up. And he'd tell me everything was going great. They were together again. This back and forth-- my hopes intermittently fulfilled then crushed-- went on for two whole years.

It got to the point that the only way I could tell if they were separated or not was by calling my dad's cell phone to see whether it said to leave a message for Richard Kine or for Norman [? Slobodkin. ?] When they were doing well, he was Richard. When they weren't, he went back to Norm.

I asked my dad what he was thinking during this time. And he tells me that he'd decided to be the attentive loving husband that he'd never been before. So again, I ask him why.

Starlee Kine

And there it was, the reason my dad stayed with my mom for so long. He didn't see her as being different from a normal person. He wasn't even thinking about it that way. He just saw her as his wife. And right or wrong, he had to stick by her. For him, that's what it meant to be married.

Starlee Kine

At this point, my dad's other line rings. And he has to take the call. So he hands off the phone to his new girlfriend, Ruth.

Starlee Kine

Ruth and my dad have actually dated before, 34 years ago, before he had ever met my mom. They were engaged to be married, but Ruth broke it off because she hadn't felt ready. Then a few months ago, my dad looked her number up, and things took off from there.

Starlee Kine

Ruth is really, really nice. But the thing that gets me is how much she seems to like my dad. Now, because of her, he has this whole new life.

Starlee Kine

For the first time, my dad is discovering what it's like being with someone you like, someone you respect and who respects you, someone who is nice to you. My mom seems much happier these days too. When I talk to her, it's like a huge burden has been lifted from her shoulders.

In August, Ruth and my dad are going to Germany on vacation. It's my dad's first trip out of the country. He doesn't even have a passport. When I ask him which name he'll be putting on it, Norman or Richard, he just laughs and says, "Either one."

Ira Glass

Starlee Kine.

Ira Glass

Well, our program is produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, and Jane Golombisky. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Kelsey Dilts.

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[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who reminded me just this morning--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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