539: The Leap

Ira Glass

Now, a man who took a leap into the unknown, back in 1947. He was a New York City bus driver named William Cimillo. For a while, he became the most famous bus driver in the country. Though, I think what that really means is that he was the only famous bus driver in the country. He told his story on television.

Ira Glass

OK. So I just want to describe what's happening here. It's black and white. The set of this TV show is a living room, but like a complete living room with everything. Window blinds, paintings on the walls, there's a credenza.

This was back before TV figured out that the only part of the living room that they actually need for a talk show is the couch. So OK. A butler-- yes, a butler-- hands the host, Faye Emerson, a silver tray with a bottle of Pepsi and two glasses. Faye pours her guest a soda and--

Ira Glass

After breakfast, Cimillo got back in his bus, and he didn't drive to the Bronx to pick up his passengers on his usual route. He headed south on US Route 1. Cimillo had been a bus driver with what was then called the Surface Transportation System of New York for 17 years, without any problems.

Went to work every day, never complained, people said. As he drove further and further away from New York City, and from his job, and from his, you know, life, he switched the destination sign from Subway to Special. Hours passed.

Ira Glass

Cimillo got back in his bus, kept driving south. He said he even picked up a hitchhiker, a sailor, who rode with him for two days.

Then, on the third day, Cimillo and his bus arrived in Hollywood, Florida, just north of Miami. It was late. He said he went for a swim.

Ira Glass

William Cimillo was 1,300 miles from the Bronx. 1,300 miles from New York traffic, from the daily grind. And he was almost out of money. He went to the Gulfstream Park Race Track. He liked to gamble.

We do not know how much money he put down, but he left the track with $2.60. Same day, he also went to the closest Western Union and sent this telegram to his boss. Quote, "With disabled bus number 1310, stop. In need of $50, stop. Send money to Hollywood, Florida, stop. Cimillo."

Ira Glass

Well, today on our radio program, what happens when you take a crazy leap into the unknown, having no idea if it's going to work out, or what's going to happen next. Will you end up on a beach in Florida, happy and carefree? Will you end up in handcuffs? We have three stories of people risking everything in their lives, including the surprising thing that happened next to this bus driver, William Cimillo. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

And of course, feel free to pop open a delicious Pepsi as you listen to this next act, Act One. By the way, we are not getting paid for that at all. Act One, Busman's Holiday.

OK. So you remember where we left off. Cimillo had just been arrested in Hollywood, Florida, by two police officers. Joe Richman is the one who dug up this old TV interview, and he picks up the story from there.

Joe Richman

After the arrest, two New York detectives and a mechanic were sent down to Florida to bring Cimillo back, along with his bus. The mechanic drove the bus, but Cimillo told people later, the mechanic couldn't really handle it. His driving made the detectives nervous.

So the cops actually put Cimillo back behind the wheel. And then right before they arrived in York City, they switched drivers again. They put the mechanic back at the wheel of the bus, and Cimillo dutifully got into his handcuffs.

So here's what happened next. As the bus pulled up to the steps of the Beach Street Police Station in Manhattan, hundreds of people had gathered, and they were cheering.

In photographs, you see Cimillo being led through the crowd by the cops, and he has a huge smile. He's beaming. Over the time it took to drive back from Florida to New York, news had spread about the busnapping. William Cimillo had become a folk hero.

Joe Richman

That was NBC. The Daily News wrote, "It must've been a wonderful trip, and we hope Bill's boss will try to understand." From the New York World-Telegram, "We know just how he felt. Who hasn't yearned for escape, for change, for fairer scenes?"

From as far away as Michigan, The Traverse City Eagle wrote, "Across the nation today, thousands of office workers and laborers went to their humdrum jobs with hearts a little lighter, because of what William L. Cimillo did to escape the same kind of boredom that fills their ordered lives." Cimillo was indicted on charges of grand larceny. He was facing up to 10 years in prison.

Cimillo's fellow New York City bus drivers-- who you'd think would be the least sympathetic people in the country to his whole joyride-- they organized a fundraiser to pay his legal fees. Letters and telegrams of support came in from around the country. The court of public opinion was delivering its verdict, and soon, the Surface Transportation System of New York decided to drop the charges.

Not only that, they gave him his job back. On his first day back on the route, a line of people waited to ride Cimillo's bus. One article reported that after school let out, 350 screaming high school girls tried to get onto his 44-seat bus, ignoring three other buses. They wanted his autograph.

In the end, William Cimillo was incredibly lucky. He took a huge leap, fled home, cut out on his job, committed a crime, and he got away with it, because people loved the story. For the rest of his life, he was that guy who took a city bus to Florida.

Joe Richman

This is Richard Cimillo, the bus driver's son. His dad died in 1975.

Joe Richman

Richard and his family never found the story as charming as most New Yorkers did, starting with the day their dad stole bus number 1310.

Joe Richman

It wasn't until his dad was arrested in Hollywood, Florida, that the family finally knew what had happened. Richard says he never sat down with his dad and really talked about why he did what he did, even as an adult.

Was it true his dad just got the idea one morning to spontaneously drive to Florida, like he'd said? He didn't plan that at all? Did he really think he'd get away with it? And the biggest question--

Joe Richman

Even now, the word he uses when he talks about his dad's bus trip is "embarrassing." But there's someone else in the family who has a completely different take on this. Richard's younger brother, Dennis. Quick heads up, their voices are remarkably similar.

Joe Richman

There's one simple reason the two brothers see this so differently. Dennis was just a baby when their father disappeared. He doesn't remember any of it.

He doesn't remember his mother and grandmother crying. He didn't think his dad had driven into a lake. He didn't picture him dead in an accident. Dennis' vision of the whole thing is closer to Easy Rider, if Easy Rider took place on a municipal bus.

Joe Richman

Dennis has a collection of memorabilia about the bus trip. He pulls out a large manila folder. On the front it says, Dad's Event. There are dozens of old photographs and articles, and a videotape with footage from 1947. We go down to the basement to watch it.

Joe Richman

It's his dad, arriving back in New York.

Joe Richman

Now, Richard, the older brother, he had told me about the same newsreel. He had seen it the week it was actual news, in a movie theater, when he was 12.

Joe Richman

So that's the older brother, Richard. But here in the basement with Dennis, his take on this--

Joe Richman

In a way, a small way, Dennis has done that. He sees himself as a free spirit. He says he got that from his dad. He doesn't worry about things too much.

He likes to gamble. He started his own businesses distributing beer and soda. He was his own boss, which meant no pension, no paid vacation, no security, no guarantees. He says it's different from the life his brother chose.

And Richard, the older brother, would agree with that. The lesson Richard took from his father's story was to be a responsible person, to think about the consequences of his actions.

Richard worked all his life as a fireman, which oddly, he calls a safe job. He's retired now. But as it turned out, when I interviewed Richard, he and his wife were getting ready to drive to Florida, as he said, the legit way.

Joe Richman

After Richard's dad, William Cimillo, got his job back in 1947, he went on to drive a bus in the Bronx for the next 16 years, with no detours. Once, a reporter asked him, do you still think about hitting the open road? Turning left and heading across the bridge again? Cimillo said, yes, he thought about it. But when you tell somebody a joke, he said, it's never as funny the second time.

Ira Glass

Joe Richmond. Sarah Kate Kramer produced that story with him. That's part of their podcast series, Radio Diaries, which you can find and subscribe to at radiodiaries.org.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads. So now a story about people who want to take a different kind of leap, a kind of quantum leap, you could say.

There was this study done by the Pew Research Center and Smithsonian Magazine back in February, published in April. The study was about future technologies. And basically, they called up 1,001 Americans.

I do not understand why it's 1,001 and not just 1,000. Maybe 1,001 just seemed sexier or something. Anyway, they called up 1,001 people. They asked them what new technological advances they expected to see in the future, and what technological advances they wanted to see.

So there were questions like, would you eat meat that was grown in a lab? Would you get a brain implant to improve your mental capacity? The answer is yes and yes to those, of course. And if you read through the whole thing, there's this kind of bizarre finding at the end, something small, something that caught the interest of producers Sean Cole and Jonathan Goldstein.

Sean Cole

So the very last question in the survey about future technologies, question 14-- it was a short survey-- was this. If there was one futuristic invention that you could own, what would it be? There was no multiple choice. This was an open-ended question. And off the tops of their heads, 9% of respondents, so roughly 1 out of 10 people, said they wanted some way to travel through time.

Jonathan Goldstein

One out of 10 came up with that on their own. That'd be roughly 30 million Americans. That's like the entire nation of Canada sitting around, wishing for a time machine. Which, speaking as a Canadian, I can say we secretly do. First stop, moments before making our national mascot a beaver and not an American woodcock.

Sean Cole

The desire for time travel, at 9%, ranked highest on the list, tied only with cures for diseases.

Jonathan Goldstein

People wanted time travel more than they wanted robot servants, which was 4%.

Sean Cole

More than they wanted world peace, a whopping 2%.

Jonathan Goldstein

Time travel was three times more popular than hover cars, holodecks, and jet packs combined.

Sean Cole

But the Pew study is just a study. It's just numbers. It doesn't explain why so many people want to travel in time. Is it our curiosity about the future?

Jonathan Goldstein

I wonder what new kinds of cutlets the world of tomorrow will hold?

Sean Cole

Regrets over the past?

Jonathan Goldstein

Boy, do I wish I hadn't eaten all those cutlets.

Sean Cole

And so we struck out into the world to try to answer that question. Why do you want to time travel?

Jonathan Goldstein

And even though they've been mulling this over for so long, many still reach for the most well-trodden sci-fi comic book staple.

Sean Cole

What's funny is that they know it's kind of lame. You can hear it in their voices.

Jonathan Goldstein

They preface it with phrases like--

Sean Cole

And then they say it anyway.

Sean Cole

We spoke to about 50 people, both friends and strangers we walked up to on the street.

Jonathan Goldstein

Most of them had more thoughts about traveling to the past, rather than the future. After all, you never know with the future. Teleport yourself hundreds of years from now, and you could land on an Earth devoid of people, where the only remaining structure is a monument to President Donald Trump, made out of eternium.

Sean Cole

Whereas with the past, at least you know the basic plot points. And there's a vast encyclopedia of calamities you could still fix.

Sean Cole

And how would you go about it, do you think?

Sean Cole

And of course, no one imagines that they'll end up with an iron collar around their neck, working in a quarry. Instead, they have a starring role in the historical docu-drama. Like this guy, who'd set the controls for the Revolutionary War.

Jonathan Goldstein

But these ambitious, world-saving time travelers are just a small subset of the people we interviewed.

Jonathan Goldstein

Most of the people we talked to didn't want to change history. They wanted to go back in time to fix something personal, something in their own lives.

Jonathan Goldstein

She told me, number one on the list, the night she told a room full of adults a joke that began, a Canadian, an Italian and two Chinese people were standing on a roof.

Sean Cole

More than one person said they wanted to go back in time just to advise their younger selves, knowing what they know now. Like my friend Jimmy.

Jonathan Goldstein

And listening to both of these groups, the ones who want to save the world, and the ones who'd use the time machine to excel in the boudoir--

Sean Cole

Or to do anything else in their private life.

Jonathan Goldstein

--you can't help wondering, are the people who want to save the world just better people? We posed this question to everyone we talked to.

Sean Cole

When you talk to a large number of people about time travel, you tend to hear a lot about the butterfly effect. That idea that a little change can have massive repercussions as it echoes through history. You've heard of this. But with these small, little personal wishes, it almost feels like you can get away with it somehow. It's just you, after all, and maybe one other person.

Sean Cole

This phone call happened when he was on his way to play cricket. This was in Australia. At the end of the game, he had a cardiac arrest.

Other folks we talked to said they wanted to go back in time and study harder in school or pick a different career path entirely. One said he wished he had picked a better roommate. Some people just wanted to go back and relive parts of their lives that they enjoyed.

Jonathan Goldstein

A few people said they didn't want to time travel. They already have too much they want to do in the present. And maybe everything would just end up worse if they changed anything, anyway.

And about that, these people who just didn't want to go back, it turns out there was another finding in the Pew study. Older people, people over 50, are less inclined to want to time travel. And people over 65 are way less inclined to want to time travel.

But why? Does one achieve a greater sense of peace in old age? Self-acceptance? Or maybe it comes down to an older person's concerns about the time machine itself. Will it have legroom?

Sean Cole

Clean bathrooms?

Jonathan Goldstein

Will meals be served?

Sean Cole

And if so, is there a low-sodium option?

Clearly, we needed to talk to some seniors. And so, like Al Pacino in a geriatric version of cruising, we set out at night, to a park, looking for old people.

Sean Cole

We found this Mutt and Jeff type pair of elderly guys sitting on a bench.

Jonathan Goldstein

We make them answer for their elderly brethren and sisteren. Is it true what the survey says? Are they not interested in time travel?

Sean Cole

Seems consistent with the research. Sort of.

Jonathan Goldstein

But after a mere 8 and 1/2 minutes of cross examination, it turned out these two were just as ready to climb into a time machine as a person half their age.

Jonathan Goldstein

It was beginning to seem as though when you scratched the surface, even those opposed to time travel might soften their position and find some reason to go back. Perhaps this is the limitation of a cold, by-the-numbers survey. Scratching surfaces is exactly what Pew cannot do.

Sean Cole

So we went looking for senior citizens who truly have zero interest in time travel, like the Pew study found, so we could ask them why. Which is how we ended up at a senior center in Brooklyn.

Jonathan Goldstein

There was maybe a couple dozen people sitting around in the cafeteria after breakfast, watching Let's Make a Deal on a big-screen TV. The director of the Center turned the sound down and told Sean to introduce himself.

Jonathan Goldstein

Not so much the radio professional when you're being stared at by a room full of silent seniors who hate you for getting their game show muted.

Sean Cole

Meanwhile, Johnny just stood there, helping not at all.

Jonathan Goldstein

And because you weren't making any sense at all, the director, Rosemary Bland, had to step in.

Sean Cole

Of course, those were not our questions, nor anything like them.

Jonathan Goldstein

Nevertheless, we made our way from table to table.

Jonathan Goldstein

Fun fact-- when talking with seniors about time travel, they sometimes throw the question into a big, science-fiction food processor with space travel. But the Pew finding did bear out. Most people at the senior center were pretty dismissive of the idea, some more emphatically than others.

Sean Cole

This is Wallace Nottage, a stately 86-year-old-- it was his birthday actually-- with a cane, and he was wearing a colorful fez on his head. We were called over to talk to him by two women who said, he'd probably have a lot to say to you. And he did. We sat with him for about 20 minutes, until finally, he gave us what felt like the most plausible reason why old people wouldn't want to go back in time.

Jonathan Goldstein

Maybe the thing that much older people understand isn't that time travel is frivolous. It's that it's pointless. When you have half a century of past behind you or more, and you look at those decades in one swath, you realize that even if you fix one thing, something else will go wrong.

Sean Cole

Even some of the younger people we talked with felt that way about changing the past.

Sean Cole

How do you mean?

Sean Cole

Inevitably, in between things, when Johnny and I were interviewing folks together, we got to talking about whether either of us would want to go back in time for any reason. In Johnny's case, the answer would be--

Jonathan Goldstein

No.

Sean Cole

Too adventurous.

Jonathan Goldstein

Not for me.

Sean Cole

Whereas I'm one of those people who's thought about this a lot. Like, a lot a lot. There was this point when I obsessively wanted to go back in time to a very particular moment in time, to fix the past.

The facts are pretty standard. I was with a woman, and we needed to decide about our future. So I flew to Alaska for the weekend to visit her. And after talking for two days, I finally said that I wasn't ready to be with her.

And for a long time after that, I wished I had made the opposite decision, that I had told her yes instead of no. I would sit and pray that I could have that weekend to do over again. I'd picture it all the time.

And then, just little by little, there wasn't any big epiphany or anything, I came to see that things were never really right between us and that they never would have been. It took about two years, maybe longer, to understand that. And now she's married and I'm not, but I'm really happy we're not together.

And it makes me realize that I have been time traveling. It's just that I've been traveling into the future at 60 minutes per hour. And maybe that's how we fix the past.

Ira Glass

Sean Cole this one of the producers of our radio show. Jonathan Goldstein is the host of Public Radio Program and podcast Wiretap, which is distributed in the United States by PRI, Public Radio International, and also available on iTunes. Coming up, the glass of wine that could change everything. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, The Leap-- stories of people taking a huge jump into the unknown.

We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, The Wisdom to Know the Difference. So Nancy Updike has this story about somebody considering a very big leap she might try in her own life.

Nancy Updike

Tina Dupuy has a story she's told dozens of times, in front of thousands of people. It's about herself at 13 years old, when she was being told by people around her, you have a problem. The problem landed her in AA and started early.

She remembers drinking sake when she was five years old at a family reunion. At age 12, pouring herself a big glass of tequila at 3:00 in the morning to drink by herself and watch TV. The kinds of things that can seem cool or no big deal when you're in it, until suddenly they're ruining your life. At a very young age, Tina became what she calls "AA famous" for telling her story at meetings and AA conferences like this one.

Nancy Updike

ACYPAA stands for All California Young People in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Nancy Updike

So Tina got AA famous as Tina D, the girl who got sober when she was 13, and could tell the hell out of her story. And if you're wondering, yes, teenagers can be alcoholics. Almost 700,000 teenage alcoholics in the US, according to most recent government statistics. AA saved Tina's life by the grace of God, or whatever higher power you choose.

She quoted The Big Book-- that's the official AA book, so much, that people in AA called her a Big Book thumper. It's like a Bible thumper, except with The Big Book. And any teenager who shows up at AA today could be handed a Young People in AA pamphlet that starts with Tina's story.

That's part one of this-- Tina from age 13 up to 33. Two decades sober. At 33, she'd been married for several years, she'd become a columnist and a political commentator, a long way from the miserable, angry girl she'd been who dropped out of school and spent her time drinking and smoking pot with the older kids, running away from home.

AA and sobriety felt so thoroughly part of her by her 30s that she only went to meetings once a month or so to listen and to tell people who were struggling the things other people had told her. Keep coming back. Trust your higher power. Everything happens for a reason. After so much turbulence, her life was finally calm. And then an unwelcome and not at all expected thought.

Nancy Updike

For someone else, maybe it wouldn't be big deal. For Tina, this was the start of a great slow unraveling. Next to go was belief in a higher power. And then she became fixated on a dangerous question.

Nancy Updike

Let's take a minute and consider the scale of what Tina was proposing. Tina had been a full-blown drunk at 13 years old. She found AA. And in every AA meeting, the first thing you say out loud to get started is, I'm an alcoholic.

Tina had been saying that her entire adult life and all of her adolescence. Asking herself, should I take a drink, was basically asking, should I turn my back on what I believed about myself for 20 years? There's only one reason to entertain a question that immense, which is, you can't help it.

Tina had doubted and questioned her way into a process that she could not stop. It was like she'd started restoring a painting and then realized, I think there's another painting underneath. I want to say one thing. Which is that, when I interviewed Tina, I saw that a lot of what she's talking about, her rethinking of her story, she's still in the middle of figuring it out right now, today.

Tina has a few key anecdotes she's told over the years at AA conferences. I've heard a bunch of recordings of her speaking. One story is about a moment when she was 12, with her mom laying down the law. Here's the recording.

Nancy Updike

Notice in this anecdote, Tina is the problem. That's how it is in all the recordings. She's rude to her mom. She's self-destructive. It's a classic AA story about admitting bad behavior, taking responsibility for it. Anything else is just excuses.

But the questions Tina was having had stirred up the anything else. It made her go back and look at things she hadn't looked at since she was a kid, especially her relationship with her mom.

A central tenet of AA is taking responsibility, not going on and on about how other people are always the problem. So let me lay out some things. Tina's parents had been part of a new religious movement, which is the current term for what most of us would still call a cult.

They moved around a lot when Tina was little-- four different countries before she was three years old. Then her parents left the cult, and her dad was almost entirely out of the picture after that.

Home was a constant battle of wills between Tina and her mother, and she was a defiant kid. She talked back. She swore. She cut school. She'd harass her younger brother. The way her mom responded to the bad behavior, as Tina remembers it, was to tell her she was evil. She was rotten.

And when Tina was 11-- 11-- her mother had her committed to hospital under psychiatric care, sort of a kiddie mental ward. Locked up. A tough-love intervention to curb her rebelliousness.

Nancy Updike

When you're 11, your parents are the casino. The house pretty much always wins. Your only move as a child is to screw up your own life and hope that it messes with theirs too.

Tina was in the hospital for 30 days. It did not make her less defiant. Two years later, her parents decided on a long-term solution to the problem of Tina, which was to make her a ward of the state. When she was 13, they put her into the foster care system.

She was sent to a girl's group home, and that's where she stayed until she graduated from high school. The head of the group home corroborated Tina's memory that her parents rarely visited her there. I talked to Tina's mom.

She didn't remember calling Tina evil, but she did remember the fighting. And she remembered committing Tina for 30 days to the hospital. She said she was trying to raise two kids on her own and went to a family therapist who gave her the book Tough Love and recommended hospitalizing Tina. Foster care, the group home, is where Tina regularly started going to AA.

So one pattern in Tina's AA stories is she's the bad guy. The only bad guy, even though she was a kid. But I noticed another pattern when I was listening through her old recordings of her speeches, which is she never gets drunk in the stories. Here's one of the recordings. Tina's talking about when she went to San Francisco to try and live with her father, briefly.

Nancy Updike

The way she told it in AA, this was yet another example of what an extreme case she was. A 13-year-old who was such a booze hound that she's bugging the guy next to her on a plane to buy her a drink. But notice, she asks for a glass of Jack Daniels, but she doesn't get it. She doesn't drink any Jack Daniels.

This is actually one of the reasons Tina was a popular AA speaker. People would come up to her afterwards sometimes, and say, thank you for not just getting up and telling a bunch of boring drinking stories. Here's another recording. Remember the glass of tequila?

Nancy Updike

The glass of tequila makes a big entrance, and then nothing happens with it. The rest of the story is about the TV show she was watching. When I asked Tina about the tequila, she told me, right, when she really thought back on it, she could only remember taking a few sips, and that was it.

It was only when Tina started having the blasphemous thought in her head, should I take a drink, that she also began to seriously question how much she had drunk as a kid, really. What was true? For instance, that AA pamphlet with Tina's story in it. When Tina read it out loud during our interview, it was the first time she'd looked at the words she'd written in about 10 years.

Nancy Updike

What was mistaken was, first of all, the place was not a rehab for alcohol or drug abuse. It was psychiatric hospitalization to fix Tina's attitude. And second, she didn't remember loving how alcohol affected her. She didn't remember it numbing the torment in her brain.

Maybe she was in denial or had forgotten, since it was so long ago, how alcohol made her feel. Which is why she now wanted to take a drink. She felt like she had to take a drink. This would be a referendum on her story. Was she an alcoholic or not?

And if she wasn't an alcoholic, then what was true from the stories she'd been telling on stage all these years. She had to know. So she and her husband talked through when and how she would take her first drink.

Nancy Updike

I just want to make sure I'm understanding. You are saying you don't think you're an alcoholic.

Nancy Updike

The postscript to drinking for Tina has been getting straight in her mind why she thought she was an alcoholic in the first place. How does a non-alcoholic child come to believe that she's a stone drunk? Well, here's how she puts it together now.

She went to the first AA meeting just because, nothing else to do. This was in the place she was being held before going to the group home at 13. And one of the AA phrases that caught Tina's ear was, relate to the feelings. Because boy, did she relate.

In AA, she heard other people talk, one after another, about things that were so familiar to her. Feeling rejected by their families, winding up in hospital or rehab, feeling trapped and furious and desperate. People said to her, I used to be exactly where you are now. And they had all done what she had done. They had lashed out. They had acted badly.

Nancy Updike

If Tina was an alcoholic, everything made sense. She was the problem. She was the only problem, and if she stuck with the program, she could fix the problem.

AA gave Tina a whole life-- goals, discipline, a belief system, people to call when things were bad, people to call when things were good. She graduated from high school at 17, emancipated herself from foster care, started her adult life.

Nancy Updike

I asked Tina if any of her friends are worried about her now that she's drinking. She said, no, not anymore. But she said, sometimes she still has a little voice in her head, saying, yeah you're fine now.

But what if there's some threshold you just haven't crossed, and when you do, you turn into the full-blown drunk you always thought you were? But the voice has zero evidence for that scenario. It's just trying to keep the story going.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike is one of the producers of our program.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Stephanie Foo and myself, with Ben Calhoun, Sean Cole, Chana Joffe-Walt, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike.

Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from JP Dukes. Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our office manager.

Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Elna Baker scouts stories for our show. Research help today from Christopher Swetala and Michelle Harris. Editing help today from Joel Lovell. Music help today from Damien Graef.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia.

You know, the other day, I walked into his office and caught him licking-- licking an old vinyl copy of Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive. I was like, Torey, what are you doing?

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.