553: Stuck in the Middle

Ira Glass

Elias stopped eating meat when he was three or four. His mom can't remember-- it's been so long. He was seven when I talked to her. And he doesn't think that anybody else should eat meat either. And he freaks out. He cried and pleaded at his grandmother's at New Year's when he heard that she might cook brisket, until she offered not to. There was the time that he got so upset in a restaurant smelling the meat cooking in the kitchen and seeing all the people around them eat their meals that he had to go sit up front by the door.

And it kills him especially to think that his little brother might still be eating animals. His brother, Theo, he just turned five at the time of this interview and emphatically is not a vegetarian. What a surprise, two brothers. Their mom, Rachel, says that Theo is not asking to eat meat in front of Elias. He's not asking to eat it all that often.

Ira Glass

She recorded one of those conversations for us when she was taking Theo, the meat eater, to a party. There was going to be food at the party, and his brother was going to be there, the god of food. What would Theo eat?

Ira Glass

OK, I just want to say before we go any further, if you are hearing all this and you're feeling judgy about these parents-- and I know you are because that is a national pastime, judging other people's parenting-- I just want to say, I totally felt that way until I heard Elias, just like she says. And hearing Elias made me realize, oh right, she actually is in a really tough situation where she has these two kids, and they both have really strong feelings about this. And she doesn't want to crush either one of them. Anyway, listen. Here's Rachel with Elias.

Ira Glass

The family did stop eating meat at home after Elias asked. Though Rachel says that they actually didn't eat much meat before that either. Maybe once a week they'd have fish or turkey. And for now, she and her husband's strategy with her two boys is that they try to get them to talk to each other and see each other's point of view, crossing their fingers that in the long run that's going to be best for both of them.

In the short run, though, it is complicated. You know, for any parent, there are always some things that you let go in the short run because you cannot fight every fight. And for a while, Theo, the one who eats meat, was secretly going out and getting turkey sandwiches with his dad after soccer. They would even dance this little turkey dance when they did it.

Or here's Rachel with Theo, the meat eater, on a Thursday. Friday, the boys' school serves pizza, and you can get plain or pepperoni. And of course, Elias does not like it if Theo eats the pepperoni.

Ira Glass

OK, an important fact-- Theo is not being crushed by Elias' demands. If anything, between the two of them, Theo is the dominant brother in most situations. He's outgoing, he's funny, he's a big personality in whatever room he walks into, and he gets his way with Elias all the time. Like, for instance, when the family took this day trip to visit Rachel's mom and coincidentally it happened to be the day of a herring run, which comes once a year. And so they stopped at this herring ladder, whatever that is.

Ira Glass

Elias, however, is always coming up with new tactics. Like in the car recently, he made this proposal to Theo involving matchbox cars, and Rachel flipped on the recorder.

Ira Glass

So this is where they are now. Rachel and her husband insert themselves in the middle of these negotiations, or they get dragged into the middle between the two boys. As parents, they have to ad-hoc their way through each new thing the boys come up with on this. Like here with this matchbox deal, the boys could not agree on what is a critical part of any negotiation, of any contract, and that is the start date of the deal. Would their deal begin before or after Friday's pepperoni pizza day at school?

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, people stuck in the middle. You know the saying "necessity is the mother of invention"? Being stuck in the middle of some situation is just like that because that is when ingenuity has to kick in. That is when you see people trying to MacGuyver their way out, trying stuff that it is surprising to see anyone try.

We have three stories today of three radically different sorts of situations and their outcomes. From WBEZ Chicago, it is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Do You Hear What I Hear?" So there's certain locations that we all find ourselves in sometimes where we're just supposed to sit and wait, stuck in the middle of not exactly nowhere but nowhere interesting. I'm talking about the rows of chairs in airports that you sit in by the door for your flight, or doctor's office waiting rooms, and finally the mundane spot that one man found himself in over and over. Sara Corbett has this story about her father-in-law.

Sara Corbett

I showed up for the first time at my father-in-law's house in 1992. He sat me down at the kitchen table, and we had a nice get-to-know-you sort of conversation. I was 24. Dick was about 60. And he pulled out a pen and took notes on what I was saying. At the time, I had no idea why he was doing this. But Dick is like this about everything that interests him.

He spent his entire career working for IBM, going back to the '50s and '60s, when working at IBM was like working at NASA. The kind of problems he worked on took weeks or months to solve, and he loved it. He's thorough, a process man. As Dick sees it, if something catches his attention, it's clearly worth gathering data on. And if it's worth gathering data on, it's worth getting to the bottom of-- including, recently, a certain piece of music.

[PHONE RINGING]

Sara Corbett

That's Dick. And for the last two years, he's been very, very interested in a piece of hold music.

Sara Corbett

He heard the hold music again when he called a medical billing center in Atlanta and again with his cardiologist. And he had a hernia, then a kidney stone. This one song, it turns out, is the hold music for Dick's entire health care network. He's 81, in great health, but 81 is 81, and he's the one who deals with all the appointments, the follow-ups, the billing, both for him and his wife, Marianne.

Sara Corbett

He couldn't find the name of it. He couldn't find it, period, anywhere except on hold. And of course, he took notes on the phone calls where he was hearing it because Dick takes notes on every phone call. The song's not in the database of music apps like Shazam and SoundHound, by the way. Dick tried it. To identify the song, he needed human help, and a surprising number of people in medical offices, strangers he met over the phone, were willing to take this on. These were exactly the kind of people Dick is always looking for when he's on a quest.

Sara Corbett

A few people called their communications departments to see if they could turn anything up. No luck. A woman seven states away spent a whole weekend looking up songs online to try and find a match. Dead end.

You know who was the least helpful? Dick's family. We did not get into it. Dick called us, his sons and daughters-in-law, and tried to hum the music over the phone. We blew it off. Dick described the hold song as haunting. But it was like a ghost none of us saw or even believed in, and he could tell.

Dick

I think when you get older, you get more of that in your life, where people are questioning whether you're really seeing it or you remember it right or whatever. And that does get you to feel a little isolated a little-- you know? Yes, you do. I did feel a little bit that way.

And like, I can't go on keep asking people what's this music all about, and I can't describe it. And you sort of find that you better just let it go. And you don't want to, but it sort of fades after a while. Until you hear it again when you call another doctor's office, and then it's back. So I'll put those in here.

Sara Corbett

This is Dick going through some of the overstuffed cabinets at my house in Maine. He does this almost every time he comes to visit. He'll spend entire weekends in our basement, sorting out the tools we rarely use, collapsing all the empty cardboard boxes that accumulate down there. He'll sift through old papers, double check our tax returns. He sees in my cabinets a bonanza of things that need sorting and labeling.

Sara Corbett

This is the advantage of having a process man in the family. Dick stays with your problem until it's been solved, the cabinets or whatever. A couple of years ago, my husband and I were about to buy a new house when Dick swooped in and spent three days doing a copious market analysis, which made it clear that we were about to make a bad investment. He doesn't let himself off the hook for anything, big or small, because things don't let him off the hook.

Sara Corbett

This is his wife, Marianne.

Sara Corbett

Can you think of anything that you've done that you did sloppily or hastily?

Sara Corbett

This woman, Denise Carter Stanley, was Dick's jackpot. She's the registrar at the medical imaging center where he went one day to get a CAT scan.

Sara Corbett

Denise is on hold a lot inside the larger hospital network. She says she's been hearing the hold music every day for what she estimates is about an hour and a half a day for the last seven years. She likes the music. The first time Dick walked into her office, there was Denise playing the hold music, his hold music, on speakerphone at her desk.

Sara Corbett

She called the IT department at her hospital. They thought she was crazy. She made more calls.

Sara Corbett

Denise, digging around, finally turned up the key fact. The music came from Cisco, the company that provides the hospital's phone system. Cisco's the number one supplier of corporate phones like this in the world.

Dick went to his local library. And a woman there-- I want to say her name on the radio, because she cracked the case. Her name is Abby Sesselberg. She went to YouTube and found an audio recording that's called simply "One Hour of Cisco CallManager Default Hold Music."

Sara Corbett

There are hundreds of comments posted about this song, pages and pages. And sure, some people can't stand it. But most of the comments are like this-- "Best hold music ever made. I love this song." "So addictively pleasant. Please, put me back on hold so I can listen to it some more." "I work in a call center, and this music is the best to listen to after dealing with rude customers." "I thought I was the only person who loved this." "I've been looking for this song for almost three years." Dick read these comments with relief.

Sara Corbett

The librarian also helped Dick find a title for the song. It's called "Opus No. 1." And that's when I finally got into it. Dick, this is for you.

Sara Corbett

Tim was 16 years old when he wrote "Opus No. 1." It was recorded in 1989 on a four track tape by one of his high school buddies, Darrick Deel. Tim was a Yanni-loving computer nerd, messing around with a drum machine and a synthesizer in his parents' garage in California.

That five minutes of tape is now on 65 million Cisco phone sets worldwide as the default hold music. It's what everyone hears unless someone inside the system makes an effort to change it. Tim was in his 20s when he got a call from Darrick about "Opus No. 1." Darrick had taken a job at Cisco designing phone systems.

Sara Corbett

Tim's not a musician anymore. He's an IT guy now. He manages the server at a bank in California.

Sara Corbett

Tim and Darrick are still friends. And Darrick's the only one, after all these years, making any sort of music. He creates new ringtones for phones, which Tim admits he's a little jealous of.

Sara Corbett

I told Tim my father-in-law wanted a copy of the song to put on his iPod, because he wants to play it around the house as he does chores and pays bills. In the comments on YouTube, lots of people said they wanted a copy. Tim found this almost impossible to fathom, but he and Darrick sent it anyway, full fidelity, in stereo.

[MUSIC - TIM CARLETON AND DARRICK DEEL, "OPUS NO. 1"]

Ira Glass

Sara Corbett is the co-author most recently of A House in the Sky. If you have not had enough of this song, "Opus 1" is available at better hospital phone systems and for a limited time at our website, thisamericanlife.org, in full fidelity stereo for your downloading needs.

[MUSIC - THE FOUR FRESHMAN, "NOWHERE TO GO"]

Coming up, the karate yid. That's an anti-Semitic, right, to say yid? Well, and if it is anti-Semitic, is if one of those anti-Semitic things that I'm allowed to say because I am a Jew? Is even asking that question anti-Semitic? Anyway, Orthodox Jews skilled in karate. You'll see what I'm talking about 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 program "Stuck in the Middle," stories of people who cannot get out of some situation, some limbo they are caught in. And so they use ingenuity and guile, or anyway unconventional means to get themselves unstuck. We have arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, "Sunrise, Sun-Get."

Not that long ago, there was a kind of wacky news story that was news for a day or so in New York City. It was on the cover of the tabloids. It was on all the local news channels in the tri-state area. And at its heart were people stuck in a kind of limbo. Mark Oppenheimer has more.

Mark Oppenheimer

The news was pretty startling. A group of men, including a Brooklyn rabbi named Mendel Epstein, had been arrested for conspiring to kidnap a husband and torture him until he gave his wife a get. The get is simply a piece of paper a husband hands his wife saying, essentially, it's over. We're divorced. Jews can get civil divorces like anyone else, but if you're an Orthodox Jew, strictly following Jewish law, the get is the only real way to end a marriage.

Usually this goes off without a hitch. But sometimes a woman wants to get divorced and the husband refuses to give a get. That's where Rabbi Epstein came in.

Mark Oppenheimer

The criminal complaint against Epstein and a fellow rabbi, Martin Wolmark, alleged that the rabbis agreed to arrange a beat down of a reluctant husband, and they were asking for more than $50,000 to do it. Here's the US attorney for New Jersey, Paul Fishman, laying this all out to the press.

Mark Oppenheimer

When the story first broke, what kind of got lost is that it's not just about cash, karate, and cattle prods. It's also about women who were stuck, essentially trapped in failed marriages. For the past couple of years as a religion reporter, I've been interviewing Jewish women in just this situation, and it can be pretty horrible. Some men refuse to give a get because they still love their wives and hope to reconcile. But others just want leverage so they can demand, for example, lots of money.

Mark Oppenheimer

This is Gital Dodelson. She's an Orthodox Jewish woman, and she's what's known as an agunah. That's the word in Hebrew for a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce. Literally, it means a chained wife. Besides money, lots of money, Gital says her husband has a long list of demands for her to meet if she wants her get.

Mark Oppenheimer

But Gital lives in New Jersey. Her husband's on Staten Island. The boy would have to enroll in two schools and alternate weeks. Keep in mind, Gital already has a civil divorce, and the custody and financial arrangements have been settled by a judge.

Gital says that her husband-- who, by the way, didn't return my calls-- is always changing what he's asking for. At one point, she says, he demanded they get rid of the coordinator who's overseeing the custody of their son. Another time, he insisted that she promise to tell the boy someday that the divorce was all his mother's fault. Gital says she should have seen it coming.

Mark Oppenheimer

Of course, there are always two sides to every divorce. And I tried to get her husband's side. When he didn't call back, I tried his parents, his uncle, even his grandmother-- his bubbe-- and none of them would talk to me.

I finally spoke with her husband's lawyer, who disputed nearly every one of Gital's assertions. He said the sticking points for his client are tiny, reasonable things, like what hour on Friday he can pick up his son so he doesn't have to drive after Sabbath begins at sundown.

But Gital's side of the story has been backed up by a rabbinic court called a beis din. A beis din is a group of three rabbis Orthodox Jew sometimes turn to to settle disputes outside the civil courts. When her husband wouldn't give a get, Gital tried to bring him before the beis din. But he refused to show up.

So the rabbis issued something called a seruv. It's basically a contempt of court. It's supposed to ostracize him in the community. Gital's brother Aryeh is a full-time scholar of Jewish law, and he says the seruv is usually an effective tool.

Mark Oppenheimer

The minyan is the quorum of 10 men needed for an Orthodox prayer service. It's sort of like telling a devout Catholic that he can't receive communion.

Mark Oppenheimer

This sort of ostracism would have worked back in the old country, where you spent your whole life around the same couple thousand people. If you were the village cobbler and all of a sudden you had no customers, you probably figured that it made sense to give your wife a get. But in the modern world, a seruv doesn't always work so well. Aryeh believes that the Orthodox Jews on Staten Island, where his brother-in-law lives, are still treating him like one of their own, so the shaming and community pressure isn't working.

Gital, of course, could just walk away. She's already got her civil divorce. The finances are all settled. So is the child custody. But she can't get remarried. She's a 25-year-old woman. She'd like to have more kids.

And I should point out, most Jews wouldn't care. Plenty of less religious Jews would be happy to marry Gital. But in the Orthodox world, where she was raised, where her whole family is, where she wants to stay, she can't make a new life for herself. Her ex-husband can cast about for a new wife and then give Gital a get if he finds somebody. But for Gital, it's different.

Mark Oppenheimer

Almost anything. She wouldn't resort to violence or hire a rabbi like Mendel Epstein, the rabbi who was arrested in Brooklyn. Now, most of Epstein's work was above board. He'd advocate for women in rabbinic court. He'd serve as a go-between with the husband's family. That's how he made his living. But according to the FBI, Epstein took his work on behalf of women one step too far.

Rabbi Epstein, I should mention, is currently out on bail, but neither he nor his lawyer responded to my request for an interview. However, about a year ago, before he was arrested, I actually met him, interviewed him at his dining room table. I recorded it on my phone. The interview started off pretty uneventful.

Mark Oppenheimer

At some point the interview kind of took a turn. Epstein told me about this case from 1992, when he got a call from a chained wife named Jennifer Klein. She had a civil divorce but no get, and now her ex-husband had kidnapped their young son and fled to Peru.

Epstein says he told her, call the FBI. She said she'd done that. But she'd also heard that Rabbi Epstein could do things that the FBI couldn't do. Epstein told me that the woman had already found a group of ex-CIA agents who were going to help her find her husband and child.

Mark Oppenheimer

Epstein says she found them. Nothing to do with us. Epstein's daughter Batsheva, a lawyer, was sitting right next to him, so he was choosing his words carefully, but not super carefully.

As he continued with his story, he, the wife, the former secret agent man, and a Jewish scribe are all bound for Peru. They find the husband, break into the house. The kid's there. They save him. And then they head to the bathroom, where the hired muscle had found the husband.

Mark Oppenheimer

I don't know if we want to discuss that, his daughter said.

Mark Oppenheimer

Just to be clear, the guy was an ex-Delta Forces commando, not CIA. But whatever.

Mark Oppenheimer

The Houston Chronicle reported on this story in 1992 and ran a photo of the woman and her son, reunited and posing with the hired gun from the Delta Forces. There are legends that this is exactly how these matters got settled back in the Eastern European villages. You hired a thug from the czar's army, he gave the husband a little talking to, and suddenly you had your get. Similar legends had floated around Epstein.

Mark Oppenheimer

This is Rivka Haut. 30 years ago, Rivka and a couple friends founded an organization to help free agunot. And back then, they worked with Mendel Epstein. She says, like everyone, she heard the rumors about some of his tactics. But she never imagined anything like what he's accused of now.

Mark Oppenheimer

Over the last few decades, as more Orthodox women decided it was OK to get divorced, Mendel Epstein got a reputation as the rabbi women could trust. He was willing to take the women's side. He even published a little handbook to guide women through the divorce process.

And Rivka says, Epstein was her guide too. She and her fellow activists were all Orthodox, but they were pretty modern. They had TVs in their houses, some of them wore pants, so they needed someone like Epstein to help them establish trust with the ultra-Orthodox women who needed their help.

Mark Oppenheimer

Then at some point, she can't remember if it was 10 years or 20 years ago, there was an incident, and her opinion of Epstein changed.

Mark Oppenheimer

A colleague of Rivka's remembered this too. Again, Epstein and his attorney declined to talk to me about any of this. Right now, a lot of Orthodox Jews are pretty embarrassed by these husbands who won't free their wives. It's cruel, and they know it looks very bad to the outside world. A couple of solutions have been floated. One would be to grant women annulments, like in the Catholic Church. One well-known aguna in the Orthodox world, Tamar Epstein, recently announced that she considers herself free of her marriage, and everyone assumes it's because she found a rabbi to annul it.

But this idea is controversial. It hasn't caught on, not yet. So for now, if you're an aguna like Gital Dodelson, a desperate woman trapped in this limbo, paying some rabbi to intervene almost makes sense.

Mark Oppenheimer

Not that she'd ever hire someone to beat up her ex. She's not willing to go that far. But as it happens, there's an old Jewish teaching that recalcitrant husbands should be beaten. And it wasn't some schmuck from Brooklyn who said so. It was Maimonides, the 12th century Spanish rabbi considered the greatest Jewish sage of all time.

Maimonides wrote that a man could be beaten until he gave his wife a get. Here was his reasoning. Deep down, he said, all of us are torn between our good inclinations and our evil inclinations. And being beaten might be just what a man needs to drive out his evil side so that he can see the wisdom of releasing his wife. Maimonides doesn't say anything about karate chops and cattle prods, but the principle's the same.

Ira Glass

Mark Oppenheimer. He writes the Beliefs column for the New York Times, and he's writing a book about chained wives. Since we first broadcast this story a year ago, Gital did finally get her get. And Mendel Epstein is currently on trial in New Jersey for allegedly asking undercover agents for $60,000 to kidnap a man and force him to grant his wife a divorce.

[MUSIC - WAXAHATCHEE, "BLUE, PT. II"]

Ira Glass

Act Three, "Contrails of my Tears." Well, when you're on an airplane, you are definitely stuck in the middle between the place that you left and the place that you are going. And Brett Martin says in that atmospheric limbo, things are different for us in at least one significant way.

Brett Martin

A couple of years ago, I was on a flight from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The movie was Sweet Home Alabama, which you'll remember is about a Southern girl played by Reese Witherspoon who moves to New York, joins the fashion industry, and then is forced to return home and come to terms with her white trash roots. At the end, there's a wedding scene when the character has to explain to her big city husband-to-be that she's leaving him for her earthy, down home high school sweetheart.

(SUBJECT) REESE WITHERSPOON AS MELANIE SMOOTER: The truth is I gave my heart away a long time ago, my whole heart, and I never really got it back. And I don't even know what else to say, but I'm sorry. I can't marry you.

Brett Martin

Into the stunned silence that follows walks Candice Bergen as the jilted fiance's dragon lady of a mother, who coincidentally also happens to be the mayor of New York. After a volley of insults, Witherspoon decks Bergen.

[CROWD GASPING]

And it was at this moment, somewhere between when Witherspoon drawled, "Nobody talks to my mama like that," and her father, Earl Smooter raised his face to the heavens and declared, "Praise the Lord, the South has risen again," that something began to happen to me.

My face got hot and constricted. A softball rose in my throat that required a surprisingly loud snort to choke back. My breathing grew rapid. In short, I lost it and started to cry.

I should say that Sweet Home Alabama is not a very good movie. It's actually a pretty terrible movie. I have no particular attachment to Reese Witherspoon, and I'm not from the South. Also, this was the fourth time I'd seen it.

See, my name is Brett, and I cry at movies on airplanes. Not sometimes, always. And not some movies, all movies. Don't believe me? Here's a by no means complete list-- Bend It Like Beckham, 101 Dalmatians, What a Girl Wants, Daredevil.

Let me be clear. I am not afraid of flying. I like flying. And I'm not a crier, at least not on land. Like many men I know, even sensitive ones who know that having a cry can be healthy and good, I passed some invisible line in adolescence when I simply stopped doing it. There have been many times in life that I probably should have cried, actually tried to cry and wasn't able to-- because, of course, I didn't happen to be at 30,000 feet.

Needless to say, this can be embarrassing. I once confessed my problem to a friend, and he thought for a long moment before saying, I'm sorry to hear that. Does it make your mascara run? Earlier this year, I was flying from Denver to New York and found myself seated next to a big, burly guy with a cowboy shirt and a Western belt buckle. Before takeoff, we talked about football or college basketball or something. Then they announced the movie. It was Under the Tuscan Sun. I glanced at my macho new buddy, thought about watching Diane Lane experience love and loss while rediscovering her inner strength in a farmhouse in the Italian countryside, and read the SkyMall catalog instead.

For a long time, I thought I was alone in this. And then a few months ago, I was at a party and overheard another guest describe how he fell to pieces watching an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond on a flight to California. I started asking around and found I wasn't completely alone. Greg is a 32-year-old guy in jeans and a Mets hat who just finished writing a book about college sports.

Brett Martin

As my fellow leaders will tell you, even not watching the movie is no guarantee of safety. Here's my friend Lindsey.

Brett Martin

Or take Stephen, an avid film festival goer and a professional movie critic who can discourse at length on the differences between early and late period Kurosawa. His plane hadn't even taken off.

Brett Martin

This is one of the strange features of our problem. We're less likely to cry at the sad parts of a movie-- or financial services industry commercial-- than at the happy ones, the parts where everything turns out all right. For instance, in the movie Larger Than Life, which I saw somewhere over the Atlantic a few years ago, it wasn't the moment when Bill Murray is separated from the elephant that his dead, circus clown father has left him as a means to change his life as a down on his luck motivational speaker that had me reaching for the tissues. It was when they were reunited.

In fact, the first time this happened to me was during one of the happiest scenes I'd ever seen. It was in Big Night, Stanley Tucci's movie about paternal love and Italian food. Midway through the movie, Tucci's character and his brother stage a feast in their New Jersey restaurant and at one point bring out a whole roast pig.

The camera pans across the faces of the guests, just amazed by this unbelievable bounty being wheeled into the room, and a lump began to rise in my throat. I found myself brimming over with joy, with the sense that somewhere in the darkness miles below, just like on the screen, people were laughing, communing, sharing a meal. It was impossibly beautiful, and there was just nothing to do but cry.

I've never heard of anyone crying inappropriately on trains or on buses or in boats or cars. What is it about airplanes?

Brett Martin

The people I talked to offered a lot of excuses. It's the recirculated air, your eyes are dry, you're often tired and leaving people behind, and of course, there's the obvious conclusion-- we're all scared to death. But I've been on hundreds of planes, including quite a few tiny ones, one sea plane that landed on water, and one blimp. I've taken the controls of a plane. I've jumped out of a plane. I've searched my soul, and honest to God, I find no fear of flying. And all the frequent criers I interviewed felt the same.

No, something else happens up there in that weird hanging state between where you're going and where you've left, where there's no phone calls to take, nowhere to go, nothing to do. Some strange overhead compartment of the heart opens up, and critical judgment grabs its flotational seat cushion and follows a lighted pathway to the big yellow slide.

My friend Greg says this actually makes the ride better. Think about it. You're stuck in a seat for five or 10 or 15 hours, and how would you rather pass the time-- sitting there being a critic or just simply giving in?

Greg

I mean, I wouldn't have watched Havana Nights in the waiting area, waiting to get on the plane. On earth, no, not a chance. But once you step on the plane, I'm open to and accepting the movie. And then once you do that, it's going to leave me jelly, turn me into jelly.

Brett Martin

My own theory goes something like this. My father once told me that the reason squirrels get hit by cars is that evolutionarily, nothing in their little hard-wired brains is capable of understanding a large object hurtling toward them at 70 miles per hour. Well, even though I fly all the time, nothing in my little hard-wired brain is capable of understanding-- I mean, really understanding-- stepping onto a metal tube, hanging in space for a while, and then stepping off 6,000 miles away, in a place with different weather, different stars, different time.

It puts you into a kind of sterile, infantalizing, travel purgatory. You're strapped in, given a blanket, a little sippy cup and tiny silverware, forced to do whatever you're told and borne away at speeds you can't conceive without seeing where you're going. We all deal with this dislocation differently. Many times I thought, why can't I just have air rage? Why can't I be the guy drinking 14 mini bottles of Amaretto, surfing down the aisle on the dinner cart, groping stewardesses and cursing? But then, I do a lot of yelling and screaming down here on the ground, even a little groping.

What I don't do is cry, not over breakups or reunions or triumphs or deaths or leaving home or coming back or any of life's other bumps and transformations. And maybe that's the key to my air-- what, sorrow? Maybe I cry the tears I should be shedding on earth.

And all you people who don't cry on airplanes, you're probably the ones I see sobbing on the subway or on street corners or at funerals. You probably get it all out at home. Well, boo hoo. Do us all a favor and keep it in the air, you babies.

Ira Glass

Brett Martin is a correspondent for GQ and the author of book about hit TV shows, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.

[MUSIC - MIDDLE CLASS FASHION, "STUCK"]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Jonathan Menjivar, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Simon Adler. Our story about Rachel and her vegetarian son was co-produced with Julian Gunther.

Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our office manager. Research help today from Michelle Harris and Julie Beer. Music help from Damien Graef and Rob Geddis.

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, I was just thinking about this the other how young he and I both were. We were so young when we made the deal to start the radio. And we had that woman, a lawyer, helping us, and we were both so strong headed. I have a recording.

Ira Glass

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