568: Human Spectacle

Ira Glass

In October 2003, a guy was brought into the psychiatric emergency room at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Dr. Joel Gold was the chief attending psychiatrist that day and saw him.

Ira Glass

He thought that maybe 9/11 was faked, just to get a reaction out of him on reality TV.

Ira Glass

But once he got to New York, instead of visiting the Twin Towers, he walked into the United Nations and asked for asylum-- asylum from a TV show that was filming him without his consent, 24 hours a day, which, you know, is how he ended up in Bellevue.

Dr. Gold didn't think much of this. People show up at Bellevue with lots of weird delusions all the time. And then a few months later, another guy walks in with the same idea, that he was being filmed 24/7 and broadcast around the world. And the second guy, like the first one, mentioned a film, the 1998 movie The Truman Show.

Ira Glass

Truman is played by Jim Carrey. He's filmed all day, every day, on a program that is broadcast to billions of people around the globe. His wife, his best friend, everybody around him is an actor. Everybody knows this is a TV show but him, until one day, he starts to see clues that make him suspicious.

Ira Glass

If your psychosis includes both paranoia and a sense that you are very, very important-- what psychiatrists called grandiosity-- 30 years ago, you know, you might think that the CIA or the KGB is watching you all the time. These days, you have another possible explanation-- reality TV. A few months later, a third patient showed up with the same delusion, and a few months after that, a fourth. Dr. Gold started calling it The Truman Show delusion. He's written a book about it with his brother Ian called Suspicious Minds. In one case in the book, a patient, a super smart guy, an academic, very altruistic, believed that he was part of an elaborate game show and the world was watching him and betting on everything that he did.

Ira Glass

Some of these patients respond to treatment, some don't-- same as with other delusions and psychoses. But Dr. Gold says that if they do come back to reality--

Ira Glass

Psychosis aside, I think all this illustrates so clearly there's a downside and an upside to being on stage for the whole world to see, a human spectacle against your will. And today on our program, we have people who became just that. They have an experience so few of us have, that we all get to see from afar. They are on display for everybody, and not because they chose it. What that feels like, the positive parts and the negative side and the real life reality, the whole thing, from the WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "I Am the Eggplant," koo koo kachoob. In the TV genre that's devoted to pure human spectacle, reality TV, you know, people fight drunkenly in hot tubs. They eat live spiders for money. But none of that can hold a candle to this show, a show that aired in Japan all the way back in 1998. It was called Susunu! Denpa Shonen. And one of its segments in particular got the attention of our producers, Stephanie Foo.

Stephanie Foo

The segment is called "Sweepstakes Life." It starts the way a lot of these shows do, with a bunch of people at an audition. One guy beats out everyone else. He's 22 years old, a comedian just starting out in his career. His name is Nasubi.

Stephanie Foo

Nasubi means "eggplant" in Japanese, a nickname he got because he has a long face. The producers tell him they have a unique idea for a show, something they've never tried before. It may or may not air. But if it does, he'll be the star. He'll be famous.

Stephanie Foo

The producers blindfold him, put him in a car, and take him to a small apartment. Then they tell him to take his clothes off.

Stephanie Foo

That wipes the grin off his face.

Stephanie Foo

But he strips. He grabs a pillow, holds it over his groin, and looks around the room. There's no chair in the room, no bed, just a coffee table and magazines, tons of magazines. The producers tell him that from now on, if he wants food, clothes, he will have to win them by entering sweepstakes in those magazines. They give him postcards to send in for prize drawings. He'll be freed from the apartment after he wins 1 million yen, or $10,000 worth of prizes.

Until then, he isn't allowed any outside contact with the world. He can't call his family. He can't talk to friends. And oh, they tell him, "Don't forget to put tapes in this little camera here every two hours and record yourself. We'll come pick up the tapes once a day." And then they say, "All right, later." Nasubi screams, "Are you for real?"

Stephanie Foo

Nasubi says he'd signed no contract. But he didn't have anything better to do, so he sat down and wrote, and soon was entering 200 to 300 contests a day. And while he waited for prizes to arrive, he had no food. Nasubi got frighteningly thin very quickly. You could see the sharp angles of his collarbones.

Stephanie Foo

After two weeks, he finally won some sugary drinks. A few days after that, he won a bag of rice. When the postman dropped it off, it was like Christmas. Nasubi danced like a madman.

Stephanie Foo

So he danced for this package of rice. But then he stopped short. He realized he didn't own a pot to cook the rice in. But after a couple days of failed attempts, he figured out that if he put some rice in an empty drink container and left it near his single gas burner, it eventually turned into a kind of porridge.

Stephanie Foo

Back then, there was a kind of sweepstakes mania in Japan. The country was in the middle of a terrible recession. And some wondered whether one could subsist entirely on their winnings. And so when Sweepstakes Life debuted, almost immediately after Nasubi was first shut in the room, it was an instant hit. Nasubi had no idea. He didn't even know he was on TV. He believed what the producers had told him, that he'd record some videotapes, and maybe someday it would end up on the air.

On television, Nasubi's groin was hidden by a purple cartoon eggplant that floated around as he moved. Everything he did was accentuated with ridiculous "boing boing" sound effects, and puffy rainbow letters floated above his head.

[BOINGING]

[GAME SHOW NOISES]

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

But these effects popped up just as often when Nasubi was despondent. The show took every chance to poke fun at him, whether he was muttering to himself, dancing around, or doing terrible headstands-- you know, the dumb stuff you do when you think no one's watching, except people were.

For context, in the US, Game of Thrones usually has around 9 million viewers. Nasubi had 16 million in a country less than half the size of ours. People thought Nasubi was the funniest comedy act they'd ever seen. And I have to admit, as a viewer, once in a while, when Nasubi got something really awesome in the mail, I couldn't help it. I laughed, too, even though I knew how much he was suffering. I couldn't help it. His unfiltered joy is contagious. Though as a foreigner watching Sweepstakes Life, most of the time, when the studio audience cracked up, I felt sick. I thought, what could possibly be funny about this?

Stephanie Foo

Nasubi won hundreds of prizes. But many of them were useless to him-- Spice Girls tickets, for example, or a TV with no cable, or a bicycle. He sent away for clothes, but never won anything he could wear. He was naked the entire time he was in that room, for the entire show. And as the weeks went by, then months, Nasubi started to look less and less sane. He grew a beard. His hair was wild. And he started talking differently, slower.

Stephanie Foo

He'd make really creepy faces into the camera. At one point, he won some toys and he started talking to them. He took a stuffed seal for a walk around the apartment. An action figure became his sensei, and he got life advice from it.

And if, right now, you're sitting there thinking, how in God's good name is this possible? Why was this allowed? Imprisonment, solitary confinement, starvation. Watching, I thought, this isn't a reality TV show. It's a psychological experiment made public. Plus boing boings, of course.

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

[BOINGING]

Stephanie Foo

That was it? The only reason? I kept asking him, but wait, really, why?

Stephanie Foo

Nasubi did finally win $10,000 worth of prizes. It took him almost an entire year. But at last, he'd completed the challenge. When he reached his goal, producers didn't tell him anything about it. Instead, they snuck into his apartment in the middle of the night, put a blindfold on him, took him out to a car, gave him clothes. Nasubi seemed to think this was a good thing. He was laughing, giggling.

Stephanie Foo

But when he took the blindfold off, he found out he'd been taken to Korea.

Stephanie Foo

After all, he was naked with no money in another country. If you watch the clip, the producers just tell him he's trapped, show him looking shocked, and cut away. The studio audience laughs.

[STUDIO AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

Stephanie Foo

Nasubi continued his writing routine for four more months. And then the final episode aired. Picture it. The producers sneak into Nasubi's room and blindfold him again, dress him, drive him to another location. They release him in yet another bare room. And he sighs and instinctively takes off all his clothes. Then, suddenly, all four of the walls around him fall down.

[CLATTERING]

Stephanie Foo

That's him screaming. Turns out he's on stage in a huge studio in Japan in front of an enormous audience.

Stephanie Foo

"Nasubi, congratulations on your goal."

[CHEERING]

Nasubi looks horrified. Two television hosts cautiously approach him and talk to him like a baby, telling him congratulations.

Stephanie Foo

Nasubi says, frightened, "My house fell down. And there's all these people here."

Stephanie Foo

"It's finally over," presses the host. "You're finished." Nasubi should be happy. But he looks thoroughly weirded out. Remember, Nasubi didn't even know he was being broadcast. The producers told him that it was an experiment, that they didn't know if he'd ever make it on air. So he's blown away when they tell him about the TV show, that a secret camera in his apartment once even broadcast a 24-hour live stream of his actions.

They tell him his diaries were published and are bestsellers. Clips from him enjoying a specific brand of ramen turned into commercials and endorsement deals. He was on the cover of magazines. Then they play a bunch of clips from the show. Nasubi blinks. He says, "Did I do that? That was me?"

Stephanie Foo

Unsurprisingly, Nasubi left the show with some scars. He had a lot of trouble holding a conversation for six months. And he felt sweaty and uncomfortable in clothes for a year. And his role didn't help his comedy career like he'd hoped. He was mostly offered roles that required him to be goofy and naked. He's a D-list celebrity now and has the dwindling bank account to match.

And talking to him, it felt like he's really worked hard to turn that traumatic experience into a positive story he tells himself. He even says he's thankful for the experience.

Stephanie Foo

And people still remember him. That's more than one could say for most of the Denpa Shonen characters. None of them lasted as long as Nasubi or became as famous. The show ended in 2002, after its ratings began to drop.

Stephanie Foo

One contestant on Denpa Shonen almost died of dehydration while trying to hitchhike across Africa. Some people were starved until they completed various challenges. Another man was forced to go into a gay club in Australia and offer condoms to men until he was assaulted. The video cuts out, but you can hear him scream.

And the mastermind behind all this, the producer of the show, the guy who convinced Nasubi to keep going in Korea, his name was Toshio Tsuchiya. Back in the '90s, he was considered the king of Japanese reality TV. Last year, 14 years after Sweepstakes Life ended, Tsuchiya called Nasubi, who wasn't thrilled to hear from him at first.

Stephanie Foo

And that seemed to me like-- well, I'll be honest. It sounds like something an evil puppet master would say. So I had to. I talked to Toshio Tsuchiya on the phone. He's a round, middle-aged guy, bleached platinum blonde hair. He confirmed that he reached out to Nasubi, and that when they met, Nasubi told them very honestly how painful his experience on the show was. Tsuchiya says he listened and was moved.

But he says he wasn't sorry, about Nasubi, about any of the segments he produced for Denpa Shonen, about any of the contestants, not in the slightest. I used the same interpreter for our interview that I used for Nasubi's. Here's Tsuchiya.

Stephanie Foo

Tsuchiya has a lot of lofty ideas of what the show was trying to accomplish. And when he talks about them, you do get the sense that it was, in fact, intended to be a sort of psychological experiment.

Stephanie Foo

It's weird to think about. But the fact of the matter is, what Tsuchiya's saying is true. Denpa Shonen did really capture humanity in a rare way. A way you don't ever really see, even on the craziest of American reality TV shows. Hungry, starving, alone, unaware that he was being watched, Nasubi was totally innocent and totally animal. Of course, it's cruel to bring a human being to that point. And it takes a special kind of cruelty to take someone at their most vulnerable and add wacky sound effects to their suffering.

A couple weeks into Nasubi's challenge, before he won any solid food, when he was hungriest, a delivery man came to the door bearing ramen and stir-fried vegetables. "It's 1,700 yen all together," the man said. "I don't have any money," Nasubi replied. "Sorry, my mistake," the delivery man said, and left. Nasubi sat there, his head hung, a contestant in a real-life hunger game, the smell of ramen lingering in the air.

Ira Glass

Stephanie Foo is one of the producers of our program. Coming up, we go to a land where highway cloverleaves are sunk in a vast meadow, where one man tries to document how things really are. 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, "Human Spectacle." We have stories of people who go on display in front of others, lots and lots of others, even though they are not so crazy about doing that. We have arrived at Act Two of our program, Act Two, "I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me."

We've talked a lot in today's program so far about reality TV. And of course, what makes reality TV entertaining is very, very simple, and that is editing. Editing-- if they just set up cameras and showed you all 24 hours in anybody's day, you know, how interesting could that possibly be? Well, here is a story of somebody trying just that, a story of everyday people being treated as human spectacle and being treated that way precisely because of their everyday-ness. Ariel Sabar explains.

Ariel Sabar

Here's how it worked. On a Tuesday morning in the spring of 1949, a seven-year-old boy named Raymond Birch was fast asleep in his bed. His mother walked into his bedroom and said, Raymond, time to get up for school. When the boy opened his eyes, he saw a scientist with a clipboard and timer standing in the corner of his room. The scientist, a stranger to the boy, just stared, didn't say a word. The boy squirmed out of bed and reached for his clothes. The scientist wrote, "7:01 AM-- Raymond picked up a sock."

In the late 1940s and early '50s, scientists followed kids in houses, schoolyards, and streets across the town of Oskaloosa, Kansas, taking pages of notes on the littlest things they did or said. "6:33 PM-- Bradley walked deliberately to where his sister sat playing with a puppy and hit her on the head, twice, just as hard as he could hit. His sister looked very surprised and annoyed." "11:06 AM-- Fred skidded on the floor so that he fell with his body partially under the sway. He yelled, 'whoops,' and then lay still, since he saw the swing coming back over him." "11:37 AM-- Margaret's mother asked, why can't you play with your dolls and let that go? Margaret kept on painting the pillars before her, neither looking at her mother nor answering her."

All of this was happening under the watch of a University of Kansas psychologist named Roger Barker, who has bend on taking his field in a radically new direction. Because psychology was still struggling in those days to be taken seriously as a science, most of Barker's colleagues imitated other kinds of scientists, doing lots of experiments in labs. But none of this made sense to Barker. Humans didn't live in laboratories. They lived in the real world.

And that's where Barker want to study them-- in the wild, the way a botanist looked at flowers in the field or a primatologist tracked apes through a forest. So when the University of Kansas called in 1947 and asked Barker if he wanted to chair its psychology department, Barker said, I'll take the job, but on one condition. You find me a small town. A dean at the school said he knew just the place-- Oskaloosa, population 725.

When Roger Barker first drove up into the hills of northeastern Kansas to see Oskaloosa, he must have been beside himself. The place was a Norman Rockwell painting-- not too rich, not too poor, sturdy families in modest houses. It was the picture of middle America.

Barker wanted to study what he called "the naturally occurring behavior of free-ranging persons." And to do that, he told his field workers to become part of the scenery-- visible and friendly, but not obtrusive. The last thing we want to do, he said, is give people the guinea pig feeling.

Barker took his own advice and moved his entire family to Oskaloosa. They settled in a beat-up house near the town square, joined the Presbyterian church, and became active in the town's social and civic organizations. And that left Barker just as exposed as the Oskaloosans he planned to put under his microscope. "You'll be watching us," a local mother told the researchers one day. "But don't forget, we'll be watching you."

One of the first things Barker wanted to do in Oskaloosa was to document a day in the life of an ordinary boy. Barker didn't have a hypothesis about the boy or about seven-year-olds. He wasn't testing for anything in particular. He wanted only to show the world that following a kid for a day could produce a ton of interesting data. Scientists could later break down that data in an infinite number of ways, depending on their interests and the goals of their research, which was how little Raymond Birch woke up that morning to find a scientist standing over him.

On that Tuesday, April 26, 1949, eight researchers, taking turns like runners in a relay race, followed Raymond for 13 hours straight. The book that came out of it, One Boy's Day, was 435 pages long. It had an entry for nearly every minute of Raymond's day. The researchers tried record not just Raymond's words and movements, but also his perceptions, motives, and feelings.

They noted that Raymond mumbled with a mouthful of toast at breakfast. They followed him as he walked with his mom through her job at the county clerk's office, and looked on as he drew a picture of a cowboy with a long beard. They watched Raymond find a baseball bat in the grass and pick it up.

"Oh, boy," he said, according to their notes. "He tossed a stone in the air and swung, but accidentally clipped a flag pole-- 8:24 AM. This made a wonderful hollow ringing noise, so he proceeded to hit the flag pole again. 8:25 AM-- He went around and round and around the pole, hitting it with a bat as he did so, until he became so dizzy that he fell down, bat and all."

Even before the book about Raymond's day was published, Barker felt it was destined for greatness. It would find its way onto campuses as a staple of psychology courses, he thought, and into the hands of artists, novelists, and laymen interested in the cultural scene. "We believe it will become a sort of classic and be in demand for a long time," he wrote in a January 1951 letter.

But One Boy's Day never took off. And by April 1959, Barker, crestfallen, asked Harper & Row to ship him the 70 remainders languishing in its warehouse. Part of the trouble was simply the book's premise. In its defiant first sentence, Barker calls the book, "a scientific document."

But other scientists had a hard time seeing that. The book was just a tick-tock chronology of Raymond's day. There wasn't any theory or analysis. And this annoyed many of the reviewers in serious academic journals. One reviewer wrote, "The reader is struck by the fact that he is encountering only raw data. How can one evaluate such materials without a theoretical framework?" In other words, what does it mean?

Barker lived in Oskaloosa the rest of his life. But he abandoned his day in the life studies after just a few years. There were more revealing and less labor-intensive ways, he discovered, to study human beings in their natural habitats.

Today, field studies of naturally occurring behavior are no more common in psychology than they were in Barker's time. The costs and logistics are just too staggering. One rare but recent Barker-like effort was conducted by UCLA's Center on the Everyday Life of Families. Researchers there embedded in the homes of 32 middle class families in Los Angeles for a week and videotaped nearly every waking minute.

But the ratio of cost and effort to interesting results remains as lopsided today as it was in Barker's time. The New York Times reported that, quote, "After more than $9 million and untold thousands of hours of video watching, the researchers found that, well, life in these trenches is exactly what it looks like-- a fire shower of stress, multitasking, and mutual nitpicking."

One guy in particular who is not a big fan of these studies? Raymond Birch, the boy. I tracked him down a few years ago. His real name is Gary Morgan, and he's now a retired utility worker in his early 70s living in Pennsylvania. Roger Barker autographed Gary's copy of One Boy's Day and personally inscribed it, calling Gary its, quote, "real author." But Gary has yet to get past its first pages.

"I have to say, why is this interesting?" He told me. "There's nothing happening in this book as far as I can tell. What is it going to tell them that I was standing there, chewing on my fingernails?"

Ira Glass

Ariel Sabar is the author of The Outsider, a biography of Roger Parker. It's available as an Amazon Kindle Single.

[MUSIC - "CENTER OF ATTENTION" BY GUSTER]

Ira Glass

Act Three, "The Big Break." So in this story, a comedy act takes to the stage for the biggest show of their lives. And it is a spectacle, though not the one they had in mind. David Segal tells the story.

David Segal

Mitzi McCall and Charlie Brill were a sketch comedy act back in the early 1960s, playing small clubs around the country-- mostly in Los Angeles, where they lived. They were married. They still are, actually. And they were struggling. Then one day, they got a phone call that changed their lives.

David Segal

This wasn't just a shot at greatness. This was a chance to meet a few of their idols who'd be on the show that night, too-- people like Tessie O'Shea, Georgia Brown, who were both big musical theater stars. But to Charlie and Mitzi, the biggest deal of all was a guy they'd already met.

David Segal

They were given the worst dressing room in the building on the top floor, a space they shared with a soda machine. But they didn't care. They were both 26 years old, and they were about to go national. But first, it was time for a dress rehearsal.

David Segal

They went back upstairs in something close to a panic. Basically, they had just been told to write a new act, right then and there, instead of the routine they had been fine-tuning for weeks. They might have freaked out, but they didn't have time. The curtain's going up in an hour.

David Segal

The worst part was that this guy seemed to want to just hang out. So he helped himself to a seat on the sofa.

David Segal

The show was about to begin. All the performers gathered in the wings, waiting for their turn. Finally, Ed Sullivan came out and announced the first act.

David Segal

The guy with the pen, the one who drew the pictures? That, of course, was John Lennon. And this was February 9, 1964, the first time a US audience had laid eyes on The Beatles. Years later, Lennon said he thought the kids that night had lost their minds. Charlie, watching from 20 feet away, thought so too.

David Segal

73 million Americans watched The Ed Sullivan Show that night, about 40% of the entire country. Ordinarily, when that many people come together, it's for the last episode of a long-running TV series, or for playoff games of teams they already know, not for a show that turns the stage over to an act that nobody's heard of. Arguably, Mitzi and Charlie had the single greatest break in the history of show business.

People forget this was an hour-long program, with The Beatles playing a few songs at the beginning and then a few songs toward the end. In between, there were six different acts, from vaudeville, from Broadway, from the circus, from everything rock was about to bulldoze aside. It was basically the future sharing a bill with the doomed. Which is why, after The Beatles finished singing "She Loves You," the next thing on The Ed Sullivan Show that night was a guy in a tux doing a card trick.

David Segal

There's an acrobatic novelty act. There's Tessie O'Shea, a very large woman in a sequined gown, playing a banjo, doing her signature tune, "Two Ton Tessie from Tennessee."

David Segal

Frank Gorshin comes on with 10 minutes of impersonations-- Dean Martin, Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn. The far-fetched conceit of his act doesn't seem quite so far-fetched 40 years later.

David Segal

He imagines a meeting of the US Senate, where character actor Broderick Crawford is vice president and people like Marlon Brando are senators.

David Segal

Just two years after this, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California.

[MUSIC - "THE ARTFUL DODGER" BY DAVY JONES]

This is "The Artful Dodger" from the musical Oliver, played here by an 18-year-old Davy Jones. When he heard the screams that evening, he thought-- and this is a quote-- "I'd like a little bit of this action." Two years later, he was cast as a member of The Monkees, the made-for-TV knockoff of The Beatles.

Mitzi and Charlie were slated for what was probably the worst slot on the show. They were the last act before The Beatles returned for the final songs.

David Segal

The premise here is that Charlie is a director casting a movie, and Mitzi is his secretary and then a bunch of different women auditioning for the role. She plays an aspiring starlet.

David Segal

And a method actor.

David Segal

Did you notice the dead silence after she says "dig," in a room that only 30 minutes earlier had been filled with the noise that scared the cops? That's a lot of silence.

David Segal

Did you have a sense at the time that it had gone well or gone poorly?

David Segal

It was, in fact, the worst three minutes of their lives. They bombed so bad that when they came off stage, people wouldn't look at them. Mitzi's mom dodged their call.

David Segal

It was such a fiasco that in 40 years, neither of them have actually seen their performance-- until now. Watching a tape of it, the first thing Charlie noticed was that they actually did get a couple of laughs.

David Segal

The problem, they both say, is that they had to rearrange their act for 14-year-olds in a hurry the day of the broadcast. They're still convinced that if they'd been invited on the show any other night, things would have been different.

As it happened, they retreated back home, where their agent didn't call for six long months. From then on, they'd wince every time they heard The Beatles. Imagine that. They had the rest of the '60s ahead of them. They were in for a lot of wincing.

[MUSIC - "REVOLUTION" BY THE BEATLES]

[MUSIC - "SGT PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND" BY THE BEATLES]

[MUSIC - "ROCKY RACCOON" BY THE BEATLES]

But Mitzi and Charlie regrouped and recovered, and they had long and fine careers. Through the '60s and '70s, they played nightclubs in Vegas, and they were on television a lot-- goofy stuff, like The Gong Show, but great programs, too, like The Tonight Show, which they were on four times. Mitzi later wrote for sitcoms, like Alf. Charlie eventually landed a leading role on a detective show called Silk Stalkings, which ran on the USA network for nine years. They have a daughter, whom they adore. No knock on Alf, but it gradually dawned on Mitzi and Charlie that on February 9, 1964, they were part of something seismic.

David Segal

Mitzi and Charlie are retired now. Meanwhile, The Beatles have split up. Hell, Wings have split up. But four decades after they flamed out in front of nearly half the country, Mitzi and Charlie are still together, still standing, and still refining the act.

Ira Glass

David Segal. He's a reporter for The New York Times. We first ran this story back in 2005. And since then, Charlie and Mitzi are still going strong. This year, they celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary.

Ira Glass

Well, today's program was produced by Stephanie Foo and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sean Cole, Channa Joffe-Walt, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show was Julie Snyder.

Production help from Lily Sullivan. Seth Lind is our director of operations. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson is our business operations manager. Kimberly Henderson is our office coordinator. Research help from Michelle Harris and Julie Beer. Music help from Damien Graef and Rob Geddis.

[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, at the beginning of this program, when we started This American Life together, even then, he already wanted to disavow any responsibility for what happens here each week. He told me--

Ira Glass

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