610: Grand Gesture

Ira Glass

We're in Payson, Utah, a small town about an hour south of Salt Lake City. It's me and Miki Meek, one of the producers here at This American Life. She hasn't been back to her high school since she graduated, but says it looks the same. And same groups of kids too-- jocks, stoners, cowboys, regular kids.

Ira Glass

Oh, right. Payson High School is where they filmed Footloose.

Ira Glass

I downloaded the film later. Totally true. But of course, America, everybody knows there's a time to be born and a time die, and a time to dance, and a time to talk about Footloose. And this is not that time.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We are not here in Miki's school to talk about a movie about dancing. We're here to talk about real life dances at this high school, and more specifically, the way that the real life students ask each other to dances.

Ira Glass

The very minimum anybody does is a bit of prop humor. You leave some object and then a pun written on poster board. Like Owen Grimshaw was just asked to the Sadie Hawkins Dance this way.

Ira Glass

A senior, Ivan Webber, Told me about last year's Sweethearts dance, he took a laminated name tag, wrote a message on it, and then froze it in a block of ice, which he was very proud of.

Sometimes the props they use are living animals. And some of these kids have access to farms. Ivan's little sister Mariah left a pair of goats at a guy's house with a poster.

Ira Glass

Slight variation on that, senior Alyssa Sutton left a guy a basket with four baby kittens and this message.

Ira Glass

Senior Ashlynn Yul left a chicken for a guy who asked her to a dance, a live chicken and Starbursts. The message?

Ira Glass

The guy actually returned the chicken. The goat got returned too. The kittens stayed. Junior Caitlin Mitchell left a tree for her boyfriend.

Ira Glass

Saying yes, you're supposed to be as creative as the person who asked you. Tyler Johnson told me about the time that his sister had a neighbor help her out with that. The neighbor was a policeman, and she hid in the back of his police car as he spotted the guy who asked her to dance.

Ira Glass

Incredibly, the guy still took her to the dance. It can be a ton of work doing these things. The most elaborate one I heard about was I met this one couple, Tyler Batty and Liz Callahan. And Tyler kidnapped Liz, this elaborate kidnapping-- duct tape, blanket over her head. She knew it was fake, by the way. Was not scared.

Ira Glass

They threw her into the back of an SUV and then swerved around the roads, up into the mountains. And then Tyler staged a rescue in a Batman costume, supposedly saving her from the fake kidnappers.

Ira Glass

We came to Payson High School because our show this week is all about grand gestures. And while you hear about schools where kids do these kinds of things for prom-- in fact, right now MTV is casting a TV show called Promposal-- here in Utah and a few other places around the country, they make the grand move every dance-- homecoming, Sweethearts dance, Sadie Hawkins, Winter Ball. And when I was going around meeting kids and I'd break the news to them that kids elsewhere do not do this, they were surprised.

Ira Glass

This is a junior everybody calls Juddy Bear.

Ira Glass

Alyssa Sutton knew the truth about how kids elsewhere ask each other to dances, but she had a special source that gave her insight into how people live outside of Utah.

Ira Glass

The kids I talked to said this idea of just walking up to somebody out of the blue, and then just asking them to a dance, it seems lame. Like, where is the effort? If doing these elaborate schemes just sounds like so much work and so much fuss just to ask somebody to a dance, a bunch of kids told me, no, no, no. It's like this project. You draft your friends into it. The invitation is a whole activity itself.

Ira Glass

Case in point, one day after school, I joined Ivan Webber-- the kid who froze the laminated name tag and thought it was chill-- and his little sister Mariah, and his friends, Ezri, Max, and Kylie, to bury in the snow a little treasure chest-- actually an old wooden jewelry box Ivan got at a thrift store.

It has a note inside to the girl who asked Ivan to go to the Sweethearts dance, a note saying yes. We get to a little park about a block from his date's house. It's a bright, clear sky day. Ivan is like a skinny, teenaged Tom Hanks, wearing just a green t-shirt, even though it's freezing outside.

Ira Glass

We tromp around a little bit. The snow's maybe a foot deep.

Ira Glass

They put the wooden box in the hole, cover it over again with snow, pat it down.

Ira Glass

Ezri points out it's less pirate and more bladder infection. Our treasure marked and now buried in the snow, Ivan takes the shovel and the note and heads up the street one block to leave it on the girl's porch. Her name's Makadie. I pin a wireless mic to him.

Ira Glass

Fast forward 36 seconds.

Ira Glass

There's a big SUV between our car and the path that Makadie's going to walk to the park. So if we all stay low, it's possible Makadie will not notice that we're here. And so we all crouch down, and we take turns peeking, to see if she's coming.

Ira Glass

Makadie and her sister walk towards us and the park. They get closer and closer. We are all as low in the car as we can be.

Ira Glass

Hits the horn.

[LAUGHTER]

Ira Glass

We pull out past a very confused looking Makadie and her sister, cruise up the street. Kylie repeats how sorry she is in between laughing. Ivan looks out the rear window at the park.

Ira Glass

Other kids I talked to said the same thing. In fact, the elaborateness of these stunts does not necessarily mean that the kids feel strongly about the person the stunt is for. The guy who kidnapped the girl and dressed in a Batman costume to stage a fake rescue? She and he both told me it was not romantic between them. They don't even like each other as more than friends. He and his buddies just thought it would be cool to stage a kidnapping.

Well, today on our program, we have stories of grand gestures, and so many of them are like that. They're an end in themselves. Even when they seem like they're trying so hard to say they're about love, and devotion, and some beloved person. From WBEZ Chicago. Oh wait, I do not need to say this myself. Can you say this for me? "From WBEZ Chicago?"

Ira Glass

Act one, Dr. Strangelove. OK, this first story is about a guy who goes so far in his grand gestures that I need to say before we start, this story is not for kids. OK? Here's Miki Meek.

Miki Meek

I have a pile of newspaper articles about the story I'm going to tell you. It's a love story from Florida in the 1940s. The papers went nuts for this story. It's about a man who loved a woman so much that he never got over her death. The Miami Herald at the time ran their love story across the front page.

The man's name is Carl von Cosel. There's a giant photo of him, where he looks charming and fragile in a white suit. Right next to that is a photo of Elena Hoyos in her wedding dress and a tiara. Her hair is in perfect black ringlets. She's beaming.

Elena died young. She was just 22. After her death, Von Cosel visited her grave every day and brought flowers. He built her a fancy mausoleum with a dome, surrounded by palm trees and flower pots.

And then this is the thing that made it a news story. Von Cosel stole her body from her grave, and then kept her in his house for seven years.

From the time von Cosel first met Elena, he launched into a series of grand gestures, each bigger than the previous, until he went too far.

They first met at the hospital in Key West. Von Cosel was an x-ray technician, and Elena was 20 years old and sick with tuberculosis. Back in the '30s, TB killed a lot of people. There was no cure.

I talked to a guy named Ben Harrison. He wrote a book about the two of them. He lives in Key West and got curious about the case when he moved there. He says that von Cosel fell in love with Elena right away.

Miki Meek

This was the kind of guy von Cosel was. He wrote a memoir, where he said things like he didn't want to disfigure Elena's beauty, and that her voice sounded like a mockingbird's song in spring. He considered himself a scientist/inventor and claimed to have multiple university degrees in subjects like chemistry, philosophy, and physics, although Ben says he never could verify any of that.

He told me von Cosel's first grand gesture is telling Elena, sure, science hasn't developed a cure for TB, but--

Miki Meek

Von Cosel was full of confidence about his own abilities. For example, he was trying to fix up a broken airplane he'd parked behind the hospital. It didn't have wings. He lived inside it. He was a German immigrant in his 50s, with a trim beard and wire-rim spectacles, walking around town, wearing all white, and carrying a cane.

So far, their story has the makings of a great tragic love story. He loved her on sight. She was sick with an incurable disease that he'd do anything to cure. But there's one detail most of the newspapers left out. She never loved him.

Elena was actually married to another guy. But after she got sick, he left her. So she moved back in with her family. They didn't have a lot of money.

Von Cosel pursued Elena with the same arrogance and optimism he did everything else, giving her gifts, jewelry, a catalog where he told her to pick out whatever she wanted. But Elena's sister, Nana Medina, says it wasn't mutual.

She gave a long interview to the Miami Herald, where she said, quote, "She never loved him. She was only nice to him because my mother told her she should be kind to those who were kind to her. She looked upon von Cosel as a grandfather. And when he proposed marriage, she always told him 'You are too old. Why, you are old enough to be my grandfather. What's more, I do not love you.' He became so persistent that we asked him to stay away from the house."

Elena died about a year and a half after she met von Cosel. When he heard the news, he rushed across town to be by her side. Here's how he wrote about it in his memoir.

Miki Meek

So many of Von Cosel's choices during this period of time illustrate just how thin the line is between romantic and creepy. Gestures that seem romantic when someone loves you immediately flip to disturbing when they don't. Von Cosel paid for Elena's burial and for a headstone, which did not include her married name on it. But it did have his name inscribed on the lower half. Again, here's Ben.

Miki Meek

On his daily visit to Elena's grave, von Cosel starts worrying about rainwater seeping into her casket, and convinces the family to pull it from the ground. He begins building a mausoleum.

Miki Meek

Elena, of course, didn't ask for any of this. She didn't love him. She's paradoxically at the center of this story and utterly left out. Still, von Cosel kept going. He put Elena in a double casket. That's one casket inside of another. He said he wanted to protect her.

Miki Meek

He wrote in his memoir that, to him, these weren't one way conversations. He would sit there in the mausoleum, and talk to her, and she spoke back to him, and sang.

Miki Meek

The song is a Cuban bolero called "Black Wedding." Ben found out it was one of Elena's favorites after talking to her friends. Presumably, von Cosel knew this too.

[SINGING IN SPANISH]

I asked Ben to translate some of the lyrics for me.

Miki Meek

The song was written to be tongue in cheek, ironic and inappropriate, but von Cosel took it literally, as inspiration for everything he's about to do next.

Miki Meek

Von Cosel wrote that he waited for a new moon, got a wagon, and stole the casket. He brought Elena home, and tried to repair her decomposed body.

Miki Meek

He did this to the rest of her body too, inserted glass eyes and painted on eyebrows. Von Cosel hadn't been deterred by what Elena wanted back when she was alive. Now that he had her dead body in his home, he could play house, dress her up, have sex with her. And he did all of those things.

He wrote in his memoir that he made Elena breakfast, eggs and a cup of Lipton tea. He filled the vases next to her bed with flowers and sometimes just talked to her about the weather.

Miki Meek

This went on for seven years. He also conducted experiments to try to bring Elena back from the dead. In his memoir, he wrote that he gave her radiation treatments, and submerged her in a tank filled with quote, plasma fluid.

Eventually, Elena's sister, Nana Medina, started to suspect that something was up. There were rumors. And she asked von Cosel to open Elena's mausoleum for her, but he refused. So one day, Nana showed up at his house.

Miki Meek

Von Cosel didn't return the body, so she went to the Key West police. They arrived at his house in a motorcade, and von Cosel confessed immediately.

And that's when the gifts started arriving at the jailhouse. People brought him fruit, cookies, and hot tea. They serenaded him at night. A group of women from Tampa brought him money. Locals posted his bond. An attorney took on his case pro bono.

People were captivated by this story. A newspaper quoted von Cosel saying, "I did not want one so beautiful to go to dust." A radio station in Havana ran a soap opera about Elena and von Cosel's great romance.

Miki Meek

This is Ida Roberts. Her mom was good friends with Elena, lived down the street from her. I talked to her for a while about this question. How could people see this as a romantic story?

Well, for starters, Ida's mom didn't know at the time that von Cosel was having sex with Elena's corpse. There were rumors, but the truth didn't come out for decades, when a doctor from her autopsy wrote about it in a medical journal. But still, that doesn't change the story so much for Ida.

Miki Meek

I heard this from a lot of people I interviewed down there-- live and let live. They take pride in their history of being home to people who didn't fit in-- bootleggers, drug smugglers, people who dropped off the grid.

But Ida's pretty straight. We talked in her office at a Catholic school in Key West. She's the director of Religious Education for kids there and looks like somebody's nice grandma.

Miki Meek

Love is an excuse for all sorts of behavior. I can understand why so many people wanted to believe this version of the story. It's much easier and nicer to see this as a grand gesture of a lovesick man than the abuse of a delusional pervert.

In the end, the charges against von Cosel were dropped. The court looked into whether he was insane and decided no. They called his obsession with Elena a quirk.

Even when the public was presented with physical proof, Elena's body, they chose to see the story this way. After police took Elena's body from von Cosel, the funeral home, incredibly, put her out on display, probably without the family's permission.

Miki Meek

That's Don Carbonell. He was a kid at the time and lived across the street from the funeral home. There's actually a photo of Don in the newspaper spread, standing in a big crowd right behind Elena's body.

Miki Meek

The newspaper articles quoted people who said she looked beautiful. "Von Cosel did such a good job preserving her." One woman wrote a letter saying, "they should enclose Elena in a glass case and turn her into a Sleeping Beauty attraction." Which is basically what's happened to Elena and her story today.

Miki Meek

This is from a trolley tour of Key West for tourists these days. All the disturbing facts of the story are now out. And our ideas about sex and men and women are dramatically different. But listen to this. They still tell this story as a romance, for the same reason people did in the '40s. They like it.

Miki Meek

And here's another.

Ira Glass

Miki Meek, Payson High School class of none of your business, is one of the producers of our program. John Ellison Conlee read the excerpts of von Cosel's memoir. Ben Harrison's book about von Cosel is called Undying Love.

Coming up, what happens when sky writers make mistakes, and a few grand gestures that actually go right. 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 we choose a theme, bringing you a variety of different stories on that theme. Today's show, as we watch Valentine's Day recede into the rearview mirror of our lives, our theme is grand gestures, stories of people who go all out, and what it means when they do. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act 2, Say It Out Cloud.

One of our producers, David Kestenbaum, spoke with some people who are in the grand gesture business. I'm talking about sky writers.

David Kestenbaum

Every sky writer I talked to you had a story of some odd message they'd put in the sky. Someone paid for a cartoon cloud to be drawn in the sky, with little lines for rain. And then there was the message that was just numbers, 3.1415 etc. Get it? Pi in the sky.

The comedian Kurt Braunohler recently hired a pilot to put up the skywriting message over Los Angeles that he'd always wanted to see. "How do I land?"

Even a simple message can cost a couple of thousand dollars. And it doesn't last very long. Basically, as soon as it's written, it starts to fall apart. So a lot of the time, it's people with a pretty big emotion who want to write something in the sky.

David Kestenbaum

This is Suzanne Asbury-Oliver. She's a longtime sky writer.

David Kestenbaum

The message? A heart. No name, just initials, in the sky over a lake.

David Kestenbaum

Sky writing seems to satisfy some very basic urge. Essentially, as soon as we figured out how to fly, someone was like, "You know what? I'm gonna write giant letters in the sky." The first pilot did it in the 1920s, maybe even earlier. And the vast majority of personal messages seem to be essentially the same thing over and over.

"Marry me," or "I love you," or a heart, or "I heart you." Here in New York, the usual spot is over Central Park. And it seems to be mostly guys who want to put messages of love in the sky. The male sky writers I talked to didn't have a lot of theories about why that was. But Suzanne did.

David Kestenbaum

Only a handful of people in the world do sky writing. It's this weirdly technical piece of flying. I went to visit Jim Record he's a pilot with a company called Skytypers out on Long Island. It was snowing out, so we weren't going up. But he showed me one of the planes.

David Kestenbaum

The plane looks like he stole it from a museum. It's a World War II plane, built in 1940. Imagine someone wearing goggles and a long scarf flying it, trying to shoot down another pilot. There's a spot on the wings where the machine guns would have been mounted. He let me climb in.

David Kestenbaum

Jim's a former Navy pilot. He once applied to be an astronaut. Every skywriting job, he and the other pilots, they call it a mission.

From his perspective, the key to a successful marriage proposal is pre-mission planning. Because in order for the message to look right from the ground, he has to write it backward. That's how it looks to him up there. He's looking down, and everyone else is looking up. The order of the letters is backward for him, and the letters themselves are backward.

Jim says he tries not to think about that. It's just too confusing. So he'll break it down into a series of moves that he can just execute.

David Kestenbaum

"Marry me." Two M's, two R's. Jim will climb into this tiny plane with me "Marry me" or whatever mapped out on a piece of paper on a clipboard. When he's in the right spot, he makes sure the Arm Smoke switch has been flipped. Then he presses that little button under his thumb on the stick, and streaming out behind him is this giant tube of perfectly white, billowy smoke.

To make sure the letters are the right length, he counts.

David Kestenbaum

He's describing how he draws a heart here, one side at a the time. He'll start at the top, where the two halves are going to come together, turning, turning, almost in a circle, then straightening out.

David Kestenbaum

Since his plane is, in effect, the tip of the pencil, Jim can't actually see how what he's writing looks. So when he's done half the heart, he'll pull back on the stick, and shoot up higher into the sky, to the point where the airplane almost stalls. He says at this point, he's upside down, looking down at the message, which, remember, is backward. Then he'll basically dive bomb back down and do the other half of the heart.

David Kestenbaum

One time-- he knows this is silly. One time, he made a mistake, and then went back to cross it out-- like flew across the whole message and laid down another line of smoke through what he'd written.

Greg Stinis, another sky writer, told me he once mixed up two marriage proposals. He can't remember the names, but it was like, he wrote "Marry me, Sue," and the woman below was named Tabitha, and vice versa.

Another time, he did this happy face over the Macy's Day parade in New York City. It looked great, but then the wind started to twist the face until it looked like a creepy demon. He flew back and forth through it, to try to get it to disperse, but it hung around for a long time.

There are darker emotions people sometimes want to put in the sky. One pilot told me about a woman who thought her boyfriend was cheating on her. She wanted to write "I'm watching you" above his head. And Suzanne Asbury-Oliver, whose company, by the way, is Oliver's Flying Circus, told me about this request she got just last month.

David Kestenbaum

She said no. And for all the marriage proposals sky writers get, Jim says there is also this one.

David Kestenbaum

One emotion did seem kind of absent in all the stories I heard, for reasons that I totally get, because it's hard enough to do this in letters that aren't a mile high, which is to say "I'm sorry."

Jim's boss, Larry Arken, did remember one like that. It was from years ago, but it stuck with him. The message "Pooh Bear, come home." They wrote it in two or three spots around New York.

He thinks some guy's girlfriend or wife had left him. He doesn't know how it turned out. But I have a guess. I think when you are to the point of writing something like that, with giant letters in the sky, you are probably past the point where giant letters in the sky can help you.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum. [MUSIC PLAYING - "SKY WRITING"]

Ira Glass

Act 3, It's Gesture Imagination. More than anybody on our staff, maybe more than anybody I've ever met, actually, one of our producers, Elna Baker, really, truly believed in the power of grand gestures. It was this kind of magical thinking that lasted well into adulthood for her, into her late 20s.

Ira Glass

Elna grew up Mormon. And talking to her about how she loves grand gestures made me think of those kids from Payson High School. Remember them? We started today's program with them. Lots of those kids are Mormon. And the way they ask each other to dances at that school happens all over Utah. And it occurred to me, is there something about being young and Mormon and grand gestures that go together?

And this isn't something you could prove one way or another, but just to say it, you have these kids who are forbidden to drink or have sex. Maybe that's one reason that their feelings for each other play out with these elaborate schemes, right? And that made sense to Elna.

Ira Glass

And that's the attitude towards love Elna carried into adulthood. When she would talk to our friends about their romantic lives and situations, at some point, Elna would tell them, OK, here's what you have to do. You have to go big. And she'd give advice that, today, she thinks was totally wrong headed. Up until her 20s, she had no experience in love, had never had a real adult relationship, was completely naive about all of it.

But she still cheerfully jumped in with her advice. She encouraged her friend Nick to move to New York City to prove his love for a woman who had broken up with him and did not want his love. She convinced your friend Allie to give a guy that she'd just started seeing this giant birthday crown, homemade with fur and feathers and a star with his picture that kind of jumped off the crown. He never went out with Allie again.

When Elna's friend Louise regretted breaking up with her boyfriend, Gabe, and decided she wanted Gabe back, Elna suggested a gift. She remembered that a couple months before they had found this vintage 1970s-era McDonald's uniform in his exact size. And he'd had all these stories of working at McDonald's in high school. So Louise bought this thing for him, to give as a present on Halloween, but never gave it to him.

Ira Glass

Which is key. It became about the bold thing that they were doing, versus how Gabe would feel. And it worked out about as well as you would expect. Louise left the box with the gift for Gabe, with no note-- just left it in his building.

Ira Glass

Elna didn't just organize these kinds of schemes for other people. She did them herself. Like, one time, she was taking tickets as a page for The Letterman Show and met this random guy.

Ira Glass

She knew, of course, from her parents to trust that voice. So she gave this guy her number and dated him for a month and a half, and it went nowhere. Then, two years later, still hung up on this guy, who'd moved to Zambia, she wrote him an email.

Ira Glass

She roped two girlfriends into this trip, spent all her money, thousands of dollars on plane tickets. They stayed at this guy's little studio apartment, and on the very first night of a 10 day visit, she snuck over to his sleeping bag, woke him up, and tried to kiss him.

Ira Glass

And then there was the time that Elna tried to drag her friend Heather into pursuing a guy with one of these capers. Heather was one of the friends that Elna took on that trip to Africa. She was a page at The Letterman Show. And Elna would sometimes ask her--

Ira Glass

And the answer was yes, one guy. It was before she moved to New York. She was working at a little puddle jumper airport in Idaho, and was checking in this guy for a flight. And they started talking, had this really nice talk for 45 minutes.

Ira Glass

And then Heather admitted she'd googled the guy, found that he worked at a river guiding company. He was in a picture on their website. And every now and then, she would look at the picture. And Elna, of course, was like, great. You know his name. You know where he works. Time to act. Heather responded in the way I think most rational people would.

Ira Glass

Then one day, Heather was visiting Elna's apartment, and Elna pulled out a box of fancy stationery.

Ira Glass

Also, of course, the whole rest of it, stumbling across this picture accidentally, the whole thing. Over the next few months, they drafted and redrafted this letter. And it was like a game. They would show it to people. They would get edits and suggestions.

Then one day, Heather calls Elna and tells her she sent the letter. And really, for the first time, Elna realized, oh wait, maybe this is a bad idea.

Ira Glass

She actually hasn't done this stuff now in almost a decade, doesn't miss it. And when she looks back on it, she thinks she was doing those big gestures because she was so unsure of herself.

Ira Glass

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