721: The Walls Close In

Ira Glass

There's this thing that happens in the first episode of the TV show Watchmen, which I finally saw last month. I'm behind. A woman is driving with her son on a sunny day, and suddenly the sky darkens and squids drop from the sky, like a hailstorm or something. But they're little squids, each one-- I don't know-- the length of your finger.

Cars on the road pull over and wait. Squids land on them and on the ground, making this soggy layer of squid on the road. And then soon enough-- again, like a hailstorm-- it stops. Sun comes back up. Everybody starts their car again, heads to wherever they're heading, just like the most normal thing in the world. No big deal, just another squid drop.

And when I saw that, I felt like that is exactly how things happen. That's how things feel. That's what everything feels like right now. Inconceivable stuff goes down all the time these days. And it's like, you can get used to anything. You know what I mean?

Every few days, more Americans die from COVID than died in 9/11. Wildfires are raging and continue to just rage. The president won't disavow white supremacists in a televised debate. I'm used to all that. That's just daily life, you know?

Or there's this example of "you can get used to anything." Jay was having a normal, stressful day for 2020, meaning he does his job from his apartment on a computer at his kitchen table on Zoom. But he's also got to deal with his children during the workday.

So a couple weeks ago, he's a college professor and he's preparing a lecture for a class. And he's anxious about that, and he wants it to be good. And then at 3 o'clock, he has to go run, get his kids, and bring them home. And he and his kids get back to their building at 3:20. And he's trying to move quickly because his class starts at 3:30. And he and his two kids get on the elevator to head up to their apartment.

Ira Glass

They push a button to call for help. And they're told somebody is going to be there to fix things, but it's going to take a little while. And they wait.

Ira Glass

She's eight years old. And part of what's happening, Jay says, is that her big brother, who is 10 years old, has actually been stuck in an elevator once before when he was little. So he's being all, what's the big deal?

Ira Glass

So, kids momentarily OK, Jay gets back to the other urgent matter that's on his mind-- his class. It's over 300 students, this big intro psychology class, which still has not started. There's still just enough time for him to quickly tap out a message on his phone-- "Dear class, I am currently trapped in an elevator in my apartment building. So I'll join the Zoom call and start teaching once I'm safely out of here."

Push Send, message goes out, and then-- nothing, right? They just stay put. And Jay starts to worry about his students, who are waiting for him on the Zoom call. 10 minutes pass, 20.

And half an hour in, he decides he's going to try to teach the class on his phone from the elevator, which takes a little technical wrangling. He has to download Zoom to his phone with barely one bar of service, blah blah blah. OK, this part is boring. But after a while, OK, no video, voice only, he's in!

Ira Glass

He has a moment of panic, like what am I going to say. And then he launches in. With no notes, none of his slides. He gives the lecture that he'd planned.

Ira Glass

Four or five minutes! We are very adaptable creatures. Soon enough, the elevator jolts and starts to move again. Jay gets back to his apartment, sits down at the kitchen table, logs onto Zoom, and teaches a couple hundred kids from his kitchen, which, of course, is also totally weird, but after months of doing that, it feels totally normal.

Ira Glass

That's all of us right now. Our lives this year are so strange. And we just do the next task and the next one after that and the next one after that, and we do not think about how weird things have gotten.

Ira Glass

Well, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, on our program, people trapped in small spaces, stuck in a situation, and coping because they have no choice.

Jay, I think it's pretty clear, was not too bothered by his short time in the elevator, but in our other stories today, it is people who are stuck in a small space for way longer. In the first half of our program, we have a story where things get pretty dire. And in the second half, it's not nearly so difficult. It's musicians who are confined to a tiny space for years, an uncomfortably tiny space. And can I say, things get pretty weird there, too. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, The People Up the Stairs. So we start today with a couple who've been penned into a small space for months now, hiding in an attic because their lives are on the line, surrounded by musty furniture and stacks of old paintings that are collecting dust. Kevin Sieff talked to them about the truly jaw-dropping story of how they got there.

Kevin Sieff

The attic has creaky wood floors and one small window, but they try not to go close to it. They don't want to be seen. The ceilings are low. Moises, who's 6'1", has to crouch, but Jessica's fine. They spend their time obsessing over not being heard. They try not to talk above a whisper or walk on the creaking floorboards. Even sleeping is stressful.

Kevin Sieff

How Moises and Jessica ended up in this attic, it goes back to how they met. It was 2016 on an anti-government WhatsApp group. They were both activists against the regime of Daniel Ortega, who has ruled Nicaragua on and off for 40 years. Then they started seeing each other at protests and meetings.

Jessica saw the nerdy guy, unafraid to go on national television, wearing a mask with the president's face on it and an x over the mouth, demanding freedom of expression. Moises saw the woman with the big brown eyes, often the last person to back down when the police showed up.

At one protest, when 200 police closed in on a group of maybe 20 protesters, Moises looked for a place to run. But then he saw Jessica and another woman walk right up to the armed officers and start yelling in their faces.

Kevin Sieff

They got married and Moises adopted Jessica's daughter, Camila. He got a job at a Sprint call center, talking to people from the States all day. Jessica worked for a company that made solar panels.

But still, their relationship was built around their activism. One parent picked up Camila at school, while the other organized a rally or held a press conference. At home, near the little girl's pile of toys, they kept masks for tear gas.

But the government's response got harsher. The regime began kidnapping its opponents. Moises was grabbed by four or five men in unmarked cars and taken to El Chipote, an infamous prison documented by human rights groups as being a state-run torture site. A warning-- this next bit includes descriptions of violence.

Kevin Sieff

He was held for two days. Not long after they released him, Jessica went to a protest that was broken up by police. Officers kicked her in the stomach and hit her with the butt of a gun. She was pregnant. She lost the baby.

Late last year, they realized they couldn't stay anymore. They needed to escape, and their plan was to go to the US. And they had a good reason to think they would be welcomed there. Jessica and Moises' brand of activism, it was championed by Republicans, including the Trump administration, for its defiance of a left-wing autocrat. They were called freedom fighters. "We stand with you," Republican senators said in statements and tweets.

In 2018, Ted Cruz gave a whole speech about US support for Nicaraguan activists like them.

Kevin Sieff

That support, it's part of what made their asylum case seem winnable, because it fell under the category of political persecution. It was one sliver of the asylum system left intact, after years of dismantling.

In all sorts of ways, getting asylum in the US has become almost impossible. Asylum seekers are being turned away at the border, told, "Nope, we're closed." Cases are incredibly hard to win even when they do get to the courts.

But the Trump administration did leave at least one window cracked. One of the few categories of asylum seekers that it purported to accept-- people who were threatened, tortured, jailed for their politics. Especially when their politics overlapped with US interests-- people like Moises and Jessica.

Moises and Jessica were a perfect asylum case for another reason. Their persecution was documented, and it was public. As activists, they had become famous. Their protests had been televised. They'd held nationally-broadcast press conferences. People recognized them in the streets all the time. Even the State Department had tweeted about specific confrontations they'd had with the paramilitary.

At any other time in recent US history, they would likely have been admitted. But instead, they're in hiding. I wanted to understand why. I've been covering immigration for the last few years, and this, to me, felt like the last chapter in the disintegration of asylum. So I called Moises and Jessica in the attic to hear about their journey from start to finish, to learn what happened.

In late 2019, they started to get ready. Moises studied the US government website for the asylum requirements. He read about the importance of supporting your case with evidence. So he bought a black backpack, and he filled it with all the evidence he could gather-- videos of their protests and press conferences, reports from the Human Rights Commission and the State Department, statements from the White House and the Republican senators.

Moises also wrote a five-page declaration, a long essay enumerating every threat, every beating he'd received from the government. He included the names of his torturers. He'd read online that the details could help his family's asylum case, so he was as specific as possible.

The backpack took on a kind of sacred role for them. It was their proof that they were deserving of the sliver of asylum that remained available in the US. Then Moises and Jessica talked to Camila, their eight-year-old daughter. Camila is outgoing, loves LEGOs and TikTok videos. They sat her down, and Moises described all of the dangers they would face on their journey across the border. Camila told them she was ready to go.

At 3 o'clock one morning, they left their house outside of Managua and headed 2,000 miles north. By early July, they were moving through the desert of northern Mexico. It was scorching, and COVID cases were spiking. Moises had gamed everything out. He wrapped some of his asylum evidence in plastic in case it got wet. And he picked where they would cross the border-- Texas.

Kevin Sieff

During tough moments on the journey to the border, Moises and Jessica had tried to convince Camila that the whole trip was a game. "It'll get more fun," they said. "Soon we'll be in Disney World. You'll eat a McDonald's hamburger." Camila played along at first, but by the time they got to the border, she was exhausted and scared. Jessica scouted out the Rio Grande. Neither she nor Camila could swim, so she nervously looked for the shallowest part.

Kevin Sieff

Jessica felt a rush of relief. That's it, she thought. The hardest part is over. A Border Patrol agent got out of a truck. Moises had been planning for this moment, and he knew exactly what to do. And Moises speaks fluent English, which is incredibly unusual for an asylum seeker. He took off his backpack, and he spread out the pile of evidence supporting his asylum claim.

Kevin Sieff

The border patrol separated Moises from Jessica and Camila. They took his bag with all the evidence in it. For 12 days, they were detained in small, crowded tents. They were just sitting on the ground, waiting, in the same clothes they'd worn on the trip north.

Kevin Sieff

Moises kept repeating himself to janitors, guards, anyone. When can we apply for asylum, he asked. Where is my backpack? Finally, some guards came to get them. The guard said, "Everyone, get your stuff. We're taking you on a bus."

They handed Moises his backpack. It seemed to Jessica like they were about to be released and allowed to apply for asylum.

Kevin Sieff

She looked at Moises to see if he was also feeling hopeful, but Moises was more skeptical, and Jessica noticed. The US, it turns out, had used coronavirus as an excuse to shutter what was left of the US asylum system. In March, the Centers for Disease Control wrote an order saying that asylum seekers could be expelled because they pose a risk to public health during the pandemic. It later turned out that the order was conceived of by immigration officials at the White House, not medical experts.

And even though Moises, Jessica, and Camila tested negative for coronavirus while in custody, they could be deported. But they didn't know that. They were kept in an information black hole for a few days and then put in a van. No one would tell them where they were going.

Kevin Sieff

Moises and Jessica first tried not to believe what was happening. In all of their planning, they'd never considered that this could happen. Never before in the modern history of the US asylum system has the US sent political dissidents back to the country they fled without first allowing them to open asylum applications.

Yet there they were, being sent back to Nicaragua, delivered into the hands of their torturers. Police would be waiting for them at the airport. And they weren't alone. Dozens of Nicaraguan asylum seekers were herded onto a charter plane, destined for a country whose treatment of political prisoners, the State Department said, demonstrates the regime's utter disregard for human life and democratic freedoms.

Not only is it a break from US policy going back decades, it's also a clear violation of international refugee law. I talked to people at the UN, and they were like, yeah, this is definitely illegal. US Customs and Border Protection did not respond to my request for comment. They claim that people seeking asylum still receive credible fear interviews, though I didn't find any evidence to support that.

The pilot comes on the intercom and calmly tells people to put their seatbelts on, like it's a normal flight. Meanwhile, the passengers are freaking out. They're still not completely sure where they're going.

Kevin Sieff

The passengers were whispering to each other. "If they take me straight to prison, call my mom," one man said. "Whoever disappears, we should all assume he's in Chipote," said another. Moises recognized some of the other activists. He told me and my producer Nadia Reiman about it.

Kevin Sieff

While they're mid-air, Moises realizes something-- the backpack. This bag full of evidence, he's about to land with it, and the police are going to see it. He can't think about anything else. The US immigration agents put it with the checked luggage, so it was somewhere in the belly of the plane. Moises couldn't even hold it, couldn't look at what was inside, and come up with a plan.

If the police find it, they'll see that he listed the names of specific torturers and what they did to him. Maybe they would decide to kill him just for that. Maybe they rape his daughter, he thinks. His mind is spiraling out of control. Next to him, Jessica is busy trying to soothe Camila, feeding her Doritos.

Kevin Sieff

When the plane lands, Moises looks out the window at the fleet of Nicaraguan soldiers and police waiting for them. Everyone gets in line, walking down the steps of the plane. Moises and Jessica and all of the others are led into a garage-like office, where the government is conducting interrogations. They're patted down, their government IDs are confiscated. The whole time, Moises is thinking about his backpack.

One officer snapped pictures of them. Another addressed them by name and asked what they were doing in the US and why they were deported. Moises tried to avoid answering. "They got me in Texas," he said, shrugging it off. They're led to another area full of police. Jessica and Camila walk hand-in-hand.

But Moises' eyes dart around, frantically searching for some sign of his backpack. Finally, he sees the luggage cart pull up, and there it is. Moises grabs his backpack and turns to face the wall of a building. It's the closest he can get to hiding. He reaches into the backpack and feels for the pages. He finds a statement, the document that outlines in explicit detail everything that happened to them.

Kevin Sieff

As they walk through the crowd of police, he kept waiting for them to take him away. He kept waiting for them to open his bag. They never did. Instead, the police drove Moises, Jessica, and Camila to Jessica's mom's house in a patrol truck. When they got there, the police started taking more photos, like they were scouting a crime scene.

Kevin Sieff

This is how Nicaragua's para-police often work. They make note of where you live, and when they want to, they go after you. Moises and Jessica had to figure out what to do next. After a few days, they noticed that the police were circling the house. The police called it random and asked about Camila.

Staying at a known address was too dangerous. They didn't think the police would hurt Camila, but what if they came for Moises or Jessica while Camila was there? She could be swept up in the violence. So Moises and Jessica relocated to the attic of a safe house and left Camila. They told her, "We'll see you soon," but truthfully, they had no idea when.

It was brutal to say goodbye, but what was the alternative, they thought. If Camila was attacked on their behalf, that would be much worse. Jessica cried when she said goodbye. That was about two months ago. She's cried most days since.

Kevin Sieff

Their days are now about hiding. They spent weeks in the attic, sleeping on the floor. And now they're a floor below in a tiny, mostly empty bedroom. But they're still just as afraid of being found. The landlord warns them when someone is downstairs so they can remain extra quiet. When one of them drops something or accidentally makes a loud noise, they're like, did anyone hear that? Is that the thing that's going to give us away?

Sometimes, Jessica wakes up and, for an instant, has no idea where she is. She has to remind herself, I'm back in Nicaragua. I'm in hiding in my own country. They're back where they were a year ago, asking the same questions. Should we leave? And when? This time, the answers are harder to agree on.

Kevin Sieff

Most of the people arriving at the US border these days know that the asylum system has been whittled away. Like Moises and Jessica, they knew it wasn't going to be easy, that it could take years.

But they believed in their case. That pile of papers in Moises' backpack-- anyone who saw them would be convinced, they thought. What they didn't believe-- and why would they-- was that no one would even look and that the backpack would end up back in a safe house next to Moises' head when he sleeps. Everything's still inside the way it was when they left for the first time.

Ira Glass

Kevin Sieff is the Mexico and Central America Bureau chief for The Washington Post. A version of this story appeared in The Washington Post and in their daily podcast, Post Reports.

Coming up, people who work in a field where it is really hard to find a good, steady job. These people find one, and then the only problem is, they have to actually come in and do the job every day, exactly the way they did it the day before. And I mean, like, exactly the way they did it. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Walls Close In, stories of people trapped in small spaces and what that's like. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Music of the Night After Night After Night After Night After Night After Night After Night After Night-- [FADES AWAY]

We now turn to people who've made a choice, a conscious choice to stick themselves into a cramped, uncomfortable space for years inside the theater. You know, the old saying "hell is other people" actually comes from the theater. It comes from a play, No Exit. That play was not written by a member of a theater orchestra. But Jay Caspian Kang has this story about how many musicians in theatrical orchestras might understand the sentiment.

Jay Caspian Kang

Nick Jemo moved to New York in 2006 to try to make it as a musician. He had just finished up college and had all these dreams of playing the trumpet for a living. But it was a struggle. There just aren't many jobs for trumpet players anymore.

So he mostly waited by the phone for gigs. Korean megachurch services, experimental plays, and the occasional substitute job with Mary Poppins on Broadway. And then a spot opened up at his favorite show.

Jay Caspian Kang

This was one of the conductors for Phantom of the Opera. She offered him a job playing shows six days a week and twice on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Jay Caspian Kang

It wasn't just a steady income Nick was excited about. Phantom of the Opera was the show Nick had loved since he was 11 years old. He had just started playing the trumpet and would lay on his living room floor listening to The Music of the Night. You know it-- (SINGING) "Slowly, gently, night unfurls its splendor."

That call changed his life. He had finally arrived, Phantom on Broadway. On his first day, Nick entered the majestic theater on 46th and 8th Avenue. He walked through a back alley, past a giant tub of dry ice, down a flight of stairs into a locker room where he changed into all black. He then headed into the pit to play the music he had loved as a child. He had his own seat there now and a music stand.

So he played the first show. Next day, he went back and played it again, and then again. His brain started to adjust to playing the same show eight times a week. And then he started to notice, it wasn't just the music that repeated itself.

Jay Caspian Kang

At first, this was funny, almost charming. Nick was 30 and the youngest person in the pit. Not by a few years, but by a few decades. He'd never been in a situation like this where everyone seemed so locked into routine. His colleagues would sit down in their chairs at the exact same minute every day.

There was the cellist who would say, "Marvelous," every time Nick asked him how he was doing. There was the first horn player who would pull out a stopwatch every single night to time how long the second horn player held the note in one of the songs. Some days it would be 17 seconds, other days 16.2.

Jay Caspian Kang

Phantom of the Opera opened on Broadway in January 1988. It was an instant hit.

Jay Caspian Kang

It did. And then another decade. And another. The musicians in the pit signed contracts with a provision which guaranteed their jobs until the show shut down. They expected two, maybe three years. But the show kept going, as three years turned into five years, which then turned into 32. That's over 13,000 performances.

Phantom is now the longest running show in the history of Broadway.

Jay Caspian Kang

That's Melanie Feld, an oboist who's been in the pit for 28 years now.

Jay Caspian Kang

I first heard about the pit at Phantom through a friend whose wife had recently subbed in the violin section. She described what she had seen as a horror show, like Waiting for Guffman, but 30 hard years down the line. I couldn't quite get it out of my head.

Jay Caspian Kang

Pete Reit has been playing Phantom since opening night. He's the French horn player who times the notes on a stopwatch every night.

Jay Caspian Kang

When I started talking to the pit musicians a couple of years ago, I wanted to know how they found meaning in the mundane and inevitable repetitions of life. In lots of jobs, people do the same thing every day, but nothing quite like this.

You're hearing the exact same lines from the stage, playing the exact same notes for the same songs. Even the guy sitting next to you breathes in the exact same rhythm. Every day, the Phantom kisses Christine for the first time, and the same chandelier comes crashing down in the same spot on the stage.

I assumed the orchestra members were like Zen archers who pull back the same bow with the same motion until they die. I talked to a trumpet player named Lowell Hershey. Lowell has been at the show since day one, and everyone says he's the sanest person in the pit.

Jay Caspian Kang

The Phantom players aren't exactly serfs. They're well-paid, they play a beloved show, and they get to play in small orchestras on the side. But these are highly-trained musicians who went to the fanciest music schools in the world.

Andrew Lloyd Weber wanted the best of the best for Phantom, which means the pit will always sound good, though it also creates some creative and spiritual problems for the players, who have to get through the score night after night after night.

Jay Caspian Kang

That's a violinist named Kurt Coble. He's a composer. His dream was always to write scores for horror films. He's now been at Phantom for 22 years, long enough to see three people in his section die.

Jay Caspian Kang

So here they all are, in this weird social experiment, trapped together for decades, 27 musicians crammed into this tiny space. A trumpet player told me it's like playing in a submarine.

I've been down there, and you can barely turn around without knocking into something. In the pit, you notice everything-- the way your neighbor blows out his spit valve, the way someone brags about their kids, the smell of someone's perfume. Every little annoyance, every perceived slight accumulates.

One of my favorite stories, which should drive anyone who has ever played in a band crazy-- there's this bassoon player who has sat next to the same clarinet player since 1988. She's convinced he plays half a note flat on every note he's ever played. He denies this.

The person I talked to the most in the pit was Melanie, the oboist. She's one of the rare people you meet who has no real filter.

Jay Caspian Kang

During most of our talks, Melanie was making reeds. It's an extraordinarily meticulous process. There's all sorts of medieval-looking tools and tiny bits of wood everywhere.

Jay Caspian Kang

Melanie studied at Juilliard. She dreamed of being the principal oboist in the Metropolitan Opera or the Philharmonic. But she kept bombing her auditions. Her nerves got the best of her every time she was up for a big seat. And then life and bills intervened.

Phantom, in that way, is a very good job in a field where there aren't a lot of good jobs anymore. It put Melanie's kids through college, paid her mortgage, and provided security while the music industry collapsed around her. But at the end of 30 years sitting just inches away from your co-workers, you lose all sense of proportion. Your enemies turn into monsters.

For Melanie, the monster in the pit was always a trumpet player named Francis Bonny. Everything he did drove Melanie nuts, from the black biking shorts he wore in the pit to always eating his dinner in the locker room with his back turned to her.

Jay Caspian Kang

I wanted to run this all by Francis. It just seemed so unreasonable. Francis was the only person I had talked to who had actually escaped from the pit. He got in a truck and drove out to the middle of nowhere in Colorado. He says he's much happier now.

Jay Caspian Kang

The musicians in the pit don't play the whole time, which means there are thousands of hours where they're not actually doing anything. And during those rests, they read books, spy thrillers and mysteries, and do the crossword with their neighbors. A trumpet player has taught himself three languages. Another musician ran a woodshop business on his laptop during the show.

And socially, it's a bit like middle school. There are the loners, the jocks, and the French horns. They're like the boys in the back of the bus. They bring in fart machines and run the same practical jokes over and over. Sometimes they even mess with the audience. The front row is right up against the pit, so close that their feet sometimes dangle next to the musicians heads. Occasionally, one of the French horn players would take out a bottle of whiteout and write little messages on the soles of the audience's shoes.

Jay Caspian Kang

This, more than anything, Melanie told me, is what makes her want to sound good every night. She's worried the French horn guys will make fun of her.

Jay Caspian Kang

Nobody is in the Phantom pit right now. The show temporarily closed in March because of COVID-19. The unstoppable show had finally been put on pause. I recently checked in with Melanie again. She wasn't doing very well. Her mother had died in a nursing home in New Jersey, presumed COVID-positive. She wasn't getting paid by the show anymore. And she missed Phantom.

This was surprising to me. Melanie and all the other musicians had told me about their fantasies of finally leaving the show. And I had believed them. But now that it had actually happened, she missed the routine.

Jay Caspian Kang

This, of course, is the opposite of what she'd said in the past, before COVID.

Jay Caspian Kang

Before the pandemic, every time I talked to Melanie, I would ask how she was doing. Her answer always depended on parking. It's hard to park in midtown Manhattan. A good parking spot was a good day. A bad parking spot was a bad day. This is how she made sense of her life.

I think about this all the time. Most of our lives are spent finding parking for the job we don't want to do. Melanie is not alone in that. And after any number of years, those routines accumulate. And that's more or less your life.

Of all the people I talked to in the pit, one musician dealt with the mundane and inevitable repetition of life in a way that really stuck with me. For the past two decades in the pit, Kurt, the musician who described himself as a violin operator, had been dreaming up the most elaborate and metaphorically perfect coping mechanism. It's a band made up entirely of automatons. I met these robot musicians in a warehouse in Yonkers.

Jay Caspian Kang

The PAM Band stands for Partially Artificial Musicians. Kurt's automatons are made up of scraps of metal and string all wired up to a soundboard that Kurt can program to create whatever sounds he wants. There's Magnus, an electric chord organ, Krieg, the bass guitar, and then there's Rosie, the theremin.

Jay Caspian Kang

I asked Kurt if the PAM Band could play "The Music of the Night," or "All I Ask of You," or any of the Phantom classics. He wasn't into that at all. This band was not designed to play Andrew Lloyd Weber.

But something inside him just couldn't get away from Phantom of the Opera. Back when he was sitting in the pit, he'd composed, just in his head, both the prequel and the sequel to Phantom, both which involve Indiana Jones type characters. And years ago, he got a copy of the 1925 silent film version of Phantom and wrote an entire score. He wanted to play it for me. He turned off the lights in the warehouse and projected the film onto the wall. The PAM Band started to play.

The score features him, Kurt, as the solo violinist and the star of the show. The automatons all play the same thing, but Kurt always improvises. None of his shows are ever the same.

[KURT PLAYING WITH PAM BAND]

Ira Glass

Jay Caspian Kang, he's making a documentary about the Phantom pit and is co-host of the podcast, Time to Say Goodbye.

[MUSIC - "FOUR WALLS" BY EDDIE HOLMAN]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Aviva DeKornfeld. The people who put our program together today include Bim Adewunmi, Elna Baker, Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Noor Gill, Damien Grave, Chana Joffe-Walt, Miki Meek, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Robyn Semien, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman, senior editor, David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to our interpreter, Gabriela Munoz. Also David Lai, Grace Paradise, Isabel Castro, Gleb Mikhalev, Cameron Dennis, Carissa Henderson, Alex Neumann, and Jean Hannah Edelstein.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. Plus, there's videos. There's lists of favorite programs. There's all kinds of other stuff there. Again, the 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. He and I were talking the other day, and he let slip he hasn't been listening to our program for weeks. I was like, what? Totally confronted him about it. And-- I don't know. I guess he had a good reason.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week. I told Torey, I get it.