796: What Lies Beneath

Ira Glass

OK, before you can understand how Bob's sister became the talk of the third grade and the big day that led to that people still remember, I need to explain first that Bob's sister is a drawing. The teacher in this third grade class, Mr. Ablao, spotted it one day while teaching math. He saw one of the students, Antonio, working on a picture.

Ira Glass

Mr. Ablao taped the drawing to the bookshelf behind his desk near a photo of a wolf that was already there. Because it was clear if Antonio kept the drawing, it would continue to be a distraction to him and a couple of his friends, who, at that point, were the only ones in class who really cared about Bob's sister.

Ira Glass

Well, that's straightforward enough.

This is Dylan, one of Antonio's friends, who was into Bob's sister from the start.

Ira Glass

This whole question-- is it an octopus, is it a minion-- I asked Antonio, who drew Bob's sister-- about that. He tended to see Bob's sister as a Pac-Man ghost with big eyes, but he said-- and I thought it was surprisingly mature for somebody in elementary school. He thought part of the appeal of Bob's sister was that it was open to interpretation.

Ira Glass

But the thing that was key to Bob's sister was, Bob's sister wasn't actually anyone's sister.

Ira Glass

So Bobsister, gender unspecified, lived on the bookshelf near the photo of a wolf, until one week when Mr. Ablao went on vacation, and the kids had a substitute. When Mr. Ablao came back, Bobsister was gone, vanished, disappeared, and was all the kids wanted to talk about. This is the point where everybody in class gets very, very interested in Bobsister.

Ira Glass

There are all kinds of theories about what happened to Bobsister. Antonio and Dylan said it was really fun to talk about various abductors, including animals from an alternate universe. But Dylan says the prime suspect for his classmates-- that other picture on the bookshelf.

Ira Glass

The chatter about Bobsister does not go away, which is funny, but also Mr. Ablao's got a curriculum to get through.

Ira Glass

Dylan, actually.

Ira Glass

Probably just to get them to stop talking about Bobsister, but also, this is the kind of teacher he is. He says, sometimes, it's smart to take some detours, follow things where they lead.

Ira Glass

That was Monday. The rest of the week goes pretty normally. Mr. Ablao sort of hoped that they would forget about the funeral by the end of the week, but no way. They're murmuring about it, preparing for it, which he has no part of.

The eight-year-olds are the ones organizing this and thinking it through. Finally, Friday arrives, the big day, the day of the funeral, kids come back into the room from recess.

Ira Glass

Dylan's the leader of the funeral, and he prepared a eulogy. So did his friend, Theo. Dylan gets in front of the class holding a microphone Mr. Ablao keeps in the room.

The other eulogy that Theo wrote was also really good. "I just want to say something about the special person here, Bobsister, how she was such a good friend to all the potatoes, and especially Mr. Potato Head." Potatoes were another fascination of Mr. Ablao's class that year. "What an honor it was to have her with us. God bless her." And then, from the back of the room, Mr. Ablao hears a boy crying.

Ira Glass

Mr. Ablao thinks maybe it was really about his dog. The dog that boy had grown up with had died just two weeks before. His mom had sent an email to let him know. But Mr. Ablao's really not sure. At eight, you're plenty old enough to catch a glimpse of what death means.

Ira Glass

And Mr. Ablao felt responsible to help them through this new experience, like he had lots of others that year. So he took control of the room back from the kids and addressed them all.

Ira Glass

Which worked. Everybody snapped out of it. The demon left the room. Next, was free time, which they all enjoy. And everything was fine.

But at the end of the school year, when the class stood in a circle and each kid names something that they remembered and liked from third grade, a couple of the kids said Bobsister's funeral. It was a moment for Mr. Ablao, too.

Sometimes, you're joking around and it's all light and fun and trying something you've never done before, and some bigger subterranean force gets unleashed. That's what our show is going to be about today-- those moments when you get a glimpse of all that feeling that's there down below, hidden from sight. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Music of the Night After Night After Night After Night After Night After Night After Night After Night-- [FADES AWAY]

So when you go to a big theater, you see all the people who are on stage-- they're brightly lit. They're visible to everybody. They are literally there to be seen.

But then, just below them down in front, there's the orchestra pit. And it seems straightforward enough what happens in there. Musicians play their instruments.

But other things go on in there, all kinds of interactions and feelings that usually we don't get much of a picture of. You know the old saying "hell is other people?" It actually comes from the theater, it comes from a play, No Exit.

That play was not written by somebody who sits in the orchestra pit. But Jay Caspian Kang has this story about how many musicians in theatrical orchestras might understand the sentiment. We first broadcast this story back in 2020. We are bringing it back today with an update. Here's Jay.

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 is 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 a 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 is 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 is a 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 a 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 the 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 had 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 Webber 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 a 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 would 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 coworkers, 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 seems so unreasonable. Francis is 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 Wite-Out 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

During the pandemic, like the rest of Broadway, Phantom shut down. The unstoppable show was put on pause for a year and a half. I checked in with Melanie during that break. She wasn't doing very well. She wasn't getting paid by the show.

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 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's 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, has 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 Webber.

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 a 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.

Ira Glass

Jay Caspian Kang is a staff writer for The New Yorker and co-host of the podcast, Time to Say Goodbye. His story was produced by Miki Meek.

So we first broadcast that story three years ago. And now, the decades of repetition in the Phantom of the Opera pit are finally coming to an end. After 35 years, the longest-running show in Broadway history is closing this week. Curious how the musicians in the pit were taking the news, Jay caught up with Melanie, the oboe player, when she just had four shows left to play. Jay asked about the moment when everybody who works on the show heard definitively, during a big Zoom meeting, actually, that the show was finally closing.

Ira Glass

11 people who are going to be in the pit closing night are musicians who were there on opening night, back in 1988. I was able to reach Lowell Hershey, who, as Jay pointed out in the story, everybody calls the sanest person in the pit. Like Melanie, Lowell has other gigs lined up for after Phantom closes, here and there. Nothing big, nothing too challenging.

Neither of them imagines playing for another Broadway show, either as a sub or as a regular player. Lowell, I have to say, was very chill about the closing.

Ira Glass

Coming up-- a mom goes underground, goes undercover, to get an urgent message to her daughter. 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-- "What Lies Beneath," the stories of things and people, usually hidden from view, coming to the surface. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, "How I Met My Mother."

So in some families, what's buried deep below are the true feelings that people have about one another. There's so many people out there who have trouble saying directly what they really feel. One of the producers here at our show, Elna Baker, comes from a long line of passive-aggressive communicators.

By the way, they know this. They own it. When her grandmother wanted to get a message across, a message like, don't leave change lying around, one time, she put an article on the fridge saying, "Toddler Chokes on Penny," and then just left it to everybody else to connect the dots.

Elna's mother communicates in the same indirect way, which became a problem in the years after Elna left the church. Elna's family's Mormon, and her mom had some important things that she wanted to say to her. Here's Elna.

Elna Baker

This all started when I made a joke about me buying weed to my brother. Careful, he said. If Mom were to hear that, she'd send an email to the whole family about how you're an addict. I laughed. And then, I was like, wait, what? That was way too specific.

Did Mom send an email to the whole family about me being an addict? And he was like, uh, mm, nothing, never mind, which could only mean one thing. She did. It took several rounds of questioning before I got the whole story.

The email he was referencing-- my mom had sent it 10 years ago. At the time, I was about to host a comedy show in New York, where me and a bunch of performers would play drinking games on stage. It was called The Drunk Show.

The show was being promoted online. My mom, a devout Mormon, saw an article about it and freaked out. Mormons don't drink. It's against the religion.

And what I learned from my brother, years after the fact, is that my mom was so worried that I was doing this show, she sent an email to my family, my extended family, uncles, cousins, and family friends who I grew up with, like the Mitchells, the Coxes-- Heidi, my middle school drama teacher.

"Dear friends," it begins. "I am writing, because I am concerned about the direction Elna's life has turned. She is spiraling downward, fast."

My mom then explains to them that I'm doing this event called, The Drunk Show, then writes, "I am very concerned. In our family, you are either an alcoholic or a Mormon. And I think she may be headed in the wrong direction. I don't know what I can do personally. She doesn't hear me."

I'm going to interject here-- that I didn't hear her, because she never said anything to me about it. In the email, she inserts a link to the article about The Drunk Show, and then reveals her grand master plan. She's been commenting on the article, under fake names, warning me not to do the show.

"Can everyone else please make up fake accounts and also comment? This way, I'll cancel the show." She ends, "Thanks. Pray for us both, please."

When I read this email, I was mortified. I drink socially. I'm not an alcoholic. But since I'd never intercepted the email, I worried everyone who got it had thought this for years. I immediately clicked on the link to the article.

At the bottom of the page, there were four comments from four different people, trolling me, all clearly my mother. Her first fake character is Carol from the West Village, who says, quote, "Encouraging irresponsible drinking that could end in hospitalization of performers is an invitation to a lawsuit. Don't be idiots."

The three other comments escalate from there. Here's the weirdest part. She wrote all these comments while she was staying with me. She was in town the week of The Drunk Show. We slept in the same bed. But she didn't say a word to me about it.

As interventions go, it was the least successful one I've ever heard of or could imagine. No one else among the family or friends chimed in. And I, the target of the intervention, never knew it happened. I never heard of or read the comments online until my brother accidentally let it slip, years later.

Since I found out about this, I've wondered why my mom chose to communicate this message to me the way she did. But I've never asked her, because I figured it would just lead to a fight and no answers. But we're much closer now than we were when I did The Drunk Show. Why not try?

To my surprise, she agreed to talk about it, but on these conditions. Dad had to be there, in case we needed mediation. I had to come home for Christmas in exchange. And most importantly, I could only do this story if she got to write the ending, which we'll get to later.

We started at the beginning. How did my mother decide that anonymous comments online would be the best way to reach me? She said my sister, Julia, told her about The Drunk Show.

Elna Baker

Before things get too tense, my mom and I pull up the comments page together.

The first thing I learned was how fleshed out these people were in my mom's mind. Like, Carol from the West Village, who warned that irresponsible drinking could lead to lawsuits--

Elna Baker

To be clear, nowhere in the comments does it say Carol is a lawyer. For each entry, there's just a name and location, like Don from the Upper West Side.

Elna Baker

Again, reading the comments, you'd never know Don was a comedian.

Elna Baker

The next comment comes from the East Village, from a commenter named, Please.

Elna Baker

The show is on September 17.

Elna Baker

Her last comment is a straight-up Mormon talking point. Alcoholism and all other addictions take away freedom of choice. Seven minutes after she posted that, she sent the mass email. My mom said she went so hard because--

Elna Baker

Stopping The Drunk Show meant stopping me from becoming one of these people. My mom says she saw the promo photo of me sipping a drink on the page announcing the show, and thought--

She'd said this to me all my life, but I was missing the context. I've never met any of these family members who drank. I don't remember her ever mentioning any of these stories. I saw my mother as sheltered. Almost all her friends are Mormon. I just thought she doesn't know what she's talking about, which was unfair.

When I make a radio story, I listen to my interviews over and over again. And this time, something unusual started to happen. With each listen, my mother sounded less and less like my mother.

Like, I stopped hearing her the way I usually do-- rolling my eyes, getting defensive. And I actually started to hear what she had to say. This is the line that struck me the hardest.

Elna Baker

She's right. And I can hear in her voice that this has been hurting her feelings for years. And that's my fault. I see why she thinks it's hopeless to talk to me about drinking, about anything. I'm incredibly dismissive. That's my part in this.

And her part-- she was totally upfront about that. She didn't want to confront me about drinking, because she has so much trouble with confrontation of any kind, with anyone, going back to when she was young.

Elna Baker

I never understood before this conversation what that feels like for her. She panics, feels trapped, like she needs to run, tightness in her chest, which is what makes this conversation so hard.

Elna Baker

I knew what this meant. From the tone of her voice, it was time to stop. This was the most direct conversation I've ever had with my mother and the longest real conversation we've ever had. She'd gone above and beyond and did something she did not enjoy, for me. I could return the favor and call it a day.

Well, folks, my ticket home for Christmas is booked. And now, for the ending my mother requested-- it comes down to three words-- "She was right." Not about me spiraling downward fast, but about The Drunk Show.

For the record, The Drunk Show was a disaster. I was the one who organized the drinking games, but because I'd only recently left the church, I was brand new to drinking. And all the penalties in the games were things like, take four shots of whiskey.

Things went off the rails quickly. A performer threw a chair at an audience member. I drunk-dialed my ex from the stage, and the call went so badly, that I started crying in front of the audience. Ira, who was in the show, got blackout drunk-- for the first time in his life, he said-- and then threw up into a trash bag.

And someone ended up in the hospital. My mom knew none of those details, of course. But big picture-- Carol from the West Village knew what she was talking about when she said irresponsible drinking can lead to hospitalization. In other words, Mom was right.

Ira Glass

Elna Baker is one of the producers of our show and the author of the book, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance.

["JUST UNDER THE SURFACE" BY VENICE]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Aviva DeKornfeld and Lina Misitzis. The people who put together today's rerun include Alaa Mostafa, Stowe Nelson, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Our website-- thisamericanlife.org, where you can hear over 700 episodes of our program for absolutely free. 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 has not been listening to our program for weeks. 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.