799: The Lives of Others

Lilly Sullivan

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Lilly Sullivan, sitting in for Ira Glass. A while back, we got an email from a listener in a small town in Utah. He wrote, "It seems like half the town has a huge elementary-school-style crush on a local veterinarian." And I wanted to know, could this be real? So I flew to Utah. And I went to the place people would a local vet, the dog park.

[DOGS YAPPING]

Lilly Sullivan

I thought it'd take me a long time to assess this. It didn't.

Lilly Sullivan

Ex-husband, he whispers at her.

[LAUGHTER]

Most of these people, he wasn't even their vet, though I did talk to someone who knows him as her vet. I'd tell you her name, but she asked that she and her dogs remain anonymous.

Lilly Sullivan

Her husband, Jim, was fine with me using his name because Dr. Artz doesn't know who he is because his wife always volunteers to take their dogs to the vet herself-- alone.

Lilly Sullivan

His wife nods and squeezes her eyes shut. She puts her face in her hands.

Lilly Sullivan

What's embarrassing about it is the amount of time they spend on this. This woman is on group threads with five other people, men and women, all couples, all straight, in happy relationships. One thread, they told me, is 80% dedicated to either Christmas movies or Dr. Artz. They don't know why they do it. The one sidedness, the degree of it all. It confuses even them.

Lilly Sullivan

This is someone else on the thread, Alissa.

Lilly Sullivan

Nonetheless, at this point, the idea of Dr. Artz has become so omnipresent, they built this whole imagined life for him. Here's Jim again, the guy who found his wife's password, who's never actually met or talked to Dr. Artz.

Lilly Sullivan

Max McClorey, the guy who first wrote us about all this, had his own image.

Lilly Sullivan

And this is what I'm here to talk about today. I totally understand this thing they're doing, putting so much thought into someone who's basically a stranger, something I do too, that I think lots of us do, but never really name.

I've never been the most social person on Earth. My natural state seems to be to spend a lot of time alone. But it wasn't until COVID and the prolonged isolation that I started noticing that sometimes random people would walk through my mind, people I had no reason to be thinking about.

And my mind would just perch there, watching them, for a little while. Nothing loaded, it wasn't a crushy feeling. It's weirdly neutral, actually. I just hover in that scene for a moment. For me, it's usually this person who I really don't know very well.

I knew her in college. She doesn't live near me. But sometimes, fairly often, I'll picture her just washing dishes in her house, sunlight pouring onto the sink, which I picture is white, even though I can't remember if that's right. There's warm, running water, suds, a few water glasses.

The images are like a little coffee break from my own life, where I try on hers for size. It feels nice there, peaceful, and rooted, which aren't feelings I feel a ton of in my own life. She does not know that I do this. And I never want her to find out.

Today on our show, we lean into this thing that is so awkward that we usually turn away from it. We're calling it the lives of others. I don't know why I do this. But I think it's something so common. So let's talk about it. First stop, Dr. Artz. Does he have any idea how much he's taken over people's brains? Stay with us.

Lilly Sullivan

Act One, So, I Hear You're Hot. I drove out to Dr. Artz's house on a sunny winter day, on what I have to say is probably the most cringey assignment I've ever had. And when my GPS told me to turn left off the highway, I got my first unexpected sign, a literal sign, as I entered the driveway. "Lost River Ranch," it read, carved in metal, mounted between two columns of piled boulders. A ranch, just like Jim had imagined.

I drove down the mountain, past a Jeep Wrangler, an electric blue pickup, past the motorcycles. And then I saw it, cresting atop the hill, a beautiful log cabin. And I met Dr. Artz, or as he calls himself, John.

Lilly Sullivan

Let's just get this out of the way. What does Dr. John Artz look like? There's this Paul Newman thing going on--

Lilly Sullivan

I stumbled through it.

I'm doing my best. OK?

Dr. Artz didn't blink an eye. It wasn't news to him.

Lilly Sullivan

His wife worked at a brew pub in town.

Lilly Sullivan

Sometimes clients would leave little notes with his receptionist, things like that.

Lilly Sullivan

Oh, no, no. Of course not. Who would ever do something like that? I told him more about how people imagined him.

Lilly Sullivan

So all those things I thought-- ranch, check. Cabin, check. Coffee percolator, check. Flannel, check. Motorcycle-- I'm going to say double check because he goes on long rides alone in the desert. Horses-- OK, no horses. But he has worked as a wrangler in Montana. And watching the sunrise from his porch-- well, his porch face is west, not east.

Lilly Sullivan

And again, I don't know quite how to say this professionally, but this entire gazing up on the snow-kissed ridge thing-- as a reporter, I can report that is an objectively hot scenario.

Lilly Sullivan

I was honestly floored that they got it so close. To me, that had seemed like the least likely possible outcome of all of this. Though to everyone in town, he was a fantasy person. So they invented a life that was perfect enough for this perfect person, which of course, left so much out. For instance, Dr. Artz is funny. And he likes dorky things, like Waiting for Guffman and Monty Python, which he quotes freely and regularly.

See?

Also, no one in town knew the most important thing in his life right now, which is that he's leaving. When I talked to him, he already had his house almost entirely packed up. He hadn't told many clients yet. But his wife and three dogs were already gone. He's moving back to Pittsburgh, his hometown. His mom's getting older. And he didn't like her being alone so much. In fact, they just had a scare. And he was about to get on a red eye.

Lilly Sullivan

Before I left, I asked him the question so many people in town had asked me. Does Dr. Artz have a Dr. Artz? Does he do this too? And he was very polite, and tried so hard to say yes, really tried to put me at ease and say that I wasn't a weirdo, that no one in town was a creep, that it's totally human and that of course he does this. But the only example he could come up with was this.

Lilly Sullivan

It was a good effort. But I think it's not the same thing. When he's drinking his coffee and staring at the amazing sunset from his cabin, I do not think he's thinking about that guy in the hot tub. Maybe that's the difference between doctor Artz and the rest of us. Some of us spend a lot of time thinking about people we don't know. And some of us are the thought about.

Lilly Sullivan

Act Two, Who is Sarah Blust? So maybe some of us spend a weird amount of energy thinking about people we barely know. But rarely then, do we go up to those same people and get to know them, and test the reality of whatever fantasy we have of them. But in our next story, that's exactly what happens. It comes from producer Alix Spiegel.

It's never easy for me to interview people I'm close to. So usually I try hard to avoid it. But a little while ago, I sat down with one of my dearest friends, Sarah Blust, to talk about something that happened to her when we were younger. A story that I've recently come to see in a totally new way, as not just a story about a strange thing that happened, but also as a good example of the way stories -- the ones we tell about ourselves and others we imagine -- can bend our lives in odd directions.

I met Sarah my first year of college. We ate at the same place at Oberlin, a small house on campus called Keep. I was immediately drawn to Sarah, I think because I saw her as my opposite. To me, Sarah seemed like a red-headed gush of uncomplicated joy, music, and glitter, a free and easy person who was up for anything.

I saw myself as the mirror opposite. There was nothing free or easy about me. I was hell bent, so on a mission to remake myself that I was oblivious to many of the parts of college life that preoccupied my peers, including, as Sarah was maybe a little quick to point out, hygiene.

Alix Spiegel

I could not go with the flow, not even a little, because of violin. The short version is that for a variety of reasons, my mother decided, when I was five, that I would become a world-famous solo violinist. But inconveniently for me, world-famous solo violinist is a field which involves ridiculous amounts of practice, three to six hours a day on top of school and homework.

I quit as soon as I got to college. But the whole violin thing meant that a sizable portion of my childhood was spent alone, in a practice room, with, as my brother likes to joke, nothing but the cinder blocks for friends.

And then there was Sarah. The last of three sisters, she'd grown up surrounded by people, and so had this easy way with them. Sarah was the kind of person who would literally brighten at the sight of someone, almost no matter who that person was, I remember thinking. And it felt like fun just inevitably found her.

For example, there was a brief time, in our 30s, when we both lived in New York City. And I remember one random Tuesday, after work, I happened to meet up with Sarah for dinner. And I asked how her day was. Sarah explained what, for her, had been a fairly typical day.

And though I don't remember the details, I vividly remembered the sentence that went through my head immediately after hearing it. Why do I never end up on a pirate ship in the middle of the Hudson River? During that time period, a sentence like that probably went through my head two out of every five times I talked to Sarah. So I think that's all the Sarah Blust context you need to appreciate the story you're about to hear.

Alix Spiegel

In 2004, about 10 years after we graduated, Sarah and a couple of her female friends decided to return to campus for their reunion. They weren't going in an overly-earnest, I miss my college kind of way. I think this was half ironic.

Alix Spiegel

So they make their way to this off-campus house where music is blaring and a large number of alcohol-drenched college students are littered across the lawn.

Alix Spiegel

Now this is Sarah Blust, we're talking about.

Alix Spiegel

Besides, this guy, whoever he was, was attractive.

Alix Spiegel

I don't want you to get the wrong idea about Sarah. She's not the kind of person who typically flirts with random college seniors. Today, she's the director of two sexual and reproductive health clinics in New York. And she was well on her way to becoming the director of two reproductive health clinics by the time of the reunion. So she wasn't exactly itching to take a college kid seriously.

Alix Spiegel

Fortunately Dan-- that was the guy's actual name, Dan-- had the foresight to stow an emergency six pack in his room.

Alix Spiegel

This, of course, is Dan, the cute, kind senior who lured my friend, Sarah, to his room with promises of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He confirms that when he first heard the name Sarah Blust, he pretty much lost his mind and started screaming at the top of his lungs.

Alix Spiegel

Dan's story starts at Keep Cottage, the same place I met Sarah my first year at Oberlin. Dan, as a freshman, had lived there too. And he says one day, he was hanging out in the lounge, on the ground floor.

Alix Spiegel

So Dan picks up one of the photo albums.

Alix Spiegel

Luckily, the photo contained additional information. There was a name on the back.

Alix Spiegel

I know this sounds a little unusual. It is a little unusual. But Dan made up a whole fictional story about a redhead named Sarah Blust, someone with two sisters, like the real Sarah Blust, who, like the real Sarah, goes to college and maybe smokes a little too much weed.

Now Dan hadn't seen this story since graduation. But we were actually able to retrieve a copy from the carcass of his 20-year-old candy-blue Apple computer, due to the superhuman efforts of a San Francisco-based computer expert named Mitch. Thanks, Mitch.

Anyway, the main focus of Dan's story is Sarah's involvement with this fictional guy named Matt. Throughout the story, Sarah and Matt circle each other, drawn, but not quite sure what to make of the strange connection they feel. And in the end, they don't end up together. In Dan's imagination, it's this made-up character, Matt, who takes the photo that he found. Here's the last paragraph.

Alix Spiegel

And Dan didn't just write a story about Sarah Blust. He also posted said story, of Sara Blust, with her photo, on the door of his room, where it stayed until the end of the school year, at which point, Dan says, it went into a trash can. And he never, ever thought of it again.

Alix Spiegel

Now I want to pause for a second because what I'm interested in is the stories people tell themselves. So I want to map their stories at each stage. For Dan, what had happened between him and Sarah the night before his graduation was very unambiguous. This was solid, one-night-stand territory. Yes, he had asked for Sarah's last name. But it wasn't for particularly sentimental reasons.

Alix Spiegel

Sarah felt the exact same way. She thought, very reasonably, that Dan was incredibly young and had a lot of growing to do. So thank you, no thank you.

Dan had post-graduation plans. The kind of post-graduation plans parents approve of, about maybe going to medical school and becoming a doctor, and-- oh, yeah, that's right. He had a gig starting in the fall.

Alix Spiegel

But on the car ride home, Dan started thinking about what had happened. Objectively, it was just crazy. Dan only had scraps of information about this person, Sarah Blust, this person he had first imagined when he was a freshman, staring at her photo.

He knew that she was in public health, as was he, she was a good dancer, as was he. And he took these scraps, and as we inevitably do, started weaving them into a story, a new story, one with an impressive series of coincidences that, when you stepped back, did look a lot like fate.

Alix Spiegel

Now I don't want to seem like I'm judging Dan for changing the whole course of his life based on what was really pretty slim evidence plus one coincidence. I understand the lure of the story he was taken with. And I, myself, obsessively tell stories as a way to navigate the world. I'm the queen of hopeful projection.

This strange, feverish storytelling started when I was young, a habit I picked up in the practice room as a way to escape. I would walk in little circles and make up stories about myself and other people. In college, I did this almost every day. I'd walk in little circles for hours, usually until my legs ached.

Like Dan, I was extrapolating from what really happened to what I hoped would happen in the future. Say I'd have some small encounter. Maybe a teacher would offer a kind word. Maybe a boy would nod in my direction. And my imagination would take it from there, build a whole life on those scraps. In my mind, I'd visualize the look of the teacher as they offered me the selective internship that would lead to a dazzling career in public policy or law or, for a very brief period during my senior year, silk screening.

Of course, I always kept this little-circles habit secret from everyone. I was aware it was not normal behavior. The one person who knew about it was Sarah. When we lived together in college, she accidentally discovered it.

Alix Spiegel

But Sarah didn't seem to mind, didn't seem to think I was a freak at all. In fact, the opposite.

Alix Spiegel

Thing is, as I've gotten older, I've grown more wary of this kind of storytelling, conscious of how often the stories we tell ourselves lead us down the wrong path.

Alix Spiegel

What happened with Dan and Sarah, the wild serendipity of it, gave it the silhouette of one of the most popular stories in American life, the fated love story. I think the fated love story, and the idea that romantic love is the one relationship that can fulfill you, has a unique weight and primacy. It's the kind of story that displaces other stories, easily sweeps them aside, which is what happened with Dan.

He dropped out of the Peace Corps, drove to New York, and instead of working in public health, got a job at the Stereo Exchange in Manhattan. On his way to this unglamorous new life, he wrote Sarah an email, framing his new plan in the most casual, non-threatening, just happened to be dropping everything and moving to your city way possible.

Sarah responded with, whoa, that's a lot. Not sure about that. Dan then responded, understand. Seems reasonable. I'm aware I don't really know you. All I'm saying is that we should go on some dates. See what happens.

Sarah told me about all of this at the time. And honestly, I was pro. She'd had a string of boyfriends who didn't seem like good partner material. And I could tell right away that Dan was solid, which from the perspective of the anxious friend, was a relief. Sarah also saw that Dan was a good guy with good values. And she thought he was fun. But she obviously had real reservations.

Alix Spiegel

Particularly, what he was getting into in one significant way. Sarah was past 30 and was very clear she wanted children.

Alix Spiegel

Dan hadn't been planning on having kids so early. But he had been planning on having kids. And he felt like the most important thing was to find the right partner. And if that turned out to be Sarah, he was game. So they decided to go on some dates.

Their first was a bar in Red Hook that Sarah picked. Then there was the date at the roller rink, where Dan broke out what they both agree were truly killer moves. They had this comfortable vibe. And it was really easy to talk. Really, there was just one problem with this whole situation for Dan.

You see, Sarah Blust, like the rest of us, was nursing her own romantic story. And the other person she was imagining didn't look anything like Dan because her hopes centered so squarely on music.

Music has always been critical to Sarah. She plays the drums, but also guitar, and sings. In fact, music is what brought us together. Our first year of college, we founded an alternative girl band called Succubus, which played all four years. After college, Sarah went on to other bands, many, because music just lights Sarah up.

Alix Spiegel

This, of course, is a common romantic fantasy which, like Dan's, "we are fated for each other" fantasy, doesn't always work out well. Unfortunately, for Dan's version of the fantasy, one day, several months after his arrival, Sarah Blust went to a concert, the show of a moderately famous indie band she'd long admired. And the drummer became quite smitten with Sarah, as she was with him.

Alix Spiegel

Poor Dan didn't stand a chance. He was science, not music. And the new guy, the drummer, in addition to being closer in age to Sarah, he was just as enthusiastic about their coming future.

Put it another way, why do I never end up on a pirate ship in the middle of the Hudson River?

In the interest of journalistic transparency, I will tell you that I was extremely and correctly anti drummer from the beginning. I was firmly team Dan. I made this case to Sarah repeatedly, as is my practice. But in that moment, she was too taken by the story that she carried in her head.

Alix Spiegel

After about a year of hanging out on the sidelines, Dan gave up and moved on. Eventually he did become a doctor. Today he's a professor of medicine. He specializes in HIV and AIDS.

20 years on, it's clear that the story he constructed on his ride home from college wasn't true. But he says, in that story, he discovered a useful lesson that he carried forward, and that shaped, he says, his behavior when he finally met his wife.

Alix Spiegel

As for Sarah, like Dan, she's married and has a beautiful kid, with the same red hair and joy as his mother. But she'll tell you, straight up, that there were moments during her single life when she really regretted that she didn't see the great person standing in front of her.

She says she saw Dan as this 23-year-old kid, but now feels like he was actually probably more mature than she was. In fact, she's kind of like the Sarah Blust in the story that Dan wrote before they met. That Sarah Blust didn't end up with the guy from Keep, but every once in a while, remembers him.

Alix Spiegel

I guess that's the cue for sad music to play. But on the other hand, isn't that also a story that might not be true? Maybe if Sarah had chosen Dan, I'd be here telling you a different version, one where Dan, confronted with the reality of actual babies in his 20s, bolts the scene. That's the whole damn thing about stories though, isn't it? You can never tell if one is true or not. And there's always a new one beckoning.

But here's the thing. I am the one who is telling this story. So I can tell it however I want. And I don't want to end it with a sad soundtrack because as Sarah would tell you, she doesn't feel sad. Sarah's soundtrack is punk and pop and marching bands and lullabies and sure, some sad core. But every life has some sad core.

Speaking of music, I'll leave you with this, a song from the back catalog of Succubus, the band Sarah and I started our freshman year. She played the drums with her eyes closed. I played a green electric guitar. Together, we blazed a trail of punk-rock glory across North Central Ohio.

Lilly Sullivan

Alix Spiegel, she's a producer on our show.

Coming up, strangers come into your house, look at all your stuff, size you up. They think they know you. How close can they get? That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Lilly Sullivan

It's This American Life. I'm Lilly Sullivan, sitting in for Ira Glass. Our show today, The Lives of Others, stories about when you find yourself thinking about people you barely know or don't know at all.

In putting together this week's show, I was thinking a lot about the film, The Lives of Others, a movie about East Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's about a Stasi agent, whose job it is to spy on a playwright.

Lilly Sullivan

For most of it, you watch the Stasi agent, whose life is bare, austere, alone, as he listens in on the life of this playwright, whose life is full of art, beauty, sadness. You watch the agent, in headphones, eavesdropping on the apartment he's bugged. He reads the book the playwright reads, listens to the most personal conversations with his girlfriend. And he starts to become moved by the playwright's life.

The agent, who you always see listening in alone, in a dark room, comes to care for the writer, to the point where he eventually tries to protect him. What I remember most about the film is the ache, the sense of longing, and the distances there always are between people. But then there are these moments where there can be this portal of emotion from your life to someone else's.

There are other jobs where thinking about someone else's life is just built into it. We're wondering what that's like in jobs with much lower stakes than being a government spy, like pet sitting That's what act Three's about. One of our other producers here, Aviva DeKornfeld, realized pet sitting is a job just like that. She talked to a dozen pet sitters, who confirmed it, and has this story about two of them. We're calling this act, If These Dogs Could Talk. Here's Aviva.

Aviva DeKornfeld

This is L. She started pet sitting a couple of years ago. And she made a point to tell me she never snoops. In fact, she asks people to leave everything she'll need out on the counter so she doesn't have to go looking for anything. But even without snooping, so much of the pet owners private life is so nakedly on display, what they watch on Netflix, what they have on their fridge. You can't help but glean bits of information about the person you're standing in for.

Aviva DeKornfeld

L ambiently wonders about all her clients. Mostly she's in it for the dogs. But there was one client, in particular, that she found herself thinking about because her house felt different than the others.

Aviva DeKornfeld

This togetherness, side-by-side gaming, is not typical. L sat for another couple, where the guy had his music room, the woman, and her crafting table, very separate hobbies. That's way more common, she says. L also like how much this couple seemed to prioritize comfort.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Just to be clear, L's never met the husband, never seen the two of them together. She has no idea what they're like as a couple. But she'd like to imagine them sitting on their big, comfy couch, chatting agreeably, deciding what they wanted to do that day. In L's imagination, arriving at a decision was always easy for them.

Aviva DeKornfeld

L started dog sitting for this couple about a month after her marriage fell apart. Her ex-husband was a real plastic-on-the-furniture kind of person, definitely not into comfort. She said he never relaxed.

Aviva DeKornfeld

L would spend days alone in this couple's house, on her own for the first time in over 10 years, like she was in some strange, on-set audition for a life she hoped to have for herself one day. One day, just as L was about to head over to the couple's house to dog sit, she got a text.

Aviva DeKornfeld

L, of course, recognizes that when big things happen in your life, the dog sitter is not at the top of the list of people to fill in. This couple barely knew her. In fact, if she was doing her job right, when the couple came back home, there'd be no trace of her at all.

Months passed. And she didn't hear from them. When Christmas rolled around, she sent the a holiday card, like she does with all her clients. The card was returned to sender.

Aviva DeKornfeld

I wanted to reach out to the couple to find out if L was right, if they really did get divorced. But L, reasonably, didn't want me to reach out. It felt like too much of an invasion of their privacy. And I realized not knowing the real answer, that's actually truer to how these things go. You wonder about people. You try to imagine their lives. And mostly, you don't get to know.

For so many of the pet sitters I talked to, the things from the pet owners lives that got to them and stuck with them were things they wanted for themselves. That was true for L. It's also the case for this other pet sitter I talked to, Peri, in a very different way.

Here are some things to know about Peri. She's 29. She's an acupuncture student. And a few months ago, she started pet sitting for a grieving family. The dad of the family had just died.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Peri's lost three close family members over the past few years. So in a way, she felt like the exact right person to pet sit for this family. She knew how to be there for them while they were in the thick of it.

The family had been a family of four, a mom and dad in their 50s and two grown kids in their 20's, one at college, the other still living at home. The mom and dad had always walked the two pugs together. After he died, the mom had tried taking the dogs out herself, but told Peri she felt a stabbing pain whenever she did. So Peri started walking the pugs five days a week, which meant she was always in and out of their house.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Peri started noticing that she would think about the dad while she worked. When she'd take the pugs for a walk, she'd think, what was it like for him to walk the pugs? How did he react when they barked at all the other dogs? When she'd greet neighbors, who clearly recognized the pugs, she'd think, they must know why I'm here, walking them. It must be strange to see the wrong person holding the leash.

One afternoon, Peri couldn't make it over to walk the dogs. She'd misplaced her phone. So she hopped on Facebook to find the mom's profile, to send her a message there, to let her know.

Aviva DeKornfeld

It's weird how something you see in someone else's life can totally turn you around. About a month ago, Peri had a moment like this, that she still thinks about.

Aviva DeKornfeld

For the fourth time in four years, Peri lost someone close to her. She was thrown back into that awful, early phase of grief, when everything feels hazy. The night of the crawfish dinner was right after her grandpa died. And Peri said she felt like she was floating, dissociated, just trying to get through it and get back for her grandpa's funeral the next day.

Aviva DeKornfeld

For Peri, who was just starting to grieve her grandfather, it was comforting to see the family begin to emerge out the other side. It wasn't within reach for her just yet. But it was nice to know it was there.

Lilly Sullivan

Aviva DeKornfeld is one of the producers of our show.

Lilly Sullivan

Our program today was produced by Aviva DeKornfeld and me. The people who put our show together today include Phia Benin, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Bethel Habte, Cassie Howley, Chana Joffe-Walt, Seth Lind, Tobin Low, Alaa Mostafa, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Laura Starcheski, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Today is the last day for our office coordinator, Charlotte Sleeper. She is off to New Zealand. And I'll miss her. Special thanks today to Ben Calhoun, Mary Fuller, Mitch Harris, John Paul Brammer, Levi Vonk, and Kasia Thomas.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thank you to our show's regular host, Mr. Ira Glass. If I've told him once, I've told him 100 times. Do not help me with my crossword.

Today, I was trying to figure out a clue, '90s dram-com with James Van Der Beek. It was driving me crazy. What was it, Dawson's something? Dawson's Landing? And I heard him.

Creek. Creek. Creek.

I'm Lilly Sullivan. We'll be back next week with more stories of This American Life.