802: Father's Day

Ira Glass

For Father's Day this year, it seemed fun to rerun this episode from the earliest days of our radio show. This is an episode that I co-hosted with my dad. And this was made so long ago that my father in this recording, he's the same age that I am right now, in 2023, as I'm saying these words to you.

Ira Glass

Now, you better explain to our radio listeners in what context you actually sat in front of a radio microphone, Dad.

Barry Glass

Well, it was around 1955 or 1956 when I graduated from Maryland. And instead of getting an honest job, I went to work in radio.

Ira Glass

So here's a tape of what you sounded like back in 1956 on the radio.

Barry Glass

Oh, please don't play that tape.

Ira Glass

This is three years before I was born. And you're just a kid in this recording. You are 23 years old.

Ira Glass

How could somebody, Dad, how could somebody who's charging $1 for a reading even afford to buy a radio ad?

Barry Glass

Well, look, she's been to Europe. She got her education there. So they must have taught her something over there.

Ira Glass

[LAUGHING] So, now, at some point, you gave up your burgeoning career in radio really before it took off the ground, and that was because?

Barry Glass

It was nothing important. It was something called making a living.

Ira Glass

Right, and so now you're a certified public accountant living in Baltimore.

Barry Glass

Right.

Ira Glass

Well, let me say this. Let me give a little explanation that we try to give each show for new listeners. Each week in our program, we document stories of life in these United States, using all the tools of radio storytelling-- documentaries, monologues, found tapes, anything we can think of. And today, for Father's Day my co-host will be my own father, Barry Glass, certified public accountant.

Barry Glass

And it's a real kick to do this.

Ira Glass

I know. This is our little Father's Day adventure together.

Barry Glass

You could have bought me a tie.

Ira Glass

Dad, why don't you read the billboard?

Barry Glass

Our program today will have four acts. Act One, Sandra Tsing Loh finds out that the world sees her father very differently from the way she sees him.

Ira Glass

Act 2, "And If That Diamond Ring Don't Shine," Ian Brown talks about everyday moments that test any father.

Barry Glass

Act 3, "The Moment Dad Left."

Ira Glass

Act 4, "Reconciling With Dad."

Barry Glass

A story from playwright Beau O'Reilly.

Ira Glass

So, Dad, take us into Act 1, will you, please?

Barry Glass

Act 1, "How the World Sees Your Father."

Ira Glass

So, Dad, our first story today is from Los Angeles. It's from Sandra Tsing Loh, as you said at the beginning of the show in the billboard. When she was growing up, her father was not a fun dad. He himself had been orphaned in Shanghai when he was 12. He was raised in poverty, and because of that, he was just this-- penny pincher doesn't even capture it. He was miserly.

They didn't celebrate Christmas. He never took his children to Disneyland, even though it was less than an hour away from their home. There were no real vacations. Sandra tells the story once she bought a book of Charlie Brown comics for $1 at a book fair, and her father threw it across the room, furious at how she had wasted money. He was really strict. But as Sandra found out recently, not everyone in the world sees her father the way she does.

Sandra Tsing Loh

There's a kind of news that you're never prepared for, and here, last week, was mine. A friend told me that, incredibly, a local grunge band had composed a rock anthem about my dad and was performing it to great response in Malibu area clubs.

The group in question was called Boy Hits Car, and the song, a wailing rock cri de coeur powered by Pearl Jam-like riffs, was, in fact called "Mr. Loh." The actual cover of the Boy Hits Car demo tape was a grainily xeroxed photo of a tiny, wizened 76-year-old Chinese man, grinning on a Malibu beach in tattered swim trunks, which was, indeed, my father.

I have to admit, however, that the Mr. Loh in the song was not one I was familiar with. As seen through the eyes of lifeguard/singer Craig Rondell, Mr. Loh is a mystical, dreamy figure who swims naked among the dolphins. In the duality that characterizes certain types of rock poetry-- I'm reminded of The Doors-- the natural dance Mr. Loh does on the beach brings the listener comfort while, at the same time, poses a profound spiritual challenge.

["MR. LOH" BY BOY HITS CAR]

Sandra Tsing Loh

My first instinct was that this had to be a sick Freudian joke one of my siblings was playing on me, as in, what is the most wildly unlikely, most fraught with amazing ironies, most wacky '60s Peter Sellers film thing you can imagine could happen to our family? But no, my father was these Malibu surfers' Eggman. He was their walrus. I decided to meet them. Craig Rondell, bass player Scott Menville, and guitarist Louis Lenard were all too happy to come into a studio and explain how their song came to be.

Talking to these guys, it suddenly occurred to me who my dad really is. You know how every neighborhood has its eccentric-- the cat lady, the parrot man, the guy with the umbrella hat and recycling cart who yells? Well, in my Southern Californian hometown, Malibu West, my dad is that person. It's an unsettling thing to realize about one of your own parents.

Yes, of course there's a Naked Handstand Man song. Unbelievably, the "Mr. Loh" song they'd recorded was only the latest in a decade-long aesthetic exploration of my father on the part of Boy Hits Car bassist Scott Menville.

Sandra Tsing Loh

I invited my father to join me and the band in the studio. He doesn't really see all the fuss about his nakedness.

Sandra Tsing Loh

But if some young people want to see his nakedness as a symbol of something more important, well, my father is happy to be of service.

Sandra Tsing Loh

Of course, with all due respect to the members of Boy Hits Car, in my opinion, my father is the least likely candidate to become a symbol of individual freedom of spiritual introspection of the healing powers of nature. After all, this is a man who believed all three of his children should get PhDs in engineering, or else they would starve in the street. Then, again, all these things may be a matter of personal interpretation.

Sandra Tsing Loh

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a competition to collect cans for spare change is not the sort of communing with nature, say, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled, which brings me to another point.

I have to say, there is something sort of poignant about sitting in a room full of young people who are hanging onto my father's every word. He's like an odd little guru, they his apostles. God knows he never got that from my sister or brother or me. At one point, for reasons too complicated to explain here, my father sang the boys in the band a Chinese folk song that he had translated into French.

Sandra Tsing Loh

Why not? Sing another one. If this makes my father happy, well, then, I guess I'll try to be happy for him.

["MR. LOH" BY BOY HITS CAR]

Ira Glass

Dad, do you have the script for the back notes?

Barry Glass

Yeah, I have it.

Ira Glass

OK, why don't you give the back notes?

Barry Glass

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer, performer, composer, and columnist for Buzz Magazine.

Ira Glass

This is Ira in 2023, today's show's rerun. I am jumping in to say that Sandra actually has a new comedy called Mad Women of the West that's running at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles right now. Her dad, Mr. Loh, died a few years ago at the age of 96. And the band did a live performance of this song at his wake.

["MR. LOH" BY BOY HITS CAR]

Ira Glass

Hey, Dad, one of the things that you often complained to me about, about stories that you hear on Public Radio is that they're too long. How are we doing so far?

Barry Glass

How long was that story, in total?

Ira Glass

The total story is about 11 minutes.

Barry Glass

That's a pretty long piece.

Ira Glass

Too long, do you think?

Barry Glass

Yeah, I think it's too long.

Ira Glass

Did your interest flag?

Barry Glass

No, my interest didn't slow down. However, if I were listening to the show at home with other distractions around, it might lag off a little bit, I think.

Ira Glass

Dad, it's time to open up Act 2.

Barry Glass

Act 2, "Father's Music."

Ira Glass

Now, Dad, for this act, I asked you to bring in an example of the kinds of music that you, my father, used to play around the house when I was a kid, because you had music going whenever you were home on weekends and--

Barry Glass

Absolutely.

Ira Glass

OK, so what did you bring in?

Barry Glass

Well, I brought three Frank Sinatra CDs.

Ira Glass

Right on. Can you just choose a song and let's pop that on?

Barry Glass

Sure.

Ira Glass

What have you got?

Barry Glass

Probably my favorite Frank Sinatra song, "Lady is a Tramp."

Ira Glass

Now, why is this your favorite?

Barry Glass

I don't know. I just like the rhythm, like Frank Sinatra's phrasing.

["LADY IS A TRAMP" BY FRANK SINATRA"]

Barry Glass

I remember the 60th birthday party.

Ira Glass

Your 60th birthday party, of course.

Barry Glass

Right, where we had the Frank Sinatra impersonator.

Ira Glass

Sure.

Barry Glass

Well, this is-- he sang this there. Did a pretty good job, too.

Barry Glass

What do you think? Pretty good song?

Ira Glass

It's a great song. And this next story that we're going to do is about a fatherly duty that is linked to a song, but not a good song.

Barry Glass

So it's not "Lady is a Tramp" or anything like that.

Ira Glass

Oh, definitely not. This song is actually "Happy Birthday." I think you're going to like this next story, Dad. It's definitely from the dads point of view. It's about being a father. Ian Brown recorded this for us at a show that we did in front of a live audience.

Ian Brown

No one arrives fashionably late for a seven-year-old's birthday party. That offends rule one of parental life-- never waste free babysitting.

[LAUGHTER]

But all seven guests at my daughter Haley's seventh birthday party were dropped off by their parents mysteriously seven minutes early. That sort of behavior is just plain rude. It was like being swarmed by a gang from Planet Tiny. They dropped their coats in the hall and immediately scattered to the farthest corners of the house like some new, instantly contagious form of biological weapon.

And I staggered upstairs with a small mountain of coats in my arms, which is not a chore I saw myself performing back when I was young and longing to be grown up. Even when I was 11, I wanted to be married because married people, I knew, had sex every night of their lives.

[LAUGHTER]

But that's another story. I was lugging coats. Back downstairs, Trish, the mother of Katie, Haley's best friend, two best friends ago, Trish shot me a knowing look. Magician, right? How can you tell, I said. Fiber optic wands by the forks.

And that was the first hint that my wife and I might have gone slightly over the top birthday wise. That we might have stepped over the strict moral boundary that separates caring, thoughtful parents who believe in personal attention and quality time from cheese balls like us who try to buy their way into their children's hearts.

It's easy to commit that social gaffe these days. My wife and I both work. The harder we work, the guiltier we feel. The more we want Haley's birthday parties to be-- well, visible from outer space would be gratifying. We'd been planning Haley's seventh birthday, or to be slightly more accurate, my wife, Johanna, had been planning it, and I'd been doing nothing--

[LAUGHTER]

--for weeks. What there was, was a cake iced by professionals in the shape of a magician's top hat, which cost 30 bucks, eight loot bags filled with thoughtful, age appropriate, peanut-free party favors at $15 a bag, and of course, the magician himself at $150 for two hours. He called himself the Amazing Robert.

[LAUGHTER]

I don't think he meant that ironically.

[LAUGHTER]

Now, I like to do something special on Haley's birthday. Still, don't you think, I said to my wife as she frantically tried to find a magician who wasn't booked three months in advance, don't you think we might be overamping? But honey, if we don't go slightly crazy, Johanna said quite logically, some other parent will. Then what's Haley going to think? And anyway, do you have a better idea?

And I did not have a better idea. My sole contribution to the magician party had been to suggest that we include a whoopee cushion in every loot bag, or at least, it was my idea to blow them up [BLOWING] and put them in the loot bags pre-inflated. In the old days, when Haley was small, we kept her birthday simple. I learned that lesson when I lived in Los Angeles near Beverly Hills.

In Beverly Hills, parents like their children's birthday parties to have a theme and a fairly significant theme at that-- manifest destiny, say, or a NASA moon shot. In LA, I never went to a birthday party that featured anything less than pony rides. And one mother actually gave out Gucci T-shirts in the loot bags. And it was hard to compete with that.

In an act of defiance, a friend of ours, a struggling writer, staged her daughter's birthday in a park, of all places. And the kids had a good enough time. They ran around and swung on swings and played tag and generally reveled in the whole two hours when they weren't under the watchful eye of a nanny or armed response security.

The grab bags contained what grab bags are supposed to contain-- candy, rather than Rolex watches. And afterwards, the Beverly Hills parents flocked, they literally flocked around our friend. Fabulous idea, they said. Nature-- who would have thought? Can I steal a theme?

But our friend Katharine is the queen of the less is more, easy on mummy birthday party. She says children want strong experiences, not new ones, which is why last weekend, for her daughter, Mary's seventh birthday, Katharine invited six girls over to string gummy bears onto extra long bamboo satay skewers. That was the theme of the party--

[LAUGHTER]

--skewering candies on a stick. There was some risk of eye injury and the entire gimmick seemed to have Freudian undertones. The little girls kept saying, I'm going to stick this skewer up gummy's tiny butt--

[LAUGHTER]

--and giggling hysterically. But all in all, it was a winner. Only one girl barfed. The entire party cost 15 bucks-- Canadian.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

It is true that Katharine had a pinata. Pinatas are excellent because they entail hitting an object violently with a stick. But those were the old pre-bacchanalian birthdays. By the time Haley turned five, the year of our most corrupt and therefore most successful birthday, we'd gone as low as a parent can go. We'd hired human Barbie.

[LAUGHTER]

For $300, human Barbie dressed up in full-sized versions of Barbie doll outfits and came to your house. Human Barbie arrived in a Dodge Grand Caravan with human Mitch, her assistant--

[LAUGHTER]

--two giant mobile racks of party dresses for the girls, a tea set in a case, and two chests of makeup. She dressed the kids, discussed the possibility of multiple careers, and fed them cake. All our friends were completely horrified.

[LAUGHTER]

I might as well have said, oh, this year, Haley's having a crack party.

[LAUGHTER]

We're having a cake made of crack, too. My Canadian friends put this crassness down to the fact that Johanna, my wife, is an American. But successful? Well, it was as if the Dalai Lama had made a stop at our house. The girls were hypnotized with awe. They spent most of the afternoon standing in a circle, brushing human Barbie's hair.

[LAUGHTER]

I had the feeling that secretly, quite a few mums wouldn't have minded giving it a try themselves. As it turned out, I needn't have worried about the Amazing Robert, the magician, either. He was a handsome guy with sideburns and a wry, if somewhat resigned, manner.

He knew what he was doing, though. He started cracking jokes with the kids right away. You must be Haley, he said to one of the boys as he walked through the door. No, Peter said. I'm a boy, and clapped his hands. Hey, the magician said. No clapping. So all the kids clapped. I said, no clapping.

By the time he started pulling eggs out of their noses, you know they were goners. And I chose that moment to run upstairs. And I find I need a moment alone at regular intervals at these kiddie birthday bashes-- also at adult parties. In fact, I could use a moment alone right about now.

[LAUGHTER]

But when I opened the door to my bedroom, what do I find lying, lying on my bed, surrounded by entire mountain ranges of miniature winter coats? Two of my adult guests holding hands. Their spouses were downstairs. I must say, they played it cool. Headache, the woman said, rubbing her temples, not that I asked. Yeah, I said. These kids' parties can be brutal.

And I tell you, I left fast. I didn't want to ask. I certainly didn't want to know. And downstairs, the Amazing Robert was making cards disappear and reappear, but Trish, Katie's mom, she kept staring at the magician. I thought she disapproved of his tricks, but then she gave a little shriek. I know, she said. I knew I knew that magician! He has just come through a terrible divorce from a birthday clown.

[LAUGHTER]

Which pretty much says it all, doesn't it? It's terrible, getting older. The disappointments and the letdowns, but no child believes that. They want to get older. And if you're seven, you can't wait to be nine. I mean, nine, that is going to be the greatest because they think life just gets better and better and better the older you get.

We grown-ups, we know better, or we think we do, or at least we need to think we do. But I didn't have much time for such maudlin thoughts and, frankly, convoluted ones because a new sound was wafting in from the living room, a sound it is, frankly, impossible to be maudlin about.

[FARTING SOUNDS]

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

They'd found the loot bags. Crass? Sure. Cheesy? Absolutely. Grown-up? Not at all. That's what I liked about it. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Ira Glass

Ian Brown is a roving writer for the Globe and Mail in Toronto, also the author of The Boy in the Moon, A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son, and 60, My Year of Aging Semi-Gracefully. Hey, Dad, it's time for us to give stations a chance to do their local ID breaks and local promos, so I think you have a piece of copy there in front of you.

Barry Glass

I do. Coming up, one father leaves, another one returns, in a minute, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass, our special Father's Day edition. And co co-hosting with me for this day is my own father, Barry Glass, now a certified public accountant in Baltimore, but once upon a time, back in his early 20s, a DJ.

Barry Glass

Ira, you also said you wanted a song dealing with fathers.

Ira Glass

That's right. Did you bring in a song dealing with fathers?

Barry Glass

I did.

Ira Glass

What have we got?

Barry Glass

It's by somebody that you may have never heard of because you're too young-- maybe you have-- Eddie Fisher.

Ira Glass

The only way that I know who Eddie Fisher is-- wasn't he one of Elizabeth Taylor's husbands?

Barry Glass

That's right. That's right.

Ira Glass

He was the one before the guy who she did Cleopatra with. Is that right?

Barry Glass

That's right.

Ira Glass

How very sad for Eddie Fisher. This is all [LAUGHS] I know. Here I am, a person in my mid-30s, an educated person. That is all I would know about him.

Barry Glass

Richard Burton was married to Elizabeth Taylor after Eddie Fisher.

["OH MY PAPA" BY EDDIE FISHER]

The name of a song is "Oh My Papa."

Ira Glass

Dad, it's like Jewish mariachi music.

Barry Glass

Is that on point for Father's Day?

Ira Glass

You couldn't get more on point. Actually, one of our producers--

Barry Glass

You go around singing that about your father?

Ira Glass

I will now, Dad. I promise. At least for the day, at least for Father's Day. Do you want me to do it now?

Barry Glass

No, that's OK.

Ira Glass

No, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. No, no, I'm going to do it.

Barry Glass

I've heard you sing, Ira.

Ira Glass

You can't stop me. (SINGING) When he would take me on his knee and with a smile, he changed my tears to laughter. Oh my papa. Dad, this is going out to you. To me, he was so wonderful. Oh--

Barry Glass

Ira, my heart is breaking.

Barry Glass

We're now at Act 3, "The Moment Dad Left."

Ira Glass

In this act, we have a story from Jay Allison. Jay Allison is this radio producer that all the people who kind of work behind the scenes in Public Radio, we all know him, and he does these really unusual little stories. He lives in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Cape Cod. And one of his neighbors is a guy named Dan Robb, and Dan Robb is a writer and a teacher and a carpenter.

And Jay and Dan had an idea for a little radio experiment. Dan's father left his family when Dan was a little kid, just, I think, three or four years old. And Dan remembered that night vividly, or he thought he did. But he never discussed this with his parents. So Dad, Jay encouraged Dan to talk to his parents about this on tape. And I'm going to play you the story they put together, OK?

Barry Glass

Yeah, I'd like to hear it.

Dan Robb

I remember clearly the morning they told me they were separating. I was three, and they leaned over my bed, which was narrow, and told me this, something like, "Don't think this changes anything, but Dad's moving out." And what I remember is telling them that it was not OK.

Then, later that day, I remember watching my father's back as he walked down the stairs outside the house. They were cement and had a black wrought iron banister running up both sides. And he was walking down the steps away from me. He had a brown tweed jacket on and brown leather shoes, and he was carrying two brown suitcases. He put them in his Jeep, back when they still said "Willis" on the side, and he drove away.

Dan Robb

And he was walking down the steps away from me, and he was carrying two brown suitcases. He put them in his Jeep back when they still said "Willis" on the side, and he drove away. A little while before he left that day, he knelt down in front of me and tightened my belt for me. I have a picture of that. His hands are big, bigger than mine will ever be, farmer's hands or a ballplayer's hands. And he is cinching the belt gently tighter and saying something to me.

Dan Robb

And he is cinching the belt gently tighter and saying something to me. I can't make out the words in the picture, which is black and white, and shows me standing there at three years old in front of the big window that let the monochrome Pittsburgh light into the living room.

The light is stark, as if all of the coal burned to smelt the steel in that city had burned the color out of the air. And it reflects off his hair, which is smooth with Vitalis, and shows his strong jaw and the depth of his dark eyes. There was no abuse in that household, no harsh words that I could hear. Just nothing. No father anymore and my mother sobbing over the dishes in the sink.

Dan Robb

I was three when they leaned over my bed, which was narrow, and told me this. Don't think this changes anything, but Dad's moving out. And what I remember is telling them that it was not OK.

Dan Robb

When my father left my bedroom, it was a turning point for me, too. It was the moment I moved outside the myth of the American family, left it and became a part of something else, something with no affirming mythology to look forward to and my restless memories of that day to look back on.

I became a part of divorce, which is like the death of the family. And I turned down a path less well-marked, less well-lit. But I, unlike my father, no longer wonder if it was for good or for ill. It just is.

Ira Glass

Jay Allison and Dan Robb made that back in the '90s when we first broadcast today's show. Hey, Dad.

Barry Glass

Yes, Ira.

Ira Glass

Do the next act open, please.

Barry Glass

Act 4, "Reconciling With Dad."

Ira Glass

This whole show is like reconciling with Dad, though you and I, we don't need to reconcile, but.

Barry Glass

No, we don't.

Ira Glass

We don't. But Dad, this next story is about a father and son. The father was this pretty well-known man here in Chicago named James D. O'Reilly. He was an actor here and a director from the 1960s through the 1980s. And among people who went to theater, just, he's one of these people who everybody knew.

He was artistic director of the Body Politic Theater and the Court Theater. And he wasn't the most reliable dad. And his son is a guy named Beau O'Reilly, who's a playwright and a local musician and stages a lot of theater here in town. And Beau has this story about his father, including a moment in their lives when they did reconcile, in a way.

Beau O'reilly

When I was a little kid, five or six, my father would do these big variety shows, these musical revues for college theater groups. And I would often appear with him, playing the bad kid in town or the clown screaming the lines of "This Old Man" from the top of a stepladder. And at the show's end, we would rush first to the bar, where my father knew all the girls' names, and then to the train station to catch the last train home.

And I would get very tense then and hot in my stomach, like I was going to burn up and pass out. So we would often miss the last train home and have to spend the long hours till morning waiting in the train station, my father falling quickly asleep, his huge head thrown back in the train waiting room seat. It seemed to hang at an impossible odd angle from the rest of his body like the dot at the bottom of a question mark that knows it has to be there, but hangs odd and unattached.

And the scene, my father drunk and snoring, a big question mark of a presence, would be repeated numbers of times over the next 25 years. My father passed out at the family table on Christmas morning, my father nodding off behind the wheel, my father snoring through the still Latin mass, my father's head thrown back in the last row during my high school production of The Glass Menagerie.

But when he was awake, he was not totally present either. He was this silent, brooding man home once a week for our family dinner. And I would sit up all night in that train station, listening to the muted rumblings of the next morning's diesel engines and the fluttering of pigeons in the ceiling above, my father's snoring made rusty and noisy by too much cigarettes and beer.

When I was 29, something changed between me and my father. I was 29, very drunk most days. And I came home to Chicago to work for my father, I guess. I had rarely seen him in my alcoholic adulthood, his alcoholic adulthood having taken him away from the family circle years ago. And when my father, he got me this job as a house manager and sometimes understudy at his theater on Lincoln Avenue. And he was warm and kind about it, I guess.

This kindness was unusual. It was hard for me to recognize it. I didn't know whether it was kindness really or not. Maybe he just recognized something in my swaying walk and my overly bright, loud way of speaking, a kindred alcoholic spirit. We would from then on do our drinking together late nights at the pub next door to the theater, a pub where we could sit for hours, get a burger and a beer, a pub where my father ran a tab, and I was always on the tab.

Now, the pub tables were family long, with my father always at the head and crowded with actors and confidants, all with one ear pointed at my father, hoping for a good joke from him, which usually came, or some word of praise, which came rarer, but when delivered, were always delivered with a flair and a passion.

These tables would start full, full of people and huge pints of black Guinness and brown beer, but by 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, they would be empty, except for my father and I. Me talking loud and feverish now, lovers and women and broken hearts and politics and plays and broken hearts and lost lovers and lost women and broken hearts. And me doing most of the talking, my father nodding and grimacing, looking appropriately sad.

But his eyes looking away always, scanning the bodies of the young women who moved about in the pub's waning hours. Sometimes these women stopped by the table to speak to my father, him finding sly ways to kiss and touch and pinch them, locking their eyes with his as if his eyes were gift enough to allow him his inappropriate touching.

The pub would close with us still in it, the tables having adopted the chairs and now holding them piggyback. And my father would sign his tab with a flourish, and we would part company. Me often watching him walk slowly up Lincoln Avenue, a large man with a lordly old-fashioned head, always aware that he was like something out of Shakespeare or O'Neill. He might be swaying, but swaying with a charm and a dignity.

The further my father got up the street, the more real he felt to me. There. There. That was the father I knew, half a courtyard away under the hot lights doing Shakespeare's Lear or Brecht's Galileo. And I would stand on Lincoln Avenue crying, the crying of a 29-year-old drunken baby whose father is moving away, always moving away. And that baby knows he's better off having Dad go.

I learned a lot watching my father's theater that year, wonderful productions of Playboy of the Western World and Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, Brian Friel's Translations. My father's performances were always in the center of the plays. And I was the house manager. I was skittish in a baggy suit and non-matching vintage ties, greeting the audience at the door, selling them coffee, but mostly watching the performances night after night.

My understudy assignment was not something any of us ever expected to use, but one week, here it comes. An actor could not appear, and I was to play my father's tortured, crippled son. It was an Irish play about an Irish father and his Irish sons, and I was an Irish son, never mind that I had an Irish brogue like Ringo Starr's Liverpool.

And I'd never appeared on a professional stage. There would be one rehearsal. My father not even on stage, but seated in the audience, chain smoking, hung over, barking orders, orders that moved my body hot and frightened, clumsily around the stage, me mumbling the lines and standing in all the wrong places.

And the night of the performance, I was pacing and shaking in the hall outside of the green room where my father and the rest of the cast were making up and preparing to perform. I could hear them talking, but they couldn't see me at all. They didn't know I was there.

And one of the actors said, with a good actor's projection and precise actor's diction, "Get ready for amateur night." "What did you say?" My father said it quietly, but with force. "Get ready for amateur night." "Well, he'll be fine. You worry about yourself. Prick."

Now, this is the only time I ever heard my father defend me. And I now realize the significance of that. But at the time, I was very angry. And it was the anger that burned the fear out of me like a fog on a new hot summer Sunday. And I was fine when I hit the stage. I was understudy good enough.

And when I played to my father, his eyes a deep well into the heart of Brian Friel's Translations, I actually enjoyed myself. There were moments of real emotion between us. And on the stage, my father was really there. Like I could reach out and touch him, and he would really be there.

And when the lights came down, I stumbled offstage, tripping and falling in the dark. My father was waiting, his big, noble actor head shaggy with sweat, his arms open to receive me. We, hugging, missed the curtain call-- probable first for my father. He was not one to miss a curtain call.

A few months later, my father fired me during his production of The Dresser by Ronald Harwood. My father playing Sir, a bullying, tyrannical, Shakespearean actor Sir. My father was not one to shrink from typecasting.

And one of my assignments was to meet him in the lobby, holding a towel, which he would use to wipe the makeup and sweat from his face before returning to the stage for the curtain call. I wasn't there with the towel. I had wandered off to the pub for a pint before the show ended.

The truth be told, there were probably many nights when I wasn't there. I was off crying into the phone, running off the long distance phone bill for the theater or selling dope out of the theater concession stand to my friends. I was 29 and drunk most of the time.

And my father, he recognized me for what I was. I was becoming very much like him in my 29th year, and perhaps he was embarrassed and uncomfortable having to see himself in me every day. And he was fired soon after from his theater on Lincoln Avenue. And we continued to meet in the pub night after night for many months.

Ira Glass

Bill O'Reilly is a Chicago playwright, and he's also the co-host of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival, which today's show is a rerun. It is now in its 34th year. He'll be performing on July 1 in a tribute to Bob Dylan.

["PAPA, CAN YOU HEAR ME?" BY BARBRA STREISAND]

Ira Glass

So Dad, you're sitting there in a studio in Baltimore. I'm here in Chicago. Do you have our credits?

Barry Glass

I do have your credits.

Ira Glass

All right.

Barry Glass

Our program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and Ira Glass with Peter Clowney, Nancy Updike, and Dolores Wiber. Our contributing editors are Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and the fabulous Margy Rochlin.

Ira Glass

Special thanks today to Bob Carlson at KCRW in Santa Monica for recording Sandra Tsing Loh, her father, and the band, Boy Hits Car, and to Dave Johnson at WJHU, the fabulous Dave Johnson for getting my dad on tape and out here.

Barry Glass

Music help today from Chicago's John Connors. The story about Dan Robb's father leaving comes from Jay Allison's series, Life Stories, which is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ira Glass

That was so smooth. Additional help in today's rerun from Matt Tierney, Stowe Nelson, and Alaa Mostafa. Also worth mentioning Boy Hits Car, the band that we heard from in Act 1, has a new album coming out later this year, 2023. 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. I'm Ira Glass.

Barry Glass

And I'm Barry Glass.

Ira Glass

Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Till then, don't drive like my father.

Barry Glass

Don't drive like my son.