850: If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread as I Walk Away

Ira Glass

This is not a setting where Chris was used to learning anything important, much less having his whole world rocked by something somebody said. He was 15, in health class, in San Juan Capistrano, California. As Chris remembers it, it was the beginning of the period. Class was just beginning to settle down. The teacher was also the school's basketball coach.

Ira Glass

But then the teacher kept going. He wasn't done. He got very specific and said, OK, you might stay in touch with a few friends from high school.

Ira Glass

This is actually one of the producers on our show, Chris Benderev. And he says he remembers the other kids in class, kind of, shrugging this off like, yeah, whatever. But he couldn't.

Ira Glass

Before this moment, Chris hadn't bothered picturing what the future was going to be very much. He had a vague sense that things were going to get better and better. But now, thanks to this random speech by this otherwise forgotten teacher, he realized the future he was facing--

Ira Glass

In fact, as senior year approached, as graduation day approached, Chris says that this tiny, two-minute speech by this teacher totally colored how he was seeing it. He loved his friends.

Ira Glass

Chris actually checked on the health teacher recently. And of course, he had no memory of making that speech, though he said it was exactly the kind of thing that he might have said. And in fact, he did remember saying it at some point to his own kids.

This teacher said that he would like to believe that he meant it in a kind of nice, "cherish these special times" sort of way, and he was horrified at the thought that this made Chris or any other kid feel bad for the rest of high school. But it just goes to show you how somebody can say something off the cuff that can accidentally turn somebody else's world completely upside down.

We asked listeners if they ever experienced this, and hundreds responded. Some of the sentences that were said casually to them that later, alone, they obsessed over.

"It's not your glasses that are uneven. It's your face."

"You must have been surrounded by some pretty insensitive people growing up."

"No, no, you're the only circumcised one in the family."

And one last one, said by a childhood acquaintance at a funeral. "Jenny, little Jenny, you're the one that nobody liked."

In Chris's case, the teacher's comment obviously stayed with him.

Ira Glass

These days, Chris is married. One child.

Ira Glass

Today on our program, "If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread As I Walk Away." We have stories about the things that people say that unravel your world, turn it upside down, shake it like a snow globe-- pick your own metaphor for this.

Some of these off-hand things that people say are completely accurate. Others are the exact opposite. And it can be really hard sometimes to tell which is which. We have real-life case examples, including somebody who thinks his life was completely upended after a single, brief, real-life encounter with Weezer. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. Act One, The World Has Turned and Left Me Here. So let's kick off this show about people saying things that unravel your picture of the world with this, from Lilly Sullivan.

Lilly Sullivan

In my family, there's a story, the kind your family never forgets. It's about a hitchhiker. It happened decades ago, in 1974. There were three women in the car-- my aunt Manuelita, her daughter, and their cousin. Manuelita was driving.

Lilly Sullivan

Manuelita is now 96, and her daughter in the car, Anita, remembers more of the details. So I'm going to let Anita tell a lot of this. She was a kid at the time, 10 years old.

Lilly Sullivan

Anita was scared because they were in Northern California, and there were serial killers-- a few of them-- around there in the '70s. Even at 10, Anita knew this. All three women in the car were small, all under five feet. Anita in the front seat, their cousin Cecilia in the back. Again, here's Anita.

Lilly Sullivan

Manuelita stopped anyway. The man came to the window.

Lilly Sullivan

Anita remembers sitting stock still, staring straight ahead, afraid to make eye contact as a stranger somehow talked them into letting him into the car.

Lilly Sullivan

Serial killer-looking white guy? Turns out, fluent in Spanish. The hitchhiker lumbered into the back seat next to Cecilia. Cecilia had only been in the country a few weeks at that point and was like, what on earth? She was 26.

Lilly Sullivan

Cecilia had just come to the US from Peru. And this is how the story started.

Lilly Sullivan

Brian-- that was the hitchhiker's name, which I know because that guy's my dad. Cecilia-- that's my mom. And this story-- it's the story of how our family came to be, their legendary first meeting.

It was followed by a similarly legendary first date. My mom's sister and cousin dressed her up in their own clothes-- white bell bottoms, white platform heels. My dad showed up in a poncho, and he took her hiking in the redwood forest, where it rained.

He ended up carrying her so that she wouldn't ruin the shoes she'd borrowed. Two weeks later, they eloped, headed off to Reno, but ended up stopping in a random town nearby, where marriage licenses were $5 cheaper. They got married at 7:00 AM on Christmas Eve. Anita remembers them coming home after with their marriage license.

Lilly Sullivan

Her mom, Manuelita.

Like I said, legendary. This story is the bedrock foundation of how I see my parents, especially my dad. I picture him at 26, his misbuttoned shirt, catching rides through the West Coast alone.

This big white guy from Detroit climbing into this car full of immigrants, just exuberant and thinking, wow, I'm going to marry this lady. And a picture of my mom at 26, having just arrived in the country, self-contained, determined, seeing this weirdo and deciding, yes. Him.

When you enter the family, this is pretty much the one story we make you memorize. And then you could be a citizen of the family. Here's my brother-in-law, Lars.

Lilly Sullivan

And the meaning of this story has always been clear.

Lilly Sullivan

Here I am with my niece and nephews.

There's something predestined about it. This is such an important story, I thought. You know what? I want to visit the spot where the meteor struck.

My dad died 10 years ago. I miss him, always. And he doesn't have a grave. He insisted on cremation by, quote, "the cheapest means possible."

He didn't like fancy things. And I also think that he didn't want to be a burden. Anyway, what I want to remember him was not, like, a location I can go to. I can't, like, put flowers by a tombstone. So how about this place? This legendary spot where he climbed into a car and our family began. So, can't be hard. So where was it?

Anita says it was by the freeway exit by our house. Manuelita says it was an onramp heading downtown. But they're not definitive about it. So I went to the third person in the car that day, my mom. And she says, sure, I know exactly where it was. And then she starts to tell me this story.

Lilly Sullivan

Brian, my dad.

Lilly Sullivan

The bus stop? He was taking the bus? This is not the story I'd always heard. In my mom's version, they weren't in a car. She and Manuelita were walking down the street.

They had just left the Jacksons' house. The Jacksons were a family where my tia Manuelita worked as a cook. She says it was a beautiful day, not raining at all. And most importantly, dad wasn't hitchhiking.

Lilly Sullivan

From my mom's point of view, this is especially mysterious because she's quite certain that Anita wasn't there. Not in a car, not on the street. Not there for this moment at all.

This kind of knocked me over. The hitchhiking story, as I've said, is the origin story of my family. My mom's had a private version of it for 50 years that she's kept herself during the many, many conversations where we tell it?

When my dad died 10 years ago, we wrote about this story in his obituary. Like, printed it in our local newspaper. We ran that obituary by my mom. She didn't think it was worth correcting?

Dad was the memory keeper of our family, a big-hearted, big-brained guy who held on to everything that happened. Who had chicken pox first as a kid? Natalie, he'd say. What was the name of that iguana that we had that died? Mari-iguana, he'd say.

He would absolutely know exactly where this happened. And the thought that he's not here to tell us-- it makes him feel so gone, like we had a favorite photo of him, and we have no idea where it is anymore.

When my dad died, it was sudden, and it devastated me. As time passes, we've lost so much of him. His clothes have lost his smell of wool and sawdust and too much Tide laundry detergent.

And this, it was like losing a big piece of him again, because in his absence and in our negligence, we simply forgot to remember. Unforgivable. I had to fix this. I had to get to the truth.

I forced the three of them-- Manuelita, Anita, and my mom-- to sit down together to try to work this out, come to some agreement about what happened and where. Anita is stunned to hear that my mom and Manuelita don't think she was in the car.

Lilly Sullivan

Mom turns to me.

Lilly Sullivan

She tells the others they weren't even in a car.

Lilly Sullivan

This went nowhere. And the fact that we've been telling this hitchhiking story for 50 years and my mom's never mentioned that she thinks it's complete bullshit? I have to say, that's very much like my mom. She's eminently capable of keeping her thoughts and feelings to herself.

She has feelings, obviously.

But she shows love in concrete ways. An unasked-for plate of fruit, a bowl of soup. She'd give me her kidney or hide a body for me, no questions asked. But sitting around gabbing about feelings-- not her thing. She finds that trying. She'll either roll her eyes or blurt out something explosive and walk away or clam up. Here's us in the car.

Lilly Sullivan

She gets impatient. She dodges. In response, I get impatient with her, about everything. I compulsively nitpick everything she does.

Lilly Sullivan

Rustling that bag makes noise that gets on the mic, I tell her. So does her beaded necklace.

Lilly Sullivan

Rather than engage with me, she whips out her little pot of Mary Kay cold cream and starts stabbing it on her cheeks and forehead.

Lilly Sullivan

I'm a nightmare. She lets it go. She's a good mom. Of course, the day my parents met, there was one other person there-- my dad. I'd interviewed him in 2010, years before he died, before he even got sick.

I've never been able to bring myself to listen to that recording. Just too hard. So I had no memory of what we'd talked about that day. But I had a hunch that if I'd done an interview with him, I would have asked him to tell me this story.

I had no idea where this interview was, but I'd given him a copy, and I knew he would have kept it. The week I talked to my mom, I spent hours digging through old file cabinets and boxes in the garage. I finally found it one night at 2:00 AM. I threw on all the lights, ran into bed, and listened immediately.

Lilly Sullivan

Oh, my god. Of course he has all the answers.

Lilly Sullivan

This recording is from 14 years ago. I haven't really heard his voice in 10 years, since he died. I hadn't forgotten, but I sort of had forgotten, how much fun we had just talking to each other.

And my dad told the same story as Anita and Manuelita. This story my dad tells about their meeting was not news to my mom. She says, yeah, we always disagreed about that. Of course he said that. He's got it wrong. Always has.

Lilly Sullivan

I thought a lot about why my mom prefers her version, where he's walking to a bus stop and not hitchhiking. And the main thing I keep thinking about is, in my dad's version, my mom's people make the first move. Their meeting is kind of random, a split-second fluke.

But in the version my mom likes, everyone's on foot, on this rainless, beautiful day, and my dad sees them and approaches. He makes the first move, which is maybe more romantic. Everyone wants to be chosen. I run my hypothesis by her. She kind of blinks at me blankly, slightly impatient. Nothing.

The day after I found that interview with my dad, I woke up early. And the mismatched memories-- it all started clicking together.

I think their car was parked on the street a little ways from the Jacksons' house, and they had to walk to the car from the house. So my mom remembers that walk. And then they got in and had just started driving when they hit that bridge and saw my dad.

That's, like, a block away from the Jacksons'. No time at all. Easy for my mom to forget. And there he stood, not at a bus stop, but hitchhiking. OK, here's me explaining my theory to my mom.

Lilly Sullivan

We drive to the spot my dad said. You remember.

Lilly Sullivan

The Jackson house is maybe a minute away, around the corner. There are trees everywhere, an intersection between residential blocks. Not much around, except for--

She had been talking about this bus stop the whole time, and I didn't believe her.

[LAUGHTER]

Lilly Sullivan

I knew this road like the back of my hand, and I'd never seen a bus stop there. But here it was, tucked under some trees, just a sign and a little bench.

This was it, what I'd wanted to find, the place our family began, a bus stop I'd driven past a million times. Not the fanciest spot in the world, but pretty, a place you wouldn't mind visiting again.

My mom said next time I'm in town, we should go sit at that bus stop, bring champagne, toast my dad. Probably get a ticket, she said. But to hell with it.

Part of what made this whole project a little weird for me was this thing that I've mentioned a few times, that my mom doesn't really like discussing feelings. But I learned something, talking to my sister Kim about all this stuff, that driving home, I really wanted to tell my mom.

Lilly Sullivan

I brought up my dad's last days, and my mom's mind went straight to their last night together. Cut to the heart of her grief, to this moment when he was dying and they forgave each other for their hurts. We've never talked about this. My mom never talks like this.

Lilly Sullivan

Mom didn't stop there. She told me something else. When I was nine, my parents hit a rough patch in their relationship and decided to separate.

After a few months, they got back together. I never really knew how or why. We didn't like to speak about that time in my family. But as I was talking to my mom about all this, she brought it up.

You want to know the real hitchhiking story, she said. And she told me that during the time they were separated, one day, she was driving down the street, and she saw my dad was walking. And as she approached him on the road, he saw it was her in her Volvo, and he threw his thumb in the air. Cool joke, huh?

So she stopped, picked him up. A couple of days later, they got back together. That's the important story, she said. After that, my parents stayed married another 20 years.

During that time, they had a blast together, sometimes inseparable. The best time of their marriage, my mom tells me, after they returned to that root moment where everything started. Only this time, it wasn't random chance. It was his choice to flag her down and hers to scoop him up.

Ira Glass

Lilly Sullivan is a producer on our show. Special thanks to Lilly's sisters. This song is one of their dad's favorites. He used to play it for them on the piano when they were growing up.

["YOU AIN'T GOIN' NOWHERE" BY BOB DYLAN]

Coming up, one badly tuned instrument on one song at one concert can change your life. That's in a minute, on Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program-- "If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Hold This Thread As I Walk Away." We have stories about small moments between people that suddenly change how everything looks. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, What's With These Homies Dissing My Girl?

In his early 20s, Mike Comite wanted to be a professional musician. He was trying his absolute hardest to make that happen, until one day, it all came undone-- weirdly, right in front of Weezer. Mike tells what happened.

Mike Comite

There's this video. I've watched it more times than I'd like to admit in the last decade and a half, kind of like a retired football player watching old game tapes from his glory days, who pauses and rewinds that one play where he tore his ACL over and over to see where his career went sideways. It happened at Bonnaroo, this music festival with some of the biggest acts in the world.

That year, Dave Matthews Band and Jay-Z were playing. It was 2010. The band I was in was invited to play on one of the medium-sized stages, which was a huge deal for us. There'd be over 2,000 people watching. It'd be the biggest stage we'd ever played on.

But then, I saw that Weezer was also playing Bonnaroo. It felt like some kind of fated opportunity. We were actually covering a Weezer song in our set, and so I had this big idea.

Our front person, Julia, was a musician who had blown up on YouTube. She had thousands of followers on social media. What if we got them all to tweet at Weezer's lead singer, Rivers Cuomo, to see if he'd come sing with us? I asked Julia, and she was game for it, and shockingly, it worked, better than we could have hoped.

Rivers didn't come sing with us. Instead, he invited Julia to come play her ukulele and sing with Weezer during one of their songs on the main stage. Julia's visibility at Bonnaroo would be multiplied tenfold. If this went well, who knows where it could lead? Maybe Weezer would bring us on tour with them as their opener.

Our agent immediately submitted us to their team for some of their upcoming shows. Or maybe Rivers would write a song with Julia, play on our record, or she'd play on theirs. The possibilities kept me up at night.

I was 22. I'd only been playing music professionally for a year at that point. But I was convinced this would be the moment that would transform our careers. The day of the show, Julia split off from our group to rehearse with Weezer on their tour bus. I felt a little sting finding out I wasn't going to meet them, too.

Weezer went on a little before sunset. Me and the rest of the band sat way back in the crowd on some bleachers, while Julia was somewhere backstage. There had to be at least 20,000 people between us and Weezer.

I couldn't believe that a dumb idea I'd cooked up in rehearsal had led to this. The song Julia was going to play on was called "Tripping Down the Freeway." Weezer started it a few songs into their set.

Mike Comite

Julia is off stage for the first half of the song. But after the guitar solo, Rivers brings the band down to a vamp and has Julia come out kind of dramatically.

Mike Comite

Julia walks on stage, strumming her uke, but something sounds off.

Mike Comite

They are not in the right tuning. She's in a different key.

Mike Comite

For a split second, I'm convinced I'm having a nightmare. I try telling myself to wake up.

Mike Comite

Nope. Weezer is still on stage, having a conversation mid-song about Julia's tuning through the PA system. Rivers pivots.

Mike Comite

He turns to the crowd and starts talking about how Julia had ended up on stage with him that day, about Twitter, about Julia's fans.

Mike Comite

He's making fun of her? I start clenching my jaw from the stands.

Mike Comite

I'm mortified. I can't believe how mean he's being to her. Just so passive-aggressive. At this point, our crew member who's been sitting next to me, excitedly filming Julia's big moment, quietly stops recording and puts down her camera. This isn't her video. Someone else posted this one on YouTube.

I couldn't help thinking, I'd been the one to suggest she do this in the first place. This was on me. After an excruciating 62 seconds of improv, Rivers wanders across the stage to where Julia is trying to retune with another band member.

Mike Comite

I'm just going to sing, she says.

Mike Comite

Rivers counts off and starts singing, and Julia jumps in.

Mike Comite

Julia looks so small from where we're sitting. But I can tell she's holding her ukulele by her side as she sings. They finish the song. Rivers thanks Julia, and she walks off the stage. I'm sitting in the bleachers, shocked by what just happened. Weezer keeps playing a bunch of my favorite songs, and I can't enjoy them.

Mike Comite

The next day, Rivers tweeted at Julia and thanked her for playing despite the mishap. A few weeks later, Weezer's manager officially turned us down for the opening spot on tour.

In the music business, you need some moment to pull you out of obscurity and propel you forward. And it felt like, for us, Weezer had been it. Instead, we'd blown it. And that was the beginning of the end.

After Bonnaroo, Julia and I stayed busy touring, just the two of us, for a while. But then things slowed down. Julia and her management were about to part ways. I started getting nervous about being able to support myself, so I tapped out of touring with Julia and got a full-time job where a lot of struggling musicians and actors end up-- at the Apple Store.

And so this is when I started watching and rewatching that video, the Weezer performance. I've been doing that for the last 14 years. Each replay, I keep hoping that it won't be as bad as I remember, but it always is. I'm still stuck on, what the fuck happened? And in particular, was it our fault?

On stage, Rivers had made it seem like it. But I've gone through the details again and again. Julia had received tuning instructions from Weezer's road manager. Were those incorrect?

Had Julia done the math wrong tuning her uke? Had I? I'd helped her with that. I found a video of Julia rehearsing with Weezer on their tour bus. She was in the wrong tuning there, too, but no one had noticed?

Julia might know what went wrong, but I never really talked to her about that show. Only once, right after. It was uncomfortable. She was clearly upset, had been crying. She asked to let it go, so I did. But she must remember something from that day. So I called her.

Mike Comite

Julia lives in Austin, Texas now. She's still releasing music, but her career has shifted more towards life coaching and guided meditation. Her memories of the Weezer incident were not as vivid as mine.

She didn't remember how she and Weezer got in touch. She didn't remember what year it happened. She definitely did not have the email from the road manager about the tuning, and she never puzzled over why her tuning was off. Because for her, that whole show was a totally different experience. When Rivers was saying all that stuff about her on stage--

Julia was so much more at peace with the day than I was. She said the band, our band, wasn't sounding good to her anyways. She thought opening for Weezer was a long shot, even if she had been in the right tuning for "Tripping Down the Freeway."

But also, the moment Julia remembered most from that performance wasn't the mistake. It was the part of the video that I usually skip over, the moment where it works out, after Rivers asked Julia if she wants to sing.

Mike Comite

You can't see any of this in the video I'd been replaying all these years. That one was shot from way back near the bleachers, where I watched the show. I almost couldn't believe what Julia described. But changing up the wording of my YouTube search, I found another video from that day, filmed close to the stage.

You can see everyone's faces, and even when the tuning mistake becomes apparent, they're smiling and they're laughing. Julia and Rivers dance. They're having a great time.

Watching it, I felt this wave of relief. It's what I was missing all these years. Julia was OK, and I believed her that the band didn't break up because of a tuning mistake. And this moment wasn't why I stopped playing music for a living.

After Julia and I talked, I finally heard back from Weezer's former road manager. She found the email they'd sent us before the performance, and the instructions were wrong. There would have been no way for Julia and me to tune correctly with them. I had the full answer now, but I was surprised by how little it mattered to me. I was over it.

Ira Glass

Mike Comite. He is one of the super skilled people who work here at the show, doing audio mixes and adding music to our stories. Diane Wu produced this story. Here is Mike playing guitar and singing with Julia, whose full name, by the way, is Julia Nunes. This is a song they used to cover together, years ago.

Ira Glass

Act Three, And If You See Her, Tell Her It's Over Now. In this last act, we turn from small, personal moments to big news that the whole world experiences, but that hits some people very, very personally. You probably saw the headlines and reports that a couple of weeks ago, after his family ruled Syria for over 50 years, the president/dictator Bashar Al Assad, was run out of his own country very suddenly.

Assad ran a government that did not tolerate dissent. He used chemical weapons against his own citizens. He spent much of the last 13 years brutally crushing an uprising. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed, tortured, disappeared.

More than half the population was displaced in that conflict. Six million Syrians fled the country. So when a rebel coalition forced Assad out two weeks ago, Syrians all over the globe had their world turned upside down, and a few of us here at the show called around to see what that's been like for them. Diane Wu put together this story.

Diane Wu

The regime collapsed late on a Saturday night. My coworkers and I talked to a few Syrians who are living abroad now about what that night was like for them. One was up studying for an exam. Another was out to an anniversary dinner. He kept checking his phone.

But the person I want to tell you about is Salma. She was in London on Saturday. She lives in another part of England. But watching the news by herself in the days before that, she felt like she had to be around other Syrians. So she got on the train and headed to her friend's apartment. She'd been crashing there since Thursday.

Diane Wu

It felt like their job to not look away. Something huge was happening back home. The rebels kept taking more and more ground each day, liberating more and more cities with hardly any pushback. Everyone was worried that Assad would do something desperate, like retaliate with chemical weapons or bombings, or that Russia would jump in. Salma and her friends were barely keeping it together.

Diane Wu

They notice there is a pattern to his fainting. First, he'd start sweating profusely, then go stand in the door to cool off, then head towards the bathroom.

Diane Wu

Salma told me that her friend who kept fainting had been detained by the regime when he was a teenager, three times. He fled Syria after the third time, but his parents are still there, and he was really concerned about them. Other people in the room were also having physical reactions from all the stress and fear.

Diane Wu

It was from inside this crowded apartment, scattered with takeout containers and nervous bodies, that these friends then witnessed a sudden unraveling that none of them had anticipated. Salma is from Damascus, the capital, which was the seat of the Assad regime.

And as the rebels kept advancing across Syria, taking Hama, and then As-Suwayda, and then Homs, her friends from those cities celebrated around her. If the rebels succeeded, her hometown would be the last to fall. When Salma saw a video of people standing on a tank in Umayyad Square in Damascus, singing "Jannah Jannah," a revolutionary song, it was finally real to her. It was over.

Diane Wu

They stayed up all night, and then celebrated more the next day in Trafalgar Square. Then Salma went home and mostly laid in bed in the dark for a few days, trying to make sense of this brand-new world. Salma's family had left Damascus in the first year of the war, 2011, when she was 15.

They moved to Connecticut, where she joined the soccer team and tried to do regular life while going to protests against the regime on weekends. Now, she had to figure out how to reverse this thing she's been doing since she was a teenager, separating herself from Syria.

Diane Wu

Someone else I talked to described it like this. Syria was on a different planet from the one he lived on now. There was no way to visit it. He had to flip a page, start a new life. Better not to think about it anymore.

But now that the regime was suddenly gone, Syria was back on this planet, a place like any other place. And they had to reset their minds to take that in, which was hard to do after so many years of doing the opposite. Salma started thinking about visiting home, not just in a dream way, but the logistics of where she would stay when she went back.

Diane Wu

The euphoria of the regime falling was laced with heavy feelings, too. In the days following the collapse, as Salma learned just how many people who'd been disappeared by the Assad government had been killed were not coming home, she had another panic attack.

Salma's been watching all kinds of videos coming out of the new Syria, and there's a particular type that delights her-- one I wasn't expecting.

Diane Wu

Watching these people just be silly and happy-- for Salma, she sees that as getting to watch them finally be free.

Diane Wu

There's pretty much no way to overstate how much there is to do next, how many things will need to be figured out, how many unknowns there are. But one person told me, none of it could be worse than what we lived through already.

Ira Glass

Diane Wu is a producer on our show. This story was co-produced by Hany Hawasly.

Ira Glass

That's Mike and Julia covering Weezer's Sweater Song, "Undone."

Our program was produced today by Lilly Sullivan. The people who put together today's show include Phia Bennin, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Cassie Howie, Chana Joffe-Walt, Henry Larson, Seth Lind, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, and Matt Tierney.

Our managing editor, Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Natalie Sullivan, Kim Sullivan, Sarah Kim, Steve Sopchak, Erin Maree Comite, Dave Burns, Todd Johnson, Leanne Victorine, Darien Woods, and Yazan Abou Ismail. To become a This American Life Partner, which gets you bonus content, ad-free listening, and hundreds of our favorite episodes of the shown in your podcast feed, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes.

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 invented this new appetizer where you put a hot dog in a handful of straw. What's he call it?

Ira Glass

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