94: How To

Ira Glass

It's a how-to manual, just six pages long, written by a sixth grader in Brooklyn named Peter. He handed it in to his teacher three years ago. She still has it.

Ira Glass

The manual gives step-by-step instructions on how to protect yourself from all sorts of unwanted visitors, that's all sorts of unwanted visitors says the teacher, Melissa Cantor.

Ira Glass

The chapter on the Wolfman begins with this little pep talk. "First think," it says, "why would the Wolfman come to your house out of all the houses in Brooklyn?" But if you're afraid, here's what you do. Number one, sleep with a glass with water in it. Number two, Peter tells you to close the blinds, get under the covers, put a fan on.

Ira Glass

The kid had the props right-- the fire, the soft music, the wine. He just wasn't clear on how everything fit together, which, in a way, happens all through this how-to. It's a hodgepodge. The dinosaur advice has images lifted straight from Jurassic Park. The Wolfman section has one practical piece of advice taken, really, from any middle-class dinner table in Brooklyn. "After you kill the Wolfman," it says, "if you think your mom will get mad from all the blood, take seltzer and paper towels and pat it. Then scrub."

Ira Glass

The how-to form. It's ingrained in us. It's part of what we are, how we make sense of the universe. Consider this story. In 1696, in England, the law changed, and suddenly people in England could publish whatever they wanted without getting it approved first by the king and his censor. And so there was this explosion of publishing. And within just a few decades, the single most popular kind of book, as soon as people could sell and buy any kind of books they chose, these were how-to books. In particular, how-to books written to teach people, mostly women, how, through education, self-control, and hard work, any family could better itself, could enter what we come to think of now as the middle class.

And here's where it gets interesting. The advice books on how to become middle class came before the existence of an actual middle class. People followed the how-to instructions, bettered themselves, and the middle class emerged. We would not be who we are today without how-to. There's a straight line from those 18th century books of personal betterment to every Tony Robbins infomercial, every Jane Fonda workout video, every Martha Stewart magazine article-- stuff that gives you both step-by-step instructions and a motivational dream, a dream that you can transform yourself into a different person.

Which brings us to today's show. Each week on our program, of course we choose theme and bring you a variety of different stories on that theme. Today's show, how-to's, and what happens during a how-to, and what our how-to's say about us.

Act One of today's show, Roadrunner, in which I teach one of our regular contributors, Sarah Vowell, how to drive, and I find out that a simple how-to is never as simple as you think.

Act Two, How to Date a Blackgirl, Browngirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie. Junot Diaz explains what to do with the government-issued cheese in the refrigerator when you bring a date over to the house.

Act Three, How to Increase Your Value as a Person, an act in which we try to tackle the biggest possible how-to we could think of, how to make your life worth more. And we get answers, real practical answers. Stay with this.

Ira Glass

Act One, Roadrunner. We don't even agree on where this story begins. As far as I was concerned, it was just another how-to story. Our contributing editor Sarah Vowell wanted to learn how to drive, and I would teach her in two quick lessons.

Sarah Vowell

For me, it wasn't even about driving. It was about fear. Nothing scares me more than driving. Nothing. I can't even ride a bike without mangling my digits and hitting parked cars. I've always been terrified that I'd get behind the wheel and it would be a big Shangri-La song with people screaming, "Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!" Somehow I didn't mention this to Ira before we began.

Ira Glass

And this, I think, is how it usually goes with any how-to. A how-to seems like the most rational, orderly thing in the world. You know you do step one. You do step two, step three. Follow the diagram and instructions. Before you know it, creme brulee or the toy train set is assembled, or you're a more effective, convincing public speaker, whatever. But in fact, the logical step-by-step process is just a veneer of civilization cutting the vast paranoia that is not knowing, and the process of learning itself, which is inherently irrational, which brings us to the car guys.

Ira Glass

These of course, are Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of NPR's Car Talk. I called them up to ask for practical advice on how to teach Sarah how to drive.

Ira Glass

What was I thinking? Tom and Ray articulated rules of the road so obscure that no one actually follows them.

Ira Glass

No useful tips on steering or shifting or traffic, but the sages of Car Talk Plaza did have one prediction about what happens when you teach someone to drive.

Sarah Vowell

When people ask me why I don't drive, I usually say, my sister drives. And to most people, that sounds like such a loony idea. But my sister and I are twins, and when you're a twin, there can be a very clear division of labor. I did the mental things. She did the physical ones. I learned to read before she did. She learned to ride a bike years before I did. Driving was her jurisdiction. Criticizing her driving was mine.

After one humiliating attempt to learn when I was 16, I simply blocked the possibility out of my mind. I'm never going to drive, like I'm never going to murder anyone, like I'm never going to like Celine Dion. It was that huge.

Ira Glass

So it comes the day when Sarah's supposed to go down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get her learner's permit. And she stops by, and I'm still thinking that we're just doing this little radio story, not realizing that, in fact, this is her greatest phobia. And I notice that she has this look on her face that I can only describe as pre-throw up, as she nervously flips through a copy of the Illinois state driving rules.

Listening back to that conversation now, I am pained. I don't know who that humorless fanatic was. Though in my defense, I was grasping for any reason to get out of this driving mistake. Let me assure you that I care about fossil fuels precisely as much as everyone else in America, which is to say not at all.

Ira Glass

So Sarah passes the test to get a learner's permit. I rent a car, and we head out to an elementary school parking lot.

I was asking a lot of questions, not just because I wanted to know, but because I was stalling.

Ira Glass

She asked about the mirror, as if reflective glass was this crazy, newfangled gadget.

Ira Glass

This is the thing about a how-to. You find yourself explaining things, putting words into sentences that you never imagined you would ever be doing.

Sarah Vowell

After more stalling than we can possibly recount here on the radio, there was no avoiding the moment I'd been dreading since I was 15.

And then we drove in circles. Literally, circles. And it was a surprisingly nonverbal kind of how-to. Mostly I just watched while Sarah got a feel for the car's controls, how much spin on the steering wheel actually turned the car, how much pressure on the gas pedal yielded how much speed. And I have to say, she was a natural.

It was like learning to play the piano, how in the beginning, you look at your hands as much as you look at the music. The hard thing isn't decoding the notes. It's doing it in time without stopping to think about every little move.

After half an hour in which I played the driving equivalent of chopsticks, Ira took over the wheel again to take us to the next parking lot. I watched the streets while he drove, and suddenly they looked so narrow and fraught with the danger. My beautiful city of orderly boulevards and responsible fellow citizens now looked like some film noir back alley where you can't trust a soul, where a dame's pretty smile gets you nothing but the jaws of life, where even the parked cars looked like they were packing heat, and they didn't care who knew.

Ira Glass

Meanwhile, in the real world, I looked for a bigger parking lot to practice driving in. And then we drove past Rosehill Cemetery. Perfect. Like a big, deserted public park with long winding roads, no cars, nobody around. Nobody we could hurt anyway.

Ira Glass

Sarah drove on snow. She handled intersections. I thought she was doing great. But then she started to act very, very strange.

Ira Glass

In any how-to, there are the actual skills that you're learning and then there is the fact that by learning these skills, you are actually becoming, in a small way, a different person. And during the how-to there's this period where you have the skills but you do not yet see yourself as a kind of person who has those skills, as the changed person. And this period, it can last for hours. It can last for years, really. Forever.

Sarah Vowell

I'd sort of forgotten there'd be other cars around. I had problems of my own without worrying about the other drivers, not just their actions, their actual existence.

Ira Glass

And this brings us to the part of our story that we think of as the frightening near misses.

Sarah Vowell

A word about this next recording before we play it for you. Remember, please, driving is my greatest fear. And it's not a totally irrational fear. There are things about driving that are in fact dangerous, like learning to pass another car without hitting it. So what happens when you confront the scariest part of your greatest fear? Well, I don't know about you, but I laugh, a lot.

It was like that the first time when I was 16 and my sister tried to teach me to drive. I got behind the wheel and started giggling so maniacally and so uncontrollably for so long that she kicked me out of her car and made me walk.

Ira Glass

So all of which to say, the first two times that another car passed us on the road in the cemetery, Sarah drove straight off the street. Here's what it sounded like.

But I'm such a brand-new driver that I have no habits. Five minutes after I'd lurched away from the truck, a Buick passed, and I was compelled toward it like a magnet. Ira grabbed the wheel and swerved us away.

This is the thing that I never suspected. I thought it was just going to be like, step one, step two, step three, easy, learn to drive, no problem. I never realized that I was actually going to get scared.

Ira Glass

Sarah looked to the left, looked to the right, and pulled into traffic down a narrow residential street.

Ira Glass

Sarah named her first book after a line from this song, a song all about driving.

Sarah Vowell

I thought it was all about listening to the radio.

Ira Glass

Anyway, the celebration turned out to be a little premature.

Sarah Vowell

The song was so blissfully distracting, it was hard to keep pace with traffic. And four cars, in a kind of convergence of hate, honked a big, "Howdy, neighbor, welcome to the car class."

Ira Glass

It suddenly seemed like a very good idea to turn off the tape.

Sarah Vowell

Despite the occasional close call, it was a very good start. But our second lesson the next day led us to a side of our how-to that-- I mean, I guess I should have seen this coming. After all, I did have the warning from the Garage Cassandras, the Bards of Stratford on Charles, the oracle at Car Talk Plaza.

Ira Glass

We'd gotten along OK on the first day. Day two began with this insane claim on the part of my friend Sarah Vowell.

Ira Glass

An impasse. Any teacher will tell you, in any how-to situation, there's the actual learning part and then, the trickiest part of all, motivation.

Ira Glass

Sarah knew how to drive. She just didn't remember why she should drive. So I tried to evoke for her the picture of an America in which she could hit the open road, like Dean Moriarty, like driving is America, like there's a fundamental idea of what it is to be an American that is bound up in every hit-the-road song and movie and story that either of us have ever loved and probably you listening to my voice right now, in your car, listening to the radio that you also have loved, like, "it's waiting out there like a killer in the sun. Just one more chance. We can make it if we run." All of that. I went through all of it.

Didn't work. She mentioned something about the highway within that I didn't completely understand. So I switched tactics.

To feel the freedom of the road, you don't need Jack Kerouac. You just need Jack in the Box. Drive-through.

I know most people think of the drive-through as a visual and gastronomic blight. But my sister and I are obsessed with them. Our dad wouldn't go through drive-throughs when we were growing up. I think they make him nervous, partly because he's deaf. He only approves of fast food when it's served on the fancy trays, so we think of drive-throughs as these objects of desire, full of the thrills denied to us so cruelly for so long.

Three left turns later, we pull into the drive-through lane of a Burger King.

Ira Glass

Those of you familiar with the customs of life here in the United States of America need no explanation of what happens next. We give the guy some money. He gives us food.

Ira Glass

We pulled into a parking space to eat.

Ira Glass

It was a really remarkable thing to see. Half an hour before this, she never wanted to drive ever again, never wanted to join the part of our American culture that is behind the wheel. It was an epiphany, an actual epiphany, all taking place at a Burger King. She overcame the greatest fear of her life at a drive-through window.

And now, my fellow Americans, we have arrived at the drive off into the sunset portion of our story, even though it was the middle of the day, even though we were heading east. We went up Irving Park Road to the highway, Lake Shore Drive, the most beautiful street in America.

Ira Glass

Trees and old beautiful buildings, the whole city of Chicago to our right. Lake Michigan to our left. Eight lanes of speeding cars. We merged.

Ira Glass

Coming up, if she's from the neighborhood, take her to El Cibao to eat. If she's not, Wendy's will do. And after dinner, what to say when you see the sunset and other how-to's including how to value your own life, in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and reporters and performers to tackle that theme. Today's program, How-to. What happens during a how-to, what our how-to's say about us. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie.

You know, one of the most common kinds of how-to's, going back to when they begin has always involved how to act to seem attractive to someone else. In that genre, we offer this story from Junot Diaz. A warning that some of this might not be suitable for younger listeners.

Junot Diaz

Wait for your brother and your mother to leave the apartment. You've already told them that you're feeling too sick to go to Union City to visit that tia who likes to squeeze your nuts. "He's gotten big," she'll say. And even though your moms knows you ain't sick, you stuck to your story until finally she said, "Go ahead and stay, malcriado."

Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. If the girl's from the Terrace, stack the boxes behind the milk. If she's from the Park or Society Hill, hide the cheese in the cabinet above the oven, way up where she'll never see. Leave yourself a reminder to get it out before morning or your moms will kick your ass.

Take down any embarrassing photos of your family in the campo, especially the one with the half naked kids dragging a goat on a rope leash. The kids are your cousins, and by now they're old enough to understand why you're doing what you're doing. Hide the pictures of yourself with an Afro. Make sure the bathroom is presentable. Put the basket with all the crapped-on toilet paper under the sink. Spray the bucket with the Lysol, then close the cabinet. Shower, comb, dress. Sit on the couch and watch TV.

If she's an outsider, her father will be bringing her, maybe her mother. Neither of them want her seeing any boys from the Terrace. People get stabbed in the Terrace. But she's strongheaded, and this time will get her way. If she's a white girl, you know you'll at least get a hand job.

The directions were in your best handwriting, so her parents won't think you're an idiot. Get up from the couch and check the parking lot. Nothing. If the girl's local, don't sweat it. She'll flow over when she's good and ready. Sometimes she'll run into her other friends, and a whole crowd will show up at your apartment. And even though that means you ain't getting [BLEEP], it will be fun anyway and you'll wish these people would come over more often.

Sometimes the girl won't flow over at all, and the next day in school, she'll say, sorry, and smile. And you'll be stupid enough to believe her and ask her out again.

Wait, and after an hour, go out to your corner. The neighborhood is full of traffic. Give one of your boys a shout, and when he says, "Are you still waiting on that bitch?" say, "Hell yeah." Get back inside. Call her house. And when her father picks up, ask if she's there. He'll ask, "Who is this?" Hang up. He sounds like a principal or a police chief, the sort of dude with a big neck who never has to watch his back.

Sit and wait. By the time your stomach's ready to give out on you, a Honda or maybe a Jeep pulls in, and out she comes. "Hey," you'll say. "Look," she'll say, "my mom wants to meet you. She's got herself all worried about nothing." Don't panic. Say, "Hey, no problem." Run a hand through your hair like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.

She will look good. The white ones are the ones you want the most, but usually the out-of-towners are black-- black girls who grew up with ballet and Girl Scouts, who have three cars in their driveways. If she's a halfie, don't be surprised that her mother is white. Say hi. Her moms will say hi, and you will see that you don't scare her, not really.

She will say that she needs easier directions to get out. And even though she has the best directions in her lap, give her new ones. Make her happy.

You have choices. If the girl is from around the way, take her to El Cibao for dinner. Order everything in your busted up Spanish. Let her correct you if she's Latina, and amaze her if she's black. If she's not from around the way, Wendy's will do.

As you walk to the restaurant, talk about school. A local girl won't need the stories about the neighborhood, but the other ones might. Supply the story about the loco who had been storing canisters of tear gas in his basement for years, how one day the canisters cracked and the whole neighborhood got a dose of the military strength stuff. Don't tell her that your moms knew right away what it was, that she recognized its smell from the year the United States invaded your island.

Hope that you don't run into your nemesis, Howie, the Puerto Rican kid with the two killer mutts. He walks them all over the neighborhood, and every now and then, the mutts corner themselves a cat and tear it to shreds. Howie laughing as the cat flips up in the air, its neck twisted around like an owl, red meat showing through the soft fur. If his dogs haven't cornered a cat, he will walk behind you and ask, "Hey, Junior, is that your new [BLEEP]?" Let him talk.

Howie weighs about 200 pounds and could eat you if he wanted. At the field, he will turn away. He has new sneakers and doesn't want them muddy. If the girl's an outsider, she will hiss now and say, "What a [BLEEP] asshole." A homegirl would have been yelling back at him the whole time unless she was shy. Either way, don't feel bad that you didn't do anything. Never lose a fight on your first date or that will be the end of it.

Dinner will be tense. You are not good at talking to people you don't know. A halfie will tell you that her parents met in the movement, will say, "Back then, people thought it a radical thing to do." It will sound like something her parents made her memorize. Your brother once heard that one and said, "Man, that sounds like a whole lot of Uncle Tomming to me." Don't repeat this. Put down your hamburger and say, "It must have been hard." She will appreciate your interest. She will tell you more. "Black people," she will say, "treat me real bad. That's why I don't like them."

You'll wonder how she feels about Dominicans. Don't ask. Let her speak on it, and when you're both finished eating, walk back into the neighborhood. The skies will be magnificent. Pollutants have made Jersey sunsets one of the wonders of the world. Point it out. Touch her shoulder and say, "That's nice, right?"

Get serious. Watch TV, but stay alert. Sip some of the rum your father left in the cabinet, which nobody touches. A local girl may have hips and a thick ass, but she won't be quick about letting you touch. She has to live in the same neighborhood as you, has to deal with you being in her business. She might just chill with you and then go home. She might kiss you and then go. Or she might, if she's reckless, give it up, but that's rare. Kissing will suffice.

A white girl might just give it up right then. Don't stop her. She'll take her gum out of her mouth, stick it to the plastic sofa covers, and then will move close to you. "You have nice eyes," she might say. Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because in truth, you love them more than you love your own. She will say, "I like Spanish guys." And even though you've never been to Spain, say, "I like you." You'll sound smooth.

You'll be with her until about 8:30, and then she'll want to wash up. In the bathroom, she will hum a song from the radio and her waist will keep the beat against the lip of the sink. Imagine her old lady coming to get her, what she would say if she knew her daughter had just laid under you and blown your name, pronounced with her eighth grade Spanish, into your ear. While she's in the bathroom, call one of your boys and say, Lo hice, loco. Or just sit back on the couch and smile.

But usually-- usually it won't work this way. Be prepared. She will not want to kiss you. "Just cool it," she'll say. The halfie might lean back, breaking away from you. She will cross her arms, say, "I hate my tits." Stroke her hair, but she will pull away. "I don't like anyone touching my hair," she will say. She will act like somebody you don't know. In school, she is known for her attention-grabbing laugh, as high and far ranging as a gull. But here she will worry you. You will not know what to say. "You're the only kind of guy who asks me out," she will say. "You and the black boys."

Say nothing. Let her button her shirt. Let her comb her hair, the sound of it stretching like a sheet of fire between you. When her father pulls in and beeps, let her go without too much of a goodbye. She won't want it. During the next hour, the phone will ring. You will be tempted to pick it up. Don't. Watch the shows you want to watch without a family around to debate you. Don't go downstairs. Don't fall asleep. It won't help. Put the government cheese back in its place before your mother kills you.

Ira Glass

Junot Diaz's story is in his book Drown.

[MUSIC - "FINE BROWN FRAME" BY NELLIE LUTCHER]

Ira Glass

Act Three, How to Increase Your Value as a Person. Most how-to's make a promise. You're not just going to learn skills. You will be transformed. So, putting together today's program, we thought, what would be the ultimate transformation? What how-to could actually increase the value of human life? And it turns out that we as a society have people whose job it is to think about this very question. And they turned out to be insurance adjusters. Insurance adjusters.

When somebody dies, insurance adjusters review the facts of the case, consider how much juries usually pay for various kinds of lifes and deaths when somebody dies and somebody else is to blame. And then the adjusters recommend how much the insurance company should settle for, what the life was worth. Adam Davidson put together this how-to on how to increase the value of your life.

Adam Davidson

When I was seven, my mom told me about a guy who died because his car blew up. It was the manufacturer's fault, and the man's relatives sued and got about $300,000. I remember wondering about that number. I remember thinking if you were going to assign a number to a human life, it would have to be huge, at least a million. To my seven-year-old mind, a million seemed like the start of the really big numbers.

The other day, I wanted to find out how much my life was worth, so I went to talk to this guy George Karas, an adjuster in Merrillville, Indiana. He looked me over, asked me my stats-- age, job, marital status.

Adam Davidson

My life, worth less than half a second of one commercial on Seinfeld. George explains it this way-- I'm single, got no dependents. And as far as he's concerned, no one would be all that affected by my death. I argued with him, pointed out my parents need me. I make them laugh. I tease them in a way that nobody else can.

Adam Davidson

There's no government chart or general agreement on how much people are worth. If you die and it's someone else's fault, you could be worth as little as a few hundred bucks or as much as a quarter of a billion dollars to your survivors. To come up with a dollar amount for a person's life, insurance adjusters add fixed costs-- medical bills, funeral expenses-- to the more intangible costs, things like loss of comfort, love, affection, guidance.

Obviously figuring out the intangible values is more difficult, but there are basic principles that adjusters and the courts go by. The more people you have dependent on you and the more people you affect positively, the more you're worth. So if you want to increase your value, here's how. Join community groups, tutor some poor kids. Marrying your girlfriend or boyfriend adds a couple million dollars to your value. And while you're at it, have sex with them a lot. Losing the pleasure of sex with you can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Remember, girlfriends don't count. Have a child. That will add another two million. A second or third or fourth child doesn't add anything.

A college degree usually increases your value by millions, same for a high paying professional job. But if you really want to go for the hard cash, the thing to do is suffer. Nothing gets a jury going like misery. Another adjuster, Sarelle Povitsky, explained that to really increase your value after a tragic accident, don't die. Live, but be severely injured.

Adam Davidson

An insurance adjuster told me about a young guy driving a truck full of tires. He crashed. The car caught fire, and the tires pinned him inside. He slowly burned to death, begging for his life. He was a menial worker, single, no kids. Normally, the adjuster told me, he wouldn't be worth 30 grand. But his parents got a tremendous settlement because of his suffering. And it struck me, as I heard this, that in financial terms, the last 10 minutes of this man's life were worth more than the whole 25 years that came before.

Anyone who looks at this stuff realizes pretty quickly that there's something irrational in all these schemes. For example, the single most important factor in determining your worth is not who you are, what you've done, who you love. It's the state or county where you die. In general, if you die in a big city, you'll be worth a lot more than if you die in a rural farming community. Juries in big cities are just more generous.

Adjusters say if you're going to die, die in Chicago or New York, preferably the Bronx, LA, Detroit. Florida is pretty good. Avoid New England, especially Maine. Stay away from the Rockies states. Don't die in Utah. You definitely don't want to die anywhere you can see the stars at night.

George Karas, the adjuster in rural Indiana, told me I would be lucky to get 50 grand for my life, but Sarelle, who works in Chicago's Cook County, knew her juries would be more sympathetic.

Adam Davidson

A million dollars, the price I dreamed of when I was seven. I asked Sarelle what I could do to increase my value even above that. And what she said kind of shocked and disappointed me. Essentially she told me I would have to reinvent myself. In particular, I would have to spend more time outside. It's a peculiar quirk of our legal system that people who enjoy outdoor activities are worth more than people who just stay inside and watch TV.

Adam Davidson

We look to systems of rules, to how-to schemes, to create order out of situations that inherently defy rationality. And it always amazes me to think that when this particular system does its job, a check is cut, it has a dollar amount on it, and that's supposed to be the value of somebody's life.

I talked to one adjuster who said that when someone loses a loved one, they don't want money. They want to get rid of their pain. They want that person back. They're angry, and they want whoever caused the death to suffer. But the only thing we can give them is money. That's all we have. That's all we can do.

Ira Glass

Well this, of course, is the point in our program when we do the credits. And we thought, as part of that, we would have one last how-to. And to help with that how-to, I'd like to welcome to the program my dad, Barry Glass, now a certified public accountant in Baltimore, but in his younger days was a disc jockey in college radio and commercial radio.

Barry Glass

Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and Ira Glass with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder. Senior editor Paul Tough. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Sarah Vowell. Production help today from Rachel Day and [? Sohini ?] Davenport.

Ira Glass

To buy a cassette of this program, call us at WBEZ here in Chicago. The phone number, 312-832-3380.

Ira Glass

312-832-3380. Our email address, [? radio@web.com. ?].

Barry Glass

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Ira Glass

WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who reminds you--

Adam Davidson

Don't die in Utah.

Ira Glass

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

Barry Glass

I'm Barry Glass.

Ira Glass

Don't drive like my father.

Barry Glass

Please don't drive like my son.

Sarah Vowell

And don't drive like me.

Announcer

PRI. Public Radio International.