Continuation of Ira Glass's talk about the public radio program This American Life.
No.9: Another way to tell a story
The
purest way to tell a story is a sequence of events. That's what going to draw
you in and pull you forward. And it will create the effect we seek, which
is that you will not be able to turn off your radio. But I can tell you, it's
very rare that something unfolds in front of your microphone in exactly the
way you want it.
So then what you have to just tell people to just tell you stories. If you listen to our show carefully, you'll hear me constantly coaching people: "And then what happened? And then what did he say? And what did you say? And what did she say?:
Six years ago, a little after my move to Chicago, I had this series of stories that I thought it would be cool, that I talked Morning Edition into doing.
I would interview somebody for about an hour, an hour-and-a-half, until at some point I would hit something that they really, really cared about. You hit the issue the person hasn't quite resolved. It's almost like their unconscious starts to speak. And then they start to describe scenes and characters and images. It's almost like a dream. It's like what happens in therapy. And that's what you're going for, because at the heart of every story is some unresolved something expressed in scenes and images and characters. And then I'd cut away all the other stuff and then you'd have this perfect little gem, perfect little object.
This is one of the stories. This guy named Bradley Harrison Picklesheimer. He grew up in Lexington, Ky., a small-town boy. Homo, gay, homosexual. Didn't like women, and really obsessed with high society. And so he moves to Palm Beach, Fla. He would work these high-society parties of the super-rich.
In the early part of the piece, he describes these parties and how you put them together and what he thinks and all that stuff, including a party that cost a half-million dollars. At some point he tells this:
Picklesheimer on tape: [Lush movie music in background.] And they treat the help like the help, you know. And the country boy in me wanted to say, "Now listen here, Honey. You ain't no better than anybody else," you know. But on the other hand, you want her business next year, and you say, "Yes, Mrs. So-and-So." Because when you deal with very wealthy people, they want what they want, and someone will give it to them.
There was this one time where we did this party for an estate in Long Island. And they had planted these flower beds and all of the flowers came up and they were all blue. But in this one bed, there was this one little yellow flower stickin' up, and we were out there working, putting the party up. And all of a sudden, like everything sort of stopped; all the gardeners stopped; all the workmen stopped, and this little old woman wiggled out on a cane, silver cane, in a nightgown and pointed at that little yellow flower and said, "That one, right there! Take that out of there!" And, Honey, these gardeners just snapped, and just like this flower had never existed.
And then later on my friend Tom from New York was out by the truck, crying. I said, "What is wrong with you?" And he said, "You know, I just realized I'm never going to be that rich. I'm never going to ever be able to do that."
And I just thought well, Honey, who'd want to? I thought that little flower just added everything to this estate, myself. I felt like that little flower was me, and it snuck its way into bulb beds and waited down there all winter long to aggravate her and got her dead ass out of that mansion and come up here and pitch us the sermons to get rid of that little yellow flower. So I loved the whole idea of it. And that was the only time we ever saw her.
Bob Edwards on tape: Bradley Harrison Picklesheimer is an . . .
Glass: Hey, you know this thing with the flowers--the blue flower and the yellow flower. Radio is your most visual medium.
Okay, I'll just go straight to it. Daniel Schorr: obsessed with Star Trek. Sylvia Poggioli: a man and a Canadian. Bill Kling and Nina Totenberg: the same person. Never been photographed together.
What number was that? Thank you. Could you keep count?
Alex
Chadwick is my favorite reporter on public radio. When I was trying to figure
out how to write for radio, the person I learned more from than anybody was
Alex Chadwick, and specifically the thing that I learned--and I've told him
this and I think it kind of freaks him out--he is the one who I would hear
jump to these little abstract ideas all through his script.
Look, if you're trained in broadcast, usually you don't say things like, "The thing about the judgment of strangers is . . ." You know, those big general statements that I make. And I make some really big ones. I make ones that are completely indefensible. I'll tell you two, before I get to Alex.
Number one. Every year around Thanksgiving, we do a show about chickens and turkeys--our annual poultry slam. Because there's something about stories about chickens that brings out the best in a writer. Like we have big, important themes that we can't get people to write for us. But if you tell them we're doing a show on turkeys, and you've got guys from the New Yorker. It's magnetic.
But I say at the beginning of the show, the thing about poultry is that, more than any other animal in the animal kingdom, we control every aspect of their lives--everything, the feed, everything. And because our dominion of them is so great, when we tell each other stories about chickens, we are really telling each other stories about ourselves.
That is completely untrue, but it really sounds good and it makes it sound like the show is really important and we're on a really important tip.
The other time that I can tell you about, where I just said something that I knew was completely untrue--and I thought it was so obvious that it was not to be taken seriously. I went to this restaurant in Chicago called Medieval Times with a medieval scholar--this is a true story, there are like 11 Medieval Times restaurants.
The number of people who come through the Medieval Times castle in Chicago--that's what it is, a castle--to see a faux jousting tournament from the 14th Century, is 350,000 people a year, which is exactly the same as the number of people who listen to the public radio station.
And the staff of Medieval Times at this one castle was 250 people. The number of people who work for NPR News out of Washington, including all the editors, all the reporters, all the producers: 170. Their budget was many times larger than NPR's or PRI's.
And what I realized was that I work for a radio network that is less popular than jousting, a sport which has been dead for 700 years.
And I just said it to be funny, but it's not true, and so clearly untrue because, you know, that's not counting all the member stations and their staffs and it's not counting the fact that that's 350,000 people in that one castle over the course of the year, and we have 350,000 people a week or whatever it is. It's like so untrue.
And I didn't realize that people didn't know it was untrue until one of my own producers said to me in passing, "Well, maybe if we worked at Medieval Times." And I was like, "Elise, that is not a true thing!" We made that up. That was just a joke! But she heard it on public radio.
So Alex Chadwick is the one who'd make these big general statements in the middle of his stories. For example, this is kind of a small general statement.
Alex Chadwick on tape: We've delayed a few days bringing you this next story because it hasn't had an ending. It still doesn't, but we're going ahead anyway with our own modest contribution to developments.
Here's the situation. In southern California, in Victorville, at Victor Valley High School, Jennifer Graham, aged 16, would not carry out an assignment in biology class. She refused to dissect a frog. She said it bothered her that any creature should have to die so that she could cut it open for study. It was a matter of principle. And as with many such issues, it wound up in court.
Glass: Ah, you see there? "It was a matter of principle. As with many such issues, it wound up in court." Completely unnecessary to the story he's telling. But it's just like this stepping back; there's a grandeur.
When I was learning to write for radio--this is a weird thing to confess--sometimes I would write entire stories as Alex Chadwick. And they would get on the air. They were good stories. Only I knew--until tonight.
No.12: How do you find those stories?
Generally the way we do the show--it's only four of us on the staff; three producers and me--we'll have one story that we really love. And then we'll go look for other stories that will go along with it.
And we'll go through 15 or 20 stories to get the three or four that end up on the air. What we're looking for is narrative--a story with characters and scenes. And some bigger something is at stake, and we watch these people go through this bigger something.
It's not just documenting everyday life; it's documenting a drama. To give you an example of what I mean, a really good, very experienced radio producer named Dan Collison sent me this tape where he wanted to do a story about going across country with an interstate trucker. It could be an okay story. And he sent me a tape and it's 45 minutes long, beautifully produced with very clear writing. You know, they had their little moments on the road. And the only problem with it was, all it was was somebody driving across the country. There was nothing at stake; the trucker didn't have any burning issue, no thoughts about, like, what am I supposed to make of this? There's no unresolved something at the center of it. So we didn't run it.
Recently, I've been reading A Thousand and One Nights. On the surface, it's kind of a corny idea. The idea is--if you don't remember this from school--that there's a king, and he catches her sleeping with somebody else, and he goes crazy. And so he kills the two of them. And he believes that all women are evil. And then from that point on, every night, he takes a different bride and in the morning he has her killed, so she can never betray him. He does this for three years until there are no young women left. Everybody flees, who could be married to him except for the daughter of his vizier, his adviser. His vizier has two daughters, Scheherazade and Dunyazade, and he makes his adviser bring him Scheherazade, and Scheherazade has a plan, which is that she's going to tell him a story and every night leave a kind of cliff-hanger so he won't kill her.
And in a way it's a really corny thing, like a series of cliff-hangers. And that's part of it. But the interesting thing to me, you've got got this king who's crazy and he believes that women are evil. And every night he decides to send one to death, and every night Scheherazade tells him a story. And almost all the stories are about somebody who's crazy. And sometimes the person knows they're crazy and sometimes they don't. And in almost every story that person is about to judge whether someone will live or die. And every story is structured so that you empathize with the person who's being judged because that's the thing the king lost, was empathy. And every night she does this kind of psychological warfare. And in every single story for 1,000 nights the king in the story lets the person live. And every night the king who is listener, her real husband, hears her tell this story where he's forced to sympathize with the person who's being judged. And at the end of 1,000 nights he isn't crazy any more. [He sighs.]
I wrote a string of stories on the public schools--a story every week or two. And there'd be all these kids in the stories, gang kids, and teachers, and all these people like struggling over these policy issues. And I think that the policy stuff made a small contribution, but I really think that the thing that people remember, and that got to people, was the fact that they could empathize with all the characters, they could empathize with the kids, they could empathize with the teachers. And what people seemed to carry away from it was like a picture of what it would be to be a person in that situation.
And there's something very particular to radio when it comes to this. [Churchy background music begins low.] Because radio, more than your other media, allows you to tell a story where the way a person looks doesn't interfere with what you're getting from it.
I remember I used to do these stories about gang kids, and I always thought that one of the advantages of doing it on radio was that you wouldn't see this kind of tough kid with baggy clothes. On radio, you could just hear their voice and I could tell their story in a way where you would become them more.
Sometimes when it comes to empathy in stories, I'll do two different kinds of stories. There are the stories about experiences that we've all had, like going to the senior prom--I hope we've had--and those stories are about trying to make you relate to characters who are a lot like yourself.
And then there's this whole other set of stories which are like making you relate to characters you normally would not relate to. In those stories, we consciously manipulate the facts to allow you entrance.
We started the show two weeks ago with a story about this Mexican-American girl, Sylvia, who is 17 years old, about to turn 18--and I don't say that she's Mexican until a ways in. I constantly phrase it as, she's an immigrant kid having a quintessentially immigrant experience. Because I felt like as soon as I said the word "Mexican," people conjure images and they think that that's not me, and it just pushes you away.
This is the beginning of the show from a couple of weeks ago. Her parents are immigrants.
Glass on tape: Sylvia's parents are immigrants, very traditional. And at Sylvia's house, the men are men, the women are women, just like back in the old country.
Sylvia on tape: "My brother goes, 'Oh, I want tortillas,' and my Mom, you know, just she's right there on. Like, "Turn off the TV," and she'll go make them. And my brother says, "I want money," and my Mom's right there to give him money. And he says, "Wash this shirt for me--I want to wear it tomorrow." And there goes my Mom washing the shirt.
And it's not like that with me. That's the way she thinks; that's the way she is. She's like, "Well, you know, he's a boy." Like, for instance, "He can't cook for himself--he's a boy." Or he can't do this, because he is a boy and it's a woman's job. And my Mom always has this little saying that really annoys me. She goes--sometimes when the house is dirty, she says, "Oh, it looks like there's never been women in the house," making it sound like women are supposed to clean. And I'm thinking, "Well, Dad can clean, you know." And she goes, "No. He's supposed to be in the garage fixing the car or something."
Glass on tape: It's a typical immigrant story in this country. From the time she was little, Sylvia spoke English better than her parents. She was the one in the family who's call the phone company or the utilities. She translated teacher conferences. If the family was going somewhere and needed directions, Sylvia was the one who'd walk up to the stranger and ask for them.
Now, nearly grown up, she wants to be an American girl, in a way that her parents don't completely understand. She goes to a big integrated public school. A few years ago she started listening to the Cranberries and Nirvana and Metallica, not the kind of stuff her parents knew, growing up in small towns in rural Mexico.
Sylvia on tape: "My Mom wants me to be a typical Mexican girl. Like, when I was younger, before I had my cotillion, I used to start liking alternative music, and my Mom . . ."
Glass: And then she goes on to, you know, tell the story about what's going on with her and her Mom and how they disagree on her future, and the whole thing is designed to make her sound exactly like you and me.
Another example: There were these kids, who we wanted to do a story with, who lived in this housing project on the south side of Chicago. And there were these three boys, total sweetheart boys, really great.
And they made the case that the housing project, one of these high-rise projects just like you see on 60 Minutes, operated like a small town. All their aunties and grandmothers and these huge extended families were all in this one building. And everybody was into everybody else's business. And in this one building they had somebody who cut hair, and two people who had little like places where you could buy candy and pop during the day, illegally, out of their own apartments. And there was somebody who made clothes. And there were the old guys who'd sit out front, and just talk about this and that.
So over the course of this story, we tried to structure the story to make these kids seem like just your kids, if you live in the suburbs, and to try to create empathy, to say that this person is just like you.
One of the things about this subculture, one of the most surprising things, because it was very particular to this world, is that all the girls moved out. Like if you had a daughter and you could halfway get it together to send her to live somewhere else, you'd send her to live somewhere else by the time she was like 13 or 14.
Boy on tape: So if there is some girls in there our age, we don't want to mess with them, because of the situation that they be in and the situation that they be causing."
Glass on tape: You just don't feel that, the girls in the building, there aren't that many who're doing that much that's positive.
Boys: Right. Most don't even go to school no more.
These females that's dropped out is younger than me, and I'm only 17, and they're like 14, 13.
Glass: If this building is a small town, is it one where you guys would choose to live if you had a choice?
Boys: Yes, it's okay to live. [Music begins low.]
It is okay to live. I want to live on my own, to tell you the truth, a place you know where I have a upstairs and a downstairs.
And a basement.
Yeah. And all that.
Glass on tape: Why a basement, of all the things you've named? Why a basement?
Boy: You could throw a party down there, card games. My auntie, she got a house with a basement in it, and that's where she goes when she don't want to be bothered with the people upstairs. She go downstairs in her basement and she's got a nice little TV down there and some furniture down there. I'd always come back and visit the building, because that's where I grew up. It's fine now. But I don't want to be there all my life.
Glass: To me, that number about the basement is like one of my favorite things. When he said it, I just was like, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." The show's going to be okay this week.
Because his dream is so normal and middle class, and anybody can understand it. And empathize. You know, like get inside his head and empathize. In our lives in this country, it is hard to maintain a kind of empathy. Because we are so various as a nation, it's hard to remember to feel for people around us who are so separated. And it's not the only mission of journalism, or the mission of radio, or the mission of public radio, just to tell us the facts and and to analyze the day's news.
It's also, I would say, the mission of public broadcasting to tell us stories that help us empathize and help us feel less crazy and less separate. And just, you know, go straight to your heart. [Music swells and ends.]
Web page originally posted May 25, 1998
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