bad metaphor

“Thirty two bucks to see a guy I hear every week for free?” was my reaction, when I heard that Ira Glass was coming to town. I’m a big fan of This American Life, and I even donate $5 whenever he implores me to each year. But that seemed such a stiff price for radio, unless there were juggling tricks or a rabbit pulled out of a hat, or anything else uniquely communicable through a live viewing. The problem with the radio show is its greatest asset: it’s just so good that I don’t feel like I need to see what’s going on, which is why I haven’t quite gotten into the TV version of TAL (well, that and we don’t get Showtime). I would fork over thirty bucks to go see Radiohead, fill my head with loud guitars and a dazzling light show – but some old public radio guy? I just didn’t know.

“Did you hear Ira Glass is coming to town?” asked Eli’s mother, over lunch one day. I said that yes, we’d heard, and what an exciting opportunity but the ticket prices seemed a little steep, and then I think the food arrived so the focus of conversation turned to that. Later that day, Eli got a call: his parents had bought us the tickets. Because of my offhand, cheapskate lament! I felt both grateful and slightly guilty, emotions that I often experience when interacting with Eli’s well-to-do parents – I definitely didn’t intend to troll for free tickets, though it certainly must have sounded like such to them. (Though I am not Jewish and was never raised strictly or even lazily Catholic, somehow I still managed to grow up with a strong, all encompassing sense of guilt. Who knows where that comes from. It’s probably a ‘child of immigrants’ sort of thing).

Anyway, here’s the show. On center stage there is an unassuming desk with a microphone and some radio equipment – no unicycles, tap shoes, or juggling balls. After the introduction, lights go out. A shadowy figure dimly shuffles towards the desk, and the lights remain off as he talks. “Thirty two bucks to not see Ira Glass?” I think, bemused and a little irked on behalf of the people who paid for my ticket, but the familiar, disembodied voice fills the darkness in the auditorium, and we acquiesce.

The lights flicker back on, eventually – Ira Glass says he wanted to do the whole show in the dark, in the most “radical bit of theater” ever staged in the Midwest, but the Lied Center folks protested on behalf of paying customers (who no doubt would have lodged complaints echoing my initial reaction), so the lights come up and we get to see the wizard behind the curtain. It is anticlimactic, and I actually kind of want the lights to go back off. Not to knock Ira Glass the person, or make him feel self-conscious about his appearance or anything – but his voice is so much bigger than the visual apparition we see on stage, that it is just kind of…weird. He wants the lights off, too, as he finds the sea of our faces a little overwhelming. He pleads ineffectually with the lighting technician to turn the house lights down just a little (“can you turn the lights down to 20? Maybe try 15? Hey, is anything even changing at all?”).

Eventually both he and the audience settle into our respective grooves, accept the visuals, and move on. The theme to tonight’s show – just like with the radio show, his live show has to have a theme – is storytelling, the fundamental building blocks of a story and how to successfully put a story together in a manner compelling enough to draw millions of listeners to check in with your show for one hour every week.

Spoiler alert – if you want to hear Ira Glass tell this yourself, and you hate spoilers, I’d skip this next couple of paragraphs. Right down to the ****, now, go on.

He plays an example of a really amazing story that did not make the air, a story told by his friend Peter, whose father was enraged at the fact that he is being charged for interring his wife’s remains at a crypt. Both Peter’s father and mother served in the military, and as veterans, one of the perks is that when you die, you get a free burial at any military cemetary of your choosing in the country. Even if you are not killed while in service. So the story is that Peter’s father goes to take the remains to the crypt, and the people who work there say, okay, that will be sixteen dollars.

The old veteran protests, “but it is supposed to be free,” and the secretary says that while yes, it’s true that the burial is free, there is a charge for bringing the remains to the crypt (as Ira Glass puts it, “it’s shipping and handling”). And actually sixteen dollars is pretty cheap, as the handling fee for a normal burial is thirty two dollars (or the cost of an Ira Glass ticket). The old man is just infuriated and feels betrayed by the government for whom he fought and risked his life so many years ago. For people who are part of “the Greatest Generation,” their relationship to government is different than the cynical attitude adopted by future generations. American government is supposed to work, and when something is free, it is totally free – no strings attached.

So the old man is so consumed with fury that he actually takes his wife’s remains and dumps them in the parking lot outside the crypt. ! For years and years afterwards, Peter and his siblings would actually tease their father about this (being remarkably sanguine about the parking lot dumping of their mother, Ira Glass notes), and when the father was planning his own burial, he would mention wanting to be buried next to their mother, and the kids would go “oh, you mean in the parking lot?”

This story has all the elements of an amazing story: it’s got tension, it’s got a fantastic plot sequence, and even a greater idea to be pulled out of it, that idea about how the Greatest Generation sees the world today vs. how we see it. The only problem with the story is that it turned out to be 100% not true.

During fact-checking, it turned out that the mother was indeed safely interred next to the father (who passed recently). Either Peter made up this entire story – and it doesn’t sound like it, judging from the bewildered tone of voice he has in the recording Ira plays for us – or the father just came up with this incredible yet totally fictional story, that became so ingrained into the family history that the kids would tease the father about it until his dying day.

So Ira Glass goes on to say that they pulled that story, and had to scramble to find something else at the last minute to put up, and though the story they ended up going with was good, it was nowhere near as incredible as the parking lot ashes story. Even though that story turned out to be false, I still feel that just like the whole JT Leroy scandal, the unraveling of the hoax leads to even stranger and weirder truths. Why would the dad lie about something like this, an incident that paints himself as the type of guy who would desecrate his wife’s ashes over a measly $16 – and keep it up for so long?

****

Ira Glass then starts to take us through the process of piecing a story together, and how he has figured out a formula for stories that succeed on the radio: action-action-action, a moment of withdrawal and reflective commentary by the storyteller, back to action-action-action, etc. He tells us how proud of himself he is that he has figured out this formula, invented it even – and how crushed he is at realizing that not only is it not a new idea, this formula is so ancient that it comprises the basic format of the Bible. But hey, it’s worked this long, right?

Ira Glass’ charm is that he is so approachable, so normal – he talks about how the journalism that TAL does uses an intentionally approachable tone, unlike regular journalism with its emphasis on detachment and sonorous gravitas. He plays a clip for us of a report he did, on air, when he was twenty six (my age!). And it’s bad. He makes fun of himself, as viciously as only one can be towards their younger self, tells us exactly what’s wrong with it. Afterwards he shares a comment from a friend, after she’d heard the clip: “at no point during this is there any indication that you have any talent whatsoever.” He points out that at this point in his career, he wouldn’t have been able to land an internship on his own show. He would eventually become talented, but as a result of a lot of work and effort.

That’s the most important thing I took home from the show. I hate to say that I am inspired by badness (because what kind of person does that make me?), but hearing Ira Glass at twenty six year old gave me a perverse sense of hope that someday – maybe when I am fifty – I can be where he is now. Maybe not the head of the most popular radio show in America, perhaps, but maybe I could be a successful writer. After all, I am at least as bad at writing now as he was at radio. “Create something at least once a week,” he exhorts the audience, and I make a commitment right then to actually do that something, anything, even if it is just to update this silly blog.

He wraps up the show with a telling of one of my favorite stories of all time, the 1001 Nights. I know this story well, but I listen with my breath held in suspense anyways because he is just that good. I see in my mind the crazed king, unhinged with jealousy transformed into deadly misogyny due to one philandering queen. I’m sad and nervous for the wazir, who is bidden to fetch his own daughter to satiate the king’s lust for violence. I totally see Scheherezade flash in my mind for a moment as a nonchalant, gum-chewing Buffy the vampire slayer type when she finds out that she is to be wed to the insane king: “bring it.”

Then Scheherezade, as told through Ira Glass’ voice, does something amazing – she saves her life and the lives of the remaining girls in the kingdom, simply by telling a story so compelling that it holds the king’s interest long enough to put him off killing her until the next night, and then the next. And I actually release my breath, discover that I have been holding it, when the 1001th night is finished and the king says it’s okay, he’s better now. Scheherezade’s stories are more effective than magic. She has subverted her death sentence, taught a man who has lost all empathy how to be human again, all through storytelling.

And that, right there, is at least worth thirty two dollars.