250: The Annoying Gap Between Theory...and Practice

Ira Glass

There's a gap between theory and practice, and it's an annoying gap. Michael was learning how to box. His punches had some power. He was sparring in these little matches. He was feeling pretty tough. He was feeling really tough, actually. And then, one night, he's walking home on a deserted street and somebody picks a fight with him. Which in a way is exactly what he wanted. When you're learning to fight, you kind of dream that happening.

Ira Glass

There was everything that his training to do in a real fight. And then there was what really happened. There was a gap between theory and practice.

Heather was eight years old, on a school trip, on the bus, and she had to pee, badly. And the bus get stuck in traffic. Here's how she remembers it now that she's an adult. She says that her eight-year-old brain came up with a theory.

Ira Glass

Inch over my seat, you mean like pee on the floor?

That was the theory. You may be able to guess how this worked out in practice.

Ira Glass

The whole thing pretty much cemented her position at the bottom of the social hierarchy in elementary school for a few years. Kids called her the Peeer, Peezilla. They'd leave yellow crayons for her, sitting on her desk.

From the time that we're very young, so much of our life is just making a guess at how things are going to come out-- making a little theory, taking our shot, and then living with the reality of what we've done. It happens in our personal lives. It happens in every kind of group decision. Somebody has a theory about what it will accomplish to invade Iraq, or to cut taxes, or to make a movie starring Ben Affleck and JLo, together as hit men. And they got their theory, they take their shot, they wait for the results.

Today on our show, the annoying gap that results. The annoying gap between theory and practice. We have three case examples for you.

Act One, Rock, Paper, Computer. Jack Hitt in that act explains the alarming difference between theory and practice when it comes to these new-fangled computerized voting machines. Act Two, Detroit Is in the House. An idealistic guy who's done lots of community work ends up representing for Detroit, in the state legislature, where he's witnessing the daily reality of democracy up close, for the first time. Act Three, Zero Divided by Zero Is Still Zero, What happens if you're poor and do everything right, all your budgeting, all your choices? Are you actually any better off?

Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Rock, Paper, Computer. Since the Florida chad nightmares back in 2000, a lot of communities around the country have been speeding up their purchase of new computerized touch-screen voting machines. These are designed to streamline the process of counting votes. They're designed to eliminate potential human error. That's the theory anyway. Jack Hitt explains how it works out in practice.

Jack Hitt

With the bright clean world of touch-screen voting booths coming to so many precincts in America these days, I felt a little nostalgic walking into my local firehouse recently to vote for my mayor. It was to say the least, quaint. I brought along my two daughters. And our local alderwoman, Alfreda Edwards, was there to say good morning. Her regular opponent, Charlie Pillsbury, shook our hands too. The poll workers, about three or four of them, made a grand fuss signing me in. There were poll watchers there as well, the folks from the opposing parties, who ensure that the process moves along honestly. We all drank coffee and chatted about the raging issue in our neighborhood, the location of a new public school. Then a precinct captain pointed me to the booth. And I let my girls plink down the tiny levers. And after fighting about just who got to pull the big red handle, I won. We said goodbye to everybody and left.

But this old world is soon to pass. Sure, there will still be poll workers. But the touch-screen voting booths will eliminate a lot of what those folks did. Instead of people running around with pieces of paper, computers will talk by modem and produce the vote totals.

Jack Hitt

That's Jim March. He's a professional lobbyist by day in California. And he's been fretting a lot about the software running on these machines. Only three companies make them. And recently the biggest one of them, Diebold, accidentally left its supposedly secure voting software sitting on its web site, for anyone to download. And when people like Jim, who knows computers, looked at it, they were alarmed at how easy it would be to hack in and cause some real trouble.

Jack Hitt

Jim's in California. I'm in Connecticut on a friend's PC. The first thing Jim has me do is open Diebold's software called Global Election Management Systems or GEMS and go to where the password is stored. We peel the password off like a piece of scotch tape and replace it with our own.

To demonstrate how this works, we don't hack into a real election. Instead, Jim gives me some old voter data that was part of the primary for the California governor's race in 2002. Essentially what I have in front of me is what a hacker would see if he got inside the system on voting day.

Jack Hitt

And then we change vote totals, which was no more difficult than just typing in different numbers over the old ones. Of course, you might think the system would track such changes and they could be discovered. But then Jim shows me how to clean up my trail and make my escape. He takes me to the audit log, a spreadsheet detailing every change made to the database, every instance when someone has logged in with the date and time, down to the very second of each command. I can see all the history of what's happened here, including my own tampering, all the keystrokes I just made. Jim has me drag the mouse down the page and highlight most of this history.

Jack Hitt

For months this software has been making the rounds on the internet, a kind of play toy for hackers. Especially since last July, when a Johns Hopkins University report on Diebold software scoffed that protections were, quote "far below the most minimal security standards." And went on to say that any insider, a poll worker, a Diebold software designer, or even, quote "a janitor" would be able to untraceably tamper with election results. In August, hackers started passing around a huge file, allegedly a collection of 13,000 pages of internal Diebold people emails written by its own employees that confirm just how easily penetrated the corporate software is.

From the beginning, Diebold has been trying to stop all this. First, they issued a point-by-point rebuttal to the Johns Hopkins report. And it said that the software being passed around the internet by people like Jim is not the version they currently use in their machines. Diebold hasn't talked directly to the press much about all this and didn't return my phone calls either. Most recently, Diebold started issuing cease and desist orders to all the internet users posting these files. They claimed to own the copyright on the 13,000 emails, while at the same time insisting that the documents may not be authentic.

All of this got seriously complicated on Halloween when a second touch-screen voting company, Sequoia, had to admit that they too had left an unprotected copy of their voting software on the internet. I called one of the country's foremost specialists on just such catastrophes, Rebecca Mercuri, the president of Notable Software, a computer security firm, and now a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. I wanted to find out just how much danger we're in and if there's some way to stop people from hacking in and changing votes during a real election.

Jack Hitt

Not the issue? Hacking into voting software when step-by-step instructions to do what Jim showed me are posted on the internet?

Jack Hitt

For Mercuri, the hacking angle is the least of it. The problem is far more fundamental. The problem is that current touch-screen technology, even when it works perfectly, can't do one of the most basic things the old analog machines did. It can't show you proof that your vote was counted accurately.

To understand why this would be difficult for a computer, you have to remember that voting machines must accomplish two slightly opposing things. First, they have to give people a way to vote without anyone finding out who they voted for. In other words, they have to provide total anonymity. But they also have to provide what is known in the voting machine business as auditability. That means if there were to be a recount, there's got to be some kind of paper trail to ensure the votes were counted correctly.

Jack Hitt

The old voting system solved this problem in a graceful, analog way. Punch card technology literally left an anonymous paper trail, the punch card ballots. But what about those lever machines? They're just giant clicking odometers. You can't recount those votes. Are they any different in that way from the computer technology?

Jack Hitt

Strangely, it was the low techness of the lever machine that made it safe. Poll workers understood how they worked. And one of the things the poll watchers, the two representatives from the different parties, typically did at the beginning of a voting day was look inside to see if there had been any tampering. And then easily test to see that a vote goes to the right candidate. Then they'd wind back the machine to zero, and the voting day would begin. Now they're not allowed to do this.

They can't really check to see if the machines work because they no longer understand what the machines do. The computer companies do the checking for them, and provide them with a list of instructions explaining how to turn the machines on. The poll workers have no choice but to trust the company.

Jack Hitt

Somehow, it gets worse. Even if we wanted to train Republican and Democratic poll workers in basic software testing so they could do what they used to do, we're no longer allowed to.

Jack Hitt

For years, Rebecca Mercuri has been going around with her revolutionary new idea, a touch-screen that generates a piece of paper. The voter can look at it to confirm the vote was registered correctly before it drops into an old-fashioned ballot box. Then if there were a dispute, anything from a machine malfunction to a suspected hacker, we could gather up the paper and do a recount. But the industry says it can't be done.

Jack Hitt

Avoiding scandal has already led to some strange events, one of which Mercuri participated in. In 2002, she was asked to investigate a local election where everyone agreed that the numbers for one candidate were way off. It happened of course in Florida.

Jack Hitt

She didn't think it was vote tampering or hanging chads or anything. She just thought that maybe the machine was malfunctioning. All she wanted to do something that not so long ago was pretty commonplace.

Because it was proprietary.

Jack Hitt

Oh yes, the spirit of democracy, the ghost in the machine. In other words, all that busyness at the local firehouse, Alfreda and Charlie out on the sidewalk, the poll watchers inside with their chatter, trading gossip, the tallies carefully noted, or the box of paper ballots carried off under lock and key. Sure, all of that can be replaced by software modems. But it assumes that voting is really just another transaction, like buying a book off the internet, which is where we're headed.

Nowadays, no one sells the old mechanical lever booths anymore, too low tech. And with the punch cards disgraced in Florida, more and more precincts are turning to touch-screen. In 2002, President Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act, which includes $700 million to replace punch card and lever voting equipment. Most recently, the city of Boston and the entire state of Maryland have become Diebold's newest customers, buying into the dream of touch-screen efficiency. So clean, so uncluttered, and free of controversy.

Back when America first opened for business, Europeans were stunned that any country would center its founding on a piece of paper, the Constitution. They thought we were crazy. We had no monarchy, no direct authority from God, no divine right of kings. We put our faith in a flimsy piece of paper, because after all the noise dies down, that's all a democracy really is.

Ira Glass

Jack Hitt in New Haven. In elections this past week, there were new controversies for Diebold. Officials in California are saying that thousands of people may have cast their votes on software that hadn't been certified by the state, as required by California law. And some touch-screens failed in Maryland, prompting a lawsuit by Republicans.

Coming up, more theory and practice. For instance, in theory you want to give $200 million to public radio so you donate to a very fine company, very fine news organization called National Public Radio in Washington, DC, without ever realizing that there is an equally worthy outfit called Public Radio International that also puts out some very fine programs, could use a little cash. But that was your theory. In practice, we actually won't hear about this at all in the second half of the show, which you'll hear in one minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, remember the name, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This is American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program of course we choose some theme. And bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, the annoying gap between theory and practice. We have stories of people coming face to face with that gap. And we are at act two of our program. Act Two, Detroit in the House.

Ten months ago, a political newcomer was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives, not because he had any childhood dreams of being a politician or because he really loved the spotlight or because he wanted power of any sort actually. He just had some ideas about how to make things better in his community, from experience working in the community, plus a masters's degree in public policy, and a law degree. The voters agreed that his ideas were the best. They sent him off to the government to make those ideas happen. And that pretty much was when theory and practice started to diverge. Alex Blumberg spent three days with freshman state representative, Steve Tobocman.

Alex Blumberg

Here are other reasons Steve Tobocman shouldn't be in office. His district is 80% minority, but he's white. At the time of his campaign, he didn't have any actual experience in politics and he was up against a two-term incumbent. And he ran in the most old fashioned way possible, no radio or TV ads, no special interest money. He went out and knocked on doors, every single day for four months.

Alex Blumberg

Steve's district is a poor inner city section of Detroit. A city's whose problems are legendary, of course. It has the nation's highest infant mortality rate, lost half its population since 1950. And to give you an idea of the size of its middle class, the total number of Starbucks in this the 10th largest city in the country, three. 13 fewer than at O'Hare Airport.

Steve had been trying to fix Detroit's problems for years in various jobs with various neighborhood economic development groups. Mostly he fought slow, bureaucratic battles to get abandoned buildings either torn down or fixed up. He can tell you all sorts of modest specific ways that government could help improve things by streamlining the way federal block grants are distributed for example or selling condemned properties to community and church groups for a dollar or to groups to rehab and sell at a discount to low income families. But these ideas usually went nowhere.

Alex Blumberg

This is Steve's wife, Sharon. She says that all this changed during a dinner Steve had with a mentor of his from grad school.

Alex Blumberg

If you've ever wondered what the hell politicians do all day, I can say that if Steve Tobocman's any indication, a lot more than you do, pal. His workday begins at 7:00 or 8:00 AM. And this one includes among other things, a very dull hour plus tour of a social service facility, a 15-minute phone call with an Arab American constituent who believes her teenage son is being discriminated against in school, at the end of which Steve promises to call the principal.

Alex Blumberg

There's a lunch meeting with a business constituent who wants a favor, a staff meeting, some fund raising calls, and then in the evening, a two-hour town meeting in a high school gymnasium on the subject of insurance redlining.

Alex Blumberg

An angry crowd of 20 to 30 Detroit home and car owners complains about insurance rates that are almost 50% higher than rates right across the border in the suburbs.

Alex Blumberg

Steve offers some suggestions. And one middle-aged Hispanic man, in a black satin varsity jacket and a baseball hat, grabs Steve by the arm and says, "We've never heard anyone talk so clearly about this before. You are the one who can help us. You are the light and we will follow you."

Alex Blumberg

Steve gets home at about 10:00 PM.

Alex Blumberg

And now it's 7:00 AM the next morning. And though it's still dark outside, the light is up and driving to Lansing, the state capitol, in his blue Saturn station wagon, where at least in theory he'll be helping the people he met last night. The problem of course is that Steve works with 110 other Representatives and they're all driving up from their own town meetings, where their own constituents have been demanding action on their own quite different grievances.

Getting elected may give you a slightly louder voice, but it also sticks you into a much noisier crowd, the majority of whom couldn't care less about redlining or community development or frankly, the entire city of Detroit. And you don't care about their issues either. In fact, being a legislator involves spending a lot of time dealing with issues you have absolutely no interest in. Sometimes though, the issues you care least about can end up altering the course of your political career, issues with names like the Michigan Controlled Shareowner statute. In the car on the way to Lansing, Steve tells me the story.

Alex Blumberg

Now as a legislator facing a bill you don't care that much about, you have two choices. You can A, assume someone in your party has looked at the issue thoroughly and vote how that person tells you to. Or B, you can do all the research yourself and come to an independent position based entirely on your own principles and convictions. No one does B. Well, except for freshman legislators.

Alex Blumberg

So just a month or two into his new job, Steve found himself reading up on the Michigan Controlled Shareowner statute. which had come before the legislature at the urging of the Todman Group, a private mall development company based in Michigan and owned by the Todman family. They were trying to fight off a takeover by an even bigger mall development company called the Simon Group and they needed a loophole closed in the law to do that. After a couple late nights of research, Steve decided the Todmans were right. And he agreed to co-sponsor a bill fixing the loophole. And that's when all hell broke loose.

There were probably $2 billion at stake. The Todmans and the Simon Group had each hired their own army of lobbyists. All of a sudden there were a 100 or 200 people at committee meetings where usually they're only 20 or 30. Everyone took sides, business groups, unions, and of course, Steve's own party. The Democratic leadership approached him one day and told him to his horror that he was the only Democrat who had agreed to support the bill. Not only that, the Democrats were planning to run TV ads attacking the Todman supporters as tools of big business. And then came a pivotal caucus meeting, a closed door strategy session where the whole party discusses upcoming policies and positions.

Alex Blumberg

Steve's colleagues still mention that speech to him. It was the speech of his young political career. He talked about what the bill would do to protect Michigan businesses and workers. He talked about jobs. He talked about Compuware, the big company owned by Peter Karmanos, that had just built a huge high rise in downtown Detroit.

Alex Blumberg

The Todman bill earned Steve a reputation as something of a rainmaker on the other side of the aisle. And the Republicans who were in charge of getting the bill signed into law were so grateful, they've actually helped Steve move some of his own legislation. But what's funny is that this vote, a vote that enhanced his political standing in his own party, gained him valuable allies on the other side of the aisle, not to mention brought about a positive change in the law, is a vote that he wouldn't have cast today. Steve no longer studies every bill that crosses his desk. He uses his time talking to colleagues, enlisting support for his own issues. If the Todman bill came before him today, he would have listened to his party, not learned anything about it, and voted against it.

Alex Blumberg

Generally speaking, all the Republican amendments do the same basic thing. They exempt certain groups from having to pay the pollution discharge fees.

Alex Blumberg

The line between political pandering and political belief is a hazy one. As I watch Representative Drolet, it seems his opposition is sincere. People tell me he's a principled and committed libertarian. If Steve sees himself as fighting on behalf of people who just want clean drinking water, Representative Drolet sees himself as fighting on behalf of people just trying to make an honest buck, without interference from the state. Both men think that if things ran their way, the world would be a lot better. And both men think that if things run the other guy's way, the world would go to hell in a hand basket.

Watching Representative Drolet, I realize sometimes democracy is not about getting your way.

Alex Blumberg

It's making sure the other guy doesn't get his.

Alex Blumberg

Speeches like Drulet's make the Democrats on the other side of the aisle nervous, especially ones like Representative Jennifer Elkins, whose district is heavily Republican. She doesn't want Gene Ringley of Kleen Gene's Laundromat to think that she's taking $2,000 of his hard-earned money. And she sees that the Republicans are setting a political trap for her. Each of their amendments exempts some group of Michigan voters from this new government fee. If the Democrats oppose the amendments, the Republicans will use that against them at reelection time. She pulls Steve aside.

Alex Blumberg

She tells Steve she overheard the Republicans mentioning her name specifically as someone's target. But Steve tells her not to worry. The Democrats met earlier and agree there's no point falling into this trap the Republicans are setting. They won't challenge the Republicans on any of this. In other words, they're voting for all the exemptions.

Alex Blumberg

On a big light display board at the front of the chamber, member names light up as they press their vote buttons. Red means no. Green means yes. Steve is the floor manager for the Democrats today, meaning it's his job to make sure everyone else knows how to vote.

Alex Blumberg

The debate about the fee bills drags on long after this, for four hours until 6:00 PM, well past the time session usually ends. And one of the bills ends up passing. But the other one keeps getting slammed around. Republicans continue to introduce amendments exempting various sympathetic institutions, farmers, schools, small towns. And they continue to pass with majority Democratic support. And then the Democrats turn around and introduce amendments that directly contradict the ones they just voted yes to, tightening regulations and increasing fees.

Alex Blumberg

These fail, entirely along party lines. There's a highly choreographed feel to the whole thing. People don't cheer and high-five when their amendments pass. And they don't slam their briefcases on their desks when they fail. They're not trying to persuade each other or even to win. Each vote, each amendment, each speech for the record is solely about targeting the other party's positions at election time. The Republicans are trying to catch the Democrats raising taxes on the Boy Scouts. And the Democrats are trying to get the Republicans on record voting against clean drinking water.

But not everything in the day goes according to script. There is exactly one time in the entire debate when someone introduces an amendment as a matter of personal conviction, and not as a matter of party strategy.

Alex Blumberg

A Republican representative, Jack Brandenburg, introduces an amendment that mandates surprise on-site inspections at companies that pollute. In other words, that actually strengthens the environmental provisions of the bill. And he does it for the simple reason that he's worried about all the bad stuff going into the water.

Alex Blumberg

Brandenburg talks for a long time before Steve and the Democrats even realize it's not the usual offering from the other side of the aisle.

Alex Blumberg

The Republicans are realizing the same thing. You can hear the murmuring increase as people try to figure out what's going on.

Alex Blumberg

Brandenburg finishes. The Clerk opens the board. And much more slowly than on any of the other votes, names begin to appear, one after another, many of them green. Republicans voting for a fellow Republican. And the Clerk closes the board. And it looks like the measure has actually passed. But then, the Clerk doesn't tally the results. Sits quietly, watches the Republican floor leader, who's talking heatedly into the phone at his desk. Other Republican leaders circulate around their colleagues. And gradually screen names start switching to red.

Alex Blumberg

At one point, I witness a classic backroom political horse trade done right out in the open, in the most blatant way possible, in the middle of the chamber floor. Virgil Smith, a Democrat from Detroit, sees which way the wind is blowing. Sees that the Republican floor leader isn't going to close the board until he gets enough no votes from his own party to kill the amendment.

And so Representative Smith decides to help them and help himself. He gets up, walks across the floor with his arm held above his head, and his thumb pointed straight up in the air, as if he were raising his hand in school and giving the thumbs sign at the same time. He walks right up to the Republican floor leader, Randy Richardville, who's huddled on the phone, surrounded by his advisers. And he stands there, with his thumb in the air. Richardville puts down the phone, looks up at him, they have a brief conversation. And then, Representative Smith walks back to his seat, still with his arm in the air, but this time with his thumb pointed down. Whatever happened, he's now voting nay.

Alex Blumberg

And it doesn't pass. After a brief digression from the day's script, Republican leaders continue turning green votes to red, until they have what they need.

Alex Blumberg

The weirdest maneuver of the day though, comes at the very end. After spending all day adding amendment after amendment, the Republicans introduce one final amendment. It comes at the very end. And it's rushed through on a procedural maneuver, without a record vote. Steve and all the Democrats scramble around to try and figure out what it says.

Alex Blumberg

Even the press guy for the Republican party is caught off guard, has to head out to the floor to find out what it does. He comes back and tells us with a sheepish smile, basically it takes us back in time three hours. It returns Senate Bill 560 to its original language, stripping off every amendment the Republicans had added, undoing everything Republicans had spent the past three hours doing. Then the Republicans bring this new bill, which is now the same as the old bill, to a vote and it fails. And then the Republican majority leader, Rick Johnson, holds a press conference in which he blames the Democrats, the minority party, and the only ones who actually voted for the bill, for its failure.

In the process, they made Steve Tobacman waste half his day on a huge turkey shoot that helped no one in his district. On the car ride home, we discussed the day. It wasn't all bad. He did manage to get some minor amendment, something to do with fraudulent notary publics, through a committee earlier in the day.

He tells me that so far the best moment of his political career was the first, election night. It was early in the evening and returns were still coming in. He was standing in front of all supporters. And for the first time, he thought to himself it doesn't matter whether I win or lose. I ran a great campaign. I took no money. I spoke about issues that I believed in. I did everything exactly according to my beliefs. Driving home tonight after a long confusing day at his new job, as the rain poured symbolically down from the sky, that night feels very far away.

Alex Blumberg

In Steve's freezer at home in Detroit, there's two foot long pork loin. It's been there for 10 months. It was a Christmas present sent to him by some lobbying group, right after he got elected. Steve's not sure who sent it to him or what it's supposed to get him to do, let alone why anyone thought sending a huge piece of non-kosher meat to a Jew before Christmas would help with anything. Or for that matter, why they ignored the obvious negative symbolism of sending pork to a politician.

In the end, so much of politics is about hope. Somewhere there's a guy at some pork council putting mailing labels on boxes of meat, thinking maybe this will help. And for Steve, making any connection between what he does on a daily basis and what he actually wants to do requires a similar leap of faith. But the compromises he makes now will reward him later. And that somewhere down the line, performances like the one today in Lansing will do some good for someone back in Detroit.

Ira Glass

Alex Blumberg.

Ira Glass

Act 3, Zero Divided by Zero Is Still Zero. This is a story of somebody trying out a new theory on how to run her life. Specifically, how to handle money. It's an excerpt from the book Random Family, in which a reporter named Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent over 10 years following some people who were living in the Bronx. One of the people is Coco, who is in her early 20s at this point in the story, in this excerpt. She has kids. She's on welfare. And at this point in Coco's story, she's living in a church-run residence called Thorpe House, trying to get her life together with the help of the nuns. Actress Liza Colon-Zayas reads the excerpt.

Lisa Colonzeas

Coco was eager to devise a plan for her future. Coco responded most enthusiastically to the workshops on money and budgeting. Every two weeks, she received $125 from welfare, by which time she was often $110 in debt. The Thorpe House covered utilities and rent. Coca hoped the budgeting workshops would teach her how to stop having to struggle-- a problem for which she blamed herself.

The day checks arrived was pickup day. After she picked up, Coco immediately accounted for one top priority-- People I Owe Money To. She always owed someone something-- $8 to Thorpe for change for washing, $6 to a neighbor for food, $15 to Dayland, a drug dealer from around her mother's way, who had lent her $200 the previous Christmas when she had no money for gifts. Coco earmarked the cash by writing the names, "Dayland's" "Sheila's"-- on the actual bills. She also deducted for subway tokens to get to appointments and put money aside for a cab in case of emergency. It wasn't unusual for her to have $5 left, which she then had to stretch for the next two weeks.

She usually owed someone food stamps. Luckily, Coco's girls were under five and still qualified for WIC-- Women, Infants, and Children-- a supplemental food program for specified items-- eggs, cereal, and most preciously, milk. What remained of the money went to clothes for the girls and necessary toiletries. Children's looks reflected the quality of mothering. Sloppiness and dirt were physical evidence of failure, of poverty winning its battle against you. Coco would keep the girls indoors rather than let them look busted-up outside. She spent hours on their hair, twisting and tugging, braiding and curling, liberally applying Vaseline. When she was done, she'd briskly rub her palms together and wipe down each daughter's face. Vaseline also kept their skin from getting patchy. "I want them to perfect. They are so beautiful," Coco said. Weeks ahead of time, Coco estimated the price of clothes she wanted for her girls, including the tax. As soon as she possibly could, she'd make a deposit and put them on layaway.

But budgeting didn't mitigate one of Coco's greatest problems-- everyone around her also needed, and Coco didn't know how to refuse. Sometimes Coco would spend down her money just so she could be the one to use it, allowing her to maintain her integrity. That way if someone asked her for money, she could honestly tell them no, she didn't have it.

The cash had to stretch further with Coco's boyfriend Cesar jailed. He needed winter boots, a coat, socks, towels, and sheets, and commissary money for his hygiene and stamps. Then he'd ask for extra things like a door-size reproduction of his favorite photograph of their daughter Mercedes with her hair in Shirley Temple curls. Coco didn't know how to tell him no. "The welfare money, that's the girls'. It belongs to the girls, not him," she would say, but only to herself.

Coco's sister, Iris, however, knew how to take care of business. Her method was a stern personality. She could ward off potential borrowers with one stony look. Coco couldn't live like that. Coco was too open. Even if she avoided being a bank for near strangers, she ended up as the neighborhood grocery store. People would be knocking at all hours of the day and night, "Coco, you got this? Coco, you got that?'"

Coco's Thorpe House case worker, Sister Christine, worried about Coco's generosity. You either made your way by hardening up, like Iris, or you stayed stuck. Coco didn't see a choice. Coco couldn't ignore the people she cared for, which is why everyone turned to her first for help. The word that came to Sister Christine's mind whenever she thought of Coco was enmeshed. Coco would have said she had heart.

One day, Coco and Iris went shopping. Although Coco had figured out her budget, she deferred to Iris, who she considered a financial whiz. Iris was the only person Coco knew who actually survived on her welfare benefits. "I'm going to give you my list of people I owe and you have to divide it up," Coco told her. At Youngland, Iris exchanged the $12.99 jeans Coco had put on layaway for a similar style Iris found for half the price. Coco would have never had the defiance to ignore the clerk's snooty look. Iris brought her to Big R Food Warehouse and suggested Coco buy the enormous packs of chicken and pork chops. Iris divided them into smaller portions and froze them separately. Coco often forgot to defrost meat in enough time for dinner. Iris had her children's school clothes pressed and laid on a chair the night before. Coco was constantly rummaging around for a hair brush or a matching sock. Coco knew she couldn't replicate Iris's strict adherence to order, but she longed for her girls to sleep in rooms like Iris's rooms. "They for beautiful people," Coco said. In her niece's bedroom, everything matched-- curtains, and bedspreads, and sheets.

But Coco's pride in her sister's way was mixed with concern. The rigidity of Iris's approach to her predicament generated its own problems. Iris lived in a housing project, where it was dangerous to take the elevators too early in the morning, or late at night, alone. She rarely ventured anywhere without her husband, Armando-- even to visit family. And the toll of their vigilance could be seen in Armando's anxious eyes or the grim set of Iris's jaw. Mainly, though, it was Iris's unhappiness that upset Coco. The family anxiety projected an unspoken, unappealing truth-- that even living right, which was what Coco called it, was just another precarious hold. Poverty pulled everybody down. Coco loosened her body to minimize the impact of the fall. Iris and Armando froze, and the chill stiffened their kids, as well. Even indoors, when Armando planted himself in his favorite chair, he gripped the arms.

Ira Glass

Liza Colon-Zayas, reading from Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's amazing book, Random Family.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Starlee Kine and myself, with Alex Bloomberg, Diane Cook, and Wendy Dorr. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Stacey Tiderington. This is our last show with our intern Stacey Tiderington. She has faced down some very fierce deadlines with us. We wish her the best.

[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS]

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who proves that he is a true Chicagoan every November when he calls us in and declares,

Jack Hitt

So let's rig an election.

Ira Glass

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

Announcer

PRI, Public Radio International.