79: Stuck in the Wrong Decade

Ira Glass

I was talking to a guy at a party, an older man. And this guy's opinionated and very charming. And we're talking about politics, and the guy lets on that he's a communist, an actual member of the actual Communist Party. "So, how's it going," I ask him, "the cause of world communism?" And he talks about the media not giving communism a fair shake. And he pulls out a pamphlet that he gives me for some talk that a fellow traveler is giving.

I ask him about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. Didn't that put a kind of damper on the whole worldwide movement? And he said what communists have been saying for decades really, that the Soviet Union's not real communism, that no one's tried real communism the way that it's supposed to be tried. And, suddenly, I felt like I was talking to a time traveler, to somebody for whom the last few decades had not occurred or simply didn't matter.

Marcel Ophuls has spent years making movies about Nazis, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Memory of Justice. His family was Jewish, escaped Germany before the war. "What's it like spending so much time interviewing Nazis," he was asked once. "Oh, I get along with Nazis," he said. "We share something in common, an interest in the past. I share more with them than I do with most people today, who don't care about the past."

Nearly a decade ago, I had a chance to interview the members of the band called Camper Van Beethoven. At that time, they were one of my favorite bands. But I blew my interview with them because I misunderstood them and their music so grossly. I was out of touch. I will just say that right now.

They were playing a kind of country-folk mixed with surfer music mixed with this sort of fake Egyptian-Russian music, whatever else came to mind, ska. They openly sang about drug use. And this is before our culture, before we as a people, had coined the words, "slacker" or "Gen X".

And I spent a lot of that interview alienating the guys in this band by asking were they hippies? Were they modern day hippies? That was the only phrase I had in my head to refer to what I was seeing. I thought they were stuck in the wrong decade. But, in fact, they were just carrying a few props from another decade into the present, which is, in fact, what I think we all do.

Walk down Michigan Avenue or State Street or Wabash here in Chicago and you'll see older guys in wide-brimmed hats from the '50s coming out of the off-track betting. They are the Art Institute students dressed in that fake '70s thing we've been suffering through as a nation for the last three years.

We all carry pieces of the past, some of us more than others, which brings us to today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, on our program, people stuck in another decade.

Act One, The Wedding Game, two people who love 1970s television and how it affects their engagement and their wedding.

Act Two, Stuck As A Teenager, two people who get suspended in time as adolescents for very different reasons.

Act Three, Perv Walk, two smart, funny, '90s men who have no problem working with women or seeing women as their equals and why. They spend 10 minutes a day walking around scoping women and talking about them like they were Jack Lemmon in some 1950s movie.

Act Four, Working In Another Decade, in which our intrepid correspondent takes a job at Mount Vernon, George Washington's plantation home, doing a job they politely call field hand.

Act Five, Nostalgia, The Final Frontier, someone who is stuck in a decade that is as far back as you can possibly go, back in the day before back in the day, the day when all matter in the universe existed in a single point in space. You remember them. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, The Wedding Game. One common way, perhaps the most common way these days, that people get stuck in other decades is that they get stuck in the TV shows of other decades. Consider, please, this extreme case example.

Karl began his life with the normal excessive relationship that most of us have with television. As a child, he watched six or seven hours a day. Wendy went even further, she actually watched TV to see herself. As a kid growing up in Chicago, she appeared in commercials that were shot here for McDonald's, for Sears, for Kellogg's. She was even in a Morris the Cat commercial. Wendy knows Morris the Cat.

Years of watching The Dick Van Dyke Show, and That Girl, and old game shows gave Wendy these kinds of skills. Karl says that once he turned on an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show for five seconds, turned off the TV, and asked Wendy to identify the episode and tell him the plot. She described everything that would happen, scene by scene. And this turns out to be a marketable job skill.

Ira Glass

But all of this was just prelude, just the hors d'oeuvre, just the 30-second promo that leads up to the very special episode of whatever, that all came before Karl and Wendy's wedding.

Ira Glass

Whatever this may sound like, it's Karl and Wendy's wedding video. They staged the ceremony as a TV game show.

Ira Glass

Karl T. Wright and Wendy Miller work in television in Los Angeles. You can see Karl in about a month on ER, the November 6th episode.

Ira Glass

And that is the most cheerful music I think we have ever put on this radio show. Act Two, Stuck As A Teenager. This is a program about being stuck in the wrong decade. And it is a truism among addicts and alcoholics that the year that you start using or start drinking is the year that you stay stuck at. So if you start using drugs at 15 in a very heavy way, in 1974, let's say, if you continue until you're 40 and you stop, you'll find yourself 40 years old but still stuck at the emotional age of 15, which brings us to Michael Stump.

Ira Glass

Darleen went to prison when she was 17 and came out in her early 30s. She says it was like being frozen in time. There was a way of dealing with other adults, as an adult, that she never learned. Shortly after she was released she went to get a state ID, and it was intimidating.

Ira Glass

Well, coming up, stuck in pre-feminist decades, stuck in the pre-emancipation decades, and stuck in the decades before time and space and decades even existed. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

With This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to tackle that theme. Today's program, Stuck in Another Decade, stories of people living in various pasts as we all do to one extent or another.

We have arrived at Act Three of our program, the story of two men who live most of their lives in a white-collar America where men and women are supposed to work and interact as equals. But, 10 minutes a day, several days a week, they retreat to a different America.

A quick warning to listeners before we hear this story. There are no nasty words or explicit deeds in this story, but it is a story that acknowledges the existence of sex and the fact that men are not always nice. Sarah Miller is a magazine writer in New York.

Sarah Miller

This is a story about two people. One is my friend, and one is my acquaintance. Both are relatively highly-placed editors at glossy New York magazines, the sort of magazines you might have on your coffee table or have read waiting to get your hair cut.

My friend, let's call him Rodge, is so charming that the first time I met him in his office we started talking and I literally couldn't bring myself to leave. He is funny and stylish in that slightly homosexual New York way.

Asked his opinion about something, he's as likely to reply "It's very Altamont meets Sotheby's," as to really tell you what he thinks. The last time I had lunch with him he said, "Don't you wish people could only communicate using proper nouns and the names of medieval diseases?" I've heard that his wife is lovely, but I have to admit that I'm a little sad he's married.

One afternoon, I called Rodge at work. We gossiped. He told me a funny story about basically hanging up on an interview subject, a famous pop star who had bored him. Then he said he had to go, that a friend of his, an acquaintance of mine, also a magazine editor, was meeting him downstairs. "We're just going on a perv walk," he said. "Perv walk," I said, "what the hell is that?"

Weeks later, I sat him down at a cafe on Green Street and made him explain on tape. It turns out that a perv walk is exactly what it sounds like. Rodge and his friend, Bill, meet a couple of times a week and walk around Soho commenting on the women that they see.

Sarah Miller

The fact that Rodge went on perv walks didn't make me hate him. Not at all. In fact, for several days I'd be on the subway, taking a shower, eating dinner and I would just start laughing.

If I were with people, I might explain, "I'm sorry. It's just that I know these two guys. Well, actually, I only know one of them well. But, as far as I can tell, they're these perfectly nice, very sweet, interesting guys. And they do this thing where they walk around Soho and talk about women, and they call it a perv walk."

Some people looked at me blankly. Some used the word disgusting. Was there something wrong with me? I thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever heard. I made Rodge do a demonstration for me.

Sarah Miller

I guess I should explain the voice. Rodge grew up in Queens, Bill, in Northwest Chicago. Two working-class neighborhoods in different parts of the country, but both, as Bill pointed out, near airports and both home to a remarkably similar cast of characters.

As they became better friends and learned more about each other, Rodge and Bill started to get the idea that their neighborhoods, though 1,000 miles apart, were actually the same neighborhood. Now, they both work white-collar jobs but, when they perv, Bill told me they become guys from the neighborhood.

Sarah Miller

I know that some of you, many of you, maybe even all of you find this disturbing. You don't find the idea of two men walking around saying lewd things about women funny. You find it juvenile, reactionary, a throwback to a time when it was permissible for a man to say almost anything, to almost any woman, at any time, just because he could. But I don't agree.

First, let me tell you why this is not horrible. None of the women they're looking at has any idea that these guys are talking about them. They never approach or touch anyone. It's not about cat-calling or looking for reaction. They're just doing it for each other. They were even reluctant to do it with me there. But I did manage to talk them into letting me record a 15-minute perv walk.

Sarah Miller

It was so different from what I had imagined. Maybe it was a function of my being there, but they barely talked about actual body parts. In fact, they barely looked at the women they were talking about. They only looked long enough to find some distinguishing characteristic that they could riff on.

Sarah Miller

Let me describe for you this person who's talking about his North Pole. He's wearing one of those bright blue shirts that The Gap has turned into this year's urban uniform. He's shy looking, book-ish, and wearing little, round glasses. Rodge describes both of them as limp-wristed pencil jockeys. We keep walking. We pass a woman going into a post office.

Sarah Miller

Both of these guys work with women. They report to and have women co-workers, and there's no problem there. I asked Rodge if they go out on perv walks because they're not permitted to say these pervie things about women at work. And he said that was part of it.

They're using fake names here on the radio because they don't want anyone at their magazines to know that they do this. And there are enough blue-shirt-wearing, gay-looking straight men parading the halls of the New York publishing world that I'm confident they'll retain their anonymity.

They don't wish work was different. They don't wish they were back in a time where every day at work could be a perv walk. But they don't want to stop perving either. So they do it, as Rodge says, with silence, exile and cunning, a 10-minute jaunt into a little world where they can pretend that the last 30 years haven't happened.

Sarah Miller

I guess what fascinates me most about the perv walk is that it's a perfect distillation of something I see in men all the time. Here, Rodge and Bill, in character, of course, are speculating on the physical attributes of a woman they've never even seen, a woman who is just the idea of a woman. And then they start flirting with her into the tape recorder.

Sarah Miller

This reminded me of the times in my life where I'd gotten a wrong number and a man had answered. "Oh, wrong number," I'd say and go to hang up. And, suddenly, the guy says, "Hey, are you hot?"

And it's not just strangers. My male friends do this to me all the time. I'll be telling a story about a friend, that she just moved to a new neighborhood, that she's writing a dissertation on French critiques of Dutch genre painting in the 19th century. And, suddenly, they'll need to know, right now, does she have a nice body?

The last 30 years have done their damnedest to clean up men's mouths. And, in some cases, in some contexts, it has succeeded. But even these guys, these hyper-educated, fully modern, and slightly nerdy guys need their 10-minute perv fix. And that, to me, seems harmless.

Ira Glass

Sarah Miller in New York.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Working in Another Decade. Well, you know, we've all seen these people at their jobs, these people who have horses and carriages for hire near the fancy hotels in New York and Chicago, old-fashioned butchers in old-fashioned butcher shops, people whose jobs are out of another era and nearly extinct.

Well, at Mount Vernon, the Virginia plantation owned by George Washington, they have an internship program in which college students spend a summer supposedly living the lives that slaves did 200 years ago. Well, sort of.

Using George Washington's own notes as a guide, they wear the same clothes, tend the same kinds of livestock, even wear reproductions of the same clothes. New Republic writer, Stephen Glass-- no relation to me, by the way-- signed up for a day.

Stephen Glass

My day as a slave started in a small trailer a short drive from the main visitor's gate. On the outside, the trailer resembles those reserved for the stars on Hollywood's film sets. The inside looks more like Loehmann's would have appeared 200 years ago. It's packed tight with racks of waistcoats, and petticoats, and bonnets. And everything has the feeling of being one or two planting seasons out of style.

Stephen Glass

An older man named Walter Laws fits the interns with their outfits. One other thing makes this look a lot like outlet shopping. It's all clean, but not really. Nothing smells or is soiled, but on the stray sleeve or occasional collar there is the shadow of a stain. Water Laws tells me the controlled dirtiness gives the slave clothes a twist of authenticity.

Stephen Glass

These knickerbockers and undershirts and accessories are flown in from the Indiana-based seamstresses of James Townsend & Son. The company's the preeminent maker of slave clothes featuring hundreds of pieces in their 60-page catalog. For the internet-savvy slave, James Townsend now has the entire line posted on the worldwide web. I figured, to best understand this internship program, I'd better suit up.

First things first. The slaves in Mount Vernon aren't really called slaves. Political correctness has, after all, come to the plantation. One intern told me the word, "slave", was classist. Another said it was imposed and Euro-centric. She argued that slaves should have the right to choose their own labels. That's hard to argue with. Still another said the word "slave" really keeps you down. The preferred term is field worker. You see, that term denotes the nature of the work, not the level of social standing.

There's been one other major change for Mount Vernon slaves since the 1700s-- progressive labor laws. Inefficient slaves used to be whipped or separated from their spouses. Today, at Mount Vernon, beatings are obviously frowned upon, and the slaves, being college students, aren't yet married. In fact, there's no hostility at all between the overseers and the slaves.

Kara David, a college student from Orange Grove, Texas, had so much fun being a slave last year, she came back for a second summer.

Stephen Glass

Back home, Kara is an Ag and Communications major, and she works full-time at the feed store. Her other summer job option was to be a manager at the local water park, which would have paid more. She doesn't see slavery as a long-term career option.

Stephen Glass

For the students, all of whom are white, they don't merely learn about agriculture but also experience, first-hand slavery, the kind of culturally defining ordeal that, according to the practitioners of identity politics, whites might not otherwise grasp. But a really authentic slave experience is hard to find.

When I spend a day working alongside the intern slaves of Mount Vernon, one thing was clear. The founding father's field hands never had this good. These slaves work no more than eight hours a day. And they get weekends and evenings off. They have private rooms with indoor plumbing and television. The slaves even have access to the internet. And, oh yeah, they're paid $200 a week. Plus they can keep a portion of the crops they grow. One slave says she's not thrilled with the pay and might ask for comp time.

Over the course of a day, each slave works at about five different tasks. I started at the barn and quickly discovered I was not cut out to be a slave. For instance, I was asked to keep an eye on a lamb. Within a few seconds, the small animal bolted for the wheat fields. I thought about letting the lamb go free out of solidarity. After all, he was just trying to break free from his master and wasn't I supposed to be feeling the same? But the animal stopped after a few yards and wandered back. It turned out to be no better a run-away than I was a slave.

I didn't fare much better as a tour guide slave. As Jimmy Guckman, a junior tourist from Los Angeles, petted the lamb's soft pelt, I imparted a bit of knowledge. "That's where cotton comes from," I said. The five-year-old, a surprisingly well-informed young fellow, rolls his eyes at me. "Ya mean wool," he said. "Right, wool."

My lack of farm knowledge wasn't the only in-authenticity. Although the adults rarely mentioned it, kids quickly noticed the obvious fact that not one of the slaves was black. When I asked John Reilly, the Mount Vernon's Assistant to the Director, about the discrepancy, he pointed out that most of his field hands come from the Future Farmers of America.

Stephen Glass

They're very clear about being an equal opportunity employer. Several officials told me this. It's even on the first page of the application. Of course, you might remember that was the main problem with slavery. It wasn't.

In 1997, it just seems Washington's farm has a hard time attracting black slaves. "We'd like to have minorities here," said one official. "I'm sure if we knew the applicant was black, we'd help him along. It would be great for us and great for them." So, it's come to this, affirmative action on the plantation.

Maybe the most bizarre part of the slave program is how fierce the competition is to get in. It doesn't need to be said that, in the 1700s slaves didn't apply to be slaves. That, of course, was central to the institution. But here, at Mount Vernon, as many as 400 students have applied in recent years for a handful of slots. Sandy Newton, the program's developer, explained the application process.

Stephen Glass

They admit about 5%, making Mount Vernon's slave internship more selective than Harvard's freshman class.

At the end of my day at Mount Vernon, it began raining. The slaves made the historically inaccurate move of ditching their posts and running for cover, abandoning a family of tourists near the fields. After the rain subsided, the slaves eventually wandered back. A few confessed they had lingered away from the work because slavery can be boring. "I guess I can relate to them," one said. "For slaves, every day was just the same routine. Each day was just another day, another dollar." I told her, "Maybe so, only without the dollar."

Ira Glass

Stephen Glass.

Ira Glass

Act Five, Nostalgia, The Final Frontier. In this program about people stuck in the wrong decade, we bring you a story about somebody stuck as far back as anybody can possibly go.

This is a story from Italo Calvino's amazing little book, Cosmiccomics. It begins with this little scientific explanation. "Through the calculations begun by Edwin P Hubble, on the galaxies' velocity of recession, we can now establish the moment when all the universe's matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space." And after that, our story begins.

Jeff Dorchen

Naturally, we were all there. Where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space or time either. What use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines? I say packed like sardines using a literary image. In reality, there wasn't even space to pack us into. Every point of each of us coincided with every point of each of the others in a single point, which is where we all were.

In fact, we didn't even bother one another, except for personality differences, because, when space doesn't exist, having somebody unpleasant, like Mr. Pber Pber underfoot all the time, is the most irritating thing.

How many of us were there? Oh, I was never able to figure that out, not even approximately. To make a count, we would have had to move apart at least a little and, instead, we all occupied the same point.

Contrary to what you might think, it wasn't the sort of situation that encourages sociability. I know, for example, that, in other periods, neighbors called on one another. But there, because of the fact that we were all neighbors, nobody even said good morning or good evening to anybody else.

In the end, each of us associated only with a limited number of acquaintances. The ones I remember most are Mrs. Ph(i)Nko, her friend De XuaeauX, a family of immigrants by the name of Z'zu, and Mr. Pber Pber, whom I just mentioned.

There was also a cleaning woman, maintenance staff, she was called. Only one for the whole universe since there was so little room. To tell the truth, she had nothing to do all day long, not even dusting. Inside one point, not even a grain of dust can enter, so she spent all her time gossiping and complaining.

Just with the people I've already named, we would have been overcrowded. But you have to add all the stuff we had to keep piled up in there, all the material that was to serve afterwards to form the universe now dismantled and concentrated in such a way that you weren't able to tell what was later to become part of astronomy, like the nebula of Andromeda, from what was assigned to geography, the Vosges, for example, or to chemistry, like certain beryllium isotopes.

And, on top of that, we were always bumping against the Z'zu family's household goods, camp beds, mattresses, baskets. These Z'zus if you weren't careful, with the excuse that they were a large family, would begin to act as if they were the only ones in the world. They even wanted to hang lines across our point to dry their washing.

But the others had also wronged the Z'zus to begin with by calling them immigrants on the pretext that, since the others had been there first, the Z'zus had come later. This was mere unfounded prejudice. That seems obvious to me because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from. But there were those who insisted that the concept of immigrant could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.

It was what you might call a narrow-minded attitude, our outlook at that time, very petty, the fault of the environment in which we had been reared, an attitude that, basically, has remained in all of us, mind you. It keeps cropping up even today. If two of us happen to meet at the bus stop, in a movie house, at an international dentist's convention and start reminiscing about the old days, we say hello. At times, somebody recognizes me. At other times, I recognize somebody. And we promptly start asking about this one and that one, even if each remembers only a few of those remembered by the others.

And so we start in again on the old disputes, the slanders, the denigrations, until somebody mentions Mrs. Ph(i)Nko. Every conversation finally gets around to her. And then, all of a sudden, the pettiness is put aside, and we feel uplifted, filled with a blissful, generous emotion. Mrs. Ph(i)Nko, the only one that none of us has forgotten and that we all regret. Where has she ended up? I have long since stopped looking for her. Mrs. Ph(i)NkO, her bosom, her thighs, her orange dressing gown, we'll never meet her again in this system of galaxies or in any other.

Let me make one thing clear. This theory that the universe, after having reached an extremity of rarefaction, will be condensed again, has never convinced me. And yet, many of us are counting only on that, continually making plans for the time when we'll all be back there again.

Last month I went into the bar here on the corner, and whom did I see? Mr. Pber Pber. "What's new with you? How do you happen to be in this neighborhood?" I learned that he's the agent for a plastics firm in Pavia. He's the same as ever with his silver tooth, his loud suspenders.

"When we go back there," he said to me in a whisper, "the thing we have to make sure of is this-- this time, certain people will remain out. You know what I mean, those Z'zus. I would have liked to answer him by saying, "I've heard a number of people make the same remark, including, you know who I mean, Mr. Pber Pber." To avoid the subject, I hastened to say, "What about Mrs. Ph(i)Nko? Do you think we'll find her back there again?" "Ah, yes. She, by all means," he said, turning purple.

For all of us the hope of returning to that point means, above all, the hope of being once more with Mrs. Ph(i)Nko. This applies even to me, though, I don't believe in it. And in that bar, as always happens, we fell to talking about her and were moved. Even Mr. Pber Pber's unpleasantness faded in the face of that memory. Mrs. Ph(i)Nko's great secret is that she never aroused any jealousy among us or any gossip either.

The fact that she went to bed with her friend, Mr. De XuaeauX, was well-known. But, at a point, if there's a bed, that takes up the whole point. So it isn't a question of going to bed, but of being there because anybody in the point is also in the bed. Consequently, it was inevitable that she should be in bed also with each of us. If she had been another person, there's no telling all the things that would have been said about her. It was the cleaning woman who always started the slander, and the others didn't have to be coaxed to imitate her.

On the subject of the Z'zu family, for a change, the horrible things we had to hear. Father, daughters, brothers, sisters, mother, aunts, nobody showed any hesitation, even before the most sinister insinuation. But with her it was different. The happiness I derived from her was the joy of being concealed, punctiform, in her, and of protecting her, punctiform, in me. It was, at the same time, vicious contemplation, thanks to the promiscuity of the punctiform convergence of all of us in her, and also chastity, given her punctiform impenetrability. In short, what more could I ask?

And all of this, which was true of me, was also true for each of the others and for her. She contained and was contained with equal happiness. And she welcomed us and loved us and inhabited all equally. We got along so well all together, so well that something extraordinary was bound to happen. It was enough for her to say at a certain moment, "Oh, if I only had some room. How I'd like to make some noodles for you boys."

And, in that moment, we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy, moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs which cluttered the wide board while her arms kneaded and kneaded, white and shiny with oil up to the elbows.

We thought of the space that the flower would occupy, and the wheat for the flower, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields, and the grazing lands for the herds of calves that would give their meat for the sauce, of the space it would take for the sun to arrive with its rays to ripen the wheat, of the space for the sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn, of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet.

And, at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed. At the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)NkO was uttering those words, "Ah, what noodles, boys," the point that contained her and all of us was expanding at a halo of distance in light-years, and light-centuries, and billions of light-millennia. And we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, Mr. Pber Pber all the way to Pavia.

And she dissolved into, I don't know what kind of energy, light, heat. She, Mrs. Ph(i)Nko, she who, in the midst of our closed, petty world, had been capable of a generous impulse. "Boys, the noodles I would make for you," a true outburst of general love initiating, at the same moment, the concept of space. And, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nkos, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading the floury, oil-shiny, generous arms. And she, lost at that very moment. And we, mourning her loss.

Ira Glass

All at One Point, from Italo Calvino's book, Cosmiccomics, read for us by Jeff Dorchen.

Well, our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder, senior editor Paul Tough. Contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Alex Blumberg and Rachel Howard.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

To buy a cassette of this program, call us at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. This American Life was distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

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

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