605: Kid Logic

23:22Gladfelter. I swear to God, I can't do anything. Paul, Timothy is in trouble. He needs your help, and I need your help too. Now if you come right this minute and get up out of that dirt, then I'll forget that you didn't come in from recess. If you don't come back inside, I'll have to speak to your mother. She held out her hand. Now come on, Paul, please. And so I took her hand and let her pull me out of the ravine and across the deserted playground, aware that in doing so I was merely proving the unspoken corollary that my mother had left hanging the other morning in the air between her and Mrs.

23:58Stokes. There was a song about me, too, I'm afraid, a popular little number that went, What's that smell-o? Paul Covello. He's a big, fat hippo jello. He's a snoop. He smells like poop. He smells like tomato beef alphabet soup. Timothy Stokes, I knew, as I followed Mrs. Gladfelter down the long, silent hallway to the office, hating him more and more with each step, was my only friend.

24:33Timothy was sitting in a corner of the office, trapped in an orange vinyl armchair. There was a Roman numeral III scratched into his left cheek, and his brilliant white shirt and trousers were patterned with a camouflage of grass and dirt and asphalt. Well now, Timothy, Mrs. Gladfelter took me by the shoulders and maneuvered me around her. Look who I found. Hey, Timothy, I said. Timothy didn't look up. Mrs. Gladfelter gave me a gentle push toward him in the small of my back. Why don't you sit down, Paul? No. I didn't want to be left alone with Timothy, not because I was afraid of him, but because I was afraid that somebody would come into the office and see us sitting there, two matching rejects and matching orange chairs.

25:20That's enough now, Paul, said Mr. Buterbaugh, the principal, his friendly smile looking more false than usual. Sit down. It's all right, said Mrs. Gladfelter. You see what you can do about helping Timothy turn back into Timothy. We're just going to give you a little privacy. She followed Mr. Buterbaugh into his office and then poked her head back around the door. I'm going to leave this door open in case you need us, all right? There were three chairs next to Timothy's. I took the farthest and showed him my back so that anyone passing by the windows of the office would not be able to conclude that he and I were engaged in any sort of conversation at all.

26:02Are you expelled? I said. There was no reply. Are you, Timothy? Again, he said nothing, and I couldn't stop myself from turning around to look at him. Timothy, are you expelled? I'm not Timothy, professor, said Timothy, gravely, but not without a certain air of satisfaction. I'm afraid your precious antidote didn't work. Come on, Timothy, I said, cut it out. The moon's not even full today. Now he turned toward me. Where were you? he said. I was looking for you. I was in the ditch. With the ants? I nodded. I heard you talking to them before. So? So? Are you Ant-Man? No, dummy. Why not? Because I'm not anybody.

26:58You're not anybody either. We fell silent for a while and just sat there, not looking at each other, kicking at the legs of our chairs. I could hear Mrs. Gladfelter and Mr. Buterbaugh talking softly in his office. Mr. Buterbaugh called her Elizabeth. The telephone rang. A light flashed twice on the secretary's phone, then held steady. Thanks for calling back, Dr. Schachter, I heard Mr. Buterbaugh say. Yes, I'm afraid so. I went to see Dr. Schachter a couple times, I said. He had micronauts and the fembots. He has Stretch Armstrong, too, said Timothy. I know. Why did you go see him, Timothy said.

27:43Did your mother make you? Yeah, I said. How come? I don't know. She said I was having problems with my anger. I don't know. I guess I was mad about my dad and things. He had to go to jail, Timothy said, your dad. Just for one night. How come? He had too much to drink, I said. Did you visit him in jail, Timothy said. No, stupid God. You belong in special school, Timothy. I hope they make you eat special food and wear a special helmet or something. I heard the distant slam of the school's front door and then a pair of hard shoes knocking along the hall. Here comes your mother, I said. What kind of special helmet, said Timothy Ant-Man wears a helmet Mrs.

28:47Stokes entered the office She was a tall, thin woman, much older than my mother with long, gray hair and red, veiny hands Every morning, she made Timothy pancakes for his breakfast which sounded okay until you found out that she put things in them like carrots and leftover pieces of corn. Oh, hello, Paul, she said in her Eeyore voice. Mrs. Stokes, said Mrs. Gladfelter, coming out of the principal's office. It's been kind of a long afternoon for Timothy, I'm afraid. How is Virginia, said Mrs. Stokes. She still hadn't looked at Timothy. Oh, she'll be fine, Mr. Buterbaugh said, just a little shaken up.

29:30We sent her home early. Of course, he added, her parents are going to want to speak to you. Of course, said Mrs. Stokes. I'm ready to do whatever you think would be best for Timothy. I'm not Timothy, said Timothy. Oh, please, Timmy, stop this nonsense for once. I'm cursed, he leaned over and brought his face very close to mine. Tell them about the curse, professor. I looked at Timothy and for the first time saw that a thin, dark down of wolfish hair had grown upon his cheek. Then I looked at Mr. Buterbaugh and found that he was watching me with an air of earnest expectancy, as though he honestly thought there might be an eternal black magical curse on Timothy and was more than willing to listen to anything I might have to say on the subject.

30:23I shrugged. Are you going to make him go to special school? I said. All right, Paul, thank you, said Mrs. Gladfelter. You may go back to class now. See you later, Timothy, I said. He didn't answer me. He had started to growl again. As I followed the secretary out of the office, I looked back and saw Mr. Buterbaugh and Mrs. Gladfelter and poor old Mrs. Stokes standing in a hopeless circle around Timothy. I thought for a second, and then I turned back toward them and raised an imaginary rifle to my shoulder. This is a dart gun, I announced. Everyone looked at me, but I was talking to Timothy now.

31:10I was almost, but not quite, embarrassed. It's filled with darts of my special antidote and I made it stronger than it used to be and it's going to work this time. And also there's a tranquilizer mixed in. Timothy looked up and bared his teeth at me, and I took aim right between his eyes. I jerked my hands twice and went, Timothy's head snapped back and his eyelids fluttered. He shook himself all over. He swallowed once. Then he held his hands out before him, as if wondering at their hairless pallor. It seems to have worked, he said, his voice cool and reasonable and fine. Anyone could see he was still playing his endless game, but all the grown-ups, Mr.

32:03Buterbaugh in particular, looked very pleased with both of us. Thank you very much, Paul, he said. I'm not Paul, I said. Everybody laughed but Timothy Stokes.

32:23Michael Chabon, reading an excerpt from his short story, Werewolves and Their Youth. You can find it in the collection of short stories with the same name. Coming up, kids talking kid talk, adults not understanding. But you will, as our special Kids Say the Darnest Things edition of our program continues in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

32:47Support for This American Life and the following message come from Squarespace. Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in one place. Whether you're doing consultations or experiences, showcase what you're offering with a customizable website designed to attract clients and grow your business. You can raise support for your cause by fundraising directly on your website with built-in donation tools. Visit squarespace.com slash American to get 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is American Life, Amirak Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme.

33:25Today's program, Kid Logic. We wanted an hour filled with stories in which kids employ kid thinking, especially the kid thinking that is perfectly logical but completely wrongheaded. And we've arrived at Act 3 of our program, Act 3, The Gay Man Over Till the Fatso Man Sings. When little kids talk about a crush or love, are they talking about more or less the same thing that adults mean by those words? Well, Howie Chakowicz remembers how he thought about love in grade school. He wanted girls to like him, but they never seemed to. Here he is. Looking back on it, I think part of the problem was how I thought about love as a kid.

34:04I had a few ideas about how you get someone to love you that, in retrospect, weren't particularly helpful to me. First, I thought that if they could see me sleeping, they would immediately fall for me. When I went to sleep each night, I would consciously try to sleep in a cute way, just in case the girls I liked would peep on me. I'd roll into a fetal ball like a kitten, and scrunch my head into my pillow, hands under my head. I imagined all the popular girls, intent on cruelly pranking me, got a ladder and climbed it through my bedroom window. But instead of painting Fatso, or whatever on my window was planned, their collective hearts would melt as they saw me sleeping like a babe, an angel, buried snugly under my blankets.

34:41I guess it was some crossover of a kid's knowledge of what was endearing to adults applied to romance.

34:54My second theory was that they'd fall in love with me if they could see me reading aloud. This conclusion came out of my experience with nieces and nephews who'd fawn all over me when I would read to them. By age six, I was already an uncle, and I felt this lent me a certain maturity. Often, at recess time, I'd go to the back of the classroom and read from a selection of kids' books. All the kids would gather around in a circle. I'd pour through books like Percy the Rose-Eating Donkey, affecting the voices of the different characters and speaking with a preacher's sweaty charisma. I'm not sure why, but everyone in my class seemed to love the way I hammed it up.

35:27The only problem with this was the girls in class ended up treating me like their uncle. They'd call me Uncle Howie and talk to me in baby talk. Weed me a story, Uncle Howie, and so on. Don't get me wrong, I love the attention, but I wanted love, not love.

35:47So I had all these ideas about love. And of all the girls I knew, my theories were most intensely targeted at one girl. The most popular girl in school, Karen. She became my most serious crush. I carried a torch for Karen from grade one to grade six. Though Karen didn't seem to like me much, one thing I learned about love on TV was that if one was sincere, love can break all boundaries. I believed that there would come a moment where I'd speak the words, I love you, to Karen, with such tenderness and tears that it would break her heart, and she would cry too and confess her love. I would allow one brave tear to travel down my cheek.

36:31Very, very cute, eh? Yeah. And Jonathan, look how cute Jonathan is. Jonathan is very, very adorable. Now, years later, I'm friends with Karen. Actual friends with both her and her husband, Alan. I even worked for him for a while. Karen and I have talked before about our elementary school days, usually steering the conversation towards how mean she was to me. But I've never really spoken with her about puppy love. I wanted to know what she remembered, whether she knew I even had a crush on her at all. Who are your interests? We'll go year by year. Keith, definitely. Love interest. Barry Seller.

37:09The big one. The big one. Lauren Wilter? Yes. Yes. Notice who she doesn't mention. Even though it was so far in the past, a crush is still such an awkward thing to talk about. When I finally did tell her about how I felt about her when we were kids, I sort of mumbled my way through it, backpedaling all over the place. I even forgot to actually point the mic at her. When I was in the elementary school, you were like a big crush. You see? I didn't even know that, you know. I thought it was just responsible for tormenting you. I didn't realize that there was a crush involved. Maybe at the time I knew, but I had no clue actually that you liked me when I think back on it now.

37:58One time in the field, Keith told me to tackle you. He said if you tackle her, she'll like you and then you'll be popular. That is so funny. This is the thing. Funny. So the story goes... You know what? That's very good advice, I think. It was very bad advice. I almost broke your leg. Basically, what happened was I was standing off to the sidelines. I wasn't often picked to play, but this was like a co-ed game and seemed like very fun. and Keith said, I'm going to throw Karen the ball. And he goes, you couldn't pronounce his R's. He goes, you tackle her, Howard. Tackle her. Tackle her hard and you'll be popular and then everyone will like you, you know.

38:30I'm like, okay, I'm going to do it, you know. And I remember like you were like kind of running and like the sun is shining off and your hair is bouncing and you caught the ball. And I remember I just, I don't know what came over me. I just remember thinking like that's what I had to do was I had to tackle you. I tackled you really hard. Like I really did. You're on the ground. You're holding your leg. Now, any kind of logic would have dictated that's not the way to get the girl you like, right? Yeah, but a lot of times the way young kids react or show affection is through physical, like I was telling you before that we, you know, I wrestled with Barry because you just want to be close.

39:05This is not how she felt about it at the time because I felt the harder I tackled her, the more popular I'd be. I took her down like it was prison football. The game came to an immediate end, everyone circling Karen's writhing body, the football near her lay totally still. She was holding her leg, looking up at me saying, you tubalard, you broke my leg. Karen doesn't remember any of this. She doesn't remember how she then jumped up, got four or five of her girlfriends in a huddle, and miraculously choreographed an impromptu kicking chorus line of Fatsoman to the tune of the Village People's Macho Man.

39:39Fatso, Fatsoman. I would not like to be a Fatsoman. Fatso, Fatsoman. man. I would not like to be a fatso. And at that point, they all threw their hands up in the air in unison.

40:00I remember it so perfectly, but then, after all, it was my crush. She had no recollection of the time the school photographer called her Daisy Duke and then turned around and called me Boss Hogg, or of the fitness day that I beat her in a chariots of fire-style race. She didn't even remember the biggest story of them all, our sixth grade graduation dance. Now, the last dance was Stare to Heaven. Now, I wanted to dance that I danced with you. But I couldn't because as I was walking, a line of people walked by and blocked me. And then it was a split second. But then you were in the arms of a grade seven.

40:34Really? Yeah. What was a grade seven doing? They crashed our grade six graduation dance. Who was it? I don't know. He was tall and thin. He had like longish hair. and he came through the back door of the gym. Now, you don't remember the last dance? No. Now, you kissed this gentleman. Did I? Like a peck or a make-out kiss? I don't think I was making it in grade six. No, by adult standards, it was a peck. I'd say by grade six standards, you got laid.

41:13It turns out that Ken remembered exactly one story about me. Well, my most vivid memory of you is sitting in class and a teacher asking us to pull out our homework and you opening up your desk and the paper kind of overflowing out of that desk and you're rummaging frantically through the desk trying to find what homework we were asked to take out and not being able to find it and our teacher walking up to your desk. And everyone knowing what was coming because it probably happened two days before. And the teacher just lacing into you and dumping the contents of your desk on the floor. Now, I mean, like when that happened, like, did I seem cool like a bad boy?

42:01No. Everyone felt very, very sad for you.

42:13More than anything, I wanted Karen to notice me, but not in that way. I think the problem with my theories was that I expected her to fall for me the same way I fell for her. That she would see me from afar, reading to our classmates, sleeping like a little prince. I thought that's what it took for someone to fall in love. I wanted her to think that this was the real me. I wanted to think it was the real me. And the truth of it was that the real, real me was getting screamed at and having his desk spilled on on the ground each day.

42:51There's a way you can love a girl in grade 6 that you'll never have again. There's something about kids, or at least the way I was as a kid, that is purely romantic, in the truest love sonneteering sense of the word. Only a year or two later, my theories on the ways of love had changed drastically. By seventh grade, I had some spin-the-bottle sessions under my belt, and I had concluded that instead of dreaming about a true love I couldn't have, I should get a little bit more pragmatic about the whole thing. One night, after deciding I wanted to have a real girlfriend, I called up identical twin sisters I liked, Darlene and Elizabeth.

43:26Darlene answered. I told her that I liked her and asked her if she'd like to officially go out with me. She kindly told me that she only liked me as a friend, but she was flattered. No problem, I said. Is Elizabeth home? She passed me over to her twin, who I made the same offer to. And Elizabeth said, sure. And that was it. They're identical twins. What's the difference, I figured. We went on for two whole months. It was great.

43:57Howie Chakowicz, a.k.a. Howard Chakowicz. He's a cartoonist and musician. His latest book, Nothing to See Here, is available from Conundrum Press.

44:12Act four, when small thoughts meet big brains. Okay, so all this hour we've been talking about kid logic. And you know, sometimes the incorrect logic of childhood does not get corrected during childhood. It does not get corrected until much, much later when childhood is long over. Alex Bloomberg explains. I can reconstruct the events that led me to one of the most embarrassing conversations of my adult life. The chain starts back when I was 11 or 12, and I first heard the term Nielsen family. I was probably listening to some adults talk, and from their conversation I gathered that networks consulted Nielsen families to find out how popular a television show was.

44:52But that didn't make sense. Why would they only ask people named Nielsen which shows they liked? I started thinking. I knew that when they figured things like this out, they didn't ask everybody, they just asked a small percentage of people and then extrapolated. I think I figured they'd done some research and found that the name Nielsen, because it was a common name, maybe, and it seemed to cut across class and economic lines, actually came pretty close to a representative sample. I knew this wasn't the way they measured public opinion now, but it seemed like the Nielsen surveys had been around for a while, and I figured they were just a holdover from a more primitive, less statistically rigorous time.

45:25After that, I really didn't think about it again. Or if I did, it was only with a mild curiosity. I wonder why TV still does it that way. Fast forward 20 years. I was talking with a friend of mine who was telling me about her friend who'd been selected to be a Nielsen family. And I said to her, Isn't it weird that they're all named Nielsen? My friend looked at me for what seemed like a long time. Somewhere during her very long pause, because of the very long pause, in fact, I realized, of course they're not all named Nielsen. That makes no sense at all. At the time of this conversation, I was 34 years old.

46:01And I couldn't believe I'd gotten this far without ever stopping to think it through. Made me wonder what else I'd missed. And if this has ever happened to anyone besides me. When I was a kid, and I would see the school crossing signs, and there's a picture of the little kids walking, and then I would say, school-ex-ing. And I thought that the ex-ing was a word, and I pronounced it zing.

46:27Turns out, I'm not alone. I've been talking to people about this for weeks, and there's a lot of us out there, like me and this woman, Jodi Mace, carting around our childhood beliefs well into adulthood. Jodi thought there were lots of zings, deer zings, railroad zings. It makes sense. Well, I was in my 20s, and I was walking into work, and about 10 geese walked in front of me on the sidewalk. And so I just turned to my co-worker and casually said, it looks like they should have a zing sign there for the geese. there was sort of a long, awkward silence. And I thought that he was thinking, you know, that really is a good idea.

47:14But instead, he finally said, you know, zing isn't a word.

47:28In talking to people, I found out that a lot of these lingering misconceptions involve mispronunciation. And often, the mispronunciation survives into adulthood because the mistake just sounds better or makes more sense. You know, it should be a word, and it should be zing. You know, you don't want a kid to walk slowly across the crossing. If he's smart, he's going to zing.

47:53Consider the word misled. I talked to three people, including my own father, who used to pronounce it mysled. All three believed it was the past tense of a non-existent verb. Meisel, which means to deceive or to mislead. There's another guy I spoke to who thought well into his early 20s that the word quesadilla was Spanish for what's the deal.

48:19Most of the common childhood myths, like the babies come from storks, get corrected sooner or later. They're not obscure enough to sneak into adulthood unscrutinized. But occasionally, even a very popular childhood myth can make it through. Like unicorns. You know, in my head, a unicorn wasn't really any different than a zebra. This is Christy Kruger. I mean, in terms of believability, I think the unicorn's really ahead of the dinosaur. What do you mean? Well, I mean, when you think about a dinosaur, it's like from a kid's perspective. A dinosaur is like these really large, you know, monstrous animals roaming the earth.

49:02And then you have a unicorn, which is basically just a horse with a horn. As Christy Kruger grew up, she says that if she ever thought about unicorns, they were on a grassy plain somewhere in Africa, drinking from a watering hole with the wildebeest and the impala. And then one night, she found herself in a conversation at a party. It was about a group of five to seven people kind of standing around the keg, just talking. And somehow a discussion of endangered species came up, in which I posed the question, is the unicorn endangered or extinct?

49:40And basically there was a big gap of silence. As you might be gathering, at some point in all these stories, you come to a big gap of silence. And then everybody laughed. And then that laughter was followed by more silence when they realized I wasn't laughing. And I was like, yeah, I, oh God, unicorns aren't real. Oh, oh no.

50:17Sometimes a ridiculous belief will survive into adulthood, and it's our parents who are to blame. Robin didn't think there was anything strange about the way she was raised. She lived together with her sister and her parents in a nice house in the suburbs. She went to school like the other kids, watched TV and did her homework. And she ate the exact same thing for dinner every night of her life. Baked chicken. It was like Monday, chicken. Tuesday, chicken. Wednesday, chicken. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Sunday, chicken. Chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken. every night of my life until I left for college.

50:58At the end of, like, the first week of college, you know, when everyone's desperately trying to fit in and everyone's, you know, it's important that you act cool and sophisticated and whatever, everyone begins complaining about the food that we're being served. What was the hard stuff in the sloppy joe? you know, what was that mystery meat? Like, what animal did it come from? And I'm looking at these people like they are crazy. Like, I was like, the variety we are getting here every night, every night there's a different meal. I mean, one night it's mac and cheese, one night it's mystery meat, one night it's sloppy joe, one night it's...

51:36I was like, how can you credit? I mean, it's a testament to what great chefs they must be that they can make a different meal every single night of the week. And they just kind of, they kind of stared and they're like, what? And I'm like, what, what?

51:59What's running through my head is, wait a minute, these people are implying that they had variation in their meal plan for their entire life. It's mind bending. I mean, I I don't care what I learned throughout college. This is the revelation that has stuck with me. This is what I've learned. Like, all of a sudden, like, holy God. When Robin came home for Thanksgiving that year and confronted her mother with the startling fact that everyone else ate things besides chicken growing up, her mother just shrugged her shoulders and said, you liked chicken. Robin had to concede the point. Even when they'd gone out to restaurants, Robin ordered chicken.

52:38They all had.

52:51Here's one more. When Harriet Lerner was a girl, her family was going through some lean years. There were two kids. The house needed repairs. There wasn't much money for holiday gifts. Harriet was seven, and she wanted a bike. Her sister Susan was 12. She wanted a set of encyclopedias. But when they came downstairs on Christmas morning, there were only two small boxes waiting for them. What was inside them, and we both had exactly the same gift, were these real ugly metal tissue holders painted black with these corny red and yellow roses. They were painted with these cheesy looking red and yellow roses.

53:33And I looked at my tissue box and I started to cry. And I looked at my big sister, Susan, and I thought, of course, she was going to cry too. And she looked like maybe she was going to cry. But then she sort of put on a big smile. And then she told me that the boxes were painted by trained monkeys. The box became Harriet's prized possession. She kept it on display in her room through elementary school, through high school. If friends asked her about it, she'd say, oh yeah, it was painted by trained monkeys. Nobody ever challenged her on it, maybe because she believed it herself so completely. And then one day, she was home from college, back in the house where she grew up.

54:21And I'm going through some papers, or maybe I was snooping through Susan's papers, and I found a composition, and it had her name on it, and she had written it in high school, and it was called The Tissue Box Story. so I sat down on the floor of Susan's bedroom to read this composition. And Susan told the story just as I told it, except that she wrote how she felt when she saw me crying and how she then looked at my parents and saw that my mother was about to cry too and how she looked at the tissue boxes. And then she remembered that my father had a friend who made them. And she knew how much my parents hated taking charity.

55:13And suddenly, even though she was about to cry, she forced herself to smile. And she pretended those boxes were painted by trained monkeys. And then, and, you know, of course, I didn't know any of this, but the funny thing she wrote in her composition is that she just rushed upstairs and started crying all over her pillow. And she wasn't really sad about the gift, really, is what she said in the composition. she wasn't sure why she was crying, except that it was sort of like she had volunteered to be a grown-up before she was even ready for it.

56:09Up until that moment, I had never thought to question my sister's story. I had never subjected it to the scrutiny of a grown-up mind. I mean, I was 20. I don't know. I had this tissue box that was painted by trained monkeys, and then it wasn't painted by trained monkeys, really. Up until reading that story, Harriet thought that her sister's lies had been only to torment her. Like the time Harriet swallowed an apple seed, and her big sister convinced her that she had an apple tree growing inside her. She'd always been jealous of her sister, always wanted to be the big sister. But reading her sister's story that day made her realize how responsible her sister felt for her, and for their entire family.

56:49and how there were benefits to being the baby. It was good to learn all that. But the vision of the lie, that we live in a world where monkeys can be trained to paint, it's hard to give up. And really, it's just that I can still picture this tissue box and how much I loved it, this tissue box painted by trained monkeys. I know what she means. For me, there's something appealingly weird about a world where only people who happen to have been born with the name Nielsen get to decide what goes on television. And not long after the day that Jodi Mace's co-worker set her straight about the word zing, she found herself on the opposite side of the exact same situation.

57:29She was having a conversation with another co-worker, and he asked her if elves were real. Elves? Like that live in the forest, she asked, with the pointy toes? He nodded. She paused. And then she said, yeah, of course they are.

57:52Alex Bloomberg. Today's show is a rerun, as I've said. These days, he is out of the radio game. He's running a building, electrification, and decarbitization platform called Daisy Chain Energy. If you reach out to his website, he'll tell you all about it.

58:09When I was a child, I thought as a child, My dreams were my kingdom, my shrine.

58:48Elaine Evans, Brett Burks, Julie Rigby, Jennifer Fields, Jack Hitt, and Noah Miller. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. We just released a new bonus episode where I talked to one of our producers, Aviva de Kornfeld, where she plays me her favorite kind of This American Life story. She actually plays a few examples of it, pretty fun examples. And then she explained to me that this kind of story that she loves more than any other kind of radio story is the one kind she can never make herself. which I found to be very surprising. If you want to hear that and the many other bonus episodes that we've been putting out, sign up as a This American Life partner.

59:26You also get the show ad-free and other stuff we give you and you help keep our program going. Sign up at thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia, who explains his behavior this way. I've been cursed for 300 years. Me too, bro. Me too. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. I'm older today And I'm sad in a way Sad that I'm no longer a child.

1:00:27Next week on the podcast of This American Life, Edward Dando was a man in 19th century England who would walk into oyster restaurants. And he would order dozens of oysters at a time. I mean, like 200, 300 oysters at a time. And then, when the bill arrived... Edward Dando would swear to God he thought it was free. He claimed in court not to know how restaurants work. That's next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.

1:01:04Thank you.