510: Fiasco! (2013)

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2013

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Stories of when things go wrong. Really wrong. When you leave the normal realm of human error, fumble, mishap, and mistake and enter the territory of really huge breakdowns. Fiascos. Things go so awry that normal social order collapses.

Prologue: Jack Hitt tells the story of a small town production of Peter Pan in which the flying apparatus smacks the actors into the furniture, and Captain Hook's hook flies off his arm and hits an old woman in the stomach. By the end of the evening, firemen have arrived and all the normal boundaries between audience and actors have completely dissolved. (4 minutes)
Act One: Jack Hitt's Peter Pan story continues. Jack is the author of several books, including Bunch of Amateurs. (19 minutes)
Act Two: A medieval village, a 1900-pound brass kettle, marauding visigoths, and a plan to drench invaders with boiling oil that goes awry. From Ron Carlson's book, The Hotel Eden: Stories, read by actor Jeff Dorchen. Ron Carlson's newest book is Return To Oakpine. (9 minutes)
Act Three: The first day on the job inevitably means mistakes, mishaps, and sometimes... fiascos. A true story, told by a former rookie cop. (13 minutes)
Act Four: Journalist Margy Rochlin on her first big assigment to do a celebrity interview. It was 1982. The interviewee was Moon Unit Zappa, who'd just released "Valley Girl" with her father Frank. She'd only been interviewed once. Midway through the interview: fiasco! Margy chokes on some coffee, which pumps out of her nose. Moon's mother administers the Heimlich Maneuver. And after that, everyone's so relaxed that Margy gets an interview that becomes her first syndicated article and a big scoop for her paper. When a fiasco destroys social boundaries, it can bring people together. (7 minutes)

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0:28.6	Hi, everybody. Ira Glass here. So our staff is busy reporting out stories for next week's show and for other upcoming shows. And we had a rerun scheduled for this week and we decided in
0:37.6	this stressful time it might be nice to keep things light and funny. And so that's what this
0:43.5	episode is. And it has not one, but two of the most popular stories we have ever put on the air.
0:50.1	The first version of this episode was broadcast over 20 years ago, back when we were distributed by Public Radio International,
0:57.0	and our episodes began with a little PRI audio logo,
1:01.0	which, I don't know, I kind of miss.
1:04.0	From PRI, Public Radio International.
1:06.0	From PRI, Public Radio International.
1:08.0	From P.R.I. Public Radio International.
1:10.0	Public Radio International. Public Radio International. Public Radio International.
1:14.1	One more time.
1:15.6	What could be more American than the person who sees something they've never done before?
1:20.4	Dreams they could do it.
1:21.7	It goes after that dream.
1:23.7	Well, let's begin today with a woman who dreams of directing a play.
1:27.1	In the small town where she lives, a college town somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line in the hills of Appalachia, a town which will remain for our purposes today, unnamed.
1:37.4	I don't think she had ever directed, and she claimed to have acted, and it was never really quite clear just what her credentials were.
1:46.5	But she had managed to convince the local theater department of this college
	...

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