813: Is That What I Look Like?

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You've been seeing yourself, getting to know what you look like, your whole life. So why does it often take an outsider to see things about you that are obvious, and set you straight?

Prologue: Guest host Nancy Updike talks about learning something new, and unpleasant, about herself in, where else, a makeup store. She also talks with other people about moments where someone made an observation about them that was shocking. (8 minutes)
Act One: Writer Domingo Martinez tells a story from his memoir, "The Boy Kings of Texas," about when he was forced to face how he might look in 20 years if he kept doing what he was doing. (12 minutes)
Act Two: A man has a very clear vision of how he always stood up to his father, protected his mother and fought hard for the truth. Until one day he discovers actual raw data — secretly recorded conversations — that threaten to change his picture of everything. (12 minutes)
Act Three: Nancy hears from Producer Ben Calhoun about the moment when the cool teacher in school told the girls they should pay attention to Ben, and they did. Also, Ira Glass interviews actress Molly Ringwald about what happened when she watched one of her own movies, "The Breakfast Club" with her daughter. Ringwald talks about how for the first time, she saw the movie from the parents' point of view, not the kids'. (19 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	From W.B. E. Z. Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Nancy Updike, filling in for
0:05.7	Ira Glass. Today's show is a rerun, a good one. And I'm going to start with this story that I want to share. It's a little personal. I was at
0:15.2	Mac the makeup store, not the computer store, and I was buying foundation, which I
0:20.6	almost never wear. It's the makeup you put all over your face to give yourself the pretend perfect skin.
0:27.0	And I asked the salesman for help finding the right color.
0:30.0	And he looked at me and he said, almost like he was thinking out loud. He said,
0:35.6	your neck, it's so much more yellow than your face. And then he turned away to start looking for the impossible color that
0:46.7	would solve this problem of the yellow right next to the so much more yellow.
0:54.4	And if you're thinking, oh, this was just a sales technique
0:57.4	to invent a problem and then offer to fix it
1:00.1	with more products, I wish that that had been the case. But this was not an
1:06.2	upsell. This was a cre-occur. The man really just seemed to be expressing his
1:12.2	frustration at this stumper of my mismatched face and neck. This sort of out of out of the blue, perfectly sharpened comment stops you
1:35.0	stop you cold because it's not an insult it's an observation that is true
1:36.0	you just hadn't thought of it before
1:38.0	it's shocking because you think I know myself
1:41.0	I know what I've got what I haven't got no one's going to spot something about me that I haven't already seen not true
1:48.4	You can be among friends doing something you love feeling great. We were backstage, you know getting ready to go on
1:55.6	preparing. This is D Watson. She was in a play a while back. And it was all black
2:01.2	women. We were all, some of us, most of us were a little bit bigger than the average, you know, and it was a supportive atmosphere and the subject of big behinds came up and me having one I know all about it and
2:17.4	one of the younger cast members she's about 25 said my mother thought your butt was so big it had to be a prop.
2:26.0	Oh my God and at that moment I didn't hear anything else anybody said I just, that was echoing through my head and I could hear
	...

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