860: Suddenly: A Mirror!
This American Life
This American Life
4.6 • 88.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A show about people who are suddenly confronted with who they are.
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- Prologue: Guest host Aviva DeKornfeld tells Ira Glass about breaking into a community pool as a kid, and the split-second decision that has haunted her ever since. (4 minutes)
- Act One: Some people are great in a crisis. Others, not so much. Does that mean anything about who we really are? Tobin Low investigates. (10 minutes)
- Act Two: Aviva DeKornfeld has the story of Leisha Hailey, who was certain she had the next million-dollar idea. (11 minutes)
- Act Three: Comedian Mike Birbiglia talks about the questions his daughter asks him and how trying to answer them showed him surprising reflections of himself. (15 minutes)
- Act Four: David Kestenbaum tells the story of the suspicious disappearance of multiple shoes and a woman determined to explain it. (8 minutes)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, their podcast listeners, Ira here to announce that I am helping kick off the Tribeca Festival with a live event in New York City. |
| 0:08.0 | On June 10th, that's Tuesday night, June 10th. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm going to be on stage with Ira Madison III, the host of the podcast. Keep it. |
| 0:16.0 | What we're going to do is we're going to take a little ERA's tour through 30 years of This American Life, visit different |
| 0:21.2 | periods of the show with clips and stories. Tickets are on sale now at Tribecafilm.com |
| 0:28.0 | slash this American Life. Again, that is tribecafilm.com slash this American life. If you're |
| 0:35.3 | in New York, I hope you can come out. I think it's going to be fun. |
| 0:39.4 | A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, This American Life.org. From WBEC Chicago, it's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. And I am joined in the studio right now by one of my co-workers of you to Cornfield. |
| 0:56.2 | Hi, Ira. |
| 0:56.9 | Hi there. |
| 0:57.6 | And so you're here to tell us a story. |
| 0:59.7 | Yes. |
| 1:00.5 | It happened probably when I was 11 or 12. |
| 1:03.4 | I was with my older sister, ORA, who's probably 14. |
| 1:06.2 | And our cousin Jake, who's 16 or so, he was visiting us. And one night we decided it would be fun to |
| 1:13.0 | sneak into the community pool, which is just a few blocks away from our house. The community |
| 1:17.8 | pool was closed. Yes, it's probably midnight. Our parents are asleep. We'd never snuck in. So we're |
| 1:24.2 | walking to the pool. And I actually didn't even want to sneak into the pool. |
| 1:28.2 | I was scared, but I just, the bliss of being included with the older kids as the younger one very much overrode my reservations. |
| 1:36.0 | Absolutely. |
| 1:36.9 | So we get to the pool, scale the chain link fence, hop over, triumphant, immediately. |
| 1:44.0 | Like one second after we've entered the pool, |
... |
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