873: Got You Pegged

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Shalom Auslander goes on vacation with his family, suspects the beloved, chatty old man in the room next door is an imposter, and sets out to prove it. This and other stories about the pitfalls of making snap judgments about others.

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Prologue: Amy Roberts thought it was obvious that she was an adult, not a kid, and she assumed the friendly man working at the children's museum knew it too. Unfortunately, the man had Amy pegged all wrong. And by the time she figured it out, it was too late for either of them to save face. Host Ira Glass talks to Amy about the embarrassing ordeal that taught her never to assume she knows what someone else is thinking. (8 minutes)
Act One: While riding in a patrol car to research a novel, crime writer Richard Price witnessed a misunderstanding that, for many people, is pretty much accepted as an upsetting fact of life. Richard Price told this story, which he describes as a tale taken from real life and dramatized, onstage at The Moth in New York. (12 minutes)
Act Two: There are situations where making judgments about people based on limited information is not only accepted but required. One of those situations is open adoption, where birth mothers actually choose the adoptive parents for their child. Producer Nancy Updike talks to a pregnant woman named Kim, going through the first stage of open adoption: reading dozens of letters from prospective parents, all of whom seem utterly capable and appealing. (6 minutes)
Act Three: David Rakoff picks a fight with a hit Broadway show. (6 minutes)
Act Four: Shalom Auslander tells the story of the time he went on vacation, pegged the guest in the room next door as an imposter, and devoted his holiday to trying to prove it. Shalom is the author of Feh: a Memoir. (22 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show.
0:05.1	If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.
0:11.8	Okay, as adults, it's pretty rare to have a moment where you're talking with somebody in your own country, in your own hometown, in your own language, and you have no idea what is actually happening.
0:21.5	When things become confusing and not in that, oh, what did he mean by that sort of way, but in
0:25.5	an Isle of Lucy, how did I get myself into this situation kind of confusion?
0:30.3	Like, for example, Amy was back home in Indiana on a break from college, and she was accompanying
0:35.9	her brother's high school class on a trip to this Health and Science Museum
0:39.0	they have in South Bend called the Health Works Kids Museum.
0:42.8	And just to give you a sense of who the characters are in this story,
0:47.3	Amy's brother is autistic and he is developmentally disabled.
0:51.7	If you had to picture Ben, I would say picture this really handsome star athlete-looking guy
0:56.7	who sort of has an age of maybe five to eight years old and loves dinosaurs.
1:03.7	As her Amy, aside from the fact that she's very close to her brother, you can get a good
1:07.4	sense of who she is by the conversation that she had with Ben's teacher on the bus with all the developmentally disabled kids driving to this museum.
1:15.1	Amy was talking to the teacher about her schoolwork, which frankly seems very, very hard.
1:19.9	Amy was majoring in physics and studying in Germany.
1:23.8	In Germany, not only were the classes in German, but we were also using all of these graduate textbooks.
1:29.6	But she was really nice and she just listened to me the whole way over.
1:33.0	So they get to the museum, and after some videos and some science experiments where they blow things up, it was time to walk around the exhibits.
1:39.4	So during all of this, one of the things that they had been really pushing, they had these new computers that were installed.
1:45.9	They were computers designed to walk kids through making a really neat identification card.
1:52.1	And they were all really excited about this.
	...

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