This is Rumbull Strip America Heilman. Today is the first episode of what class are you, a periodic series that I make for Vermont Public.

This series started as an experiment a few years ago.

I wanted to have conversations with people

about the terrible cultural divides

that keep growing in our country

without ending up in boring conversations

about politics. So I drove around asking

strangers, what class are you? Which is a kind of a stupid and offensive question

but it turns out that people have a lot to say about money, education, opportunity, power. So I kept doing it. And this is season two and three of that series. The first shows I made about class, I already ran on

Rumble Strip in a single show. You can find that on my website, but these next

episodes in the series I'll run one at a time every couple days for a few weeks. We're going to start the series with my old friend

Susan Randall, the private investigator, I interview a lot for Rumble Strip. So without further ado, here's Susan Randall on what it was like to

grow up upper middle class. Welcome. So there have been years that I was like on the poverty level in Vermont.

Like I've covered, I've totally qualified for government cheese in this state.

And I've worked my ass off and now I own a business and I have employees and I you know I'm okay.

That's Susan Randall she's a private investigator in Virgins and an old friend of mine, I interview her a lot because she is smart and

thoughtful and she does not hold punches. I asked her to talk about where she

comes from and who she comes from. Here's what she said.

We're both born upper middle class and we both had ups and downs in our own adult life. In other

words we're down downwardly mobile.

Well, we had the luxury, we had the luxury

of being in college and saying, what interests me?

...