306: Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time

This episode explores the unexpected consequences of ideas that initially seemed promising but later turned out to be problematic or humorous.

1. Even simple plans can lead to unexpected complexities when put into practice.
2. Group dynamics can significantly influence individual behavior, often amplifying the initial intent of an idea.
3. Personal experiences and professional settings can blur, leading to humorous or challenging situations.
4. The intersection of intention and reality often teaches valuable lessons about planning and expectations.
5. Reflection on past decisions can provide insights and change perspectives on what constitutes a 'good idea'.

1: Luck of the Irish

A tale of how a dance troupe's lottery dreams affected their performance, illustrating how high hopes can impact professional duties.
Ira Glass: "And then things happen. More than you bargained for, more than you wanted."

2: Taxation without Inebriation

This chapter explores a quirky accountant's unconventional methods, highlighting how desperation can cloud judgment.
Joe Lovell: "It was more than just the money, though. There was something, I don't know, kind of cool about having a tax preparer who couldn't have had less regard for the government's rules."

3: Bad Morning America

An exploration of how a morning TV show can become a platform for unexpected revelations and chaotic moments.
David Rothbard: "You collect trash? Is that it? You like trash? Trashy trash."

4: The Function of the Heart

A personal story about an 11-year-old girl trying to connect with her distant father through a class he teaches about the heart.
Elspeth Carruthers: "I felt like I had really kind of finally connected with my dad."

1. Expect the Unexpected: Always have a backup plan when experimenting with new ideas.
2. Group Influence: Be mindful of how group enthusiasm can skew personal judgment.
3. Reflect on Outcomes: Use unexpected outcomes as learning opportunities.
4. Maintain Perspective: Keep a sense of humor when things don't go as planned.
5. Communicate Clearly: Ensure all parties involved understand the goals and potential risks of any plan.

A girl signs up for a class. A couple hires an accountant. A group of co-workers decides to pool their money and buy a couple of lottery tickets. In the beginning, they're full of hope and optimism — and then something turns. Stories of good ideas gone bad.

Prologue: Paul was a cop. One night he was pulling second shift when he had a perfectly good idea: He'd stretch out in the back seat and take a little nap during his break. He fell right asleep, and slept well until he woke up and realized the funny thing about the back seats of cop cars: The doors don't open from the inside. Paul is author of the book Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All. (8 minutes)

Act One: It was two months into the tour. Katie Else and the rest of the Riverdance cast had been performing eight shows a week. They decided to pool their money for the Mega-Millions lottery. Lotto fever gripped the cast. They started to genuinely believe they would take home about $2 million each, and quit Riverdance the next day. They took the stage the night of the drawing and pulled off their best performance ever, "For the Lotto!," trying to direct their energy towards the win. An hour later, at the hotel bar, the numbers came in. (17 minutes)

Act Two: After years of neglecting their personal finances, Joel and his wife finally decide to sort things out. They hire a tax accountant named Len, whose casual manner is a real comfort, at first. But then, "casual" turns into "drunk" and then it's clear that he's just plain delinquent. Joel tries to take his business elsewhere, but Len refuses to let go of their file. He begs for a second chance, which it seems, came too late. Joel Lovell is executive editor at Pineapple Street Media. (8 minutes)

Act Three: Davy Rothbart was on a 136-city tour appearing on morning TV talk shows to promote his book Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World. Just before one appearance he had what seemed like a great idea at the time. Without letting the host know, he tested it out, live, on-air. Davy is the creator of Found Magazine and author of the book of essays My Heart Is An Idiot. (6 minutes)

Act Four: When Elspeth was a girl, she wanted nothing more than her father's attention. He was busy, a doctor, and distant. One day he agrees to put on a volunteer seminar for their church, about his area of expertise: "The Function of the Heart." Elspeth and her best friend are the only two kids who show up, and Elspeth is attentive and engaged, the perfect student. It was an incredible experience for her, the best day she's ever spent with her dad...she thinks. That is, until her mother takes her aside and explains her big mistake. (8 minutes)

People

Paul Bacon, Elspeth Carruthers, Joe Lovell, David Rothbard, Katie Else

Content Warnings:

None

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Ira Glass

Hey there, podcast listeners. Ira here. I think it's accurate to say that the modern era of podcasting began when serial reinvented what a podcast could be in 2014. And so many people began listening to podcasts to hear the story of Adnan Syed. It was just crazy numbers.

Over 300 million downloads. I remember at one point we realized the average episode of Cereal had more people downloading than the number of people who watched the Game of Thrones finale. And then since that first season, every season, our colleagues at cereal have tried something completely different, building on the ambition of what they began with. I thought, personally, season three, where they tried to explain basically the way the entire criminal justice system works for most Americans through a series of ordinary cases from one courthouse in Cleveland, was kind of unbeatable, epic. And then they came out with their new season.

They're in the middle of that right now. And just to encourage you to listen, what we're going to do now is I'm going to play you the trailer for season four. And then after that, we'll start this week's show. Here we go. Right after September 11, we created a brand new criminal justice system at Guantanamo Bay, a prison and a court to deal with people we suspected of being terrorists.

Dana Chivis

To do what we wanted to do at Guantanamo, we pushed aside the old rules for detaining prisoners of war so we could interrogate people how we wanted and hold them indefinitely without charging them with a crime. Maybe you have an idea of what it's like to work at Guantanamo Bay. Put that aside for a second. You know, you're on 42 sq. Mi.

Katie Else

You've got like five great beaches. I partied my ass off and give up. Almost everyone was getting drunk and getting laid like it's la la land. We're like a Disneyland employee.

Ira Glass

Hmm. Let's talk about that comparison there. Oh, no, that was a joke. Definitely a joke. It's nothing like, nothing like Disneyland.

Paul Bacon

Our mission today is to provide safe. Humane, legal, and transparency. The US government has its own story about what's been happening inside Guantanamo all these years. Legal transparency, transparent care, custody and control. But we wanted the people who served at Guantanamo and survived Guantanamo to tell their stories.

Dana Chivis

Now that they've left Guantanamo, what would they say now that they couldn't say then? A lot, as it turns out. Chaos. Simply put, it was chaotic. You think your Allah is going to help you?

Sarah Koenig

You think your quran is correct? You know, it's a bunch of garbage. It's a pop up, right? What right? Nobody knows you exist here.

He wasn't tortured. He wasn't physically beaten. He wasn't tortured. He was beaten. In the respect that we won, he lost.

Ira Glass

So when you are taught by someone who doesn't believe in tota, how can this guy who believes in human rights doing this to me, this is something that they would never have made public. But the day of the riot, morale was never higher because we got to kick their asses and get away with it. And that's the God honest truth. From cereal productions and the New York Times, this is serial season four Guantanamo, hosted by me, Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivis. Listen on the New York Times audio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Elspeth Carruthers

Is Gimmoleath still open? Oh, are you asking me? Are there still prisoners there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God.

Ira Glass

Paul's a cop in New York. Paul Bacon. Officer Bacon. No jokes, please. And one night, he did his regular four to midnight shift.

And then he was told that they needed him to cover a second shift in another part of the city in a little security booth in an area they were protecting from terrorists. Basically, at 02:00 a.m. The other officer whos working in this booth with him takes a lunch break, goes and takes a nap. And then at 03:00 a.m. Its pauls turn for a break.

Hes exhausted. Remember, he had already worked a full shift as a patrolman. And he decides that hes also going to take a nap. He gets into his patrol car and he drives it out into this parking lot a little ways away from the security booth. I parked my car in the one available spot, thinking, no, this is a parking lot.

Paul Bacon

Nobody's gonna be coming by here. It's gonna be fine. And so I turned off the ignition and just sat there. And I realized I can't, I don't think I'm gonna be able to fall asleep sitting up. So I got out of the driver's seat, gotten back and closed the door, and I was asleep within seconds.

I had set my alarm watch to go off so that I would get up in plenty of time to go back on post so my partner wouldn't worry where I was and everything would be fine. It would be smooth. But I woke up a few seconds before my alarm with this terrible realization, which is that I was locked in the back. I just, I was like, I'm trapped. That was my first thought.

Because you don't get out of the back of a police car. The back of the police car is for prisoners. I mean, I never really thought about it, that a police car is really just like a rolling jail cell. That's exactly right. And also it's hermetically sealed.

Remember, it was very cold that night. It was February, and I had closed the grating to the front and the windows were up. So it was really, you could just feel there was less oxygen in the air. And also all the windows were all fogged up, so I could barely see out. And I started to panic.

I reached for both of the door handles. Neither of them worked. And so I rolled over on my side and I pounded against the door as hard as I could with both my feet. And there's just no way out of this car. Its dark, its cold.

Ira Glass

But hes only 60ft away from the security booth where his partner is, and hes right next to a sidewalk. All he needs is somebody to see him come over and lift the door handle from the outside. And he gets lucky. A Pepsi truck parks right on the street right in front of him. He waves frantically at the driver.

He pounds on the glass. He can see the driver peering in at him. And then the driver flees. He flees. Who is going to help some maniac trapped in the back of a police car?

Paul Bacon

My next thought was, well, maybe somebody else will come by. And so I wrote in the steam on the window, I wrote the word help, and I did it backwards. But then I got to thinking, well, that's not going to be any more convincing. So I wrote underneath help. I wrote, I'm a cop.

But unfortunately, nobody came by to read my message.

Ira Glass

His police radio is in the front seat, out of reach. And three in the morning, exhausted, panicked. It takes him 25 minutes to remember that he is carrying a cell phone, a cell phone he says he almost never uses. But here's the problem. He's working with an officer that he's never met before in a place he's never been before.

He has no idea what the phone number is of that little booth just 60ft away from his parked car. That little booth where right now his partner is expecting him back on post, wondering where he is. His first great idea of the night was to take a nap. Now he had a second great idea. I, uh, I did what I thought I would never have to do ever in my life, and that is to call 911 as a cop.

Paul Bacon

When the operator came on very shortly, she says, well, don't worry, we'll put this through to your central dispatcher. And she was about to get off the phone with me and I said, well, wait, there's this very, very important thing to tell the dispatcher, and that is that this needs to go over the radio as a non emergency, because anytime that a copy requests help, and it's not qualified in any way, it sends out the cavalry, everybody drops everything they're doing and comes very quickly to that location, and that's a dangerous situation, and all because I made this stupid mistake. So I said, please make sure that you specify it's a non emergency. I swear, within a minute, lights and sirens coming from all directions.

Ira Glass

Now part of the chaos is coming from the fact that Paul wasnt really exactly sure where he was. Remember, this is not his regular precinct. So cops are zooming around just trying to find him, but this seems like way too much commotion even for that. Something has gone very, very wrong. So Paul dials 911 again.

They tell him that his call had gone out as a 1013, 1013, officer down. Like as if a cop was being beaten or had just been shot. And that's why everybody was going all over the place. My call had basically woken up the entire midnight squad. You know, probably half that squad was also sleeping.

Paul Bacon

And now I had gotten everybody's blood going. So my partner up in the booth finally got up and started walking down into the parking lot, and I saw him coming, and I took my flashlight off my belt, and I'm shaking my flashlight, I'm real like, crazy. Just to show him that this is not a headlight of some car. This is a person being very creative and very emphatic about letting you know that this is somebody stuck. And he sees me from about 50 yards away, and he takes his flashlight off and jingles it back at me and starts to walk away.

He's just thinking I'm having a good time, you know, like, ya ha ha ha. He was walking away, so I had to rap really hard on my window again, and I rapped so hard that I cut my knuckles. But he got the point and he came down to my car, just lifted the door handle. It took him 2 seconds to let me out.

Ira Glass

So he's free and they call off the cavalry. Nobody in his regular precinct ever found out about it. Today on our radio show, we bring you stories like this one. Stories that begin with a bright idea. Like, for instance, you're going to park your car 60ft from your partner and climb in and take a nap.

And then things happen. More than you bargained for, more than you wanted. From WBEZ Chicago, it's this American life. I'm Eric Glass. Each week we bring you a bunch of stories organized around a single thought.

And this week that thought is, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Our show in four acts today, each of which starts off with great hope and a shiny new idea. Act one, luck of the Irish. In that act, a bunch of people become very convinced that with one simple purchase, they can change their lives forever. Act two, taxation without inebriation.

In that act, how to make a decision to hire somebody who absolutely, positively is going to do you no good. And you can tell they're going to do you no good and why you may never fire that person. Act three, bad Morning America. David Rothbard goes on to morning television and does a little experiment on his hosts. Act four, the function of the heart.

An eleven year old girl comes up with a simple scheme on how she can finally get to really know her dad. Her dad, who is not so keen on being known. Stay with us.

Equine luck of the Irish. This first story takes place far from the New York police force. This is a very different kind of job. Maybe about as different as you can get. Well, I was in river dance, but I don't actually dance, I just sing.

There's like a lead female singer. It must be a terrible thing to be the singer in Riverdance because nobody actually, you know, it's all about the dancing, right? Like. No, exactly. And every now and then someone will say something like, it's called river dance, not River Sing.

Mister and misses America, please meet katie else. Katie was touring with river dance, doing eight shows a week, working every day. Any day that they weren't on stage, they would be traveling. 70 people in the company, that's four singers, a band, sort of tech guys and support people, and 40, yes, 40 dancers doing that irish step dancing thing they do. I don't even know if it's called step dancing.

You know what I'm talking about here, that Michael Flatley. Of course you do, because you've seen television. Anyway, two months into the tour, a time when working every day, they're getting kind of tired with the monotony of working every day, and they needed some excitement. And this idea spread through the company like wildfire. I think it was the idea of the lead dancer and dance captain.

He has this ridiculous luck with raffles. We have a raffle every Friday, and he has won it five times, and he just has ridiculous luck with this. And he just happened to notice on the Internet, I guess, that mega millions had gotten up to $360 million or something like that. So he suggested that we all do a syndicate ticket. It's like you pool your money, so dollar five gets five tickets, but everybody has a share in all the tickets.

Not too complicated, right? They're playing the lottery. So the company's physical therapist, who's a guy named Scott, he is the one who organized the whole thing and collected everybody's money. And the reason why it's him is, okay, if you picture this company of 40 dancers, it's like. And I hate to bring up this analogy, but honestly, it's very, very apt.

Okay, the starship enterprise. Okay, remember this? I always thought that it was really a little weird that the one job, besides actually flying around and exploring space, the one set that they bothered to build on this television show that wasn't actually adventure related was the doctor's office. I mean, of all the things, right? And basically, it's like that with Riverdance.

Scott, the physical therapist, has a very big role behind the scenes in Riverdance. Well, his office is like a center for gossip and for people gather there, like, during the show and. And how'd the pitch go? Like, give me the pitch. Well, he didn't have.

It was just basically like, everybody's doing this. We want everybody to get involved, because then our chances will be better, which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say when you're talking about the lottery, because your chances are so slim. You're like, one more person. But we figured out the stats. I guess the stats on the mega millions at that point was one to 760 trillion, but we figured we had, like, a 340 to 760 trillion chance, which sounded better than one because you.

Guys would buy 340 tickets. Yeah, but did it seem. Did it seem in some way reasonable? I'm sitting here, actually, and you're saying these numbers, and I'm writing out on a piece of paper, 760. And I realized, I don't even know, like, wait, is trillion the next one up from billion?

And then, like, I'm writing 340, and then, like, honestly, then you start to cross off a zero and a zero, and then you get the 34 and the 76 and then, like, a lot of zeros. And it just still seems like there's a lot of zeros there. You're still up in the kind of billions, aren't you? To one, yeah. I mean, the chances are so unreasonable at that point, we just kind of forgot about the stats.

I don't even know. I mean, it just got unreasonable. Like, we just thought for some reason, if we focused all our energy on this, we were gonna win it. People even brought up theories of, like, quantum physics and how we're all energy, and if we just focus our energy on winning this lottery, like, we'll be able to create our own destiny. Does that makes any sense?

It does indeed. Yeah. No, because when math fails, what do you have left but pure faith? Faith? Yeah, like, there'd be dissenters.

That would be like, you know, the chances of us winning this, we'd be like, no, no, no. You're the chink in the chain. We need to focus all our energy on winning the lottery. And then it just became kind of like a group psychology thing, right? Like, everybody's holding everybody else up, but.

It'S kind of bizarre, like, how worked up you can get yourself. And one of the girls even said she'd been reading, like, Deepak chokra or something. And she was like, we can't say we're going to win the lottery. We have to say we've won the lottery, and then we'll win.

How far did this go? They all started planning what they were going to do with the money. Katie, for example, was going to pay off her parents house. She was going to buy a house for herself. She was going to put a little recording studio in the house for her singing career.

And as they came closer to the night of the mega millions drawing that Tuesday night, it was clear what most of the cast wanted. I have to say, it's kind of touching. It tells you so much about them and their lives, what it is that they wanted. See, a lot of people are quite young in the show, so they're like, I'm quitting river dance. I'm going to school.

Like, everybody was quitting. Hold on, I'm going to stop that tape right there. Can I say, this is such a sad statement about the state of education funding in America, that if you're young, okay, you're young, you're in your twenties, you think, okay, how can I get to college? What might be a good way that I may be able to finance that? What would be a good plan?

And the plan that seems reasonable to you, and not just to you, but to you and several dozen of your peers, is, I'm gonna play the lotto. Like, everybody was quitting, but we decided that we would stick out the rest of the tour because it would be a while before. Cause at first, people were like, this will be our last show. This will be our last show. Like, we realized we wouldn't get the money for a while, and so we decided that we'd stick out the rest of the tour, and then I'll quit after that.

Well, that's sporting up you to honor your commitment to Riverdance. Yeah, isn't it? Because we were just gonna call our producer the next day and tell him. Tell him we were done.

Well, we also had a plan, too, because we had, like, a break a week later of a few days, and he's like, well, I'll just go pick up the money in Georgia. You know, like, during the break, I'll bring somebody else with me. And he's like, first things first. We gotta hire ourselves a lawyer. Like, we had the whole game plan.

You know, that's important because, as anybody who's ever been to the movies knows, you have to have a game plan because somebody has to go with the physical therapist at Georgia to pick up the money. Or suddenly you're in a whole, you know, Billy Bob Thornton movie where things are going wrong and people are running off. You definitely want to avoid that. Okay. All right, this brings us to the big night.

All right, let me cue some big event music here. Okay, here we go.

All right. It's the big night. Mega millions drawing Tuesday night. A show night for them, because every night is a show night. Backstage before the show, they all gather in a big huddle around the dance captain, where basically amounts to the St.

Christmas speech from Henry V. He kind. Of made this speech and said, you know, we want you to put all your energy into the show, and maybe we can win this thing. You mean while you're dancing, you're dancing for the lottery and you're focusing that dance at those little balls somewhere? Exactly.

You're sending that dancey energy through space. Yes. Towards winning the lottery. So it was sort of exciting. It was quite exciting.

And, I mean, we kind of got worked up into a frenzy, almost like people were just going insane. There's one point where I actually dance. I dance for about 30 seconds, and we're kind of, like, spinning in this circle in the middle. And usually you're kind of like, yep, you woo. But people were, like, screaming and they were yelling things like, do it for the lotto.

Do you think the audience could hear? Do it for the lotto? I really hope not. I mean, you can see why they would get so worked up about this. They had been working every day for two months.

Which actually brings us to one of the difficult things about doing theater, especially a show like River Dance. You have to find ways to break up the monotony of doing something like that, because it's not even like you have a role to throw yourself into. And half of what I sing is nonsense anyway. So to have something else to add to the show or spice up the show, I think helps a lot, because otherwise you can just easily just be going through the motions. That's right.

I hadn't thought about that. It's actually. It's a job where you don't get a day off. And every single day, you do exactly the same thing. Yes.

And, like, exactly the same thing. Like, it's not like other jobs where, like, you're working in cash register, and it sort of seems like you're doing the same thing, but you're actually talking to different people and you're doing this and that, but you're actually, like, literally making exactly the same motions around the stage, uttering the same sounds out of your mouth. It's exactly the same every day. Yeah. See, we try to find other ways to try to spice up the show.

Like, okay, in this number, you have to do as many random 360 degree turns as you can. Really? Yeah. Or in this one, you have to do as many head twitches as you can fit in. You know, this is.

I don't know. This is just a universal thing with performing, I guess. I mean, I feel like. I feel like I even I. In my limited way, I understand this.

I. For a radio show, I go out and I visit public radio stations around the country and give these talks about our show in theaters. And years ago, when I first started doing this, like, the way that they would send me out is I would go out, like, five or six nights in a row, like, one city each night. And the thing that I learned is that I am not a good enough performer to say the same thing on stage five or six nights in a row and sound sincere or even speak with any feeling at all. Like I have to do them weeks apart.

And even then, it's best if I change the speech a little each time. Otherwise, I find myself on stage talking about these things that mean, you know, so much to me about our radio show and what we're trying to do. And I'm on stage and I'll be talking and it'll just feel like. Like nothing. Like nothing.

Like blah, blah, blah, gum that's been chewed for way too long. And this is the thing about doing dance as a job or any kind of performing music or comedy or acting. It's like once you turn it into a job, right? Once it's a job, it means that every night you have to get on stage and take something that means so much to you, that means the world to you, and you have to repeat it until it does not mean anything at all. So if you're somebody like Katie in a big professional touring production, you have to consciously do stuff to keep up your energy when you're on stage.

Sometimes if you're on stage and, like, the dancers are dancing and I'm not singing, like, I'll just be, like, talking to people and, you know, talking to. People, smoking a cigarette, you get a cell phone call. Excuse me, you gotta take this. No, but I know I feel bad in the same regard with the audience. You know, when we perform and they think they're getting.

You're giving them all this energy and this amazing performance, and you're really just like, where are we gonna go tonight? What are we gonna do, though? On the night of the big mega millions drawing? That was definitely not a problem. The audience was really reacting to the amount of energy that we were putting out.

Like they were going nuts. Like, they'd be breaking out into applause in the middle of numbers and just, like, the amount of volume coming from the audience, like, you could just tell, definitely the best show on tour. So much energy we were giving them. But it was for. It was because we wanted to win the lottery.

Like, it wasn't because we necessarily wanted to give them a really good show. It's because we were greedy. Was it the actual best night of Riverdance you ever were in? Yeah. Like, I.

At the end of the show, I almost felt like I was on some kind of, like, crazy drug. Cause I was like, yes, do it for the lottery. You know, like, you've gotten yourselves so worked up at that point, at least for me, I've never had so much energy on stage. I'm usually a little bit lethargic, and I basically just kind of stroll around, turn my head out to the audience and sing. So they come off stage, it's 1015, 1020, something like that.

And it's like they are stoned, they are buzzing, they are totally hyped up, and the lottery is at eleven. And they gather at the hotel bar. Scott, the physical therapist, actually went to the trouble to type the numbers of all the lottery tickets out onto a page, which he duplicated and handed copies to everybody sets all over the bar. And he also had the original tickets sealed neatly in these little plastic bags in numerical order. Such care.

And pretty much everybody was there. We're at a bunch of different tables, and every table has a different computer print out to read over the lottery numbers. So we get the numbers and we're just pouring over these sheets, and we're just getting nothing. Nothing. Not even, like, anything remotely close.

Katie Else

Wow. So then someone's like, I wanna see the originals. Like, what if you made a mistake on the computer? So we're going through the originals? Yeah, I love the instinct of that, though.

Ira Glass

Like, the instinct is, this must be wrong. I mean, clearly we want. There's been some sort of mistake here. You made a mistake. But it wasn't even like there was one that was close.

And someone actually brought up that someone actually posed the idea that maybe Scott had put the numbers in wrong and we had won the lottery. He had won the lottery and was going to take all the money. Wow. It's amazing how worked up you can get yourself. And especially, it's like a gang mentality how worked up you can get each other.

And then you just crash. Nobody even hung around. She said, I went straight to bed. And the next day they did a lousy show. Incredibly low energy.

And here's the disturbing thing. The audience loved it. Couldn't tell at all. Which either means, you know, that, a, they are such solid performers, and this material, the riverdance material, is so solid that even on their worst day, they are pretty damn good. Or b, it's kind of ugly to say, but I'm just gonna say it.

When you and I and a lot of people, when we get together in a mass group, when we get together in an audience, when we're sitting in a theater in an audience, we just get stupid. And it doesn't matter if the performers try. Katie actually sees it. Somewhere in between those two, they're gonna. See kind of what they wanna see.

They came wanting to see this thing they think they're getting. You're giving them all this energy and this amazing performance, and that's what they're. Going to see, which, in a way, you know, is just people being nice. Assuming the performers are doing their best on stage. You know, we want to laugh at the comedians jokes.

We want them to be funny. It's a nice thing. This whole experience raised some very basic questions about performing. And in theory, as we were talking, we were like, you know, I guess that's how much energy you're supposed to give the audience. You know, ideally every night, but you can't.

Like, I couldn't do. I think after we, you know, lost the lottery, obviously, I turned to one of my friends, and I was like, I don't think I could do another lotto show. I don't think it would be possible. Like, it's just too draining. Cause I would think it's more fun to perform if you're more hyped up.

You know, it definitely is more fun.

It kind of puts performing in perspective, because, I don't know, maybe some people just get themselves really hyped up and can do that every night and, you know, good for them. But, like, eight shows a week, that's a lot of shows. I don't think I could.

You know, one of the conclusions that you all could come to is that although you were dancing your hardest and trying to direct that energy towards the powerball, that perhaps that isn't really what determines how the Powerball falls. Perhaps. Well, or possibly you weren't dancing quite hard enough. Yeah. Or there was, like, a touring company of Chicago that really danced.

Well. I think the people who ended up winning was. It was another syndicate ticket, but it was nurses, so I don't know what they did. They, like, put as much energy into changing bedpans and putting in iv's as. They could or saving lives.

We're saving lives. One little dance troupe can't compete with that, man. You know, they get in there and they save a couple lives for the lottery. That's some energy. That's true.

I bet they saved a life, damn it.

Singer Katie else. Today's show is a rerun, and since doing this interview, she has quit river dance. To hear more of her music, go to katielse.com.

Act two. Taxation without inebriation. So you need help. You're in over your head, and you turn to a professional. Often that is a good idea.

It just depends on who the professional is that you turn to. A couple years ago, Joe Lovell and his wife had financial problems. Tax time was coming around, and for once, he says, they got the bright idea to take appropriate steps. The first time we went to see Len, he spent an hour and a half talking about movies and musicals and the actors. He'd had his clients way back when.

Sarah Koenig

Nobody knew their names. F. Murray Abraham owes me, he said. I've saved his ass for years. Eventually my wife, Kate, cut in and explained that we were pretty worried that the bulk of our income that year had been untaxed and that we hadn't paid any quarterly estimates.

Kate made most of her living then as an improv actor, and I made most of mine as a freelance writer. And the truth was, we'd spent everything we'd earned in war. Len looked at us incredulously. Can one of you explain to me, he said, how the hell ordinary people beats out raging bull? Does that make a lick of freaking sense?

It's a little hard to explain now, but at the time it seemed charming rather than worrisome, that our accountant was more concerned about what won best picture in 1980 than about our unpaid taxes. On the subway ride from Len's Manhattan apartment back to Brooklyn. I went on and on about how reassuring it was to take our financial mess to a guy like him. His whole attitude was comforting, I kept saying. Even the fact that he was drunk while we sat there in his office, it helped put things in perspective.

When we got home, there were three messages on our answering machine, each one more slurred than the one that had come before it. It's Len. The first message started. You kids are screwed. I'll do what I can, but this is a horror show.

You should know that. Then a beep and it's me, Len. I don't know what the hell we're gonna do here. And finally this, which we had to play over a few times to understand. Kate, you're a comedienne, for christ's sake.

If you go out to drinks with Steve Martin, you can write that off. That sort of crap, that's legit. Kate, who had never met Steve Martin, stared at the answering machine for some time. Eventually she looked up at me and said, we can't ever go to Lynn again.

The next year I went to Len again. I know it doesn't make any sense. I knew it even then. But the thing was, he saved us a ton of money, and while he did it in a way that was not technically legal, he made it all seem perfectly justified. When I went to pick up our return and pause for a moment over some figures that were utterly fictional, Len scoffed at me.

Look, he said, they want to screw you, and I'll lie up the walls to make sure you don't get screwed. Em. That's how you have to think about these things. It was more than just the money, though. There was something, I don't know, kind of cool about having a tax preparer who couldn't have had less regard for the government's rules.

Len did. The taxes of artists and writers and actors, and the thing he valued about them had nothing to do with their money. At a time when a few of my friends had become suddenly, inexplicably rich, just sitting in Len's shambles of an office, looking at his albums and books, at the paintings and sculptures he'd accepted from clients in lieu of actual payment, it made me feel like I was a part of this creative community.

It was about ten in the morning when I saw Lin, a week before the filing deadline, and he was chain smoking parliaments and drinking scotch from a stainless steel tumbler. His desk was covered with manila folders, dozens of them. They were coffee ringed and cigarette stained, his calculations scratched across them in a tiny, illegible hand. There was a drum kit in the corner of the room, piled high with even more folders, and next to Len's desk, on a metal cart, was a computer that looked like it had just come out of the box. They told me this freaking program would make it easier, Len said.

But I dont know what the hell. He looked exhausted and distracted. Theres this kid that keeps sending over to help me out, but everything he says just confuses me more. He slouched in his chair and rubbed his fists in tight circles around his eyes, then gave his head a little shake. Ah, crap, he said.

Your old lady is a kick in the pants. Shes a funny chick. Im sorry shes not here. He started to chuckle, but the chuckle turned into a coughing fit and Len hacked away for a solid half a minute, waving me off with one hand and resting his forehead on the edge of his desk. Eventually a tremendously thin and wrinkled woman appeared in the door.

You okay, Lenny? She asked. He lifted his head. Yeah. Good, he said, and the blood began to slowly retreat from his face.

The woman handed him a handkerchief, and Len pulled a wad of crumpled bills out of his breast pocket. Go buy us some steaks, he said. Wine, too, if there's anything left over. Then he looked at me and smiled. My ex, he said.

She's helping me out of a jam here. I nodded and held onto my folder, filled with another year's bad news. I said something about how great it was that they could still work together, he and his ex. Especially under the gun like this. Yeah, we've been through it, he said, and then he went on to tell me about how the two of them went on this trip to Puerto Rico years ago, shortly after they were married.

We drank rum drinks and sat around burning our asses off all week. It was great. On the last day we barely had two nickels to rub together, so this is what we did. We went down to the pool for a few last drinks, you know, just left all our crap in our room, right? Then caught a cab to the airport and got on the plane with nothing but our towels and sandals.

He started laughing again, hard, and I braced myself for another coughing fit, but it didn't come. Aw, Christ, he said. Those were good days. You could do stuff like that. Back then I just sat there trying to take in what that meant.

30 years ago you could check into a hotel in Puerto Rico for a week, then not pay and leave all your belongings in your room and go to the airport in your swim trunks and fly back to New York City.

While I consider this, Len pulled himself upright and surveyed the mess on his desk. He let out a long, dramatic sigh and said, aw, crap. There's no use putting it off any longer, right? Let's have the mess. I thought of my wife, the funny chick back home in Brooklyn.

She was really tired of us being jackasses about money, and I couldn't believe that she'd look kindly on this scene. I don't know, Len, I said. It looks like you have your hands full this year. Why don't I take all this to someone else this time? Just gimme the freaking folder, Len said.

I started to make an excuse, but before I could get anything out of my mouth, Len heaved himself out of his chair and fell across the width of his desk. He grabbed my folder with one of his hands and I watched his face go crimson. Come on, he said. I need this. I let go.

Len fell back into his chair with my folder in his hands and closed his eyes. I knew I shouldn't leave it at this, that I needed to stand up and maybe get a little mean and self righteous and tell him to give me my folder and then walk out of there, but I couldn't. I'd like to believe that it was out of some sort of compassion, that I was looking at a broken man and choosing not to break him further, and maybe that was part of it, but it also had something to do with my own private disgrace at how little money I had and at how badly I managed it. It felt to me like it was just a facet of something larger and more troublesome, an inability to take much of anything very serious. Without Len, I'd have to show that folder to someone else who'd probably look down on me.

Len was less my accountant than the guardian of my shame, and in that respect, I still needed his services. So I said okay, and walked out and waited for the elevator. When it arrived, Len's ex wife stepped off with their steaks and wine. We smiled at each other, embarrassed, and she said, he'll be better next year. This one's a toughie.

Len never called us to sign our return. I assumed he'd filed for an extension, and I called him a few times and left messages trying to find out, though I didn't try very hard. Several months later, we received a letter telling us that Lyn had died in April, days before the filing deadline. I called the accountant whod sent the letter, and he told me they had taken over a bunch of Lens clients. Our return had never been filed, he said.

My wife and I owed a lot of money. Hed do what he could to explain the circumstances, but there were going to be some fines and penalties to pay. I understood that right. I thanked him and hung up and called the IR's. I know I should have done something.

I found myself admitting to a woman who repeatedly insisted that I, and no one else was responsible for my taxes. I know I should have taken care of it differently. And then I thought of the bulk of Len's body on top of his desk, the wad of bills he handed to his ex wife, the thousands of dollars we owed that we couldn't possibly pay. I imagined that figure circled in marker, sitting on the pile in Len's office after he died. Can you tell me, I asked her because I genuinely wanted to know.

Can you tell me how someone else would have handled this?

Ira Glass

Joe Lovell. He's no longer a freelancer. Now he's the executive editor at Pineapple Street Media.

Coming up, can garbage be a force for justice? That's in a minute from Chicago public radio, when our program continues. Support for this american life comes from indeed, indeed is driven by the search for better. But when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isnt to search at all. Dont search match with indeed and indeed doesnt just help you hire faster.

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Head to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com American to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hi, I'm Wendy doar. I'm an editor with New York Times audio. For me, the magical thing about audio is how it can take you closer to somebody else's life. You feel like you're getting to know somebody that you might never normally meet.

Ira Glass

And the New York Times audio app is all about bringing those voices to you with new stories to explore every day. Download the New York Times Audio App@nytimes.com audioapp. You'll need a news subscription to listen.

This is American Life. Every week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show seemed like a good idea at the time. We arrived at act three of our show, act three, Bad Morning America. Every so often it actually happens.

The idea that seems so good at the time actually is kind of. Which brings us to Davey Rothbard's story. Davey has been on our show before. He is the creator of Found magazine, where he publishes notes and scraps of paper and pictures just kind of randomly discovered by people in the street or wherever. A couple years ago, David was promoting a book based on the same material.

It was on this book tour that went to 136 cities, and in a lot of these cities, he did the local morning tv shows. This story he's about to tell was recorded in front of a live audience. Some of the names of cities and people have been changed. Early on in the tour, I took these gigs pretty seriously, but by the third week of the trip, I was starting to wonder who exactly, if anyone, was watching the local news at 07:00 a.m. Also, while a couple of the hosts of these shows were real cool and genuinely excited about the book, most of them didn't get the whole idea behind it.

Katie Else

For some reason, this only increased their chipper ness. Those pants are so fun, they'd say, looking me up and down. Plaid pants, you're fun huh? The one thing that kept me excited about these morning tv gigs was getting to meet and hang out with my other fellow guests. These were local chefs with recipes of the week, mayoral candidates, a team of irish dancers, a kid with an 80 pound pumpkin on Fox 40 five's good Morning Baltimore.

I did my little song and dance. Then the anchor asked me to stay on her couch while she brought out the next guest, Baltimore's best mom, an 87 year old woman named Darnelda Cole. She sat next to me on the couch, and on the far side of her sat her 50 year old son, Dice. Darnelda had no idea why she'd been asked to come on tv. They plotted this as a surprise.

The anchor asked Dice Cole to read the letter he'd written. Darnelda grew weepy. At last, the anchor declared Darnelda Baltimore's best mom and produced an oversized plaque from somewhere and presented it to her. At which point Darnelda fell sobbing into my arms. I gave her a wild bear hug, caught up in the moment.

A moment later, the anchorwoman joined our embrace.

Dice, meanwhile, had lit up a cigarette, which an alarm producer raced over and doused with a splash of sparkling water. Darnelda took this in and began hollering at her son and whacking him with her new plaque. Dice, you can't smoke in here. This is tv we're making. Put that damn thing out.

There were other high points, and by high points, I mean low points for the stations and their guests. In Cleveland, two city parks employees showed off an injured hawk and Falcon they'd rescued. Then the falcon got loose and started flapping about, peeing on everything. The anchors had to forge on through the local news and sports and weather, while the falcon continued to dive bomb them, rationing its urine so it could drip a few drops on them with every sortie. It was amazing.

In Chicago, a young soccer champ, demonstrating his fancy moves booted a ball off the wall of the set, knocking it over backwards, revealing the fact that we were not actually in the host living room, as it might appear, but in the middle of a big, dank concrete hangar in Phoenix, I was sandwiched on air between Cedric the entertainer and the governor of Arizona. Cedric came on right before me, dropped a couple f bombs, and then sheepishly left, telling his chaperone, I didn't mean to say that. It just came out. I swear to God. I was traveling with my little brother in a van I'd bought off eBay.

Often we would do a found event in one city, take turns driving all night to the next one and get to the tv station parking lot around 04:00 a.m. I could get a couple hours of sleep before it was time for me to unfold myself, clomp inside, all rumpled and bleary eyed, and do my thing for 90 seconds on air. In the wee hours, security guards in the station lots would poke flashlights in our van windows and roust us, and I'd explain that I was going to be a guest on the morning show, and they'd disappear for 20 minutes to check into it, then come back and wake us again to tell us that things had checked out and everything was cool. In Seattle, after a young security guard played this game with us, I asked him if I could come inside to use the john. We ended up talking for a while.

His name was Pico. It turned out that the station was moving soon to brand new, larger digs, and that Pico was going to be replaced by an automatic gate with a swipe card. Pico asked why I was going to be on the morning show, and I explained to him the found book, all notes and letters and photos that folks around the country had found and sent in to us, little scraps that gave a glimpse into the lives of strangers. Pico got excited. He told me that earlier that very same night, he'd been sifting through boxes that were being tossed out before the station's big move, and he'd found a bunch of racy notes written by the morning show's old dour anchorman to a young camerawoman.

Pico and I, we galloped out back to the dumpsters and mucked about until we found the stack of steamy pages. You should read some of these on the show. Pico cried.

I thought this could be a terrible idea, but Pico was vehement. This guy's a class a, he said. I'm telling you, he got a janitor fired for throwing out his lucky tie that he left on the bathroom floor. She had worked here eight years. 3 hours later, we were on the air, and the anchorman was turning to me with a grumpy look.

So, tell me about this book. You collect trash? Is that it? You like trash? Trashy trash.

One person's treasure's another's treasure. He might very well have been drunk at 715 in the morning. Yes, sir, I said. People are finding this stuff all over the country, all over the world, really, and sending it in to us. It's amazing how powerfully you can get a sense of someone just from a little ripped piece of paper you pick up off the grass.

Like this one, for example.

Seems like it's a guy who's trying to woo a girl by describing what he'd like to do with her breasts. I held his note up high and read it out loud. Stacy, you've got a rack on you. Now that's a pair. I will.

And on them. Quit playing hard to get.

What an expression that fellow had on his face.

For a moment, his mouth, his nostrils, his eyes, and each eyebrow seemed to burst with separate looks of stun, confusion, outrage, remorse and panic. Then, in an instant, he recovered, a true professional, and he asked me, so, did you bring any other kinds of notes? I had to admit, Pico was right. Great idea. Back in the lobby, Pico stood with two janitors by a big tv set, and as I walked out into the bright, blurry morning sun, they applauded and whistled and called after me, good job, man.

Good job.

Ira Glass

David Rothbard does its story in his book, my heart is an idiot. He's also got a new film out called 17 blocks.

Act four, function of the heart. When you're a kid and you're frustrated with something in your life, your strategies are kind of limited for how you can fix what's wrong. When Elspeth was a kid, she saw an opening, she got an idea, and she got results. She definitely got results. Mainly, she wanted to get closer to her dad, who was a doctor.

She says what you knew about him already was mostly, well, he worked in a hospital with a lot of old men. It was always a relationship where I was always just desperate for attention and for knowledge of him. I wanted to know what he was like, what he did, what he was interested in, and he was extremely unforthcoming on every front. So I would ask him things like, where are you going? And he would say, oh, and I would say, out.

Where? And he would say, just out. And it would turn into that kind of incredibly frustrating word game, which he would sort of treat it as though this was playful, fun. And I just remember by the end of it, I was just enraged.

Was he actually, like, around? Like, would he be home at night? Yeah, he was home, but it was. Important to him to have quiet, so when he could come home, he would want quiet. And of course we were, you know, we would scream and with enthusiasm that he would be there, and he would be clearly kind of affronted with all the noise.

Elspeth Carruthers

So I was eleven at sort of at the height of, I would say, desperation to, to get something from him. And this was a thing that was set up by the unitarian church. Parents would come in and they would teach a little class in their specialty. And so my dad had volunteered, being a doctor, he was going to give a class on the function of the heart. It was going to be on the function of the heart.

And so I, of course, decided I was going to sign up for my dad's course because I really wanted to finally figure out what he did. So one of my good friends, Ruthie, also signed up. So there were the two of us. And so he had gone out and he bought this at a butcher. He'd gone to a butcher and bought this massive, raw, bloody cow heart in to demonstrate the function of the heart.

Ira Glass

So. So the class begins and you see this bloody heart and automatically, are you horrified to start because you thought it would be something else? Oh, no, no. I was quite riveted. No, you know, very cool looking and actually genuinely interested in the topic as well.

Elspeth Carruthers

And so he had sliced open the heart and he opened it up and we went through the various functions of the heart. And then he would ask questions, and there are two of us in the class. And even so, I raise my hand every time, and I don't just raise my hand, I raise my hand like. It'S me. I know the answer.

I have this. This is the question? This is the question, yeah. And then he would pause and Ruth would be sitting there quite quietly, and then he would ask for what my question would be. And then I would ask the question and then he would explain and go into a long, long explanation.

And he's a very quiet man. He's a very, very quiet person, not used to speaking, so the explanations would go on for quite some time. And then he would ask another question and I would again raise my hand. And not just raise it, but like pump it. I would pump my arm.

And so the whole class was just me dominating the classroom over Ruthie, my very dear friend, who was the soul of discretion throughout, you know, very subtle, kind of acute reading of the room dynamic, I would say, for an eleven year old. Stayed right out of it. And that was the class. And after that class, I felt great. I loved it.

I felt like I'd had this great class with my dad, that he saw. Your smart questions and that he actually answered your questions and gave you the attention. That's right. And that I finally had some evidence about what it was that he actually did. It was a great moment.

And I felt afterwards like I had really kind of finally connected with my dad. Just like the poetry of it of like you in this classroom, this formal setting with your dad and your best friend there for protection, basically. And a bloody heart cut open sitting there in between you. No, it's quite. Quite the tableau.

Yeah. Yeah.

But then a couple of days later, my mother took me aside and she sort of raised the issue about how important it was to be a quiet person. You don't want to be the loud person. That was. This is the message. You don't want to be the loud person.

You want to be the quiet person. And by the time she's saying that, I know exactly what she's telling me. I had offended the sensibilities of my father, who would prefer that I was like Ruthie, the quiet person in the classroom. So here I thought that I was doing the right thing. And then what I learned after the fact was that I had been loud and vulgar somehow and that I should have just shut up and been the quiet person.

Ira Glass

See, you must have been completely mortified. I felt like a fool, I think afterwards, in some sense, that I had been so deluded that I had gotten it so profoundly wrong. And so was it helpful that your mom gave you this information or was it not so helpful? In retrospect? It was helpful, but not in the sense that it was intended to be helpful.

Elspeth Carruthers

What my mother was telling me was to become quiet, and I just. And I never did. And so that advice was not helpful. But knowing that I should be quiet was helpful because I knew that my dad was wrong and I knew that my behavior was completely acceptable and, in fact, was a good thing. And that was a moment when I realized I have to kind of strategize around this relationship in a way that a child shouldn't have to.

I've got to be more crafty about this in order to get through this childhood thing. I mean, it's funny because the thing you're describing is this moment of a kid understanding that their parents really don't have it together all the time and are doing the wrong thing. Everybody has gone through that moment with their parents at some point, and in a way, that's an amazing thing to have happen at eleven. Yeah. And I did finally get to the point where I accepted the fact that I'm never going to be the quiet person.

I'm always going to be an enthusiastic person who, if I have a great question, I will pump my arm and I will continue to offend him for the duration. And then, of. Of course, I took up the trumpet, which is the world's loudest, most vulgar instrument at eleven, now that I think of it. So very shortly after this, I took up the trumpet. I thought, what is the loudest possible instrument I could choose?

So, yeah, no, I went right for the trumpet.

Ira Glass

Elspeth Carruthers, executive director for the Neubauer Collegium for Society and Culture at the University of Chicago since we first broadcast this story, Elspeth's dad has died. He was 83.

Our program was produced today by Amy Owiry and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Christopher Stratalla and Lisa Pollock. Our senior producer for Today's show was Julie Snyder. Production help from Alvin Melloth and Matt Tierney. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Additional help with today's rerun from Michael, Catherine Raimondo and Safiya Riddle.

Special thanks today to Robert Andrew Powell, Peter Rothbard, Jeff Cass and Ashley Lewis. Paul Bacon, the policeman who I talked to at the beginning of the program, he is no longer a policeman. He's written a book about his experience as a cop. It's called Bad Cop. New York's least likely police officer tells all information@paulbacon.com.

Our website this americanlife.org, where you can listen to our Dot archive of over 800 programs for absolutely free. This american life is distributed to public radio stations by PRX, the public Radio exchange. Special thanks as always to our program's co founder, Mister Tori Malatia, who swears that thing he said about my mom, he swears it's all a misunderstanding. I didn't mean to say that. It just came out.

Katie Else

I swear to God. Alright, glass back next week with more stories of this american life.

Ira Glass

We all have smartphones and we all know they're pretty amazing, but they also can be amazingly distracting, especially when we're around other people. So us cellular wants us to reset our relationship with our phones by putting down our phones for five. That's right. A company that sells phones wants us to put down our phones and to see what we find. Learn more@uscellular.com builtforus.