'No one in America--including me, and I make documentaries--wants to hear a documentary'
Quirky, off-center human-interest stories have made his public radio show 'This American Life' a big hit

By Debra Pickett
Sunday, August 18, 2002
Sunday Lunch With, Pg. 22, 1213 words

If this were an Ira Glass story, it would not be about Ira Glass. It would be about the woman who served his butternut squash soup or, more likely, the guy who picked the squash.

Ira Glass has a radio show. If you're one of the 11/2million people who listen to "This American Life" on public radio each week, you've probably come to love Glass' slightly off-center way of looking at things. If you've never heard of it, well, it's a little difficult to explain.

"If you just give the facts of it," Glass says, when I ask for his suggestions on how to do this, "it fails. I mean, each week we pick a theme and then we do different stories on that theme. It sounds like school."

"Or," he says, "if you call it a radio documentary ... well, no one in America--including me, and I make documentaries--wants to hear a documentary." Mostly, the show is about stories.

"There's a certain type of story where we take on something, just because no one else is getting to the bottom of it," he says. "Like on an aircraft carrier with 5,000 people on it, everyone goes and does a story about the [fighter pilots]. Well, there are only like 100 people doing that and 4,900 people who do what the rest of the military does: fix stuff, do laundry...."

"Fill vending machines," I say, unable to stop myself from interrupting because I heard that show--during the height of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan--and I loved it.

"There's a woman who fills vending machines 12 hours a day in the war against terror," he says, not acknowledging that I have--very unprofessionally--given away the fact that I am a huge NPR geek. I don't know if he's doing me a favor or if he's just mildly annoyed. A radio interviewer would never interrupt his subject.

"Literally," he says, "CNN did a documentary on the same ship. It was all about the great technology, with the military music playing in the background, flags snapping in the breeze, a deep-voiced narrator ... that's just dumb."

With unmistakable pride--and absolutely no irony--Glass says, "We did the straight-up funniest hour on the war effort."

This is the thing that Glass wants to say most about "This American Life": It's funny. Funny in a smart-assed, high school AV club kind of way.

"Some stories," he says, "are there just because they're really funny. Then we try to come up with some high-minded reason to put them on the air."

The best example of this is the tale of the rookie cops and the squirrel in the attic.

Responding to a call, the officers find themselves at the home of a young married couple. And to understand the story, you've got to know that the wife is very good looking. "She's just this sweet, pretty, really pretty woman," Glass says. And there's something about the way that he says it--full of nerdish admiration--that gives you the whole picture. She smiles at the cops, and they melt. Glass is melting as he tells it. As it turns out, the emergency at the couple's house is that there's a squirrel in the attic. This is not the sort of thing the cops would ordinarily take care of.

But one cop looks at the other and says, "Yeah. I think we can help this lady out."

Everything, of course, goes wrong.

"It escapes the attic," Glass says, his voice getting a little lower, ready to build up speed. "Then it goes into the fireplace and catches on fire. It runs under the couch, so soon that's burning, too. And the house is filled with smoke, and the squirrel is a piece of beef jerky."

He knows it wouldn't be as funny if it was, say, a charcoal briquet, rather than beef jerky. He also knows that it's funnier on the radio because you don't see how hard he's working to tell it exactly the right way. I'm not sure, though, if he knows that it's not really his story--if he remembers that it once belonged to the rookie cop.

We're sitting in the food court at Marshall Field's on State Street, and I'm thinking how strange it is to be looking at Ira Glass as he's talking. Since I'm used to hearing his shy-sounding, slightly nasal voice on the radio, I feel as if he should be sitting in my living room, just out of my view, as I stand in the kitchen, cooking a Friday night dinner.

Also, he's not what I want him to be. It's not exactly his fault, but I expect him to be younger and thinner and shorter. I want him to be a 20-something slacker prodigy who has reinvented a dry, tired medium, effortlessly creating a radio hit on his very first try. Instead, he only dresses like one.

Though, at 43, Glass is a year younger than the average Chicago public radio listener, he is still a veteran radio journalist and producer who started with NPR as a 19-year-old intern and--until launching "This American Life" with a foundation grant years ago--added to his income as a free-lance radio reporter with temporary secretary jobs. He works 70 hours a week and eliminates at least a third of the stories he originally sets out to do, just to get the show to sound as cool and effortless as it does every week.

He doesn't have strong feelings about being famous, he says, because he works all the time and isn't really aware of it. He doesn't seem to like to talk about himself very much, maybe because the stories aren't as good as what he puts on the radio. The ones he does tell have a certain pre-written quality that makes them great fun to hear but, also, oddly uninteresting. The insights they offer are either right on the surface or completely hidden from view. There's very little open to interpretation.

Glass, wearing his signature Buddy Holly-esque glasses, a black short-sleeve shirt, khakis and bowling shoes, says he chose this place mostly for the soup. But there is also a story, which he e-mailed me in advance.

"I discovered that cafeteria--on the seventh or sixth floor, something like that--the day I went to buy a couch for my office," he wrote, already giving the place way more character by calling it a cafeteria rather than a food court. "I'd always thought that the day I got a couch for the office, that would be the day I'd know I'd finally made it. Naturally, this being public radio, I had to actually buy the couch myself, out of my own pocket, but still. I shopped, I saw the cafeteria, I got the couch from the discount floor. The food was vegetarian, but the couch was leather."

"You're a vegetarian?" I say.

"Yeah," he says, "and I hate it."

He does not elaborate.

Because the personal questions aren't going very well, I give up and ask him what he's been working on lately. He tells me about his recent trip to Israel and the episode of the show he'll do about it.

He says he was surprised by how far to the right most Israelis have gone in their politics, that, over and over again, he'd be having dinner with people and thinking how nice they were, and then they'd come out with a statement that seemed racist or extremist. I ask him if he thinks it's similar to the strong pro-Bush comments people, even of the most liberal persuasion, were making after the Sept. 11 attacks.

He has no idea what I mean.

"I didn't talk to anyone that month," he says.

He was working on his radio show, the one that tells such incredibly human stories about life in America.

E-mail: dpickett@suntimes.com

GRAPHIC: Al Podgorski, Ira Glass likes the butternut squash soup at Marshall Field's "cafeteria." He's a vegetarian--and so is the soup, but he discovered the food court at Marshall Field's on State after buying a leather couch for his office at National Public Radio.

Reprinted for educational, not commercial, use.

Chicago Sun-Times, 2002