Paul's a cop in New York-- Paul Bacon. Officer Bacon. No jokes, please. And one night he did his regular 4:00 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 2:00 AM the other officer who's working in this booth with him takes a lunch break. Goes and takes a nap. And then at 3:00 AM it's Paul's turn for a break. He's exhausted. Remember, he had already worked a full shift as a patrolman. And he decides that he's also going to take a nap. So 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. Nobody's going to be coming by here. It's going to 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 going to be able to fall asleep sitting up. So I got out of the driver's seat, got in 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-- [GASPING] 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. And you know, 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. And 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. It's dark. It's cold. But he's only 60 feet away from the security booth where his partner is. And he's right next to a sidewalk. All he needs is for 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? 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. His police radio's in the front seat, out of reach. And 3:00 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 to that little booth just 60 feet 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 did what I thought I would never have to do ever in my life. And that is to call 911 as a cop. 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 any time that a cop 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. Now, part of the chaos is coming from the fact that Paul wasn't really exactly sure where he was. Remember, this is not his regular precinct, so cops are zooming around, just trying to find him. 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. Probably half that squad was also sleeping, 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 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 then starts to walk away. He's just thinking I'm having a good time, you know? Like, 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 two seconds to let me out. 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 60 feet from your partner, 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 Ira 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. Davy Rothbart goes onto morning television and does a little experiment on his hosts. Act Four, The Function of the Heart. An 11-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. Act One, 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 Riverdance. But I don't actually dance. I just sing. There's a lead female singer. It must be a terrible thing to be the singer in Riverdance because nobody actually-- it's all about the dancing, right? No, exactly. And every now and then, someone will say something like, it's called Riverdance, not Riversing. Mr. And Mrs. America, please meet Katie Else. Katie was touring with Riverdance, 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, assorted tech guys and support people, and 40-- yes, 40-- dancers doing that Irish stepdancing thing they do. I don't even know if it's called stepdancing. You know what I'm talking about here? The 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 like 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 like $360 million or something like that. So he suggested that we all do a syndicate ticket. It's like you pool your money. So $5 gets five tickets. But everybody has a share in all the tickets. Not to complicate it, 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-- OK, 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-- the Starship Enterprise. 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 people gather there during the show. And how'd the pitch go? Give me the pitch. Well, he didn't-- 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. To be like, one more person. But we figured out the stats. I guess the stats on the Mega-Millions at that point was 1 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 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 realize like, I don't even know-- wait. Is trillion the next one up from billion? And then I'm writing 340. And then honestly, then you start to cross off a zero and a zero. And then you've got the 34 and the 76 and then a lot of zeros. And it just still seems like there's a lot of zeros there. (LAUGHING) You're still up in the kind of billions, aren't you, to 1? 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. We just thought for some reason if we focused all our energy on this, we were going to win it. People even brought up theories of quantum physics and how we're all energy. And if we just focus our energy on winning this lottery, we'll be able to create our own destiny if that makes any sense. It does indeed, yeah. No, because when math fails, what do you have left but sheer faith? Faith, yeah. There'd be dissenters. They would be like, you know, the chances of us winning this-- and we'd be like, no. 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. Yeah. It's kind of bizarre how worked up you can get yourself. And one of the girls even said-- she had been reading Deepak Chopra, 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, a 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 the people are quite young in the show. So they're like, I'm quitting Riverdance. I'm going to school. Everybody was quitting. All right. I'm going to stop that tape right there. Can I just say this is such a sad statement about the state of education funding in America that if you're young-- you're young. You're in your 20s. You think, OK, how can I get to college? What might be a good way that I might 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 going to play the lotto." Everybody was quitting. But we decided that we would stick out the rest of the tour because it would be a while before-- because at first people were like, this will be our last show. This will be our last show. 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 of you to honor your commitment to Riverdance. Yeah, isn't it? Because we were just going to call our producer the next day and tell him we were done. Well, we also had a plan too, because we had a break a week later of a few days. And he's like, well, I'll just go pick up the money in Georgia during the break. I'll bring somebody else with me. And he's like, first things first, we've got to hire ourselves a lawyer. We had the whole game plan. 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 to Georgia to pick up the money. Or suddenly, you're in a whole Billy Bob Thornton movie where things are going wrong, and people are running off. And you definitely want to avoid that. All right. This brings us to the big night. All right. Let me cue some big event music here. OK. 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 for what basically amounts to the Saint Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. He kind of made this speech and said, we want you to put all your energy into this 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. People were just going insane. There is one point where I actually dance. I dance for about 30 seconds. And we're kind of spinning in this circle in the middle. And usually you're kind of like yip, yoo, woo. But people were 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 Riverdance. 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 a job where you don't get a day off. And every single day, you do exactly the same thing. Yes. And exactly the same thing. It's not like other jobs where you're working a 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 literally making exactly the same motions around the stage and 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, OK, 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. This is-- I don't know. This is just a universal thing with performing, I guess. I mean I feel like I-- even I, in my limited way, understand this. I, for our radio show, 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, the way that they would send me out is I would go out 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. 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 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 nothing, like nothing, like-- blah, blah, blah. Like 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, 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 the dancers are dancing, and I'm not singing, I'll just be talking to people. (LAUGHING) Talking to people. Smoking a cigarette. You get a cell phone call. Excuse me. I have to take this. No. But I know. And I feel bad in the same regard with the audience when we perform. And they think you're giving them all this energy and this amazing performance. And you're really just like, where are we going to go tonight? What are we going to 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. They were going nuts. They'd be breaking out into applause in the middle of numbers. And just the amount of volume coming from the audience, you could just tell. Definitely the best show on tour. So much energy we were giving them, but it was because we wanted to win the lottery. 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. At the end of the show, I almost felt like I was on some kind of crazy drug. Because I was like, yes, do it for the lottery. You'd gotten yourself 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 just kind of-- I basically just kind of stroll around, turn my head out to the audience, and sing. So they come off stage. It's 10:15, 10:20, something like that. And it's like they are stoned. They are buzzing. They are totally hyped up. And the lottery's at 11:00. And they gather at the hotel bar. And Scott, the physical therapist, actually went to the trouble to type the numbers of all their lottery tickets out onto a page, which he duplicated and handed copies to everybody. So that's 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 printout to read over the lottery numbers. So we get the numbers. And we're just poring over these sheets. And we're just getting nothing, nothing, not even anything remotely close. Wow. So then someone's like, I want to see the originals. What if you made a mistake in the computer? So we're going through the originals and collectively-- Yeah. I love the instinct of that, though. The instinct is, this must be wrong. I mean clearly we won. Exactly. There's been some sort of mistake here. He made a mistake. But it wasn't even like there was one that was close. And someone actually brought up-- 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 gang mentality-- how worked up you can get each other. And then you just crash. Nobody even hung around, she said. They all 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 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-- and this is kind of ugly to say, but I'm just going to say it. When you and I and a lot of people, when we get together in a mass group, and we get together in an audience, and we're sitting in the 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 going to see kind of what they want to see. They came wanting to see this thing. They think you're giving them all this energy and this amazing performance. And that's what they're going to see. Which in a way is just people being nice, assuming the performers are doing their best onstage. You know? We want to laugh at the comedian's 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, I guess-- we were talking. We were like, you know, I guess that's how much energy you're supposed to give the audience, ideally, every night. But you can't. Like I couldn't do-- after we 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. It's just too draining. Because 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 good for them. But eight shows a week, that's a lot of shows. I don't think I could. 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, 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 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 put as much energy into changing bedpans and putting in IVs as they could. Or saving lives. Or saving lives. One little dance troupe can't compete with that, man. No. 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. Since doing this interview, she's quit Riverdance. She has an album coming out. Info at katieelse.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, Joel 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 as clients way back when 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 and more. 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 going to 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-- 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 Len 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 paused 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 "waz" to make sure you don't get screwed. [BLEEP] them. 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 10:00 in the morning when I saw Len, 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 don't know what the hell." He looked exhausted and distracted. "There's this kid they keep 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's a kick in the pants. She's a funny chick. I'm sorry she's 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 OK, 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 on to 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. "Ah, 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, then go to the airport in your swim trunks and fly back to New York City? While I considered this, Len pulled himself upright and surveyed the mess on his desk. He let out a long, dramatic sigh and said, "Ah, 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 give me 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 seriously. 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 OK, 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 Len had died in April, days before the filing deadline. I called the accountant who'd sent the letter. And he told me they had taken over a bunch of Len's clients. Our return had never been filed, he said. My wife and I owed a lot of money. He'd 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 IRS. "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?" Joel 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 on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Every week on our program, of course, we choose some theme and bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time," we've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Bad Morning America. But every so often it actually happens-- the idea that seems so good at the time actually is. Kind of. Which brings us to Davy Rothbart's story. Davy's been on our show before. He's the creator of Found Magazine, where he publishes notes and scraps of paper and pictures just kind of randomly discovered by people on the street or wherever. A couple years ago, Davy was promoting a book based on the same material. He 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 7:00 AM. 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. 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 45's Good Morning Baltimore I did my little song and dance, and 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'd 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 alarmed 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 [BLEEP] 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's 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 [BLEEP]. 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 4:00 AM. I could get a couple hours of sleep before it was time for me to unfold myself, "plomp" 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 [BLEEP]," 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." Three 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 treasures, another's treasure." He might very well have been drunk at 7:15 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 [BLEEP] and [BLEEP] 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 stunned 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." Davy Rothbart, he's the creator of Found Magazine. And he writes essays and books. You can find his work at myheartisanidiotbook.com. 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 she 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 un-forthcoming on every front. So I would ask him things like, where are you going? And he would say, out. 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-- 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 around? Like would he be home at night? Yeah. He was home. But it was important to him to have quiet. So when he'd come home, he would want quiet. And of course we were-- we would scream with enthusiasm that he would be there. And he would be clearly kind of affronted with all the noise. So I was 11 sort of at the height of, I would say, desperation 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 had bought this at a butcher-- he'd gone to a butcher and brought this massive, raw, bloody cow heart in to demonstrate the function of the heart. 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, very cool-looking, and actually genuinely interested in the topic as well. 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 raised my hand every time. And I don't just raise my hand. I raise my hand like, uh, uh, uh. "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 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 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-- very subtle, kind of acute reading of the room dynamic, I would say, for an 11-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'd really kind of finally connected with my dad. Just the poetry of it, of 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 the tableau, 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. This was 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. So you must've 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. What my mother was telling me was to become quiet. And I just 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-- 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. And 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 11. 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 course, I took up the trumpet, which is the world's loudest, most vulgar instrument-- at 11, 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. Elspeth Carruthers, she's 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 O'Leary and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Chris Swetala, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from Alvin Melathe and Matt Tierney. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Paul Bacon, the policeman who I talked to at the beginning of the program, 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 at paulbacon.com. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Special thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who swears that thing he said to me about the way I look in the new shirt I bought-- he swears it's all a misunderstanding. "I didn't mean to say that [BLEEP]. It just came out, I swear to God." I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.