This American Life -- 11/29/09 -- "Middle of the Night"

The Show

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Damn good episode, TAL.

We start with a good old fashioned Ira Glass story. In this case the romance of working as an all-night temp typist. Waxes poetic on the beauty of the middle of the night. Transition to a bunch of teenagers who “pile into a Honda Odyssey minivan” and drive around their northern california suburbs, kidnapping their friends. They ride around, cracking jokes, and then go out to deserted zone where they imitate the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland, music and all. Cute stuff. That hyper-specific, banal, TAL special. Gets me all misty-eyed for my youth. Thesis: night time is special. Good enough. Let's get to the show.

First piece is done by the Planet Money team and Adam Davidson and Hannah Jaffe Walt. It's a story about a late-night produce market for most of the northeast. This piece is excellent, probably among my recent favorites--not least because it really hones in and milks this just-plain-interesting dynamic of old-breed deal-makers on the hunt. The piece starts with the great line “Eddie One-Way needs some pears.” Eddie-One-Way is a buyer, and they do a great job making him a character in the story, managing to get some really great, candid audio, including one segment where he harangues (and even yells at) a guy who he's trying to make a deal with. Adam and Hannah do the back and forth narration thing exceptionally well, even varying up the length of their comments so it doesn't get too dull, back-and-forthy. Also, Adam takes on the burden of being pedantic all “supply and demand” and what-not, while Hannah gets to be more lay-speak. Not only is the piece totally gold in terms of well-placed ambience, but it's just totally spot-on in terms of using narrative to deliver information about an unfamiliar world. We are constantly kept apprised of EOW's goals, motives, as well as given context for how EOW's actions relate to the general dynamics of the market as a whole. We even get to hear about One-Way Eddie's crush on a nearby seller. Excellent, excellent piece, through and through. More Planet Money, TAL. They might be your MVP.

Next up it's a story from The Moth. TAL relies on them pretty frequently, but I really enjoy most of the stories that come from them. This one is from a woman named Jennifer Hickson, who talks about a night she jumped out of her boyfriend's car at a stoplight, met and shared a number of cigarettes with a stranger whom she got a light off of and subsequently discovered was in an abusive relationship much like her own. The telling is pretty impeccable, with an attention to detail that you'd expect to see in a short story or an essay. A damned impressive amount of practice must have gone into preparing this. What's that voice good storytellers use? It's a number of voices. It's a perfect calibration of tone to content. Tone not just in the inflection but in the rhythm, and the pauses. Really well-told story, pretty gripping throughout. The story culminates with an act of touching generosity and paean to cigarettes. Good to find someone in cigarettes' corner, after all that nay-saying on the billboards and the packages and what not, though she admits at the conclusion that she's given up smoking.

Anyone listening to the Moth radio show? How is it? Worth an entire hour of radio? Who downloads from Audible? I do. Heard some really good stuff too. Barthelme, Foster Wallace, Charlie Rose interviews...

Piece about two producers visiting a Chik Fillet that's about to open, and like all new Chick-fil-A Fillet's is giving away a year's worth of free meals to anyone who waits around outside a full 24 hours before the opening. Dave Hill and Shana Feinberg, who Glass specifies are not real reporters, tell the story. Not much at all happens in the piece--maybe hence the caveat from Glass. They have trouble setting up their tent, they meet a guy who (and you can practically feel their gratitude at him for doing it) goes ahead and explains what the “typical” person waiting in line might be, and why he isn't that person. Something mildly weird happens when a Christian shows up and starts preaching to everyone waiting around. Dave talks to him and he turns out to be far less crazy than you'd might expect. This story has all the hallmarks of a failed excursion: lack of structure, urgent desire to overcome said lack of structure with “cute” moments that function on their own, a lot of emphasis on clever narration. All in all, a failure. I wasn't entertained enough to overlook their failure to uncover anything interesting going on. A word of advice for anyone embarking on a “Investigating Quirky Phenomenon That Possibly Involves Staying Out All Night/Spending Times With People Whose Motivations You Consider Strange”, it's probably a good idea to have an idea of the story you want to tell, beforehand. Otherwise it's just a jumble. It ends with a pretty lame song that Dave and Shana wrote. My vote, failure. By the way what's with all the squeaky-voiced girls on TAL? Is there some kind of quota system in place whereby they must hire 90 percent of the American population of nerdy-cute girls with nasally voices? Is there now a Sara Vowell type? What's going on here? Anyway, next story.

Interview with national guards-woman Lindsay Freedland who is stationed in Iraq. She traverses the country in convoys, and talks about the experience with producer Nancy Updike. The interview is informative, and Nancy is a really good interviewer. There's a great image at the beginning of the convoy looking like a string of “Christmas lights out at night.” There's something nice about phone sound-quality. I want to know what technology they're using because it sounds really clean--just the faintest sort of reorientation along the EQ spectrum toward the higher frequencies. But really, very clean, and something about the telephone-quality connotes, or maybe denotes, distance, which is helpful for this piece. Freedland is in Iraq during the conversation, so it's effective at giving a kind of subtly operating sense of great distance between her and us, which is a bit of what the piece is all about. Not much narrative arc, but the interview is short enough and filled with enough interesting specifics to hold attention.

The last piece is an essay from producer Jane Feltus about a time when she was 6 and suffered a major head injury. For some reason the story didn't really hold me. I guess I'm not that big on injury narratives. Also, prolonged discussion of head trauma makes me feel a little woozy. About five or so minutes in, not really being all that interested and, experiencing that wooziness I get from prolonged exposure to stories about head trauma, I turned it off. Sorry Jane. Nothing personal. I'm glad that your head healed.

And that's it for my review of “Middle of the Night,” another successful outing from the workhorse of radio. The giant is still up and strong, going around doing it's giant-y things. Good for it.