61: Fiasco! (1997)

From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. Public Radio.

Public Radio International. One more time. What could be more American than the person who sees something they've never done before, dreams they could do it, goes after that dream? Well, let's begin today with a woman who dreams of directing a play in a small town where she lives, a college town, somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line, in the hills of Appalachia, a town which will remain for our purposes today unnamed.

I don't think she had ever directed, and she claimed to have acted, and it was never really quite clear just what her credentials were. But she had managed to convince the local theater department of this college that she should direct a production of Peter Pan. When I was in the 10th grade in 1973, Jack Hayes saw her production. And like everybody else in town, he heard about it for weeks beforehand.

Slowly but surely, you began to hear, you know, sort of rumors about this production. For example, I know that they had spent a lot of money renting these flying apparatuses out of New York. And apparently, there are only like one company and a handful of these apparatuses. And so to get them was a major coup.

This is a story not just of a mediocre play or a terrible play. When I talk about it, it's not even a story about a play. This is a story about a fiasco and about what makes a fiasco. And one ingredient of many fiascos is that great, massive, heart-wrenching chaos and failure are more likely to occur when great ambition is coming to play, when plans are big, expectations great, hopes at their highest.

And what you have to understand is that everybody in this sort of community understood that there was certainly a sort of air of everyone sort of reaching beyond their own grasp. Every actor was sort of in a role that was just a little too big for them, every aspect of the set and the crew. And you know, rumors had sort of cooked around. You know, there was this huge crew.

There were lots of things being painted. This, in fact, is one of the criteria for greatness, is that everyone is just about to reach just beyond their grasp, because that that is when greatness can occur. That's right. That's right.

And maybe greatness could have occurred. Well, today on our program, what happens when greatness does not occur? What happens, in fact, when fumble leads to error, leads to mishap. And before you know it, you have left the realm of ordinary mistake and chaos and you have entered into the more ethereal, specialized realm of fiasco.

Today's show, Fiascos, a philosophical inquiry, perhaps the first ever, as far as we know, into what makes a fiasco, what takes our ordinary lives that extra distance into fiasco. Welcome to WBEZ Chicago. This is American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Today's program in four acts. Act One, Opening Night. Act Two, A Fiasco Involving a Village, Marauding Visigoths, A 1900-Pound Brass Caldron, and some oil. Don't even ask.

Act Three, Car Wars. The true story of how putting NPR's show Car Talk on the air in Wisconsin led not just to hundreds of angry letters from listeners, not just to a protest rally, not just to a monthly newsletter devoted to the scandal, but eventually a state audit and state hearings by the legislature. Act Four, Fiasco as a Force for Good in this World. We begin our show with this true fable of Peter Pan in Act One, Opening Night.

Opening night comes and, you know, well, almost everybody in the area and, you know, the 10-mile radius of this theater, knows somebody in this production. So the place is pretty much packed. And I don't know if you remember the opening moment of Peter Pan, but it's the three little kids sleeping in their bed. And Peter Pan comes flying in the window.

And in this particular production, there's a big bed with all three kids in it. And off to the left, I remember, is a big, huge wardrobe. And there's a large window there and a little bureau. And Peter Pan comes in and, you know, has a little speech where he says, you know, anybody can fly.

Why, with just a little magic dust, one can fly. And Peter Pan sort of sprinkles his magic dust in the air. And sure enough, the kids sort of suddenly just lurch into the air. And it becomes clear right away that the people that they've hired to run these flying apparatuses really aren't quite clear on how they actually work.

So instead of the kids sort of sailing, you know, gracefully to and fro, they sort of hang in the air like puppets, just sort of dangling there, sort of getting jerked up an inch or two or back and forth. And sometimes they're just stationary. Yeah, just hanging there like a spy. And then several of them start to sort of circumscribe these circles in the air where it's clear that the people running the machines have just sort of set them off on these kind of oval courses that spiral farther and farther out.

And if you're sitting in the audience, it was clearly a sense of fear on the faces of these people. Of the actors? The actors. The actors actually, you could sense their lack of confidence, shall we say, in the people running the machines in the back.

So wait, wait. And the audience reaction to this point is just, are they laughing? No one is laughing. Everyone, now this is one of the great things about audiences, especially in a live theater production, is that they're very forgiving.

They want the show to work. And so everyone is sort of gripping their chair a little tightly. Right. You know, we feel for them.

You know, they're up there. They're embarrassing themselves for us. We identify with them. We are become them.

And so the audience, I think, was very forgiving and very understanding of this moment. But there was one moment that in this first opening scene that kind of put the audience on notice. And that's when, as the kids are sort of jerking up and down and swinging back and forth and sort of going around these ovals, at one point, the littlest one, the little boy, is sort of being flung around a little too... a little too hard.

Well, he has the least mass to resist whatever the machinery is doing to him. Right. OK, so add. And so he's flying around in a circle and the audience sort of sees this coming and there's a real sense of pain and ripping of the chair and white knuckleness as the kid suddenly does just an enormous splat into the wardrobe.

I mean, and it's clearly he's hurt, you know. And he comes out of it sort of, you know, a little dazed. And then, of course, he's jerked up in the air a little bit and often a little too high. So he's suddenly sort of in the workings.

He's sort of left the stage itself. He's now up there with the lights, you know. And then suddenly, plummet back down to the stage and be caught up just before he hit the floor. And it was it was hard to watch because, as you can tell, it's a it's an incredibly funny moment.

But like I say, the audience was still in this very forgiving mode and no one said a word. We just all sat there sort of holding our breath. And there's that weird tension of being in the audience thinking, oh, oh, my goodness, they have gotten off to a very bad start. Oh, this this is not good.

Right. And we feel for them. May I just interrupt for just a moment to just to say now at this point, because after all, we are not just joined here together on the radio, you and I today to laugh at the foibles of the unfortunate. No, no.

We're here to enumerate the qualities of a fiasco. At this point, we are not yet in the territory of fiasco. No, no, because, you know, like I say, audiences are forgiving and they, you know, one or two mistakes, even big ones like this. They're going to let that ride.

Yes, they are. We did. We did. We were very good.

And so we are not yet at fiasco. We are at a sort of normal level of mishap. Right. What happens immediately after this?

They disappeared at Neverland. And if you remember this, the stage goes dark. And then when the lights come up, there's Captain Hook. And he's giving his first opening soliloquy about how evil he is and what a menace he is and how he, you know, harms people and hates children.

And it's all that good stuff. So Captain Hook is out there and he looks great. He's got one of those big old fat hats and this great hook and these wild looking boots and everything. And people are feeling more confident.

Something's happening. It's a good sign. It's a good sign. And he's in charge.

This guy's he's got a bad mustache and he is certainly evil. Yes. And the audience is totally in his pocket. He's he's speaking away and gesturing wildly and going on and on about how bad he is.

And then at a certain point, as he gestures, his hook and the entire black casing up to his elbow flings off of his hand and flies into the audience and punches an old lady in the gut. And now he is bad. He's very bad. He had like the worst ad lib I've ever heard.

I mean, what do you say at that point? Because, of course, his hand is now nakedly exposed to the audience. A tough moment for any actor. That did not happen in this case.

This bulb comes just dangling down and sort of hangs around this naked white bulb, just hangs around and people are talking to it. And I think Tinkerbell must have had an appearance in the first act, but it was somewhere in here that people just started laughing like this. Then another thing that happened was later on in the scene, if you remember, Wendy gets trapped on an island and she spots a kite that's floating by and flying by. And she's supposed to grab it and attach it to her back and fly off.

Right. Well, of course, the kite is attached to the flying apparatus line. And it gets closer and closer to her. She's standing on this little papier-mache hill.

And but the flying apparatus people can't quite get it close enough to her to reach. So she has to step out into the water that she's just told is filled with crocodiles to grab it. She finally gets to the kite. And when she yanks on it, it pops off the flying apparatus and the hook goes zinging up into the lights and catches.

So now there is this big loop of wire hanging in front of the stage. And there's Wendy holding the kite. And she ad-libbed as best she could, as I remember. She sort of said, on second thought, maybe I can swim.

And with that, she walked off the stage, sort of motioning her arms like you would do the swim, the dance in 1965. So she does that. At this point, I mean, the audience, the actors are just falling apart. They are so frightened of the audience.

There are just belly laughs rolling up to the stage from the audience. People are howling with laughter at every mistake. And now any small mistake just takes on these, these, you know, it's just any instigation for laughter is just enough for the audience. And now the whole people have given it up.

Everyone has quit being nice. Now there is just this kind of frightening roar that comes from the audience every time there's a mistake. What happened? At some point, the audience turned and realized, oh, wait, I realize what's going on here.

This is a fiasco. Yeah, this is a fiasco. And what's really interesting about a fiasco is that once it starts to tumble down, the audience wants to push it further along. Oh, they get hungry for more fiasco.

Oh, yeah. If the play proceeded perfectly, they would be disappointed. Oh, it would have been a grave disappointment had there not been just one more mistake after another, one more embarrassment after another. Now the reason they're there is to chronicle these embarrassments.

This is why I have remembered this play for 25 years. Towards Act III, the director decided that she wanted to break down the fourth wall. You know, this was cutting edge theater as far as she was concerned. But please just explain, when we say breaking down the fourth wall, what we mean is the wall between the actors and the audience, you know, usually it's impermeable, but then there came a point in the late 60s, early 70s where a lot of theaters, basically the actors would come out into the audience.

That's right. And interact with the audience and break down that wall. So the idea being that you would get more in touch with the dramatic sense and the reality of what was happening. Anyway, so in this particular scene, what was going to happen was that the Indians were going to throw rope ladders down from the balcony and climb down these rope ladders into the audience and, you know, move among the audience in their very sort of scary, savage way and frighten us.

Anyway, I knew about this scene because my friend David, who I went to high school with, was in it. And so when David was climbing over the top of this balcony to climb down the rope, he lost his footing and fell to the floor from the balcony, a distance of about 15 to 20 feet. Oh, my God. A good fall.

That's horrible. Yeah. And he landed on both of his feet and sprained both of his ankles and, of course, curled into a fetal position and began to cry. Right.

He was really, really hurt. Now, to appreciate the horrible moment I'm now describing, also understand that it's a Friday night. We are in a college town and there is a volunteer fire and ambulance department. And in order to summon the rescuers from wherever they are, an alarm is sounded that can be heard for five miles.

That alarm is located right over this theater. So the alarm goes off. OK, this is an air raid siren. It is so loud.

You can put your fingers in your ear and it's still hurting your ears. We're right under it. It can be heard for five miles in a minute. And then, of course, three minutes later, busting through the door of the theater are these, you know, 15 firemen who are in boots, hats.

They got hoses. They don't know what it is. All they know is that they've been sent on a call. Right.

And to sort of add to the chaos, the director, of course, has sort of flogged the actors that the show must go on. No matter what. No matter what. So while all of this is happening and people are sort of several people are attending to David and other people have just now like decided that since the firemen are here, he's going to be fine.

They can start laughing. And now the audience has just completely lost control. People are standing up in their seats and shouting for more. They want blood.

I mean, at this point, people are actually injured in the production. And they want more. Somehow that's how this entire play ended. What's interesting about this as a fiasco, I feel like the thing that makes me understand about fiascos is that the fiasco itself is an altered state.

That is, all the normal rules are off. You have left the normal rules of how the audience is going to interact with the actors. I've never seen a production like this. And I've never seen an audience collapse like this.

See, but I wonder, like, when you think about what people go to theater for, like what kind of release people want. I mean, people want an experience that will take them out of ourselves. We all want an experience that will take us out of ourselves and into another place and another reality. Right.

And it sounds like this production, even though it was a fiasco, in fact, because it was a fiasco, was more successful at that than any conventional play could be. Well, see, I would disagree with this. See, I think, you know, the old theater critics, you know, the ancients, would say that the reason you go to the theater to see a great production is to be, I think the word they used to use is transported. The idea being that you would be lifted away from your animal nature and into these higher, more spiritual realms or get in touch with these greater tragic emotions, right?

Of course, what happened here was the exact opposite. We got transported directly in touch with our animal being. Our base ourselves. Right.

But, you know, that's almost as rare, if not more so, than a great production. I want to tell you what we wanted to do. With some fiascos, all social order breaks down. With others, the thing that you're trying to create simply refuses to be created.

And this next fiasco falls into that second category. Ron Carlson wrote the story. Jeff Dortchamitsen. What we wanted to do was spill boiling oil onto the heads of our enemies as they attempted to bang down the gates of our village.

But as everyone now knows, we had some problems. Primarily technical problems that prevented us from doing what we wanted to do the way we had hoped to do it. What we're asking for today is another chance. There's been so much media attention to this boiling oil issue that it is time to clear the air.

There's a great deal of pressure to dismantle the system we have in place and bring the oil down off the roof. This would be a mistake. Yes, there were problems last month during the Visigoth raid. But as I will note, these are easily remedied.

From its inception, I have been intimately involved with the boiling oil project. Research, development, physical deployment. I also happened to be team leader on the roof last month when we had occasion to try the system during the Visigoth attack about which so much has been written. First, the very concept of oil on the roof upset many of our villagers.

Granted, it is exotic, but all great ideas seem strange at first. When our researchers realized we could position a cauldron 200 feet directly above our main portals, they began to see the possibilities of the greatest strategic defense system in the history of mankind. But at every turn, we've met problems that our researchers could not, despite their intelligence and intuition, have foreseen. For instance, how were we to get a 1900-pound brass cauldron onto the roof?

In the end, the cauldron was raised to the roof by means of a custom-designed net and petard under less than ideal conditions. The retro-goths and the Nilagauss plundered our village almost incessantly during the cauldron's four-month ascent. The cauldron's arrival on the roof was quite a moment. I remember it well.

We stood by that gleaming symbol of our impending safety, a bright brass beacon to the world that we were not going to take it anymore. The wind carried up to us the cries of villagers being carried away by either the maxi-goths or the mini-goths, but there we stood. As I felt the wind in my hair and watched the sporadic procession of home At that time, I put my hand on the smooth side of our beautiful cauldron and found it only vaguely warm, lukewarm, tepid. We had not known then what we now know.

We need to put the oil on sooner. It was my decision and my decision alone to do what we did. And that was to pour the warm oil on our enemies as they milled about the front gates, hammering at it with their truncheons. Now, this is where my report diverges from so many of the popular accounts.

We have heard it said that the warm oil served as a stimulant to the attack that followed, the attack I alluded to earlier in which the criminal activity seemed even more animated than usual in the minds of some of our townspeople. Let me say first, I was an eyewitness. I gave the order to pour the oil and I witnessed its descent. I am happy and proud to report that the oil hit its target with an accuracy and completeness I could have only dreamed of.

We got them all. There was oil everywhere. We soaked them. We coated them.

We covered them with a lustrous layer of oil. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, it was only warm. Their immediate reaction was also what I had hoped for, surprise and panic. This, however, lasted about one second.

Then, several of them looked up into my face and began waving their fists in what I could only take as a tribute. And then, yes, they did become quite agitated anew, recommencing their assault on the weary planks of our patchwork gates. Some have said that they were on the verge of abandoning their attack before the oil was cast upon them, which I assure you is not true. As to the attack that followed, it was no different in magnitude or intensity than any of the dozens we suffer every year.

It may have seemed more odd or extreme since the perpetrators were greasy and thereby more offensive and they did take every stick of furniture left in the village, including the pews from the church, every chair in the great hall, and four milking stools, the last four from the dairy. But I, for one, am simply tired of hearing about the slippery stain on the village steps. Yes, there is a bit of a mess. And, yes, some of it seems to be permanent.

My team removed what they could with salt and talc all this week. All I'll say now is, watch your step as you come and go. In my mind, it's a small inconvenience to pay for a perfect weapon system. What we wanted to do was from Ron Carlson's book of short stories called Hotel Eden.

Coming up, how a friendly little radio show about cars from the fair city of Boston ended up the subject of legislative hearings in Wisconsin and other fiascos. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. This American Life is a rather glassy truth and our program, of course, features a theme, bringing a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Fiasco, our own inquiry into the nature of what makes a fiasco and when you have left the realm of mishaps, stumble, human error, and entered the more rarefied realm of fiasco.

We have arrived at Act 3, Car Wars. If you are hearing the sound of my voice right now, you probably have also heard these voices. You know, I just had a brilliant invention. People have cup holders in their cars, but the problem with a cup holder, it's frequently located in a bad spot.

I know what you're gonna think of, a straw! A three-foot straw! Flexible straw! You can even drink gasoline out of a tank if you wanted to.

Or you could drink out of your friend's cup, too. This is Car Talk, and though you may think of it as simply the friendly banter of Tom and Ray Magliotti, Click and Clack, it is also the single most popular hour in public radio. And this story starts simply enough. Wisconsin Public Radio, a network of 14 stations in, guess what state, decided they wanted to save a few bucks.

And years ago, when nearly every other public radio station in the country signed up with the most single popular show in public radio, Wisconsin Public Radio thought, it'll cost money, it'll cost us tens of thousands of dollars. And they said, the car show. We can do our own car show. So, they did.

Welcome to another hour of About Cars. Lori Skelton in the studio with Matt Joseph. And later in the hour, we have a review of the 1995 Dodge Viper RT10. And we stand to run out of adjectives for this before the hour is over.

It's a stunning piece of raw brute force. I think the one word we applied was wow. Yeah, basically. We'll add a few others a little later in the hour.

That's just a show all about cars on Saturday mornings, where most public radio stations run car talk. It's the most popular show on public radio. He was the car expert. She would prompt him along, asking the questions that you or I might ask.

Collins went into much more technical detail about engines than you ever hear from Tom and Ray. And the show started with 10 minutes of serious automotive industry news. General Motors announced in Los Angeles last week that they're going to sell EV1, the impact car, which many people have seen. I've actually driven it a couple of years ago.

It will be joined by a conversion of the S10 pickup truck. It was a perfectly decent, solid, informative hour of radio. And while it was not the single most popular show on public radio, it got good ratings, had fans, did great and pledge drives. Matt Joseph thought he was doing everything right.

Now, if the fiasco thing began, like any human dispute, with a simple misunderstanding, a difference in perspective. And in this case, Matt Joseph's bosses had a completely different perspective on his show from his perspective. Sure, he got great ratings. His bosses thought that it could be so much more if only he were more like, well, like the most popular single show on public radio, Car Talk.

They were constantly trying to get him to make his show snappier, faster paced, more of an entertainment. Matt Joseph thought they were wrong. They were always threatening to cancel him and bring in Car Talk. There were unpleasant memos and there were tense meetings.

And this fundamental disagreement laid the groundwork for the fiasco that followed. Finally, because of a complicated deal involving, what do you know, Michael Feldman's game show, which is produced by Wisconsin Public Radio, the price of Car Talk to Wisconsin Public Radio dropped from $33,000 to an affordable $10,000. And the network, which had thought that it did not need the single most popular show on public radio, looked over its shoulder at what was happening on 400 other radio stations and decided that maybe, in fact, they had been wrong. They wanted Car Talk.

Joy Cardin is one of the Wisconsin public radio programmers behind all this. The most recent audience research that we had showed that Car Talk is a program that works extremely well when it's paired with what do you know with Michael Feldman. And, in fact, both programs do better. And we made the recommendation that the best place to put Car Talk would be 9 o'clock on Saturday morning, followed by what do you know with Michael Feldman.

Because 9 in the morning was when All About Cars was on the air. But, said Joy Cardin, they did not want to kill All About Cars. They simply wanted to move it to a different time. We knew All About Cars was a popular program.

We certainly were trying to keep it on the schedule. The recommendation was to find a mutually agreeable time on Saturday afternoons. Did you name a specific time? We started with a specific time.

We started with a specific time of 3 o'clock. So what happened then? What was his response? His response was absolutely not.

This guy didn't say they were thinking of moving it to 3 o'clock. I said I found that unacceptable. I never said I wouldn't do it. I just said I found it unacceptable in the sense that I really didn't like it.

Our response to that was, well, is there any time on Saturday afternoon that would be agreeable to you to reschedule this program? No. The last thing I said to them was, I suggest we do it at 8 o'clock. They said, we will think about it and get back to you.

They got back to me by firing me. I never flatly rejected 3 o'clock. Now, if you want to ask me, would I have rejected 3 o'clock? Yes, I would have.

And to understand why he would say no to 3 o'clock, you have to understand that from Matt Joseph's perspective, this was just the latest insult from bosses who had always doubted and questioned the way he did his show. It made no sense to him, this treatment. After all, his ratings were strong. Sometimes he was the single strongest show in their Saturday morning lineup.

His show was inexpensive. It was a success. Why couldn't they be more respectful? If somebody dumped me and said, hey, Matt, we've got a really weak afternoon and we think you can really help, and we're going to give you really adequate promotion and so forth, would you help us out with our ad?

If somebody had approached me that way, I certainly would have listened to them and probably would have agreed to it. You know, one definition of a fiasco is something small and ordinary that turns into something monstrously large. And what could be smaller in this world, my friend, than simply trying to reschedule a public radio car show from the morning to the afternoon? My After Show was canceled.

1,500 calls and letters came into Wisconsin Public Radio and camaraderie of the two guys that do the show, but on public radio we're used to listening to people with a little more expertise. Response? Yeah. Boy, if that is not the classic definition of a stiff, I don't know what is.

Yeah, he's like a barrel of laughs. You'd love to have coffee with him. On public radio where we're more used to listening to more boring things than these two jerks. Well, tell him that we feel the same way about him.

And I didn't enjoy listening to it either. I won't be voting for him anymore. Well, I don't know. Well, I mean, everyone has his own opinion.

I don't think he's wrong about what he said. No, and I'm sure this other fellow whom we attempted to usurp here probably is a lot more knowledgeable, certainly more informative than we are, because we don't take the car business, at least on the radio, that seriously. But did anyone speak in our behalf? Of course not.

Apparently not, no. This whole thing was an entire thing and nobody's spoken to it with you. And nobody... Why don't we defend ourselves?

I mean, I would have flown my brother up there. On a sense, the Wisconsin Car Show Fiasco happens on a much smaller scale. Whenever any show with any following is taken off any public radio station in this country, people get upset. Partly I think because every pledge drive, which is, you know what, every three or four times a year on most of these stations, listeners hear programmers like me say, you are the public in public radio.

And so listeners are understandably angry, being the public in public radio, when a show they like is suddenly gone. But it is exactly incidents like this one in Wisconsin, and programmers' fear of incidents like this one in Wisconsin, that makes innovation so slow in most of the public radio system. Yeah, I believe that this really has had a very chilling effect on Wisconsin public radio and myself personally. Joey Cardeen, who spent months dealing with the Wisconsin Car Show Fiasco, says that now she thinks twice before moving any show.

And it makes you think long and hard before you make those kinds of decisions because you don't want necessarily a public outcry or the legislature examining your every move. This Fiasco is also a parable of bigger changes coming within the public radio system. Partly because of the success of Car Talk, there is a move to come up with lighter, more entertaining shows in the public radio system, especially for weekends. Matt Joseph's Fiasco occurred partly because he represented an older style of public radio, a more informative style.

After some months off the air, Matt Joseph now does his show All About Cars on a commercial station, WDTY in Madison. He's on up against Car Talk. Hey Matt! Yes?

Is this over for you yet? Is it over yet? No. No, it'll be over when the changes are made at Wisconsin Public Radio that restores that service to what it used to be.

A responsive service that has things like children's programming, that has local drama that educates students in broadcasting. These are all things that don't go on over there anymore. You're describing all these things that used to be the kinds of things that were on public radio that didn't draw much audience. Well, I think there's going to be room for things that don't draw much audience, and I think they would draw much considerable audience if they were done right.

Act 4, the Fiasco is a force for good. George Clooney, Jennifer Aniston, Shannon Doherty, Jodie Foster, Alicia Silverstone, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Sharon Stone, and John Travolta. Also, George Burns, Bob Hope, Gene Kelly, Gina Rollins. Also, Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, Nora Ephron, Jill Schumacher.

Margie Rockland has interviewed all these people. She does big magazine feature stories for big magazines. But the very, very first big feature assignment she was actually sent out on by a publication was in 1982. The Los Angeles Reader sent out a very nervous, very youthful Margie Rockland to interview Moon Unit Zappa, daughter of Frank, who had consented to her second interview ever after the release of her runaway hit song, Valley Girl.

In this little bit that she does on the song, she's using a lot of this language that, you know, sort of valve speak that no one had ever heard before. And it was considered really exotic. And so I was from the valley, so I was sent to go talk to her. She was one of your people.

Speak to her in your secret private argot. Exactly. And of course, what is so touching to me is that I totally bought that. You're right.

I'm the right person for the job. I'm going to go speak to her in the valley language and we will bond. So you get there and you're a bit nervous and the pressure is on, which is, of course, the setting for a possible triumph or a possible fiasco. Right.

And what happens next? Well, what I noticed was that there was it was not it was a tense situation. I just didn't feel like it was going very well. And the mother was sort of hovering.

Right. We have a recording of it because you had a tape recorder rolling during this. Yes. Mother hangouts in the valley besides the bowling alleys with big arcades are very popular.

Like, well, I'm trying at this point. I'm sort of at that rock bottom level that everyone can get at in an interview where you're just saying, you know, like, what's your favorite color? And she's trying to help me along. It's now the sports center.

Oh, this is the same thing. Yeah, it's still very. Yeah. So we sit it in the den and the mother made me coffee, but I was too nervous to drink it.

But I sort of kept staring at it and she kept staring at it. And I felt like it was pretty important at some point. I better drain that coffee cup. And so what happened was Moon told me a joke and I didn't see the joke coming.

And right before she told me the joke, I'd taken a big swig of the coffee, which is now cold. And when she told me the joke, I burst out laughing and I started to choke. And so I pressed my lips together. So I didn't spit it out.

I didn't wanna do a spit take. And the coffee came shooting out my nose. Shooting out your nose? Shooting right out my nose.

Are you OK? Are you OK? I was really embarrassed, but simultaneously I couldn't breathe. At the same time I was choking and I jumped up and I sort of started running around the room knocking things over.

And and I don't think they I think that they didn't know what was going on. But the mother began chasing me. She began chasing you. She began chasing me because I was sort of running from corner to corner trying to catch my breath.

And she began chasing me at a certain point. She got behind me and she gave me the Heimlich maneuver. Well, you know, in the news business, I've been a reporter for 20 years and nobody's ever given me a Heimlich maneuver while I've been in the story. Well, I always say that it's a benchmark.

It's a very low benchmark. And I can do any interview. I can get thrown off a set. You know, I can be cursed out by the subject, but I can leave and get in the car and I can drive home and think, you know, I didn't blow coffee out my nose.

Now, what happened? What happened after that? It was sort of like we'd all been in an earthquake together and all of the nervousness left the room. And suddenly we were three gals just chatting.

And I remember that I sort of like hugged them both when I left. Wow. They were now my friends. It's interesting, you know, because one of our criteria for a fiasco is that all social order, the normal social structure breaks down.

And literally that's what happens here. The normal interview stops and the social structure of the moment completely changes. The mom gives you the Heimlich maneuver and then suddenly it stops feeling like an interview. Yeah.

No, it was really. And I have to say that, you know, it was a very embarrassing experience and it completely made me feel close to them. It was so interesting. When Moon's father died a while ago, I bumped into her somewhere and we both burst into tears.

And I really felt like a little sister of mine had had a loss. You know, the starting point was, you know, that moment. That moment. To me, the thing about it that's useful is that it shows the useful purpose of a fiasco.

That is when social order breaks down, that could be a force not just for chaos and for entropy and for evil, but in fact that could be a force for good. Right. It can bring people together. Right.

You know, it was actually this huge success to me. I'd never been sent out, you know, under these kind of circumstances before. And I remember we beat the local paper. The Herald Examiner followed us a week later.

And so we had the first story and it was sort of considered the definitive one because we have this glossary of terms that I had made or put together. Of Valley Speak terms. Of Valley Speak terms. And then it was syndicated.

And most of the quotable stuff that you ended up using in your story happened after the... Happened, yeah. Right. After it squirted the coffee from your nose.

Right, exactly. Exactly. It's a technique I don't suggest anyone try. For, you know, years afterwards, Moon would send me postcards.

And on the postcard somewhere would be a picture of a nose and there would be liquid coming out of it. Sort of like my logo