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Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Is Ricky Martin on the mommy track?
Singer says he wants grande family; Jerry Hall on the unfathomableness of love; this week's fun couple: Richard Simmons and Janet Reno. Plus: Rosie O'Donnell, editor in chief?
By Amy Reiter
[07/16/99]

Nothing Personal
What is it about noses and nookie?
Leapin' lizards! Paula Jones' snoot doc has zipper problem; Newt set to bore nation to tears -- again; Helen Hunt afflicted with terrible head-swelling.
By Amy Reiter
[07/15/99]

Rogues' Gallery
Shopping at high speed while black
Armed with an AmEx card designed to function silently, a scalawag aliased Raydog pulls a fast one.
By Douglas Cruickshank
[07/15/99]

People Feature
Charles Aznavour
After six decades, the man who reinvented the French chanson, composed more than 600 songs and sold more than 100 million records is still a star and one of the last classic pop stylists.
By Jody Rosen
[07/15/99]

Nothing Personal
Courtney Love: Baby talk
Tells mag she likes "porno 44DD" girls, "and they have to be really aggressive."
By Amy Reiter
[07/14/99]

Complete archives for People

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One such moment occurred during a recent show in which a woman who had been married for a long time ran into her ex-boyfriend at a yogurt shop. She found herself thinking about him night and day. She looked forward to his calls. She considered meeting him. And finally she told her husband how she felt. What we expect is anger, or pain, or tears, resentment or the tallying up of the years her husband stood by her unfalteringly. What we expect is outrage. Instead, the husband wraps his arms around his wife and says, "Honey, I am so sorry I can't do that for you anymore." He holds her, then she calls the ex and tells him she can never speak to him again.

That's transformation.

"The husband, the wife, the ex -- who, among us, has not been every character in that piece?" Glass asks.

As the medium's coolest commodity, "This American Life" -- which began airing on public radio in 1995 and falls just behind "Car Talk" and "Prairie Home Companion" in popularity -- captures the listener's imagination by mirroring our culture and society through the individual stories of people and the poignant, strange or luminescent moments in which they find themselves. Each week, "This American Life" presents "a bunch of stories," as the program's Web site explains; "some are documentaries, some are fiction, some are something else ... we choose a theme and invite different writers and performers to contribute items on the theme." Today the show reaches nearly a million listeners on more than 300 stations.

I spoke with Ira Glass recently at Zinfandel, a restaurant in Chicago's River North area, not far from Touristville, with its Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe. After more than a dozen e-mails attempting to pinpoint the wheres and whens, we settled on this place because Glass, who recently turned 40, feels a special affinity for it. Zinfandel, an ochre-walled nouveau American cuisine bistro piping in Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, opened right around the time "This American Life" began. Zinfandel employees are unwavering fans of the show. So loyal are they that each month the restaurant chooses a culinary theme in honor of "This American Life's" weekly themes, and offers special menus around that theme. "There's something so loopy about that," Glass says. "They've chosen, as their medium, food. I love that."

"The most surprising thing I can tell you about this place," he says, leaning conspiratorially toward me, "is the shrimp cocktail. Because shrimp cocktail is not a thing you think would ever be good, but in fact it's completely ..." He thinks a moment. "It makes you think that shrimp cocktail can be something." I stare at him. It's true. Shrimp cocktail is just shrimp cocktail. "I think you'll be surprised," he says, then looks up toward the ceiling and mutters, "please, God, let it be good."

I attempt to not look charmed. In Chicago he has a reputation for dating lots of women -- an unlikely Romeo, one article called him -- though pieces written about him mostly suggest he works too hard to maintain a shred of a social life. "If you date one woman a year," he says with an air of exasperation, "times 10 years, and that's 10 women ..." he trails off. It's a tired topic -- and one that, with his growing fame, is bound to get more tiresome. I refrain from telling him that many of my highly educated, highly articulate female friends were reduced to schoolgirl giggles and the throes of groupiedom at the mention of my meeting him.

In jeans, Converse All-Stars, green T-shirt and unbuttoned button-down, Glass could be anybody -- the Wrigley Field frat boy going gray, the roadie for an Elvis Costello tribute band, the tourist come to the big city for a weekend of megastores and theme restaurants. It's precisely this regular-guy feel that allows him to penetrate worlds most of us would be barred from: a father-and-son exploration of the elder's Alzheimer's disease, a young daughter's feelings of betrayal upon discovering her father and her imaginary friend are one and the same, an African-American who journeys to the homeland and in the process discovers where home is not, a pimp who fails because he is not brutal enough, a man's violent boyhood pranks.

Glass withholds judgment completely and consistently, even with the inmates and the prostitutes. This refusal to judge, a trait that would both win him votes and make him a terrible politician, is part of the universal appeal of "This American Life." It compels us to want to tell our stories in ways, perhaps, that we've not had the courage to tell before -- ways that evoke audience empathy for everyone, victims and villains alike. We've all been down there with the liars, the thieves, the hacks. But we've also been heroes and saints.

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