Usually This American Life brings you stories of people in the middle of big experiences. But sometimes these moments of dramatic change are only half the story. The other half occurs after time passes and they return to revisit what happened, and who they were back when. Today's show is about what they find.
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Act One
I Used To Bank Here But That Was Long, Long Ago
David Rakoff goes in search of the only existing mementos of a year-and-a-half of his life when he nearly died from Hodgkins Disease. The missing relics are his own pre-chemotherapized sperm — which reside somewhere in a Toronto lab. But over the years, his hospital has moved, the lab has moved, and he has moved. (22 minutes)
Act Two
Exile On Main Street
Keith Gessen, a young Russian emigre, revisits the heroes of his youth: the brave Soviet dissidents who risked their lives at the height of the Cold War. Many of them resettled into comfortable suburban lives in America. That these idealists would wind up on shady streets where private lives are more important than public ones is perplexing to Keith. (18 minutes)
Act Three
Shopping for a Better Future
Producer Julie Snyder looks at what happens in one poor Chicago neighborhood when the community begins to undergo a revitalization and a new store comes to town. (11 minutes)
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Act Three: Iron Man
Mark O'Brien is a writer in California, who lives most of each day in an iron lung, thanks to a childhood case of polio.
Act Two: Snail in the Coffin
Senior Editor David Kestenbaum talks with a different kind of advocacy group: animal scientists doing their best to save a particular species before it winks out of existence. (16 minutes)
Act Three: I Worked at the Kennedy Center and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
In the 1970s, Dave Kestenbaum's cousin Dan Weiss got promoted from stocker to gift shop manager at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC.
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