Transcript of 852: Pivot Point

A quick warning.

There are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show.

If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.

Org.

When Kirk and his wife, MJ, evacuated their house in LA on the second day of the fires. They could see the flames at the hill from their backyard. They packed the car full, got their seven and eight-year-old kids inside with a family cat, hit the road. And Kirk started recording. Okay.

Now, I know it's That's scary.

Did this happen when mommy or daddy was little?

He records his kids a lot and just had a feeling like this is an important moment.

Can we just start on to a song like Bye, the Beatles?

Sure.

Not rock band, okay?

Sure. Not like we're the Kings, because I don't really want to listen to rock. Okay, but can I just say something? Can I say something?

I don't really want to listen to rock music when our house is going to burn down.

Our house is going to be a camp.

Kirk is Kirk Johnson. He's been on our show before talking about his experiences in the Iraq War, among other things. He thinks of himself as somebody who can usually handle a moment of crisis. But he admits he made mistakes in the car. He didn't bring the family A tortoise, an animal he says his kids have ignored for over a year. He lives in a giant crate outside the house. In the car, he realized how upset his son, August, was about that. But they drove, who to wind speeds and wind directions, made a guess about where it might be safe, booked a hotel, and things were feeling a little calmer in the car.

Daddy, can you tell us one of your kid's stories you haven't told us? No, that's a good idea, August.

That's August, asking Kirk to tell a story from his childhood, which he does sometimes. Kirk grew up with chickens, goats, and animals.

Okay. Did I ever tell you the story about... I think I did when my horse got sick?

No, you don't have to tell the Who was that?

I used to have a horse named Joe. Yeah.

That's a big question. What's his picture's last name? Biden, okay?

Joe Biden. Joe Biden. Joe Biden, the horse. And Mamey and Gramps went to visit Uncle Soren in Russia. They were far away, and they left me home alone. How old were you? I was 14 or 15.

One day, I went down to check on Joe one morning before school, and he was lying on the ground like he was kneeling down, which is not a good sign for a horse.

I didn't know what to do. I went to school, and then I came back and I was really nervous, and Joe was still lying on the ground. Every day, I was trying to get him to eat food and stuff, and he wasn't eating anything. I'd say, You know what I did? You know what my best idea was? What? I started digging a grave next to Joe, a big hole a little bit every day so that if he died, there would be a big hole right next to him. That was my smart idea. Then Mamey and Gramps got home and they're like, What are you doing? I was like, I'm digging a grave for Joe. They're like, Why don't you just call the veterinarian? The veterinarian came and gave him a shot, and he was totally fine. But after that, Joe looked at me a little funny.

What was the moment you realized, Oh, this is not the right story for this moment?

Well, when I realized it was a creature that I was a beloved pet of ours that I was convinced was about to die.

And digging a grave for.

But halfway through, I realized, Oh, God, I'm getting them right into death and dying and uncertainty about how to handle a situation. How do I get out of this?

I don't really want to talk about a dying grave right now.

It's okay, Daddy. Let's do, Sorry. I shouldn't have told the Joe.

I just Joe Joe, I rode that horse all the time. Kirk and his family were lucky. Unlike so many families in Los Angeles right now, they're now back in their home. The tortoise is fine. But in that moment, when it was so unclear what to do, and and his wife, MJ, were trying to pretend that things were going to be fine when they really had no idea at all and were scared they were not going to be fine. When his brain searched for a story to tell the children, this one with the horse is the one that popped up.

If I really think about it, that story is about decision making without enough information. I didn't know what to do. The best idea I came up with was just impossibly stupid. But yeah, the moral of that story is like, sometimes you choose poorly.

These moments when you feel the Earth shifting underneath you and you just have to figure out what you're going to do in this new reality. That's what our show is about today. People with different pivot points in their lives between what was and what's about to happen. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This is American Life. I'm Eric Glass. Stay with us. This is American Life, Act One. Who's laughing now? We start today with this story about somebody who's been thinking a lot about one particular pivot point that the world might go through. Nancy Uptight went to meet him.

Got a question for you out there listening. Have you ever had a bloody nose? I ask because I got a bloody nose recently when I went to do an interview with a British comedy writer and director named Armando Yannuchi. He He made the TV show Veep for HBO, now Max, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing the vice President. He made a movie called The Death of Stalin, a comedy somehow, about the battle for succession in the Soviet Union after Stalin died. He made a movie that I especially love called In the Loop, about the lead up to a war that isn't identified as the Iraq War, but seems a lot like the Iraq War. Also a comedy. Armando Yunuchi gets called prescient a lot, but I think of him not so much as prescient as in tune. He follows the news. He is paying attention to now. Veep got into aspects of the political culture in Washington in a way no other show did. The epic pettiness, the unglamorous maneuvering. I'm always interested to see through his work what he finds funny and relevant and sometimes frightening in the world. I went to London to interview him about one of his new projects, a new play, which I will get to.

But right now, all you need to know is that I came to the interview as a fan, straight up. I didn't hide it, but I didn't lead with it either. We were both there to do our jobs. I was told I would get an hour with him. To be safe, I was 15 minutes early, and while I was waiting, I got a bloody nose. I got the bloody nose while I was standing in the living room type room somewhere upstairs at the Noel Cowered Theater in London, a room that has a white carpet and white upholstered chairs and a silver upholstered couch. I pulled a bunch of tissues from my bag. Pretty much always have tissues, and I was holding a pile of them to my bloody nose. Normal. It happens. I get bloody noses sometimes. Then I ran out of tissues. So I started using paper towels from the kitchenette that was attached to the living room, and it was a lot of blood. So I had a big wad of paper towels pressed to my nose, trying not to drip on the white rug, when Armando Ritchie, walked through the kitchenette and into the living room.

He and the publicist were concerned. He said, Do you need a few minutes? He understood about bloody noses. The publicist said, Would you like to use the toilet? I said, Yes, that would be great. Thank you so much. I am so sorry about this. Where is that toilet? And I went to the bathroom to wrap this mess up. And I had what seemed to be a rolling series of bloody noses, or one big one that had many phases? I don't know. But what I do know from sad, gross experience is that a bloody nose means there's a clot somewhere high up in my nose that needs to come out for the bloody nose to stop. So I was trying to blow my nose and blow the clot out, and it took me some time to realize that as I was doing that, unsuccessful, I was spraying tiny droplets of blood all over. The sink, the toilet seat, the floor, the mirror, the wallpaper, the wallpaper. I started wiping everywhere like it was a crime scene, and I rolled up a tight little roll of toilet paper and stuck it up my right nostril to catch the blood.

That's what I do at home when I have a bloody nose and no one's looking. The little roll of toilet paper filled with blood and fell on the floor as I was wiping the floor. Had to roll up another one. That filled with blood. Roll up a new one. Take out the old one. Repeat, repeat. I went through an entire roll of toilet paper and had to start a new one. So I was pacing around this little bathroom with toilet paper in my nose, looking for tiny blood drops and muttering to myself, You got to wrap this up, wrap it up, wrap this up. And time was passing, so I started thinking, maybe I could interview Armando Yannucci with rolled up toilet paper sticking on my nose. Or maybe I could stick a really tiny bit of toilet paper far enough up my nose that he wouldn't see it, but it would still block the blood? This nosebleed went on for half an hour. It was a full-on anxiety dream come to life. Armando Yunuchi's movies and TV shows are full of awkward scenes that happen on the job, a person trying to do a serious thing and getting thwarted by something dumb and embarrassing, like a pair of squey shoes.

In one of his movies, an assistant secretary of state starts bleeding from her teeth in the middle of a meeting. What usually happens in these scenes is the person just gets pounced on, mocked without mercy by their colleagues or rivals or the press. Any vulnerability or misstep is noticed and weaponized. But Armando Yunuchi, the real person in real life, did something completely different. I walked out of the bathroom, not even sure the interview was still possible. So much time had been lost. And he said, with perfect grace, I'm not in a rush. He and the publicist, Nada, simply put the whole thing behind us. Nada said, Look, he's got a photoshoot in half an hour, but he can come back after that. Armando said, We'll talk for a while, and then I'll go and come back, and we'll talk more. It was like he waved a wand over me and said, You had a nightmare, and now it's over, which is the opposite of what happens in his new play. I wanted to interview Armando because his work is so good at capturing things about now, about the present. I saw that he was doing a stage version of an old Cold War film, Dr. Strange Love, by Stanley Kubrick.

I found it alarming that this was his next project. I mean, it's a comedy, but the last scene is nuclear Armageddon and the End of the World. So what did he see in it that spoke to him about now? Why choose that particular story out of all possible novel stories at this moment? Well, part of the answer to why now is someone asked.

Well, Doctor Strange is one of those films that's always been in my top five movies of all time.

Ladies and gentlemen, Armando Yannucci. He got a call from the director and co-adapter of the play, Sean Foley, who asked Armando, did you want to work on it with him? And Armando quickly said, yes.

I think it's the best dark comedy film ever made. I'm a huge Kubrick fan. The other reason I said yes was because, and this was several years ago, at the time, climate change was becoming a much more stark reality. There was a sensation of, we don't do something immediately about this. The world isn't going to come back from it. That sense of us as a collective species still being unable to save ourselves from our own behavior.

Us as a species being unable to save ourselves from our own behavior is the plot of Dr. Strangelove. The entire story lives in the minutes right before the world pivot from a planet full of life to a deathscape of ashes and poison. The story is an American general goes quietly nuts. He's a conspiracy theorist who believes commies are poisoning America through floridation. To stop that, he sends US bombers off to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. When reasonable people on both sides realize what's happening, they try to stop it. The US President gets so desperate that he gives the Soviets the information they need to shoot down the planes. But one bomber gets through any way, triggering a cascade of nuclear bombs to fire automatically, destroying the world.

Everyone on stage realizes a good chance the world might end, but they can't quite admit it. It's like a very slow motion car crash that you're watching, and everyone's caught up in it, but unable to, because of their own desire to retain their own status and to prove their point over the enemy, leading to anihilation.

More than any one-to-one correspondence with the news now, there's a feeling to strange love that I found familiar, a sense that enormous danger is looming, but we're also waiting through a sludge of ridiculousness. I feel some level of dread all the time for a while now, and I had a hunch based on Armando's work, that he might have a similar feeling.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, dread, yes. I think we're all anxious about something, but for each person, it's a different thing, or we can't quite put a finger on it. There's just a cumulative atmosphere of dread and foreboding, but not quite knowing what.

Was it a way for you to organize or contain your own dread as a project?

Oh, absolutely. It's a way of articulating it. It's a way of processing it. It's a way of dramatizing it.

Once I got an answer to, Why make strange love now? We moved into a meandery but very enjoyable conversation about how to confront your dread these days. Because I am taking suggestions, and Armando's work is something I've returned to again and again. What I'm thinking now is that, especially with his movies and with Strange Love, I come for the comedy, but maybe stay for the dread. We talked about how do you go about making comedy out of catastrophe and fear? You've said that people underestimate comedy, which I agree, especially Especially about things that are big and terrifying. But make the case. What do people underestimate its ability to do that you feel like, no, it's best. It's best at that.

I'm not arguing. Comedy is- Or better. It just gives you another way in. And I think comedy, I think it just allows you to open up your mind a bit. If you find yourself laughing at something and then ask yourself, should I have Are you happy about that? Well, if you've laughed at it, then you should. It's spontaneous. I think that's why autocratic leaders hate jokes about themselves.

Because it's spontaneous. They can't control it or predict it.

It's out of their hands. They like stuff where they could tell you what to do. And comedy allows what might otherwise feel a forbid and inaccessible theme. It allows you that entry point. Before making The Death of Stalin, I went back and watched The Great Dictator.

The Great Dictator is a movie about Hitler that Charlie Chaplin put out incredibly in 1940.

So not even with the benefit of hindsight, right in the middle of it. And he treads this line between high comedy, fantastic, memorable comedic moments like I don't know, it hinkle the dictator, just playing with a globe, picking Earth up in his hands and dancing with it. And then scene set in the Jewish ghetto, which are not funny, not meant to be funny. And it's this balance between the funny and the tragic. And I knew when going into the Death of Stalin, that's what I wanted to do. And I said to everyone when we started filming, I said to the crew and to the cast, it's a comedy, but we must also be mindful and respectful of what happened to the people. We're not making fun of the death and the punishments. The comedy comes from those inside the Kremlin. And I was holding those two tones and moods simultaneously.

Armando pulls it off because he doesn't skimp on either the bad in The Death of Stalin or the comedy The bad is quite bad, and the funny is really funny. One way I've noticed that he keeps those two moods aloft at the same time in many of his projects, he often focuses on people who work together. In the death of Stalin, there's this intense rivalry among the men around Stalin, all jockeying for power after he dies, scheming and whingeing and flailing. That workplace power struggle is what made VIP so funny, too. In In the Strange Love play, the President and his advisors are in the war room, gathered around a ludicrously large circular table, mostly arguing. One guy, a guy you may know from your own job, keeps throwing out bad ideas in a loud voice in a Roman, Roy, I'm the only one being real here, way. For instance, he argues that maybe the thing to do is to lean into this attack the US has launched, not bring back the bombers that are on their way, but send more planes with more bombs, try to win this war rather than try to stop it.

It all makes sense under something called Plan R.

It would remove all uncertainty if we pretaliate. Pretali what? Pretaliate. I think this is a new word. See, conventionally, if the Russians attack us, our only option is to... Retaliate. Plan R gives us a second option. We pretaliate before they even think of taliating. Nuclear preterrance, sir, in a nutshell, it's bulletproof.

Pre-tallyate isn't in the Strange Love movie, but it was built out of logic that is in there, and that Armando and the director and coadapter Sean Foley, expanded and rifted on.

I've spent the last, whatever, several decades examining politicians, their speech and how they use rhetoric to disguise or to pretend something is not what it is and so on.

But Armando says, Sometimes you really don't need to rift or invent. Sometimes, comedy is just sitting there waiting to be picked up, like a $100 bill on the sidewalk.

In the film, it opens with the Air Force saying, Peace is our profession. I thought that was a gag. I thought Kubrick made up. In the archive, you come in, There's the photo. It exists.

This is in the Kubrick archive, he says.

He saw this photo of an Air of space with Pieces Our Profession written on it. So again, he's taking what's true and just putting it in.

Yeah. Pieces Our Profession shows up a bunch of times in the movie, along with other funny sight gags of just the way things are labeled. And I thought Pieces Our Profession was over the top. I thought, oh, it's too much.

And it was real. It was real. I know. And that's when you just think you You don't have to broader it. If what is true makes the point, then make that point with the truth. With the death of Stalin, as we researched the story, we kept finding more and more stories that were just absurd but actually happened.

Like a scene that ended up in the movie about Stalin's son, Faisalah.

Faisalah was high up in the Soviet Air Force. He was over promoted. He was drunk. He was in charge of the ice hockey team. He sent them to tournament in an ice storm. He was warned there'd be a danger to the flight. The flight went down. He lost the ice hockey team. He was too scared to tell his father. So he just recruited friends of friends for a new team who were terrible. And that's such a bizarre story, but it says so much about even his son was scared of him. And that's what I'm saying. It's all about the truth. It's the truth of what people really felt at the time. How can we get to that, that uneasy feeling they had at the bottom of their stomachs for years, that they might be rounded up and taken away in the middle of the night?

I've now seen Dr. Strangelove a bunch of times, the movie and then the play. Every time I think, so no one wins in the end. The bad ideas don't prevail, nothingness prevails. It's shocking. Many times in my life, I've looked back at a specific moment and thought, Oh, right. That was before. Before I knew that. Before this happened. But it's much more unsettling to experience now the moment you are currently in as that before time, to look around and feel that you will look back on this moment as one that came before so many losses or changes or hard relationships. Dr. Strangelove, the play, gave the audience a chance to, sure, laugh, but also to feel that dread, to see ourselves as living in a time before, before Something. It's not clear what. Nuclear bombs have a narrative advantage that way. They have one iconic image associated with them, a recognizable brand of destruction. What is the right image for what's on our horizon? Or mine, I'll just speak for myself, my dread. I rewatched the movie and saw the play during the hottest year on record in the summer before the US presidential election.

I'm writing this story wondering how much of Los Angeles is going to burn and whether there's going to be a nationwide ban on abortion, mass deportations. I don't have a picture in my head to focus on. It feels more like a play, a lot of dialog, and I'm experiencing it live.

Nancy Optec, this producer on our show, the stage version of Dr. Strange Love, which, by the way, stars Steve Coogan in several different roles, is playing at the Noel Coward Theater in London through January 25th, and will be in Dublin from February fifth to February 22nd.

At two, the view from the dugout.

So one of the things that seems likely to change once Donald Trump is again in the White House is US policy toward Ukraine. His vice President, JD Vance, has called for an end to aid the Ukraine and describe a peace plan that basically lets Russia keep the territory it's gained. Donald Trump has been vager about his intentions, but he's been a skeptic of continued aid. He has said many times that he going to end the war in 24 hours. We wonder what it's like for Ukrainian soldiers who depend on US arms right now to see all of this at this pivot point and how they're imagining what's going to happen next once Trump takes office. Our producer, Valerie Kipness, spoke with a bunch of people on the front lines.

The first soldier I want to tell you about is Serhe. He's a former vegan chef from Kyiv. He quit his job to join the army a year ago. He's really proud of the fact that his unit recycles. When I asked how he described what his unit looks like when they're in action, he said, Like hobbits in a bunker, hobbits with mortars. Serge told me that it's a strange feeling to live in this moment of time before things might change. Everyone around him believes in anything and everything all at the same time. There's nothing that's not in the realm of possibility. Definitely, it felt like and still might feel like time has stopped. Time has stopped and something needs to happen. Like right now, you're living in the part of time that's stopped. Definitely. Everything simultaneously, like with this, everything is real. Everything might be real. Everything might happen.

So there is no reason why tomorrow or in a week, like a whole Europe and UK and US might not decide behind closed doors and just provide Ukraine with a decision to to stop military funding.

And of course, that would be a huge impact on our ability to keep on fighting. Oh, one second. One second. Let me hear if you hear it. So there is an air alert going on. If you can hear the signal. Wow.

Yeah.

What does that mean? It sounds like there might be some air attack, like be it drones or a missile or something like this. Do you have to go hide somewhere or what do you do? No, I'll go brew myself a cup of tea, maybe. That's how long this war has been going on. Long enough that there's an air attack and you go brew yourself a cup of tea. When Donald Trump won the election, Serhe was sitting in a dugout on the front line. That's basically just a big square hole in the ground, 100 square feet. Like in World War One, five guys all huddled together. That night, they just finished firing at the Russians, sat down to rest when one of the guys in his unit went on X, saw the news that Trump was winning, and read it aloud. He went all like, oh, this guy wins, and if he wins, he will end all the help to Ukraine, and we are basically screwed. We went in the full discussion of how the American democracy works So bringing up Wikipedia pages. We spent around three hours of our night time just by talking, talking, talking about what the present in America has a power to do.

Could Trump just stop the war unilaterally? Stop sending aid they'd already promised? And what's the deal with the House and the Senate? Did he need their permission? Serhe and the other soldiers dug and dug for answers. And here's where he came down. He concluded that Trump wouldn't have the power to reverse the aid Biden had already promised all at once, which isn't exactly true. But that's what he told his unit. Did you feel like it was your job to calm everyone down? Maybe calming in a way that I don't want my crew member to feel their heads with downgraded morale for a In the next five days, we need to be going hand in hand for our mission. These kinds of conversations have been happening on the Ukrainian front line for months now. Not all the time, but here and there. I talked to 10 people in a variety of positions on the front. They all laughed when I asked about Trump saying he could finish the war in 24 hours. Of course, they remembered the first time he said it. They remembered where they were, what they were doing, but they didn't think much of it except for the fact that Trump was a showman and that this was all part of his act.

But even so, that didn't stop them from wondering, what in the world might he mean? Same thing happened a few days after Trump won the election in November. Joe Biden approved Ukraine's use of long-range missiles. The soldiers were excited. They'd been waiting for this for years. But then, Donald Trump said that he thought launching long-range missiles into Russia was actually a big mistake. One soldier told me that he was on the front line, just finished shooting mortars when he heard what Trump had said. And he looked at his crew like, What? What does this actually mean for us? Will they actually take away the approval they'd just given us? Another soldier who told me about trying to read the tea leaves of American politics is Vitali, a drone operator. He's from a region of Ukraine that's been in the fight against Russian occupation since 2014. Vitali has been fighting this war on and off since he was 24. As a drone operator, he spends hours sitting in a bunker watching monitors. He's got two screens in front of him, a one is a live feed surveillance of the frontline, and the other, his phone, social media, group chats, the news, one right next to the other.

Oftentimes, we talk the evenings while looking at the monitors because there's no much action during the night. The Russians usually start moving early in the morning before the sunrise. These conversations are meant to pass the time because now it's winter and the night is long, and you have a lot of time to kill, in fact. Because war is not always action. War is very often sitting put for a long time. They talk about how Trump, the candidate, could be against funding for Ukraine. But Trump, the President, might not be. Sometimes we'll just be sitting there in our positions in the basements, and someone will say that Trump doesn't actually care about any of this, or us, and that he will make a deal with Russia at whatever price is most favorable to him. Then there's the people who will say that Trump actually understands everything and will try to talk to Putin, and Putin will not want to come to an agreement and will not want to give us any territories. And so, Trump will realize that there can be no agreement with Putin and will instead provide us with lots of new weapons thanks to which we can win.

Vitali told me he actually finds this last scenario pretty convincing. Other times, he's less optimistic. One day, I was sitting looking at the monitor, my phone next to it, just scrolling, and there was Trump's tweet. Then I turn and I tell my fellow servicemen, Hey, take a look. There's Musk who consider a visionary, but Musk writes such offensive things about Ukraine. Elon Musk has said there's no way that Putin will lose. And he pitched to Ukraine, quote, unquote, peace plan on X, which would cede Crimea to Russia. And now, he's going to be sitting in Trump's administration. And we were all like, Shit, maybe he'll change. Maybe he'll be different as a politician when he gets some experience. One of the guys in the unit said, My brother has a Tesla. If I had known this guy would be a part of this, I would have convinced him not to buy it. Trump's victory has cracked open a space for conversations that were once totally off limits. I heard about a moment like that from Artem, a soldier with a big personality. Artem is a volunteer fighter in a unit that calls themselves Peaky Blinders.

He helps prepare ammunition for drones. He calls himself the Candymaker. Artem is a big believer that the war is nowhere near ending, Trump or no Trump, funding or no funding. But a few weeks ago, Artem went out with his commander, Zaliznyak, and another guy in his unit. In the evening, we went out to a hooker lounge and sat down to relax with our brothers in arms. We were sitting at the table together with Chish and Zaliznyak in this cafe where we ordered ourselves some dinner, and the guys ordered a hooker as well. I don't smoke hooker, but they do. That was when our conversation began. When the waiter took our order, Zaliznyak looked up deep in thought. He then turned his eyes to Chish and began to ask him some questions. Chish is a soldier in our 10s unit. He asked, Chish, if the war ends, what would you do? He asked what he thought his future would look like after the war was over. They started to speculate what events would unfold, who would travel, who would do what, basically, putting out their hearts to another. Artem can I didn't believe that he was hearing his fellow brothers in arms talking about what they would do after the war ended, going to travel, going back to their normal civilian lives.

I told him I didn't believe it. To hear a fellow soldier even whisper the possibility that the fight could be over is still not something Artem's used to. The party line of any Ukrainian soldier, of any Ukrainian, really, is that they'll fight to the end, and the fight may never end. Expressing any doubt feels almost unpatriotic. But I talked to a Ukrainian expert who's in contact with many high-ranking officials in the army, who told me that while many soldiers remain diehard and committed to keep fighting till the end, another group, which is growing, is made up of people who are getting increasingly weary of this war. Ukraine's recently suffered a series of setbacks and defeats, and the expert says this group likes that Trump is someone who will change things up. Artem thought about this moment with his commander for a while. What had he meant by that? Did he actually think this war would end? Artem told me this. A few days later, in the midst of heavy bombardment, he studied his commander's face. He looked like he was all in. And so, Artem decided that his commander didn't mean what he said. He told me he'd figured it out.

His commander didn't actually think the war was ending. He was just testing his unit. The truth is, these guys don't think about Trump all that much. They've got other things on their minds. One soldier told me that when you're in the rear, far from the front line, it's easy to imagine all the possibilities of what could happen next. But when you're on the front, it's like all of that collapses into this one linear logic. The weapon in front of you, the tank next to you, the amount of ammo you have left, the present, no before and no after. Those are the moments he said that feel the greatest for him when he just does what he can with what he has. When he's not speculating about what will be.

Valarie Kipness is a producer in our show. She reported this with help from Anastasia Mzezova. Coming up, the power of a simple photograph in a moment of uncertainty. That's in a minute, Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. It's This American from Ira Glass today on our program. Pivot Point. On this weekend, before a new presidency begins, we have stories of people living in this strange and often unsettling in between moment when you know things are right on the cusp of big, big changes. We have arrived at act three of our program, act three, period piece. When we were discussing this week's theme as a group here at the radio show, one of our coworkers, Susan Burton, started talking about a year-long pivot point. It lasts 12 months that many of our listeners have either gone through or in the middle of now or we'll go through. Quick heads up. Susan describes some bodily stuff in here. Here she is.

I got my first period when I was 10, and then I continued to get it for the next 40 years. I didn't get it every month. There were exceptions, blackout dates, pregnancy, breastfeeding, anorexia. But for most of the 40 years, each month my period would come and I'd open a calendar and mark the anticipated date of my next period with a TK. Like a forthcoming fact and a piece I was reporting. Sometimes I would get my period and not have tampons, and then I would go online and order enough tampons so that I would never run out again. Then suddenly I was about to turn 50, and I understood I would never get through all the tampons I had ordered. What was the first day of your last period? Asked the nurse at the gynecologist's office. Okay, I said, I think it was sometime last month, like August, but it's hard to tell. I'm at that age. I was bleeding all summer. Not in an alarming way, just it was hard to tell. You are officially in menopause once you go one full year without a period. So I was not there yet. I was in perimenopause.

During perimen, my period had first come a lot every 18 days. Over time, that changed, 60 days between periods. Then 90. I'd start thinking, this is it. And then I'd get my period again, and the clock would restart. Congratulations, a friend said to me one day when the counter reset to zero. She was kidding, but that was the feeling. Perry was a safe zone, and I wanted to stay there. What made Perry a safe zone was simply that it was not menopause It was still the before-time. Perry may have been a safe zone, but it was not a safe harbor. During it, I'd had the common symptoms you hear about and other things you don't. Frozen shoulder, which was just what it sounded like migraines I managed by digging my fingernails into my forehead. There were remedies for some of the symptoms, but what I tried or didn't is not what I want to get into here. My point is that I'd already been through a few rocky years. Years. Years have accelerated aging. I felt startled by how quickly my face was changing. According to the internet, this was on me. There was a punitive quality to the phrase sun damage.

But the promise was that once you were officially in menopause, you would feel better because things would slow down and your moods would level out. You would come into your own. You would give a shit less. In menopause, you would be sanguine, and yet I wasn't eager to get there. All along, I had so many fears about menopause. A short list of those fears might start with my associations to the word dry, wiry, papery. I was scared of what would happen to desire, like how much of it I would feel. The messaging on this was positive. Women in menopause can still be sexy and still want sex. But the celebrities of menopause were hot and liberated, and you hardly heard from the regular women who maybe did want less. That was the information I was looking for, how it felt to still be sexual, but to have the volume just turned down a bit, because that was what I suspected was most true. I didn't know yet. I wasn't there. But I thought I might be closer than I'd ever been. That period I'd had in August, light, persistent, I had a feeling it would be the last one.

My bet was that once the hand on the clock circled through the year, that would be it. I would officially be in menopause. September, October, November, December. No period, still in the before-time. It was like not wanting to move into a new decade, like wanting to linger in the last months of being 29, 39, 49, or nine. Even as a child, I'd had a sadness about aging, not wanting to cross into the double digits of 10. Getting a period of 10 was early, very early in 1984. I'd felt horror at that advancement. Now I recognize that this was happening again. As the year ticked on, now January, now February, I found there were things I missed about menstruating. There was a stillness in my body without it. I missed the cycle, which began each month with a low flat mood and then continued with the rising action of ovulation. That mid-month surge of energy, some of it erotic. I missed the elevation and mood. March. Earlier in my life, fearing pregnancy, I'd willed my period to come. But it wasn't like that now. I wasn't pulling down my underwear and hoping. April, May. I was still in the before-time, though I was increasingly accepting of the idea that I would soon be in menopause, testing it out in my head.

Maybe this is partly because a whole new generation, millennials, had discovered perimenopause, and once again were shining up the scruffy territory we Gen Xers had claimed. Advertisers had gotten there, too, and now it seemed like everyone was talking about menopause, but most of them were not talking about it the right way. And this is probably always true. No one is ever talking about your own menopause, about exactly what it means to you. June, month 10. By now, I was traveling without any supplies. There wasn't going to be an emergency. There wasn't going to be another period stain. For years, I dealt with period stains, kneeling by the washing machine, spraying stain remover into a seam, or looking at the back of a skirt and wondering if it could be saved. But there's one stain I've never been able to get out, a stain on the pink upholstery of one of our dining room chairs. I sat there one early summer morning. For me, a singularly important morning. A book I'd written had been published. I sat there in a nightgown reading a glowing review. I could feel that I was getting my period, but it didn't matter.

A dream of my life was coming true. I wanted to sit there in it. I didn't want to move. Now that stain is there and I've tried to lift it, but it won't come out, and I don't mind that it's there. It's a marker of a moment of bliss and of an earlier self, too, one whose body still did that. For so many years, I tried to manage my period, make it invisible, get rid of evidence. Now this strange, possibly even repulsive, preservation. But it's a stain that makes me remember the feeling of the world opening up before me. July came, and then it was August again, and it was official. One full year. Is it too, Polyana, to say that I actually did feel the world opening up? There had been something trying about wanting to stay where I was. Once I crossed the threshold, there was no more resistance, and I was moving forward again. When I went for my physical, my doctor said, What was the date of your last menstrual period? August 2023, I said. Menopause, she said, with an exclamation point like Menopause, the musical, like a curtain rising on a new stage.

Susan Burton is an editor on our show. Back 4, since you've been gone. So show today is about people at a pivot point, and one entire community in that situation is Altadina, California. It's one of the towns around LA that's so devastated that for most of the last week and a half, nobody was allowed in. It's been surrounded by National Guard with barricades. One of our producers, Miki Mink, talked to somebody who stayed at her house. The fire stopped about a block away. And in the first days of the fires, came up with a mission for herself.

Vanessa Pratt is a nursing student, 25 years old, lives with her parents in the homes she grew up in. In those first few days after the fires, she realized people who'd evacuated didn't have a way to figure out if their homes were still standing or not.

I remember I was just sitting and thinking, Well, one thing we've been doing is driving around, so maybe something I can do to help is drive around and take pictures of these homes.

She went onto a community Facebook page for Altadina and posted this message.

I said, Hello, everyone. Our home and family is all okay and safe. That being said, we are behind the barricades. We are more than happy to drive around and take a picture for any person who would like to see their home, or God forbid, what is left of their home. Please let me know the address.

Then how fast did you start getting responses.

So I started getting responses pretty quickly, probably 5, 10 minutes after I posted it. Then when they shared the address, they write something and they say, Oh, I brought my children home to that house. I've had people say I was born in that house after Actually, I had somebody say my grandma was born in the house. I was married in that house.

54 people messaged her their addresses. She wrote them down into a notebook, and then she and her dad got into their old Toyota minivan and started driving.

See, if I That preace melted.

Vanessa in the passenger seat and her father driving. Okay, that one is on the left side. Just a few. That's their dog, Shelby, panting on her father's lap.

Look, it's here somewhere. Where?

On the right side? I think it's this. They mentioned it was.

They got to 10 houses on their first day, but it took them almost four hours. Altadina is a small place. The whole thing is only about nine square miles. But the streets were blocked with down power lines and fallen trees. When they did get to an address, Vanessa would snap a photo and text it right away.

The goal is to get the photos as quick as possible without delay to these people about their homes, because you can imagine the agony of somebody sitting in a shelter are not known.

How many people have you responded to so far?

We've done about 41, and I think we have another seven or eight today.

Then of those 41 that you've been able to check on, how many are still standing?

Less than half.

Less than half. Okay.

Yeah, less than half.

What is that? Can you just explain the process to me?

It's difficult. When the house is there, I send the picture and I don't say anything because there is no words needed. Usually, I get a thank you. When the isn't there, that's when it becomes a little bit more challenging. Some people will send me, Hey, can you send me the status of my home? I know it's probably gone, but it would be great to know what the situation looks like. Then there's the ones that are like, I have no idea if you could send me a picture, and those are the hard ones because you know you're the one who's going to break the news. And so I send a picture and I say, I'm so sorry for your loss, is usually all I say and they usually respond with something. Then I'll follow up with, I wish I could do more to help. I wish there was something else I could do to help. There's not much you can say if somebody has lost their home. And then I've also had the occasional, after I send the burnt house, they'll send me photos of the house prior. I remember one of the houses that they sent that burned.

Oh, my God, it was really burnt. And they sent me a picture of the house was beautiful. I mean, it really was. That one was hard. Yeah.

How did you respond back?

What a beautiful home. I'm so sorry. I mean, it really was. It had a beautiful garden. I'm looking at the picture now. It's a dark, brown roof. The house is off-white, and the yard has like, bushes, and the bushes have small pink flowers. They had a bench on the outside of their house, and it's a red bench, which really goes with the house, honestly, because it really complimented the color of the house. It made it stick out.

A few days after the fire started, when it was still only 3% contained. She and her father were trying to get to an address at the end of a cul-de-sac. That one house took them a couple of days to get to. They kept trying different roads in.

Every way had a tree, a huge tree that fell in the middle of the road, blocking I said, This is going to be the one that I'm not going to be able to send a picture for. I saw the person, she had a family, and I was like, Oh, my God. I'm telling my dad, We need to see what we can do. We need to try. On their fourth attempt, they finally got closer to the address but encountered another tree blocking the road.

Vanessa got out of the car and started walking. She sent me the video.

Okay.

Around her were charred trees and electrical poles from power lines. The bottoms burned completely off.

I'm walking under the poles and going in between wires. I couldn't figure out which house it was. I mean, it was that area was demolished. It looks like somebody dropped a bomb in that area, and there's nothing. There's not even… You know when you go to a house and you see those house numbers on the curb? It was so bad that those house numbers were nonexistent. Stuff.

The rubble was still smoldering, and all she could see were remnants of stone walls and chimney columns, a burned-out station wagon.

But it was just like, I'm going to make a general video, and just, hopefully, I hit the house, and I sent that one, and I told the person, Please let me know if I am getting your house because I'm here now and I can get another picture or get another video if needed. They said, No, that's perfect. You got it.

One of the last messages I got from Vanessa was a rare, bright moment in this terrible time. Oh, my God. She's going to take a picture here and walk there and take the other one. She and her dad found a house still standing. Wonderful, right?

Yeah.

But go to that again so we can take...

Miki Mik is a producer on our show.

I wish I could say it would all be all right.

It'll all be all right.

I wish I could tell you.

It Well, our program is produced today by Emmanuel Joci.

People who put together today's show include Fia Bennett, Dana Chivas, Michael Comette, Angela Gervasi, Cassie Halley, Hannah Joffy-Walt, Henry Larson, Seth Lind, Captain Raymando, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rummery, Alyssa Shipp, Laura Sturchesky, Lily Sullivan, Chris D. R. Zertala, Marisa Robertson-Texter, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor, Sara Abderaiman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Special thanks today to Tassia Plecheceva, Eric Pela, Katerina Sergatskova, Michael Hanlin, John Witzfield, Bennett Epstein, Vanessa Martinez, Ron Glenn, Jeanette Marantos, and Hannah Fry at the LA Times. The actors performing the English translations for the Ukrainians in Act Two of our show today were Alexander Foreman and Ross Pella. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. To become a This American Life Partner, which gets you bonus content, ad-free listening, and hundreds of our favorite episodes of the show that are going to show up right in your podcast feed. Go to thisamericanlifepartner. Com. Ceece and life. Org/lifepartners. Your subscription also helps keep our program going. Thanks this week to Life Partners, Cee C. Chen-ming Fé and Colette Spriggens. Thanks, as always, to our program's co founder, Mr. Tori Maletia.

He's been taking a figure drawing class His drawings are pretty good, except for the hands. He does the shoulder, upper arm, forearm, all great, and then gets to the end of the arm.

And as always, we can't quite put a finger on it.

I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories. All stories of this American life..