180:
Return to Childhood
Originally aired 03.23.2001
Stories of people who try to revisit their childhoods. What they find. And what they do not find.
Host Ira Glass talks with Kayla Hernandez, a seventh-grader who likes to reminisce about when she was a child, back in fifth grade. She visits Room 211 in her school, where her fifth grade class met, and looks at her old books, thinks about what happened there. She says she knows that decades from now, she won't even remember most of what's happening to her this year, in seventh grade, and that makes her sad. (5 minutes)
Act One. Once More, With Feeling.
Jonathan Katz listens to old tapes of his family; then travels back to the neighborhood in Brooklyn they lived in during the 1950s, looking for evidence of what his childhood was like. His sister is along for the trip, and they do not agree on the meaning of what they're seeing. A collaboration between This American Life and Lost and Found Sound. (13 minutes)
A mortgage broker named David Philp discovers that his old punk band from the 1970s is hot in Japan. He decides to leave corporate life and revisit his teenage years by going back on tour, playing music for the first time in two decades. (12 minutes)
Act Three. Ich...Bin...Ein...Mophead.
Producer Alex Blumberg sets out to find a woman named Susan Jordan, who babysat him and his sister for a year when he was nine. He discovers that each of them remembered something about the other that the other would just as soon forget. (20 minutes)Song: "Jenny G", The Push Kings
Act Four. Every Day I Forget Something Else.
An excerpt from Nicholson Baker's novel The Everlasting Story of Nory, which is narrated, more or less, by a ten-year-old. In this excerpt, we return to what Kayla Hernandez talked about in the prologue to the show: The narrator discusses the difficulty of remembering what happens on any given day. It's read by Michelle Trachtenberg, from the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (5 minutes)
