There can be consequences for reading other people's mail.

After all this doom and gloom about the difficult lives of artists, we end the show with a more hopeful story from Joel Kostman, a New York City locksmith, who tells us about an incident that happened to him on the job. Joel is author of Keys to the City: Tales of a New York City Locksmith.

The first part of Josh Seftel and Rich Robinson's documentary about South Africa. Josh meets people who may be distant South African relatives.

Michael Ventura, who grew up Sicilian in New York, says that as a kid he thought Sinatra was in his family. His book The Death of Frank Sinatra is not really about Sinatra.

Writer Julie Showalter on her parents' romance.

David Sedaris tells a story from his boyhood, when a voice inside his head commanded him to lick every light switch and tap his forehead with his heel. It's from his book Naked.

Jerry Capeci, dean of the New York reporters who cover organized crime, on the decline of the mob in recent years. And Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker magazine, who discusses a photo his wife took of his old neighbors, the Gambino crime family.

John Connors has very mixed emotions about attending a convention for viewers of the TV program Dark Shadows.

Julia Sweeney reads this story. She's a former Saturday Night Live cast member and star of the sad and comic memoir of life with cancer, God Said, "Ha!," which played on Broadway.

Binjamin Wilkomirski and New York writer Blake Eskin try and figure out if they are related. NOTE: A few years after this interview aired, Binjamin Wilkomirski and his Holocaust memoir Fragments were shown to be fabrications. Blake Eskin chronicled this story in his 2002 book A Life In Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski.

Chicago Playwright Bryn Magnus with a quintessential gun story from his childhood in Wisconsin.  It contains both the fear of guns and the pleasure of shooting one.

A story by Bia Lowe.

An odd occurrence at 124 East Fourth Street in Manhattan's East Village. For the last five weeks, a singer named Nick Drakides has stood on the stoop singing Sinatra songs late at night to the delight of his neighbors.

Sarah Vowell puts her foot down. She says that contrary to all the wide-eyed voyeurs we've heard up until this point in the program, reading other people's mail is wrong, simply wrong.

Sarah Vowell goes home to Montana to try and understand her gunsmith dad a little better.

Writer Sarah Vowell explains why she watched The Godfather every day while she was in college. The film, she says, depicted a world with an understandable moral system to it.

Ron Carlson's short story.

Writer Tim Melley.

Ira with chicken photographer Tamara Staples.

Journalist Margy Rochlin on her first big assignment to do a celebrity interview. It was 1982.

Alix Spiegel in Colorado Springs, where a massive prayer project is underway to pray for every person, business, and school. When she arrives, she finds the Christians speak a kind of Christian jargon she does not understand.

Ira with Lynnette Nyman, who, as a girl, recorded her parents fighting with a cassette recorder she got for Christmas.

Writer David Sedaris on parents' dreams and children's nightmares.