553: Stuck in the Middle
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As I stopped eating me when he was three or four, his mom can't remembered been so long. He was seven when I talked to her. He doesn't anybody else at me either, and he freak out.

He cried and pleaded his grandmothers in new year's when he heard that he might cook brisket till SHE offered not to. There was the time that he got so upset in a restaurant smelling the meat, cooking in the kitchen and seeing all the people around them eat their meals. They had to go sit up front by the door, and he used them especially to think that his little brother might still be eating animals.

His brother theo just turned five at the time of the same interview. And effect, ally is not a vegetarian. What a surprise. Two brothers, the mom, Rachel, says that theo is not asking to eat meat in front of alias. He's not asking to eat IT all that often.

He wants to eat meat sometimes. And I think he feels it's not fair that allies know. I think he calls him the god of food.

And that alliance doesn't have the right to be the god of food and tell the IO what to do. IT causes a lot of conflict. And I think there are conversations almost every single day around this .

SHE recruitment of those conversations for us when he was taking theo, the mediator, to a party, is going to be food at the party. And his brother is gonna there. God of food, what with the oe.

were going to this pot luck. What do you? What do you? Things gonna there.

But I hope this me, and if you get, if you give me, nick, is, let me eat IT.

So what do you think what happened if you ate me at the potluck?

All we would like you would fight.

You alias would fight.

Yeah well, but I do know what well do you think .

is this is tonight is a night for a live as class. You think you could not eat meat tonight? So he doesn't have to have a freak out in front of all his friends. What do you think?

No, I think IT o is, don't need any me for the rest of you. Like I know, I think things will .

change when he gets older, but I just want you to think about whether or not you think it's worth IT for him to scream in yet at school and night with all of his friends. Okay, think about that. okay. do. And he's not looking .

yeah do you think .

this gives a lias too much power over the .

o yeah I mean it's definitely a concern. And um at some point, probably a year into his vegetarian m, he asked that we wouldn't be eating media the net that the house wouldn't have any meat in um that was something that my husband, I had to, you know, take a step back and think about you know, people would say to us, you know, how could you have your seven year old making decisions about how you're going to be running your family um and um I guess .

our responses .

always been um you you have to hear how our child talks about meet and how IT feels to him when he sees I eat me and other people around him and his close family eating meat at such a painful experience for him.

okay. Just want to say before we're going further, if you are hearing all this and you're feeling judged about these parents, and I know you are because that is a national pastime, judging other people's parenting, I just wants to say I totally felt that way until I heard alliance just like he says and hearing a liars may be realized oh right he he is in a really tight situation where SHE has these two kids and they both have really strong feelings about this and SHE doesn't na crash either one of them and we guess here's Rachel .

with the liars you decide become vegetarian .

and remember yep and so basically, I just always thought that how they got me was finding dead animals like on side of the road or something. But then I figure out they're actually killing them. And I thought IT was not that nice. So it's stop deeding IT.

What do you think about .

other people eating meat? I really don't like IT.

And what you what do you say about what you want to do with your life? And what do you like? What's your goal in life? One of your goals.

I know you have a lot of them to get everybody vegetarian.

And what do you feel about animals?

I feel like, well, yeah, I love animals. And and I know that there are only like one thousand giant pandas left in the world, and also thirty other levers, so they're pretty in danger. What do you .

think about how how the way people treat .

animals in general? Well, most of them not very nice, like singing about lads. They they killed for nothing.

and.

Every time you talk about that, you start to cry lames of particular hard for you. The family did stop .

eating needed home. After I was asked, the richer says the actually didn't eat much meat before that either maybe once a week that a fish or turkey. And for now, you know, husb strategy with their two voices, that they try to get them to talk to each other and see each other other's point of view, crossing the fingers that in the long run, that's gonna best for both of them.

In the short round, though, IT is complicated. You know, for any parent, there are always the things that you let go in the short run, because you cannot fight every fight. And for a while, D, C, O, the one who eats meat, was secretly going out and getting turkey sandwich.

Es, with his dad, after soccer, they would even dance a little turkey dance when they, or here's Rachel with a theo, the mediator on a thursday, friday. The boy school serves a Peter and you can get plane or peony. And of course, a list does not like IT. If theo eat a pear oni.

what do things .

can happen tomorrow about the pep oni pizza? Um anybody getting you any other snacks?

Okay, things going to work?

I don't know. They would be a hard choice to do this. But what you really .

gonna .

do so is IT okay .

for for your five .

hundred .

to tell you they are going to deal with the situation just by lying to their .

siblings um well, I will say that we have come some way since that was taped in um we don't lie about IT anymore um and that was sort of, I think, an interm .

fix um what made them to stop lying .

I think probably the more we are talking about IT, the more I realized didn't I didn't feel great and so I was sort of being more open with the liars and saying, you you have to realize this is this is the reality of who theo is and who has the right to begin. Theo has his own choices and he has the right to those choices. And even though for you this is doesn't make any sense right now.

code IT was a conversation where you're talking to him about about whether theo has the right to do this.

Can you tell me a little bit of about what happens with you and theo? Like, you know, when he wants to you meet in, you don't want him to in the pepper, only whole thing that happens.

every I Normally kick him in .

the back. And do you think that makes someone to eat meat us? Or do you think .

maybe the opposite option probably?

And do we what do you think about what we talk about that you can control other people?

And what they what do you mean that that you is .

not your job to tell the people what to do, but what they get eat, right? We've talked about that.

right.

Do you think it's true .

that you have don't have a way to tell the people what to do?

Yeah, yes.

you guess that tired?

I feel like when he says that, he's not totally sure he .

believes that yet. Agree.

you can hear is always like, I know this is the thing to say exactly can't be the truth.

can not exactly. Yeah.

okay. An important fact.

Theo is not being crushed by Alice s demands, if anything, between two them. Theo is the dominant brother in most situations. He's outgoing, he's funny, he's a big personality and whatever room he walks into and he gets his way with the liars all the time.

Like, for instance, when the family took this daydream to visit Rachel mom and coincidentally had happened to be the day of a hearing run, which comes once a year. And so they stopped at this hearing letter. Whatever that is.

we are cheering for the hearing. And they're doing their final leap into the water to go back to their spin grounds. And we finally leave. We go back to my mother's house, and the al runs to the frigid aor, opens the door, pulls out the jar hearing, because I can't wait to eat that hearing. And IT was just like a wow, like and of course there then became a list pleading and crying and hoping and hoping that deal wasn't going to eat this hearing that we just saw all of his cousins did he eat?

Hearing.

oh yes. So he ate the airing on the porch. The alliance, um I think, cried in the living room.

A lies, however, is always coming up with new tactics, like in the quire. Recently, he made this proposal to theo involving matchbox cores and maybe flipped on the record.

So tell me what you are just saying at the lies. You had a plan. What was the plan? You said, theo, if you .

a for two weeks, i'll get you three new cars.

我是谁？

good. no.

But does that seem like a fair deal? If you are vegetables, you, you get two weeks. Is IT worth IT to you.

Is that true? 妈妈 really.

really give me, this is not my negotiations.

Yes, if you do IT for three weeks, i'll give you eight, but will give you me a you at one week.

So this is where they are now. Rachel and her husband insert themselves in the middle. These negotiations, or they get dragged into the middle tween the two boys as parents, they have to add, hook their way through each new thing the boys come up with on this.

Like here with this matchbox deal, the boys could not agree on what is you critical part of any negotiation of any contract? And that is the starting date of the deal with their deal. Begin before or after friday's pep oni pizza .

at school.

So you want to start after .

you're being a vegetarian .

starts on friday? No, so fine. It's certain saturday?

All right, good.

But can you like shake on IT? I.

Well, today on our programme, people stuck in the middle, you saying necessity is the mother of invention. Being stuck in middle of some situation is just like that, because that is when genuine has to kick in. That is when you see people trying to make giver their way out, trying stuff that IT is surprising to see anyone try. We have three stories today of three radially different sorts of situations and their outcomes from W B easy, chicago IT. Is this american life, amErica glass stay with us.

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Do you hear what I hear? So there are certain locations that we all find ourselves, and sometimes we were just supposed to sit and weight stuck in the middle of not exactly nowhere, but nowhere interesting i'm talking about, you know, the rose of chairs and airports that you sit in by the door for your flight or doctors office waiting rooms. And finally, the man, dane spot, that one man found himself in over and over.

Thera corbit has the story. A Better father. In all.

I showed up for the first time at my fathering love house in ninety ninety two. He SAT me down at the kitchen table, and we had a nice get to know you sort of conversation. I was twenty four. Dick was about sixty, and he pulled out a pen and took note somewhat. I was saying at the time, I had no idea why he was doing this, but dickers like this about everything that interest him.

He spent his entire career working for IBM, going back to the fifties and sixties when working at IBM was like working at NASA, the kind of problems he worked on took weeks or months to solve, and he loved IT. He's throw a processor as dix is that if something catches his attention, it's clearly worth gathering data on. And if it's worth gathering data on, it's worth getting to the bottom of including recently a certain piece of music.

H hello, could you do me great way? This is a very unusual call. But you know the music you have, the holding music when you put me on hold, IT plays IT. Could you do that for me for minute? I appreciate that very much .

that dick, and for the last two years, he's been very, very interested in a piece of hold music.

The first time I heard what I was talking to stanford hospital, that's the call that started. The whole thing. I love this on just very unusual IT was bells and synthesizer, and I just clappin. IT was an unusual piece. It's very hard to describe.

He heard the whole music again when he called the medical billings center in atlantic, and again with his cardiologist. Then he had a horia than a kidney's down. This one song, IT turns out, is the whole music predicts entire health care network. He's eighty one in great health, but eighty one is eighty one. And he's the one deals with all the appointments, the follow ups, the billing, both for him and his wife, marian.

So if I called any number of doctors in the area, I would hear that music in every time I heard that. I would just again remind me of what the devil is, that too. He couldn't .

find the name of IT. He couldn't find IT period anywhere except on hold. And of course, he took notes on the phone calls where he was hearing IT because dick takes notes on every phone call.

The song's not in the database of music apps like you. I am in sounds hand, by the way. I dic.

Tried IT to identify the song you needed human how and a surprising number of people in medical offices, strangers he met over the phone. We're willing to take this on. These were exactly the kind of people that is always looking .

for when he's on a quest of person that get .

into a few people called their communications departments to see if they could turn anything up. No luck. A woman, seven states away, spent a whole weekend looking up songs online to try and find a match dead end.

You know who is the least helpful dix family? We did not get into IT. Dick called us his sons and daughters and law, and tried to hump the music over the phone. We've lew IT off. Dick described the whole song as hunting, but IT was like a ghost none of a saw or even believed in, and he could tell.

I think when you get older, you get more that in your life where people are questioning whether you really seen IT writer, you remember IT writer, whatever. And that does get you to feel a little isolated a little, you know. Yes, you do. I did feel a little bit that way like I can't go on keep asking people what's this musical about. I can't describe IT in your sort of find that you Better just let her go and you you don't want to and but it's sort of fades after a while until you hear again when you can know the doctor's office and then it's back.

So i'll put those in here.

This is dick going through some of the overstuff cabinets in my house in maine. He does this almost every time he comes to visit. He'll spend entire weekends in our basement sorting at the tools we really, really use, collapsing all the empty cardboard boxes that accumulate down there, healthy the old papers, double check our tax returns he sees in my cabinets of benza things that need sorting and labelling.

I think i'll get a box for all your your good eyes like this when those carboy before thrown out a label IT and put those together like this .

is the advantage of having a processed man in the family. Dick days with your problem until it's been solved. The cabinet ts are whatever.

A couple of years ago, my husband, I were about to buy a new house when dick swooped in and spent three days during a copious market analysis, which made IT clear that we were about to make a bad investment. He doesn't let himself off the hook for anything bigger, small, because things don't let him off the hook. Yeah, he's not fooling around. This is his wife, marian.

with life for feelings or getting things right or doing IT complete. And there is nothing in his life that is inconsequently. Everything matters.

Can you think of anything that you've done that you've did sloppy or hastily or not really?

So I I IT would be just not in my vocabulary to do something and say, okay, that's good ough, let's go um and yet I I don't say that's right. I really don't say that's right and learn. I think that it's wrong and I should be ond to something else.

I can hear the music in my head now, 当 当当 to this woman in。

His car ter standard was dix jackpot. She's the register at the medical imaging center where he went one day to get a cat skin great.

SHE was a single mom, and SHE would had been gone to school at night. We talked about a lot of things, and SHE was the kind of person that, you know, get into IT.

Denis is on hold a lot inside the larger hospital network. SHE says she's been hearing the whole music every day for what he estimates is about now in a half a day for the last seven years. SHE likes the music.

The first time dick walked into her office, there was denies playing the whole music. His hold music on speaker phone at her desk. In seven years of other people ask you about the whole music.

Actually, they have, they have, but I just, I never get into IT with them the way that he and I did. They were just like, you know, casually, yeah, that whole music. Do you know who is my right? no. But when he came in, IT was really different. IT was like, he was really interested and really wanted to know.

SHE called the I. T. Department at her hospital. They thought he was crazy.

SHE made more calls. Have our information.

Are are you like dick that you keep notes .

on other stuff? Yeah because sometimes you just get fixated on something and you just you have to know you can't rest until you and you know so you're .

a persistent person.

Yes, very when you recognise .

somebody else who's persistent, do you have a special bond with them?

Yes, because I know them. They get me, I I get them and they get me so .

that how you feel about dick, that he, yes, he is one of your tribe, yes.

Denies digging around, finally turned up the key fact the music came from cisco, the company that provides the hospital phone system. This goes the number one supplier of corporate phones like this in the world. Dick went to his local library and a woman there, I want to say her name on the radio because he cracked the case.

Her name is abby sussa bird. SHE went to youtube and found an audio recording. It's called simply one hour of cisco call manager default. Hold music. Can we do? IT?

I want to hear IT, okay.

There are hundreds of comments posted about this song. Pages and pages ensure some people can't stand IT, but most of the comments are like this best hold music ever made. I love this song so addictively pleasant.

Please put me back on hold so I can listen to IT some more. I work in a call centre in this music is the best to listen to. After dealing with two customers, I thought I was the only person who loved this. I ve been looking for this song for almost three years. Decorate these comments with .

relief can to help my self. I have been calling this on campus. Put me on hold.

See, she's calling, asking a Peter. Put on hold because I love that hold music. You see this rather crazy, he said.

Well, I must say you from being what compulsive about IT in the early times when I was trying to find him, you, where are you so compulsive about this? You're crazy. And and then I started read this, and I say to a laugh by mental health.

yeah, you feel, feel Better about yourself. You're not alone.

Mental condition.

The library and also helps dick find a title for the song is called opus number one. And that's when I finally got into IT. Dick, this is for you.

My name is tim karlson, and I am the composer of office number one.

You're heart defined, by the way. You know that about .

yourself yeah, I don't really have much of a way presence.

Tim was sixteen years old when he wrote office number one. IT was recorded in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine on a four track pe by one of his high school buddies, direct deal. Tim was a yoni loving computer nerd, messing around with a drumm machine in a synthesizer and his parents garage in california.

That five minutes of tape is now on sixty five million cco phone sets worldwide as the default hold music. It's with everyone here, unless someone inside the system makes an effort to change IT. Tim was in his twenties when he got a call from Derek about ops. Number one, deric had taken a job at cisco designing phone systems.

And it's like, dude, if if you send this over, give us, give us permission to do this, we can make this the defauts. I think I can get this in and I was lean like putting an easter in a in a DVD or software, uh, just like a little hidden gym that the, oh yeah, the next time you're on hold IT might be my music. I just thought I would be a cool piece of trivia.

So and then technically, what happens? So they license the music from you. I mean, they renew their license every few years. I are you making any money of?

Not a penny. So I think that's probably my most legit claim. As a music artist, I didn't make any money for my music.

Tim is not a musician anymore. He's an IT guy. Now he manages the server at a bank in california. What is IT like to be put on hold and hear your own music?

It's really embarrassing when you're not expecting to hear that. And then all I suddenly have that memory pop up. I just I start blushing immediately. It's just, it's it's a different time. It's not the the same person I am the day.

So is IT sort of like looking back at a picture of yourself from one thousand nine and eighty seven and saying.

why was I wearing that outfit? exactly? That's exactly IT.

So has anybody has IT ever yielded anything good for you? Mean, is that ever, if IT doesn't made you money, has anybody ever bought you drink in a bar? You picked up women with IT or rockstar application here. I don't think i've .

i've ever actually tried to use though you know I wrote the default hold music for a lot of companies.

Tim Derek still friends and directs the only one after all these years, making any sort of music. He creates new ring tons for phones, which timid, admits he's a little jealous.

is something that many people are are choosing to put on their phone as opposed to this this music being forced on them. I think that would have been more entertaining to me.

I say, say, yeah, so you feel like your your music has been forced on millions of people. So it's not exactly something to brag about that .

I .

think the source of my embarrassment yeah.

I told him my father in love one of the copy of the song to put on his ipod because he wants to play around the house as he does chores and pays bills in the commons. On youtube, lots of people said they want to a copy. Tim found this almost impossible to fail them, but he and direction ent IT anyway fulfillment in steria.

So a corbit important main, her father and loddard k is now ninety two, like I said earlier today, shows a rerun. He still loves obese. Number one, if you have not had enough, the song is available with Better hospital phone systems everywhere. We also have links to streaming and downadup versions at our website. This american life work.

No where to go.

都会 走。

Coming up with about to juice and kari and cattle prades and so much more. That's in a minute chick above a radio when our program continues.

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This american guy for my a glass, which we in a program, of course, you choose a theme, bring a different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, stuck in the middle, stories of people who cannot get out of some situations, some limbo. They are cut in, and so they use ingenuity and dial, or anyway, unconventional means to get themselves unstuck.

We have arrived at act two of our show, act to sunrise, sun. Get not that long. go.

There was a kind of wacky news story that was new's for a day or so in new york city. IT was only covered with tboy. IT was on local news channels in the try stay area. And that is hard, where people stuck in a kind of ibo mark up and hammer has more.

The news was pretty startling. A group of men, including a broken in rabbi named mental abstinent, had been arrested for conspiring to kidnap a husband and torture him until he gave his wife get. The get is simply a piece of paper of husband hand.

His wife saying, essentially, it's over. We're divorced. Jews can get civil divorces like anyone else, but if you're in orthodox, do strictly following jewish law, to get is the only real way.

And a marriage, usually this goes off without a hitch. But sometimes a woman wants to get divorce and the husband refuses to give again. That's where ravi estein came in.

According to the complaint, estein talked about forcing compliance through the use of tough guys who utilize electric cattle prods, kari hand cups and place plastic bag over their heads of the husbands.

The criminal complaint against este and a fellow rabbi, I am mart walmart, alleged that the rabbi is agreed to arrange a beat down of a reluctant husband, and they were asking for more than fifty thousand dollars to do IT. Here's the U. S. Attorney for new jersey, paul Fishermen, laying this all out to the press. The charges are kidnapping and extortion.

violent crime to get jewish en, to give .

divorces .

that they would otherwise give. And it's not really exercise of religion is really about money and and when the .

story first broke, what kind of got lost is that it's not just about cash, kai and cattle prods. It's also about women who are stuck, essentially trapped, in failed marriages. For the past couple years, as a religion reporter, i've been interviewing jewish women in just this situation. And IT can be pretty horrible. Some men refused to give a gap because they still love their wives and hope to reconcile, but others just want leverage so they can demand, for example, lots of money.

anywhere between half a million and two million dollars, depending on the day, and I guess, the position of the sun in the sky.

This is gul dodley. She's an ortho doc jewish woman, and she's what's known as an that's the word in he brewed for a woman. News has been refused to give her a divorce.

Literally IT means a change. Wife, besides money, lots of money, get all. As her husband has a long list of demands for heard to meet. If he wants to get.

he wants, I have a four year old son. He wants fifty, fifty custody, where my son would be a week with me and a week with him.

But call lives in new jersey, her husband's on state nyland. The boy would have to enroll in two schools and alternate weeks, keep in mind, and get all already has a civil divorce, and the custody and financial arrangements have been settled by a judge. Kita says that her husband, who by the way, didn't return my calls, is always changing what he's asking for.

At one point, he says he demanded they get rid of the coordinator who's overseeing the custody of their son. Another time, he insisted that he promised to tell the boy someday that the divorce was all his mother's fault. Guitar says he should have seen IT coming.

I was Young and dumb, and there were a lot of things that maybe should have been red flags that I wasn't paying attention to. He's said while we, while we were dating, he told me once that he's always right now I I laugh because I don't know who says that. No one says that seriously saw assumed he was joking and he wasn't joking.

You know, a weekend to my marriage, I was looking back and kicking myself because, I mean, I I have stop dating him right there, but I didn't realize. And by the time I realize, that was too late. I actually find IT easier to explain now that he hasn't given a get for four years because the way he's trying to control me now through they get, that's what he tried to do throughout the whole marriage.

Everything was subject to his control and subject to his demands. He had to have a final say in everything, even in, in, in what we were having for supper, or or the brand of laundry detergent that I used or anything. And nothing was too small for him to care about.

Of course, there are always two sides to every divorce. And I tried to get her husband side when he didn't call back. I tried his parents, his uncle, even his grandmother, his Bobby, and none of them.

We're talk to me. I finally spoke with her husband's lawyer, who disputed nearly every one of guitars assertions. He said the sticking points for his clients are tiny, reasonable things like what hour on friday he can pick up his son so he does not have to drive after sabbath begins at sundown.

But cattle side of the story has been backed up by a Robinet court caught a based on. A based in is a group of three rabbies orthodox jews sometimes turn to to settle disputes outside the civil courts when her husband wouldn't give a get the tall try to bring him before the based in, but he refused to show up. So the rabies issued something called a serious.

It's basically a contempt of cord. It's supposed to australia, him in the community get his brother are ya is a full time scholar of jewish law. And he says the serum is usually an effective tool.

A year of is, if followed properly by the community, is an incredibly powerful thing. It's sort of cuts them from from every aspect of jew's life. I mean, you know, you can, you can stand in his within six feet and six square feet, eight graphite. Whatever is of him you can count .

from in the minion is the corum of ten men needed for orthodox player service. It's sort of like telling a devout catholic that he can't receive communion.

You know, he's really can't give in allia. He can't be called up to the ta and sure which is, you know the big hour and know he doesn't get that anymore. He can serve as a hasen there. You know the chanel changed prayer.

You can do that. You're supposed to boycott his business, I think. Well, you can't near him, right?

Well, you can't near. And so the theoretically, if followed properly, it's IT should be enough to both shame them as well as on the practical level. They don't have they're losing all their contacts was to talk to you supposed to you know, you can get a ride.

can do a favor. This sort of ostracism would have worked back in the old country, where you spend your whole life around the same couple thousand people. If you were the village cobbler and all of us, you have no customers.

You probably figured that IT made sense to give your wife forget, but in the modern world, a series of doesn't his work so well? R A believes that the orthodox jews on state nyland, where his brother in law lives, are still treating him like one of their own. So the shaming and community pressure isn't working.

Get all, of course, could just walk away. She's already got her civil divorce. The finances are all settled.

So is the child custody. But SHE can't get remarried. She's a twenty five old woman. She's liked to have more kids. And I should point out, most jews wouldn't care.

Plenty of less religious jews would be happy america, all but in the orthodox world, where he was raised, where her whole family is, where SHE wants to stay, SHE can't make a new life for herself. Her act husband can cast about for a new wife and then give you all I get if you find somebody. But for at all, it's different. What would I be like? I mean, could you, could you date?

Well, I mean, in my community, you don't date unless you're actively looking to get married. And since I already married, that would pose a little bit of a problem. I I don't think I could find anyone who would be well to me under the circumstances. That's what I say.

Hey, i'm looking to get married, but you might have to wait two or three or four, ten or twenty years because, you know, there is this man who's refusing to give me to get and he doesn't feel any urgency because he can get out of IT whenever he wants. He can give me a get and be done with the whole thing within a day as soon as he decides he wants to. So for him, it's it's just a waiting game where why not wait longer if if his demands were something that I could give yeah, I would have given a long time ago because this this life is agony. I mean to wait and wait and never know and to be tied together like, like this, I would give anything I could to be finished with IT.

Almost anything. SHE won't resort to violence or hire rabbi like mental este, the rabbi who was arrested in brooklin. Now, most of abstinence work was above board.

He'd advocate for women in Robinet court. He'd serves a go between with the husband's family. That's how he made is living.

But according to the F, B, I, estin took his work on behalf of women one step too far. Rabbi epstein, E. I should mention, is currently out on bail, but neither he nor his lawyer responded to my request for interview.

However, about a year ago, before he was arrested, I actually met him. Interviewed at a dining room table, I recorded IT on my phone. The interview started off pretty unevenly to tell me what you do, explain you what you do.

Well, on the simplest level, people come there is if they should get the voice at some point.

the interview kind of took a turn. Ettie told me about this case from one thousand nine hundred and ninety two, when he got a call from a change wife named Jennifer client. SHE had a civil divorce, but no get.

And now her exercise been a kidnap her Young son and fled to peru, abstinent said. He told her, call the F. B.

I. SHE said he had done that. But sh'd also heard the rap, I abstinence, do things that the FBI couldn't do.

Ettie told me that the .

woman had already found a group of X, C, I, A agents who are going to help her find her husband, D.

Epstein says he found them nothing to do with us. Epine daughter about chavez, a lawyer, was sitting right next to him. So he was choosing his words carefully, but not super carefully, as he continued with a story. He, the wife, the former secret agent man and a dea scribe are all bound for peru. They find the husband, break into the house, the kids there, they save him, and then they head to the bathroom where the higher muscle had found the husband.

The husband was already down on the floor, completely make IT seems he was taking a shower for the indian mate. We put him down and then, and then we had a conversation with him. He said the words he had to say, you please write, you can say please, right? And you will get to my wife. Messes we did, everything had doing so they so and convince .

them to give, to get.

I know we wanted.

I don't know if we wanted discuss that. His daughter said.

Now the C, I, A has a little pills.

Just to be clear, the guy was an x delta force's commander, not C, I, A, but whatever.

The C, I has a little pills. They put IT in his mouth in the second alcoa. So the guy waited around two hundred hundred pounds, we lived to the day out, and we put him in the big tub lock to do, is they going to see, how long do you going to sleep? How long will we wake up? So he said, ravi will into diagnostic a blood. And like you do an assortment, first, if you every wakes up.

Secondly, many.

The huge chronicle reported on this story in one thousand and ninety two and ran a photo of the woman in her sun reunited and posing with the higher gun from the delta forces. There are a legends that this is exactly how these matters got settled. Back in the eastern european villages, you hired a thug from this rs.

army. He gave the husband the little talking to, and suddenly you had your gt. Similar legends had floated around up stein.

the violence that he's accused of doing. Now I would never have dreamed that that was what he engaged in.

This is rika hot. Thirty years ago, rivka and a couple of friends founded in organization to help free. And back then they worked with mental epstein SHE says, like everyone, SHE heard the rumors about some of his tactics, but he never imagined anything like what he's accused of. Now.

I was very sad because I no mental many years, and but I still .

feel very .

sad about IT figured the most t dozers grab men and kind of threatened. He's a big man. You've seen him. You know that he's he's physically a big man and I don't like a little fist fighting that I was slapping around that that was my assumption.

Over the last few decades, as more orthodox women decided IT was OK to get divorced men, leptin got a reputation as the rabbi women could trust. He was willing to take the women side. He even published a little handbook to guide women through the divorce process.

And rivka says epstein was her guy, too. SHE in fellow activists were all orthodox, but they were pretty modern. They had TV in their houses. Some of them were pants, so they needed someone like este to help them establish trust with the auto orthodox women who needed their help.

Me, este, that I know way back when was a mentor. K to us. He told us a lot about argouges, and he was a great help to organ note. He tried to do the right thing, and he was out to get justice for women, and he did. He help many, many women.

Then at some point, SHE can't remember her was ten years or twenty years ago, there was an incident, in her opinion, of estee changed .

the way IT worked for me. We were working on a particular case and and he called me the night before, and he was bad man. He started saying very bad things about this woman who was a wonderful woman.

And I was shocked, and I said, what are you talking about? We're going out tomorrow. We're demonstrating on how you have he said, no, you're not because you don't have a sale of and I said, we have a say of i'm holding IT in my hand.

It's a Robinet court document, he said. Now I got them to resent that. I had them resented. And you can't go out. You don't have a sale .

of why he had IT resented because .

he went to work for her husband. You fan attorney would do that. They get this sparred, but these rules don't apply. So he he stopped working for her.

So the husband made him a Better offer.

I guess, I guess and that was a different face of of him. And at that point we had to tell women, don't go, don't ask him for help and don't go to him.

A colleague of rivka remembred, this too, again, abstinent, his attorney, declined to talk to me about any of this. Right now, a lot of orthodox tus are pretty embarrassed by these husband who want free their wives. It's cruel, and they know IT looks very bad to the outside world.

A couple of solutions have been flooded. One would be a grant women announce, like in the cathode church, one well known agen a in the the doc's world to more estein recently announced that he considers herself self free of her marriage, and everyone assumes it's because he found a rabbi e to a. But this idea is controversial. IT hasn't caught on, not yet. So for now, if you are in a guna like a todo tal son, a desperate woman trapped in this limbo, paying some rabbit, intervene almost makes sense.

You know what the numbers that i've heard, my husband is demanding a lot more than that for they get. So you telling me I would, i'd pay a third party a small amount of money and and he'll get rid of the problem for me, instead of having to fight IT out with my husband and give him much, much, much more. If you take out the fact that he's beating people up, that that sounds like a pretty good deal.

Not that you'd ever hire someone to beat up her x she's not willing to go that far but as IT happens, there's an old jewish teaching that we're calls and husbands should be beaten and IT wasn't some smug from rockin who said so IT was my monists, the twelve century spanish rabbi considered the greatest jewess stage of all time. My monists wrote that a man could be beaten until he gave his wife forget here with his reasoning.

Deep down, he said, all of us are turned between our good inclined and our evil inclined. And being beaten might be just what a man needs to drive out as evil side so that he can see the wisdom of releasing his wife. My mini doesn't say anything about kari jobs and cattle prides, but the principles is the same.

Mark up in hymir he had its the regard gin in politics magazine arc you can find to that arc mag dot argue that's A R C M A G dot org since reverse broadcast the story in twenty fourteen. Get help did finally get her get mental epstein of sentence to attend your prison sentence for asking undercover agents for sixty thousand dollars to kids up a man and force them to grant his wife and divorce, usually early in twenty twenty two. right? Ht died in twenty fourteen.

I'll give you everything you. wanted. Look into your olive color. I feel the bridge here makes me cry. With three controls .

of my tears, when you're in an airplane, you are definitely stuck in the middle between the place that you left and the place that you are going. And bread, Martin says in that atmosphere, climbing things, you're different for us in at least one significant way.

A couple of years ago, I was on a flight from new york to send one porter ego, the movie sweet home alabama, which she'll remember. He is about a southern girl played by risk is spoon, who moves to new york, john, a fashion industry, and then is forced to return home and come to terms with her White trash roots. At the end, there's a wedding scene when the character has to explains her big city husband to be that she's leaving him for her earthy, down home high school sweet heart.

So the truth is. I gave my heart way along time ago, my whole heart, and I never really got IT back. I don't even know what else to say. I am sorry. I can Carry you into the stun silence that .

follows wax candles bergin as the ult fiances dragon lady of a mother who who incidentally, also happens to be the mayor of new york after a value of insults with the spoon .

on dex burger and IT was .

at this moment somewhere between when with this spindled, nobody talks to my mama like that and her father, old smooth, raised his face, the heavens, and declared, praise the lord, the south of reason again, that something began to happen to me. My face got hot and constricted. A soft ball rose in my throat that required a surprisingly loud sore to choke back. My breathing grew rapid. In short, I lost IT and .

started to cry IT.

I should say that sweet home obama is not a very good movie. It's actually a pretty terrible movie. I have no particular attachment to is with the spoon, and i'm not from the south.

Also, this was the fourth time i'd seen IT see my name is bread. And I cried movies on airplanes. Not sometimes, always, and not some movies, all movies.

Don't believe me. Here's a by no means complete list. Spend IT like back home. Hundred one dominations what a girl wants. daredevil.

Let me be clear, I am not afraid of flying. I like flying and i'm not a care, at least not on land. Like many men, I know, even sensitive ones, who know that having a cry can be healthy and good.

I pass some invisible line and adolescence when I simply stop doing that. There have been many times in life that I probably should have cried, actually tried to cry and wasn't able to, because, of course, I didn't happen to be a thirty thousand feet. Needless to say, this can be embarrassing.

I once confessed my problem to a friend, and he thought for a long moment before saying, i'm sorry to hear that. Does IT make your mascara run? Earlier this year, I was flying from denver to new york and found myself.

See the next to a big, burly guy with a cowboy shirt, a western belt buckle. Before take off, we talked about football or college baskett ball or something. Then they announced the movie IT was under the tusk and sun. I gLance my march. A new body thought about watching dianne experience love and loss while rediscovering her inner strength in the farmhouse in the italian countryside, and read the sky mock call logue instead.

For a long time, I thought I was alone in this. Then a few months ago, I was at a party and overheard another guest described how he felt the pieces watching an episode of everybody loves rayman on a flight to california. I started asking around and found I wasn't completely alone. Greg is a thirty two year old guy in genes in a medhat who just finish writing a book about college sports.

I think IT would have been the only movie available was, uh, dirty dancing to havana nights. The parents watched ed them dance and they see .

how special um that this .

relationship is. At that moment we've gone from angry parents to sort accepting of heavy air. I mean, I got shot up.

As my fellow wheelers will tell you, even not watching the movie is no guarantee of safety. Here's my friend Linda.

So I was on on flight. I believed california to new york, and the specifics don't stand up. But I do remember that IT would require a two dollar deposit for ear phones or something, and I wasn't ready to pay the two dollars or I didn't have two dollars, and I decided i'd read my book.

But you know, the movie is playing and I see and I can't take my eyes off IT. So I end up watching the entire duration of the movie without sound and a various pots. Throughout IT, I started welling up thinking, wow, I can't believe i'm crying in a movie. I can inherent the sound too. And it's pretty friday.

Or take Steven, an avid film festival goer in a professional movie critic, who can discourse at length on the differences between an early and the period cursor. His plane had even taken off.

and they were just running this loop of commercials in inflight programing, and that they hadn't started. The movie was very early on. And there is A M commercial, a man traveling through europe. And, you know, I think I was night time, I want to say I was running or something. And this kind of hagger red traveller, this business man, is walking briskly through the street and then they close up on a wallet, clearly his that he had left behind unknowingly. And then you see kind of cut to the hotel where he's checking in and the woman asked for a credit card that he pass themselves down and realizes he doesn't have and he goes into a state of panic. I think that's when I started choking up.

And then he gets american express on the phone. They explain that it'll OK. I'll have a credit card in the morning and then I start to relax a little bit and then he says, waited, i'm not onna be in the city tomorrow.

I have to travel and then I started choking up again, and then they said, oh, we will have IT waiting for you in that city. And then I just started cry. After that, I was so happy for him and relieved. And IT was a pretend situation there for that fifteen or twenty seconds.

This is one of the strange features of our problem. We are less likely to cry at the sad parts of a movie or financial services industry, commercial, then at the happy ones, the parts where everything turns out, all right, for instance, in the movie larger than life, which I saw somewhere over the atlantic a few years ago. He wasn't the moment when bill murry is separated from the elephant that his dead circus clown father has left him as a means to change his life, as a down on his luck motivational speaker that had me reaching for the tissues he was when they were reunited.

In fact.

the first time this happened to me was doing one of the happy scenes had ever seen. IT was a big night Stanley tusher's movie about return, al love and italian food. Good way through the movie tuchman's character in his brother stage of feast in their new jersey restaurants, and at one point bring out a whole roast pig. The camera pans across the faces of the guests, just amazed by this unbelievable barne being wailed into the room, and the lump began to rise in my throat. I found myself booming over with joy, with the sense that somewhere in the darkness, miles below, just like on screen, people were laughing, commuting, sharing a meal, there is impossibly beautiful, and there was just nothing to do but cry.

I've never heard of anyone crying and appropriately, on trains or on buses, or in boats or cars. What is IT about airplanes?

Remember getting off the plane thinking I should really actually be embarrassed by the fact that I just cried during freaky friday. I didn't even hear the sound to IT, but I wasn't. It's like, you know what happens in air days in air? I guess the people .

I talk to offered a lot of excuses. It's the rescind culte air. Your eyes are dry. You're often tired and leaving people behind. And of course, there's the obvious conclusion, were all scared to death.

But i've been on hundreds of plants, including quite a few tiny ones, one sea plan that landed on water, and one blip. I've taken the controls of a plane. I've jumped out of a plane.

I've searched my soul and honest to god, I find no fear flying and all the frequent fires I interview. Ed felt the same. Now something else happens up there in that weird hanging state between where you're going and where you've left, where there's no phone calls to take, nowhere to go, nothing to do.

Some strange overhead compartment of the heart opens up, and critical judgment grabs floating seat cushion and follows the lighted pathway to the big yellow slide. My friend greg says this actually makes the right Better. Think about IT.

You're stuck in a seat for five or ten or fifteen hours. And how would you rather pass the time sitting there? Are being a critic or just simply giving in?

I mean, I wouldn't have watched a vana ites in the waiting area waiting to get on the plane on earth. No, not a chance. But want to step on the plane i'm open to and accepting the movie and they want to do that is gonna ve me jelly. Turn into jelly.

My own theory goes something like this. My father once told me that the reason schools get hit by cars, that evolutionarily, nothing in their little hardwired brain is capable of understanding a large object hurtling toward them at seventy miles per hour. Well, even though I fly all the time, nothing in my little hardwired brain is capable of understanding, I mean, really understanding.

Stepping onto a middle tube hanging in space for a while, and then stepping off six thousand miles away in a place with different weather, different stars, different time, IT puts you a new, a kind of sterile infant alizon travel permit ory. You're strapped in, given a blanket, a little sippy cup in tiny silver ware, forced to do whatever you're told, and born away at speeds you can conceive without seeing where you're going. We all deal with this dislocation differently.

Many times i've thought, why can't I just have air rage? Why can't I be the guy drinking fourteen many bottles of amaro, surfing down the oil on the dinner card? But then I do a lot of yelling and screaming down here on the ground, but I don't do is cry not of a break up, or reunions, or triumph, or deaths, or leaving home, or coming back, or any of life's either bumps and transformations.

And maybe that's the key to my air. What sorrow? Maybe I cry the tears I should be shutting on earth and all of you people who don't cry on airplanes.

You're probably the ones I see solving on the subway or on street corners or at funerals. You probably get IT all out at home. Well, boohoo, do us all a favor and keep IT in the air. You babies.

Red Martin is a correspond to project and the auto of a book about prestige television, difficult men behind the scenes of a creative revolution.

stern.

It's not something i'm round of.

Reproduced today by john and he without engberg bank l home, sir a cnc, nik nik, brian re, rob Samuel, a ship, and Nancy updike, senior producer for this episode, was july snyder production up on today's rerun from herry, lars and the matter I, A story about Rachel and a vegetarian son of alias was conduce jillion come there, allied, by the way, is now a freshman in college.

He's began his brother behave a vegetarian for a few years, gave IT up, eats meat now research p today from a shell Harris, Julie beer music and damian gray from rob getz. Our website, this american life dot org, this american life is to over the public radio stations by P, R, X, the public radio exchange. Thanks, as always, to a programs cofounder, yy maltee. You know, I just think in the other day about how Young he and I both were so Young when we made the deal to start the radio show, and we have that lawyer, a woman, helping us, and we were so strong at IT every .

recording, fine. It's just on saturday.

good making you like shake on IT.

I think interesting amErica .

glass back next week with more stories of this american life.

Next week, the podcast to this american life, what took like one hundred and miles of tunnel S A.

really a room that was all the ics, both tiles and the walls.

And above, above the were these two lips painted with Green, beautiful leaves.

Because IT was not always so nice, details of life is hostage next to on the podcast in your local public radio station.

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