172: 24 Hours at the Golden Apple
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There are certain things you should really only say to your best friend. This is probably one of them. "You ever just shut up and just listen to somebody? That's what it is. You can smell it out there, brother. You already did." Tom and Scott are in an all-night diner around midnight. Scott is disheveled and tired, he's been working all night as a bartender at a Chinese restaurant, serving lots of free drinks on the slide to Tom, and Tom, in response, seems astonishingly ungrateful. There is a kind of sass that Tom keeps throwing, Scott's way. "You're the one who needed the food, the beers, and all that stuff like that to calm down after your traumatic night stealing from your employer." "Really?" Just at that moment, a man on a Hawaiian print shirt and khaki pants walks by their table, he hears the word "employer" mistakes it for the word "lawyer," and then turns to Tom. "Are you a lawyer?" "No." "No, do you want to be?" "Who brought up a lawyer to start with? You just came walking?" "No, I didn't. Not at all." He didn't say "lawyer." "You thought that you heard something and then you let your mind take over and then it got you and it put you." "Well, I am a lawyer, so that's probably why I might have thought that. But you know what? I'm trained in the art of listening, because Sportner said you want it to be a lawyer." "I definitely wouldn't hire you because you heard completely wrong." "Really?" "Yeah." There are some conversations that you over here, and it is hard not to want to keep listening or to butt in, even though everybody knows that it is not the right thing to do. One Sunday morning, a while back, I was sitting in one of the booths in this very diner, the golden apple in Chicago, on Lincoln Avenue, and walked around the restaurant. With the table next to me, my family was taking their teenage daughter out to an awkward glass of breakfast, where she shipped out with the military. There were dressed up people who'd come in from the church across the street, and young couples who'd stumbled in with the paper, and were working on the crossword together. And I thought, if only somebody could interview every person at every table in this restaurant, that would be amazing. You'd get such a wide variety of different kinds of stories, from different kinds of people. So we decided to try it. On Friday night, a big group of us took shifts, starting at 5 a.m., and going to 5 a.m. the next morning. During quiet hours, it was just one of us on duty, recording and interviewing people. During the busiest hours, which means late night, three or four of us worked the tables. The first broadcast today's program, all the way back in 2000, and we'll be running it
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