169: Pursuit of Happiness
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Hello, it's This American Life, I'm out of a glass. Each week in our program, of course, we choose the theme, bringing you a bunch of different stories on that theme. And the best way to describe the theme of today's show is to kind of sidestep it for a minute and to begin with this story. One of our producers here at the radio show, Blue Shevany, was living in New York a few years ago, with women that she describes as a kind of random roommate, an aspiring actress. In the middle of the night one night, the phone rang. And it was some crank collar sort of stalker-y kind of person. He starts saying these creepy things to her, and it wasn't just a crank call because they knew her name. You were made hangs up on him, and he calls back. And then she tells him off, and he calls back again. And then she stops picking up the phone. But it keeps ringing. And it's not exactly clear what to do, middle of the night. So they call the police. Blue tells the rest of the story. So the police come up to our apartment. We're on the sixth floor of a walk-up. They come up like huffing and puffing up the stairs. And it's in the middle of the night. Our apartment's like a mess. It's just kind of strange having these strangers come into your house. It's just cinematic and disorienting. I mean, they're in their cop uniforms with these guns. And one of them is this kind of like 40-something heavy balding Italian-y-looking, Sippewitz kind of guy. He looks like detective Sippewitz from NYPD Blue. Pretty much exactly. And then the other guy is this younger, really good-looking black guy. And they both just look like they're off a TV show about the cops. [MUSIC PLAYING] They started asking us about what's happening and what we're explaining. And my roommate just goes into this whole-- like, long as she's into this whole thing about how she's an actress. And people calling her, and people get her phone number off her headshot. And it's got her picture and her name and her phone number all in one place. And it's really scary. And the young black cop says to her, oh, you know, I've had that experience because I'm an actor, too. He says, oh, I don't do it much anymore. But I was really pretty serious about it before I became a cop. And they start talking about what it's like because they're both black and young, playing parts in plays and auditioning for things, where there aren't that many parts that are interesting for black people. And it turns out that my roommate has played the part of Juliet
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