69: Dream House
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
It wasn't Amanda's dream house, it was her mom's, and it wasn't what you usually think of as a dream house. Picture, 500 people living in a 10-story building dorm style in the middle of the city. We were supposed to come for a four-day visit and it turned into a two-week visit and then like a month visit and then we lived here. So I never really got to go back and say goodbye to my friends or anything and I was really mad at my mother for doing that to me and all this type of stuff and I was just really mad at everybody and didn't like it here at all. Where the move is an experiment in communal living that's been going on for 25 years here in Chicago. No one owns private property, everything's shared, the TVs, the cars, everything. If you need pocket change you go to a room called the money office. If they've got cash, they'll give it to you. Remember this is 500 people. And if all this is starting to sound like a big socialist collective in the middle of 1990s, neoconservative, neoliberal, neo everything America. Let me add one more fact to make this picture complete. This community, it's Christian, run by a group called Jesus People USA. All I did was sit up in my room and just stare out the window. I did not come down to eat or anything. I just sat there and stared out the window because I was so angry that I was just going to kill anybody that bothered me. And I did that for like the first few days, like the first three days. Now at 16, a year and a half after they moved here, Amanda says she doesn't think of herself as a Christian anymore, which understandably upsets her mother, who moved her partly so Amanda would live in a Christian environment or in Christian values. Sometimes it's tense between them. Like if I was in church and I didn't take communion or something, then all that day she'd like ask her questions. She's like, you know, I just can't think right now. I just can't imagine you going to hell and all this type of stuff. You know, so I just, I think she's really concerned about me, but she's just gonna have to live with it. Though the setting of this story is fairly exotic, this I would argue is not an unusual American story. How many of our parents moved to some new place, some dream house, some vision of a new life, somewhere else, moving the family with them, hoping it would work out for the kids. In the last half of this century, as American families have settled new suburbs, as families migrated because of layoffs and divorces, what story could be more common. And often it works out fine. Amanda's the exception at the Jesus people community. Most of the teenagers living there, they like it a lot, seems. And like any good parent, Amanda's mom consulted with Amanda about the move. Amanda even agreed to move that the final decision wasn't hers. That's one thing I really get angry with is I don't feel like I can make my own choices a lot of times, but that's what happens when you're 16, I guess. It's like, well that's just being a teenager and I'm like, it stinks. I hate being a teenager. Welcome to WB Easy Chicago and Public Radio International. It's this American life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week in our program we choose some theme, invite a variety of writers, performers, and documentary producers to tackle that theme. Today's show, Dream House. Stories about parents who had some utopian vision from their family's future and who built their dream houses to try and realize that future. Act one, meme is adventure. A family dreams of life in rural Maine, moves there from the city and then, well, things start to get complicated. Act two, blue sky dream. Arthur David Bearer explains the gorgeous modern vision that drew his parents in tens of thousands of other
Transcription truncated.