Ira Glass has landed in Chicago. The host of This American Life has just disembarked and he’s on the move. He asks if he can call me back once he finds a cab. A few minutes later, we’re chatting about a range of things, starting with Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host, his touring show with dancers Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, which makes its Chicago debut at the Athenaeum Theatre tomorrow.
Ira Glass: It is good to be back. From the air, all anybody who lives in New York can ever think when they fly over Chicago is the lake looks so big even from the sky.
You guys have no plans to continue doing it elsewhere?
It wasn’t just awkwardness. The fact that they were staging these moments of awkwardness was interesting, but overall there was a feeling of watching . . . I don’t even know how to say this. I felt like I was watching a play more than a dance, even though it was continual dance. They were such relatable people on stage. Monica and Anna, they’re playing characters in this way that there were moments that were funny, moments that were awkward. Awkwardness contains so much. Awkwardness contains both shame and embarrassment, and then you have to recover from the moment of shame or embarrassment. It also has a documentary quality where you’re trying to capture a moment or feeling that’s real and a physical representation in a heightened form of things that we all do in a way that classical dance doesn’t and other dance doesn’t either.
Oh my God, the title is not very good. The only one that I tried to lobby for with Monica and Anna—and they were like, “eh”—is “One Talks, Two Don’t.”
In the bathroom in the office right now we framed my notes from the meeting with all the names that were contenders. My favorite was, and still is, “American Whatever.” I feel like it’s less pretentious than “This American Life,” and it accurately describes the show and my feelings about everything. My staff was horrified. I can’t foist something like that on them. They were like, “It’s too Alicia Silverstone.” They were very much against it, and so then we batted around a bunch of ideas until “This American Life” was a compromise candidate. It went forward into the general election and won.
