How to Give
How to Give
Transcript for How to Give (Full Episode)
Jonah Willinhganz: [00:00:00] From Stanford University and KZSU. This is the Stanford Storytelling Project.
Nick Hartley: So I mean, yeah, I guess I was probably a little bit scared about things like that and because since I don't necessarily like, I don't necessarily like having things removed from my body.
Charlie Mintz: From 90.1 Kz. SU Stanford, it's State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Charlie Mintz.
Rachel Hamburg: Last October, my friend Brian invited a bunch of us at our house to come help cater an event that was supposed to benefit his school. It was a charitable event in La Honda, in the woods.
Charlie Mintz: This is Rachel Hamburg, she's a producer for State of the Human. Rachel brought up this story in a meeting and I asked her to tell it again here. I thought it was interesting because it shows a side of giving that we don't really hear about too often, how much it takes to get people to give. We're devoting our whole show this hour to giving, asking how we give, what we give, and like in Rachel's story here, why we give.
Okay. Back to Rachel.
Rachel Hamburg: And, um, I'm not exactly sure what I expected. Um, I expected it to be very fancy, I think, um, because he told us beforehand that the plates were $500 or something like that.
Charlie Mintz: And you would be.
Rachel Hamburg: So we were catering. So our job was basically just to, to deliver the food, um, to the people who were going to eat it and to be very presentable and, and nice.
Charlie Mintz: So picture Rachel and her friends. These are scruffy co-op kids, grain eaters spiffed up for the occasion, it's evening. And they volunteered to help cater a nice charity dinner at a country club about an hour from Palo Alto. They stand in their tuxes on a wet but well manicured lawn.
Rachel Hamburg: So when we arrived, nobody was really there yet, but there were these beautiful white tables spread around this kind of [00:02:00] rolling green that I think was actually normally a golf course.
There was a fountain, um, in the middle of it that had been converted out of a swimming pool, and it's shooting up these neon spurts of water and there's ella Fitzgerald playing over these empty lawns and a gorgeous mansion behind it.
Charlie Mintz: The main event that night was a charity auction to help out a school in a poor neighborhood. A big chunk of the school's budget would come from this fundraiser, from these guests who were now walking through a gate, turning over their credit card numbers and pledging that whatever they won at the auction that night, they had to buy no backing out.
Rachel Hamburg: And then as soon as they come through the gate, they're immediately presented with me um, and all the people, the other caterers who are with me, who are all holding, um, two trays, one in each hand full of very alcoholic beverages. And the other people who are there are the 49 ERs cheerleaders. Um, and they're wearing their cheerleading outfits, which look like really, like amazingly sexual, like outside of the context of being cheerleaders,
Charlie Mintz: when? When was the first moment you saw the cheerleaders?
Rachel Hamburg: I think before they were just, there were a few isolated cheerleaders out in the yard, you know, and you're kind of thinking like, huh. And then they all show up right as you know, like next to the alcoholic beverages and the people who just signed their credit cards over and you're like, Hmm, this looks like a trap.
Charlie Mintz: Rachel is not naive about fundraisers. Her mom's job actually involves advising a wealthy family. On how to give money. So Rachel knows about charity dinners and all that. She knows you have to treat people well if you want them to give, but she's also feeling pretty cynical. She's feeling like this [00:04:00] combination of hot cheerleaders and booze is something beyond just wining and dining, but she can't put her finger on it, so she just watches things.
Rachel Hamburg: The next thing that happens is basically that dinner does not start, you know, this is supposed to be a dinner. Dinner does not start for at least an hour and a half, maybe two hours after people have been let in to this arena. Right? Um. And meanwhile the alcoholic drinks have not stopped. So there are a few hor d'oeuvres, but like basically people are just getting smashed.
Charlie Mintz: Finally, dinner starts, and this is when the charity auction begins. Soon people are bidding thousands of dollars on items like
Rachel Hamburg: a children's birthday party with all of the cheerleaders of the 49 ERs, which you know, would've been like my idea of hell as a child. But anyway, that was five
Charlie Mintz: different strokes. Anyway, so the auction goes on and the host knows how to work the crowd
Rachel Hamburg: and the whole time, you know, the announcer is like kind of congratulating all these guys on their awesome wins and like talking about like, oh, you know, Chuck over there, you don't know. Oh, he's, he's in a fighting mood and you know, so-and-so's not gonna stop him. Oh my God, look at him. I wins the paddle. He's
Charlie Mintz: getting him pumped up.
Rachel Hamburg: Yeah, yeah. But like, and, but in this way there's like, I know you right, but he doesn't, he doesn't know Chuck.
Charlie Mintz: After dinner, the fundraising gets taken up another notch.
Rachel Hamburg: The weirdest game was the last game, which was just this game where when everybody is like at their most drunk, they're like, okay, so now we're gonna play a little game.
Everybody who's willing to give away a hundred dollars, please stand up. And so like most people stand up, right? 'cause everybody's got that amount and they're all drunk. And then they're just like, [00:06:00] everybody's gonna give away $200 keep standing.
Charlie Mintz: So how many people stood for a hundred and how many people stayed standing?
Rachel Hamburg: Most people stood up for a hundred, I think, and then people, you know, people are dropping off every time and it gets up to like probably like $5,000 or something, right? You're just like, wow. You didn't even have to like give away a private dinner with seven of the 49 ERs, cheerleaders in the back room of Nola's or whatever.
Like you just had to be like, gimme your money. Go. It'll be fun!
Charlie Mintz: Rachel realizes what's been making her feel so uncomfortable. It's the fact that all these techniques are necessary. Some 200 people have decided to do something good, give away their money to help a school, but they don't just give it. They're coaxed, they're given gifts in return, they're boozed up and put in competition to be the most generous, last man standing.
And it does seem to be geared toward men, doesn't it? How else do you explain the cheerleaders, if not as some primal stimulus, some catalyst of the ancient biological drive to display wealth for attractive women? And why is all this necessary? Why isn't enough just to help out some kids? Yeah. So you, you detected the dark undercurrent, you like radar for the darkness was like very keen, but like what, what were the good things about it?
Rachel Hamburg: Yeah, I mean, there were lots of, lots of good things going on. Like they gave away enormous amounts of money to a school. That's awesome. Um, you know,
Charlie Mintz: You dont sound like you believe it though.
Rachel Hamburg: I, I, you know what? I do believe it. I, I do believe it. I think.
I think maybe the main difference is that these people [00:08:00] are not a part of the community of the children that they're helping and the event is not designed to connect them with those kids in any way. And I have very mixed feelings about that because it is the most effective way to get a ton of money.
And I have absolutely no doubts about that. And I think, you know, in the quote unquote real world, that's how it's done.
But I also think that if this is the only way to get the wealthy to give, we have a problem on our hands.
Charlie Mintz: I don't think it's just certain people who need encouragement to give. It's not just people who go to charity fundraisers. It's all of us. We all want to feel good about giving. I do, Rachel does. We all need to be enticed either through guilt or with the promise that giving will make us feel good.
Philosophers can debate if giving is inherently selfish, and scientists can argue for program to look out for number one, but it's the storytellers job to give examples to make the problem come to life.
So that's what we're doing on today's episode of State of the Human, how to Give. We've got three stories for you of people trying to give and give well, and how that works out for them. First, it's a story about giving the shirt off your back. Second, a story about giving from your body. And last, it's a story about giving something you can't hold, but that might be the most meaningful gift of all.
Stick around.[00:10:00]
You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I am Charlie Mintz. Today's show is how to Give. You can't talk about giving or charity without talking about the developing world, places where Western poverty can seem cozy By comparison, we in the West have so much that it seems natural to ask why we don't give more to people who really need it.
We are told that the money we spend on coffee in a year could in another country, by cataract surgery for a blind girl send her brother to school and feed their whole family for a year. It's just so tempting to want to give our surplus to make the world a better place. This next story is about someone who tried to do that not with money, though, with T-shirts.
Will Rogers: If you paid attention to the world of social media marketing or charity in 2010. You might've seen this video.
Jason Sadler: Hey everybody, my name is Jason Sadler and I am starting a project called 1 million Shirts. I wanna get a million shirts donated to the people of Africa, different countries, different villages, different towns.
Will Rogers: In the video, Jason is standing in front of a closet overflowing with T-shirts. His hair is buzzed and his muscles are huge. He looks like he could be somebody's personal trainer or one of those uber healthy business people who lives off exotic shakes. Point is he's got charisma, and in this video he's channeling that charisma toward getting a million T-shirts donated to the continent of Africa.
Jason Sadler: If you're like me, you've got an entire closet full of shirts that you probably don't wear anymore. I'm a little bit more drastic than most. I also run a company called I Wear your shirt.com, where I get paid to wear t-shirts for a living, so I really don't need any of my old t-shirts. [00:12:00] I plan on wearing t-shirts for a living for
Will Rogers: how does someone get paid to wear t-shirts for a living?
Sadler essentially is a human billboard. Every day he wears shirts with corporate logos on them. It's part of a company he started from scratch. Sadler's enthusiasm is contagious. He's stoked in his video about Africa, and when you watch the video, you get kind of stoked too.
Jason Sadler: And right now it's time for me to put my shirts together.
Let's see how many I've got to, uh, to donate. 2 5, 10.
Will Rogers: The project blew up when it hit the site mashable.com.
Jason Sadler: Alright, here's 50.
Their article was about how people can use social media to clothe Africa and it praised Sadler's Facebook and Twitter skills. But not everybody thought the project was a good idea.
In fact, aid workers from all over the world basically hated it. They filled up pages and pages of anti-jason material in their blogs. The blog, good Intentions are Not Enough Lists over 60 different blog articles that lambast Jason's video. Here's one by a blogger named Teddy. It's called Found 1000000th Stupid Idea by Wannabe Do-Gooders.
I'll just read a little excerpt. Out of all the problems Plaguing Africa, shirtless kids running around in tropical weather isn't a global crisis. And don't get me started on the gratuitous use of poverty porn in your video. Aid bloggers like Teddy took issue with a couple of the things in the project.
The first was economical shipping T-shirts to Africa just isn't practical. Way more money would go into the hands of international oil companies than would go into the hands of people who need it. Plus, why send shirts to Africa when people in Africa can make their own shirts creating jobs and making the kinds of shirts that they actually want.
But what bloggers really didn't like about 1 million shirts was how it felt overall. Like [00:14:00] this one part.
Uh, some people only have half a shirt to their name. Some children don't have a shirt at all,
Will Rogers: right then a picture pops up of an African kid without a shirt on. This is what Teddy was talking about when he mentioned poverty porn.
The image is supposed to make you feel guilty, and it does. When you see that kid without a shirt on, you want to send one of your extra shirts all the way to Africa.
Saundra Schimmelpfennig: Well, it's not a coincidence that my blog is called Good Intentions Are Not Enough.
Will Rogers: This is Saundra Schimmelpfennig. She's one of the bloggers who chewed out Jason Online.
Saundra Schimmelpfennig: There are these people that don't know anything about aid in development, just getting into communities and leading projects, even though they may not have any background and experience, they don't understand the language, they don't understand the culture, but they're given a pass. Because they have good intentions, and if anything's written about them, it's always the positive homeboy does good story that you get in your local newspaper.
Will Rogers: Sandra has a name for this local homeboy story. She calls it whites and shining armor.
Saundra Schimmelpfennig: And that local newspaper never actually goes obviously to the location and talks to anyone else. And so the entire story is written from the perspective of the person who went and you're not hearing the impact on the ground and if that project fells, which they often do, that's never reported back to the newspaper because the person who was in the newspaper obviously doesn't want a story written about it.
Will Rogers: It's easy to hear the frustration in Sandra's voice. She's frustrated by the gap between people who make positive differences in the developing world and the people who just have good intentions.
Saundra Schimmelpfennig: His project really isn't that much different than hundreds, thousands, thousands of projects out there. He just happened to have got into Mashable, which has a big enough audience um, that it was then seen by the aid blogosphere, and so the aid blogosphere started to joke about it rather snidely, [00:16:00] and so Jason did a response video where he was rather snarky.
Jason Sadler: Hey, internet trolls, uh, angry people on Twitter, whatever you want to call yourselves. Be a man, 140 characters. You don't even have the time to email me and you're gonna talk to me on Twitter. I don't care. I don't drink haterade. I really don't. I'm gonna go ahead and keep trying to give kids and families who don't have shirts in Africa, uh, clothing to wear, because you guys all seem to think that everyone in Africa has clothing. I'm happy to talk to anybody who wants to, uh, you know, maybe step up and, and actually speak to somebody and not sit behind a computer. I don't do that. Have a great day. Uh, I wish you all the best.
Will Rogers: After Jason's response video, some people on Twitter organized a huge conference call over Skype, sort of as a way of saying, okay, let's give Jason what he asks for. People from all over the world were there, including Jason and also including Teddy, the guy who had blogged about poverty porn in the original 1 million shirts video.
Here's part of what Teddy said.
Teddy: As an African, I've really become tired because everybody thinks that all Western organizations and all Western ideas are the best thing for Africa, sometimes they're not. Most of the time they're not. A lot of the times we have solutions and initiatives already on the ground that are kind of gl. So when something like this just gets heaped on our economy, he doesn't help us. He completely destroys those.
Will Rogers: In the conference call, Teddy tells Jason exactly how he feels. He's upset about Jason's project and projects like it because of the effects of American handouts in developing economies. But there's a difference between being upset on Twitter and being upset in a conference call because in a conference call, you can be a little [00:18:00] more sure that someone is listening.
And Jason was definitely listening.
Jason Sadler: The turning point in this whole thing was working with Teddy.
Will Rogers: This is Jason speaking in an interview with one of our producers.
Jason Sadler: That was the turning point for me, because that was somebody who wrote negatively about me from the beginning, you know, chastised me openly, and then kind of came back and said, you know, listen, I, I apologize for, you know, what I, you know, originally what I said, you know, I meant it, but I still, you know, I, I want to help you and I want you to realize what was wrong.
Will Rogers: Teddy and Jason made amends, and they even started to collaborate.
Jason Sadler: He, he was the one who sat down with me on Skype and who worked with me and, you know, wanted to literally, every single day, if I needed questions answered, he would be there. He would be there to answer those questions.
Will Rogers: They drastically revised the 1 million shirts project together, transforming it from a charity project into an entrepreneurial venture.
This new project would not send any shirts to Africa, but would keep them in the States and make laptop cases out of them. Then they could sell the laptop cases and use the money to give college scholarships to African students.
Jason Sadler: Sending a bunch of people free handouts in, in other countries, you know, it's, it's not good for what's going, you know, what's going on in their economies.
Um, and you know, while, while the intentions are are in the right place, you know, it's, it's not actually gonna be a helpful thing. I mean, that, that's obviously why I stopped doing it.
Will Rogers: What's remarkable about all of this is that Jason went so wrong trying to do something that seems essentially good. He wanted to give t-shirts to people in Africa who didn't have them clothing, the poor, that's like textbook benevolence, but it completely backfired on him. Then he was able to transform the backlash into an entirely different project.[00:20:00]
But when Jason stood back and looked at the revised version of the project, he realized it was not the project that he wanted.
Jason Sadler: It, it didn't feel right to me. It didn't feel like it was actually gonna do as much as I I wanted to do. Um, you know, I'm somebody who, when I start something, you know, I have a goal in mind. I wanna hit that goal. So when we completely changed the focus of it, the amount of time that it was taking, um, you know, it, it just didn't seem like it was gonna work for me.
Will Rogers: So there it is the death of 1 million shirts. It was the project that wasn't going to do any good and it was stopped before it ever really got started. It seems like that was the best thing that could have happened given the circumstances.
Before this story completely finishes there's kind of a weird addendum, which is this, not long after he laid 1 million shirts to rest, Jason became passionate about fighting human trafficking.
Jason Sadler: I know that the majority of people out there don't understand, you know, what's really going on. But when you hear a story of human trafficking in person, it's very difficult to hear.
Will Rogers: Jason wanted to make a difference. So he devised a plan and in his new project, Jason would buy slaves. Yes. He would buy humans from the developing world, and he would set them free.
Jason Sadler: And, you know, immediately, you know, the, the guy Teddy, you know, reached out to me and he was like, you can't, you can't do this.
Like, you can't be a part of this because what you don't realize is it's just, it's perpetuating the cycle of human trafficking. You can't have people taking kids out because that just means the more kids go in,
Will Rogers: if you buy slaves, you support the slave trade industry. Teddy told Jason not to go through with the project.
Jason Sadler: That was a, that was a tough one to, to swallow because, you know, what are you supposed to do? You know, you're basically just supposed to sit there and say nothing, you know? And, and that's, that's the most help you [00:22:00] can do that. That's, that really sucks.
Will Rogers: Jason is thwarted again by someone who understands the situation more fully, telling him why he shouldn't get involved.
In my mind, the great thing about this last part of the story is that Jason scrapped the project after he'd written one single blog post about it. Yeah, all he needed was one email from the right person. And he knew the project wasn't a good idea.
Jason Sadler: You know, I slapped myself in the forehead and was just like, I should have thought about that more before I wrote it.
But I can't take those things back, you know? And, and so many people emailed me and were like, holy crap. Like, I didn't even, you know, I didn't even think about these things going on in the world. So, you know, maybe I open some, some people's eyes to some things. I don't know. I'm not trying to be some great leader in, in this.
I'm just trying to say that I learned lessons and I hope people learn them from me.
Will Rogers: In the end, Jason Sadler will probably be remembered as a great leader in the field of knowing when to let go of a project. It wasn't easy for him, and I think we can all agree that it was a good thing for this project to fail over here in the States. Instead of failing in Africa today, Jason is still running I wear your shirt.com and he now donates 12 days out of every year to support the nonprofit world by wearing the t-shirts of nonprofit companies for free.
Charlie Mintz: That story was produced by me and Will Rogers thanks to Jason Sadler. Sandra Shimel Finning and Teddy, AKA Tms Rouge for lending their voices
[00:24:00]
Charlie Mintz: Welcome back to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Today's show is how to Give. You just heard the story of someone who wanted to give, but didn't know the best way. Now it's a story of two people who knew exactly what to give, but weren't sure if they wanted to.
Dana Kletter fiction editor for the Stanford Storytelling Project tells this tale of two donors.
Dana Kletter: This is Nick.
Nick Hartley: I'm Nick
Dana Kletter: Nick's an amiable guy, a thoughtful guy, a guy who does nice things for his friends. But this is a story about doing something really nice for someone who isn't a friend, someone he didn't know.
Nick Hartley: So that morning I was lying in bed and I was supposed to have already gotten up, but I hadn't yet just 'cause I was really tired and really didn't, didn't want to do anything.
Dana Kletter: The phone rings and Nick listens to an offer, a chance to do something of great consequence.
Nick Hartley: It was actually someone from the, uh, bone marrow registry and they were very awake and cheerful, and I was still half asleep.
Dana Kletter: A friend had convinced Nick to join the registry a few months back. People who suffer from blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma or autoimmune diseases can be saved by a bone marrow transplant. The trick is in matching the donor with the patient. According to the Marrow Registry, only one out of every 540 registry members will become actual donors.
Nick learned that he might be a match for a patient needing a transplant. Basic tests had proven he was a possible donor. Now, Nick had to make a decision should he submit to more tests that would [00:26:00] confirm him as a true match.
Nick Hartley: I mean, you hear a lot about bone marrow being so, I guess intense. Um, you hear about like it being a painful process and you hear about like it being a procedure and surgery and things like that.
Um, but, and at the same time I've like, I don't think I've ever even given blood.
Dana Kletter: There are two ways of donating bone marrow. The first is done under general anesthesia. Doctors stick a giant steel needle into your pelvis and suck out your marrow. There's also a new technique, which is basically just like giving blood. Nick wasn't sure which procedure he'd have to undergo. It's up to the patient's doctor to decide what the most effective method of harvesting marrow will be.
Nick Hartley: So, I mean, yeah, I guess I was probably a little bit scared about things like that and because, especially since I don't necessarily like, I don't necessarily like having things removed from my body, but at the same time I thought like, but this is such a good thing for someone. It could really make change someone's life.
I should be, I should be willing to do that. And then I thought, well, like if they're saying I get the blood work and then it's two to three months from now, that's during spring break, and do I wanna spend my spring break potentially in the hospital or at the very least kind of having to take it easy.
But then I thought, well, what someone else might have already been in the hospital for five weeks. I can give up three days. And I wasn't really sure because it was there. I had a lot of reservations, but I didn't necessarily feel like my reservations justified me saying, no.
Dana Kletter: We want to be good to give, but we're scared of pain of what might happen, of what we don't know. And it isn't a simple choice because we're also choosing what kind of person we want to be. [00:28:00] It's rare that a decision reveals so much about who we really are.
Nick says he's almost hoping that he turns out not to be a match.
Nick Hartley: A part of me is hoping that just because it would be a lot easier to not have to do anything more. But at the same time, there's also definitely that reward, rewarding feeling of having done something to make a difference in someone else's life.
Dana Kletter: So now Nick's waiting to hear back, and if he is a confirmed match, a true match, he'll have to make a difficult decision. Will he be the person who gives or the person who doesn't. On the one hand, he faces pain and discomfort on the other, the chance to give something extraordinary. Only someone who's donated bone marrow can understand.
Mandeep Gill: I got, I, I connected with this, uh, young woman who had cancer.
Dana Kletter: This is Mandeep.
Mandeep Gill: Okay. I'm Mandeep Gill. I'm a researcher in cosmology here at Slack.
Dana Kletter: Mandeep stood where Nick stands now,
Mandeep Gill: emailed her and said, Hey, you know, I, I see that you're waiting for your,
Dana Kletter: he knew he was a potential bone marrow match and had to decide if he wanted to go forward and,
Mandeep Gill: you know, up to a certain point you can pull out and her donor pulled out and, and so she actually passed away. Uh, I mean, I just checked sometime later and she, she, you know, I read that.
Dana Kletter: This woman wasn't mandeep's potential match, but she might as well have been her donor backed out and she died. Mandeep knew he had to follow through and give, but he had some of the same worries as Nick.
Mandeep Gill: There's not too many times, especially for males in life, that we choose to have any, you know, pain in our life.
Dana Kletter: But he was also excited.
Mandeep Gill: I was thinking, well, this is like, wow, I'm gonna save a life, you know? [00:30:00] It's like kind of cool.
Dana Kletter: Mandeep had to donate with the old procedure.
Mandeep Gill: They, uh, they turn you over on your stomach. The one with the needle take a big, huge needle like a over foot long and they stick it into your, in your pelvis and they punch it through the bone into the scaffolding, which is inside, inside your pelvis. And they suck out a bunch of bone marrow and blood along with it.
They just do this a bunch of times. So if you look the back of my pelvis, you can still see little spots where the scars are, where they, where they went into it.
Dana Kletter: Under general anesthesia, mandeep felt nothing. But a painful recovery lay ahead.
Mandeep Gill: And when I woke up, I couldn't walk or stand up, uh, for a while. 'cause it, it was just, just shooting pains down, you know, uh, down the back, um, the lower back. And I was tired for about six weeks. Um, it was just, it was, it was sluggish.
So, uh. So that's the procedure, you know, I mean, a little bit of pain for, well, a lot bit of pain for a week and, and a lot of tiredness for six weeks. But, you know, there was a human life. That's the world that I wish we lived in, where everybody just stepped up and at least once in life was, was willing to go through some amount of, you know, pain to, um, save another person's life.
Dana Kletter: How much pain should one endure to save a human life? What should we give? What should we give up?
Most of us hang on to what's ours: time, money, marrow. When we give it up, we want something in return, a good deal. The hand says take and the mouth says take. But deep in most of us, there's something saying, [00:32:00] give.
Mandeep Gill: It's just 'cause you feel decent. You know, you feel when you've looked, when you look back at life, you feel like that's a cool thing I did.
Charlie Mintz: Thanks to Mandy Gill and Nick Hartley for telling their stories. Nick is a sophomore at Stanford.
Welcome back to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Charlie Mintz. Today's show is called How to Give. You've heard stories of giving the money from your wallet, the shirt off your back, and even the marrow from inside your bones. There's something else you can give though.
It's not something you can wear or spend or even hold in your hands, but this thing, it might be the most important thing you can give.
Our next story is about that thing. We start on a Saturday morning in an apartment in Manhattan, a quiet woman with dark shoulder length hair.
Christina Qulin: My name is Christina Qulin
Charlie Mintz: is sharing breakfast with her extended family, her aunt, her cousin, her cousin's husband, and their baby daughter,
Christina Qulin: and her little baby daughter.
And we sat down for bagels in the way we had often done in the past.
Charlie Mintz: Christina's in her early thirties, and she's been in a rut for a while, actually, like almost the last decade. But this morning, as she looks at the faces of her family, she feels
Christina Qulin: [00:34:00] so happy.
Charlie Mintz: Happy
Christina Qulin: because it's my family. I love them so much.
Charlie Mintz: Sharing breakfast with them is another woman. She's a short woman with dark eyes dressed in black sweatpants and a dirty black shirt.
Christina Qulin: And she was so sad.
Charlie Mintz: This feels weird for Christina on the one side, comfort and family and on the other, this tar pit of sadness. And soon things get even weirder her family, they start to leave.
Christina Qulin: So at a certain point, my cousin's husband took the dog out for a walk, and then my cousin and my aunt and the baby, they left to go get more orange juice, but they never came back.
Charlie Mintz: The sad woman stands and walks around the breakfast table all the while telling Christina how terrible she feels. She sits down next to Christina and her sadness is all Christina can see, and Christina feels her heart start to break for this woman. In a panic she looks for her family, but they aren't there
Christina Qulin: to have started out in such a happy scene surrounded by family and to see them all leave.
I still have such an emotional reaction to it even now.
Gimme a second.
This was almost a year ago. It's crazy.
Charlie Mintz: If something seemed off to you about that scene, like it wasn't reality. You're right. [00:36:00] It wasn't reality.
It was a kind of play put on just for Christina, that sad woman, she wasn't a real person. She was an actor. Christina's family was really her family. But the scene was a performance put on just for Christina. And this one scene was only a small part of a much larger performance. In total, it would last 36 hours and its stage would stretch hundreds of miles from Manhattan to upstate New York.
The group behind all this is called Odyssey Works. You'll hear the story of Christina's Odyssey in a bit, but first you should get to know a little bit about Christina. The same way Odyssey works had to. Odyssey works consists of a group of artists from New York and San Francisco. They make art for free.
Here's how their website describes what they do. Immersive site specific long duration performances for very small and fully participatory audiences, but you can think of them as interactive plays for a single person art in a single serving cup. It starts with the application. Christina's sister had forwarded one to her knowing she wasn't really in a good place and thinking maybe this would get her out of it.
The application asked what Christina regretted, what she loved, what she feared it, asked if she was happy and if she wasn't, why It was like applying for a friendship with your therapist.
Christina Qulin: At the time that I filled out the application, I, I think I was about 30 and I was very unhappy, and all I could see was this very narrow road ahead of me. Just the daily [00:38:00] grind, going to work, coming home, going to sleep, going to work, coming home, going to sleep. It's like I had blinders on. And I had been struggling so much that I, I kind of was feeling hopeless at a certain point.
Charlie Mintz: You can probably relate to this, especially if you've ever been in your twenties or thirties feeling stuck in your life, losing sight of meaning. What Christina's talking about is pretty universal, but her unhappiness had its own particulars, a relationship. She didn't want to be in close family, living far away, a sick mom living in upstate New York, depending on her.
No one thing was making Christina miserable, but all the same, she was.
Christina Qulin: When I got the call from Odyssey Works that they had selected me, I was really shocked. I had been so stuck for so many years and really had been trying to find some way out of the rut that I was in, and here was something that came to me.
Abraham Burickson: Hi, I am Abraham Burickson. I'm the artistic director of Odyssey Works.
Charlie Mintz: Abe picked Christina out of more than 30 applicants to have an Odyssey Works performance made for her. He remembers studying her application and finding it fascinating. One question in particular caught his attention. It asked what Christina's favorite and least favorite movies were and why.
Christina's answer is pretty revealing. I'll read a shortened version of it. Ingmar Bergman, especially Winter Light, and The Silence for How Sad they are. Seven Brides For Seven Brothers for How Happy it's Singing In the Rain for Gene Kelly's Joyful Dancing In the Rain, swing Time, and Top Hat for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers joyful Dancing. [00:40:00]
Abraham Burickson: She loved these absolute forms. These. You know Fred Astaire films. Happy, happy, happy. Ingmar Bergman. Sad, sad, sad, right? And nothing in between.
Charlie Mintz: Happy, happy, happy. Sad, sad, sad. This was a key clue to understanding christina and Abe knew how important it was to listen to these clues, understanding people in order to make art for them. That was the thought that Activated Odyssey works and led Abe to bury his best friend.
Abraham Burickson: My good friend Matthew and I, Matthew founded Odyssey, works with me. We were down doing a writer's retreat in Big Sur, and we took this long walk down the beach trying to get at the core of the problem.
Charlie Mintz: The problem was that they made art, but they felt like they were making it for themselves. Who even knew if it had any effect on people, even the people they imagined they were making it for.
Abraham Burickson: You have this idea of the ideal audience, but really who is that person? And if there is an ideal, then why not just go find that person and make the work for them?
Charlie Mintz: They treat art like a love poem.
Abraham Burickson: You know, you write a love poem for your beloved. You think about the way she sees the world, the kind of language that she uses, the time of day when it would be best to give it to her, the pace, her attention span, all these things so that this poem will have, you know, the ideal impact.
Charlie Mintz: Most of us limit this kind of attention to the people we love, and this was how Odyssey Works began just for friends. Matthew actually was the first to get one. He'd been thinking a lot about cycles of birth and death. [00:42:00] Abe decided this meant they should bury him in the sand.
Abraham Burickson: And then it took him, I don't know, 45 minutes to dig his way out.
And he was so ecstatic at the end of this that he tore off all his clothes and ran and jumped into the ocean. And you know how cold that is.
Charlie Mintz: So at that point, what are you thinking?
Abraham Burickson: I was thinking, awesome.
Charlie Mintz: So going back to Christina, after he picked her, he conducted follow-up interviews asking more questions about her life and her fears and everything that meant anything to her. This went on for three months, three months of the Odyssey Works team, inserting themselves into Christina's mind, planning the perfect work of art.
Abe and the rest of them even asked for her dream journals picture a half dozen artists lying on their backs in a dark room, trying to dream a stranger's dreams. That's Odyssey works.
Christina Qulin: It's a a difficult thing to describe what it is, and I think a lot of people, when they heard about it, kind of expected it to be that I would be sitting in the audience, there would be one chair in the audience and I'd be sitting and looking up at a stage. And obviously that is not what it ended up happening.
Charlie Mintz: As you can imagine, a lot can happen in 36 hours, starting Saturday morning, Christine was guided from scene to scene by different members of Odyssey Works. She began in Manhattan and ended up [00:44:00] in Ithaca, New York, hundreds of miles away to describe everything that happened in between would take about a day and a half, but certain moments stood out for Christina.
These moments gave a shape to their performance movement from happy, happy, happy, sad, sad, sad to something else.
Christina Qulin: I, I think I figured there was, there was something to learn from what was going on.
Charlie Mintz: Okay, we're back to Christina's Odyssey. We left her at breakfast with the saddest woman in New York. Her name's Jen,
Jen Harmon: Jen Harmon, and uh, I played the archetype of a very, very depressed woman.
Charlie Mintz: She's an actress and a dancer, and a member of the Odyssey Works team.
Jen's character was based on meeting Christina and getting to know her.
Jen Harmon: When I first met her, I was at a children's birthday party of her cousin's child, and I played a nanny for hire.
Charlie Mintz: She lied, it blew Jen's cover a little bit for their next meeting. He sent Christina over to Jen's place to talk about a monologue that Jen was working on. Christina might have suspended her disbelief a bit. She probably knew on some level Jen was going to be part of her performance, but the two bonded.
And Jen got to know her.
Jen Harmon: I remember her saying that my friends just don't understand. My friends don't understand me, and they don't understand this dilemma. I had to think about Christina in a very particular way in terms of the part of her that was quite stuck and felt sad. And so I had to think about those parts of her and then I had to think about those parts of myself.
And I think there's [00:46:00] something quite poignant about having someone try to share with you or mirror back or show you part of your own struggle.
Charlie Mintz: Christina got it. That moment of breakfast, she was seeing her saddest self and yeah, it's a performance. It's not reality. But it was true.
Christina Qulin: And, and I'm sure on some level, I knew that she was reflective of my emotional state a lot of the time. You know, I, I had often felt withdrawn and not participating in, in positive scenes in my own life.
Um, so I think she was, she was there as a reminder of that.
Charlie Mintz: But Christina's Odyssey was just beginning. Soon there was a knock on the door.
Christina Qulin: It was my next guide, and there was a moment where Jen asked me to stay with her because she was so sad. And my guide was, you know, he had high energy and he said, it's time to go.
We're we're going to the next, the next place. And so I had, in that moment, I had the choice, do I stay with this sad person who seems to need me for comfort or do I embrace the unknown and keep going.
Charlie Mintz: If you feel bad for Jen here, that's nice of you, but remember, she's a prop. This is Christina's Odyssey.
Sometimes you need to ditch the anchor.
Christina Qulin: And it was, there was no question in my mind I was gonna keep going, but I think the next pivotal moment probably was where I was taken down into the subway,
Abraham Burickson: the loneliest, the most disgusting, least loved place, right?
Christina Qulin: And there were several people on the [00:48:00] platform with very sad, sad energy holding dead plants. No one was saying anything.
Abraham Burickson: It's the most sort of lonely, dark kind of experience that you could imagine.
Charlie Mintz: Now might be a good time to interject one fact about Christina. She hates New York and she hates subways. Abe knew this from reading her Odyssey Works application on it. She'd listed as her least favorite place in the world, a New York City subway. It was the place where her loneliness and sadness haunted her the most.
Every day after work, she'd get on the subway, take her seat and cry.
Christina Qulin: And we got onto the train when it came into the station, and again, no one said anything, and the rest of the people on the train really didn't care. No one was looking at us. It was just a very classic New York moment.
Charlie Mintz: Sad, sad, sad is coming to an end. Things are about to change. Christina arrives in Grand Central Station in New York City and the crowd, she spots a familiar stranger. He gives her a train ticket to Ithaca and a beautifully bound hardcover book. It's a re-imagination of the famous Italian novel. If on a winter's night, a traveler by Itlo Calvino, it's one of Christina's favorite books.
This re-imagination though, is for Christina. It's based on interviews with her and on her dream journals. This is a book made for Christina.
Christina Qulin: Um, the last chapter of the novel brings in, [00:50:00] um, some themes from reoccurring dreams that I've had often over the last few years, um, about being pregnant. And being very upset about being pregnant. And I can read, let's see here. So the chapter is called Where Everything Falls. And this is the first paragraph. You are pregnant with ghosts. When you concentrate on your breathing, you can feel two ghosts breathing inside you as well. The rhythm of blood. The days like a bridge. These ghosts inside you, they're not even twins, they say the body is mostly water.
At evening, you feel yourself draining away. You're no longer the person they will become. But every cell in fiber, the small bones in their ears, their flesh was, their flesh is yours.
Charlie Mintz: And as the pages go on, they begin to fragment and tear. And gradually become illegible. Chaos has come on the scene. The train ride lasts about six hours. Christina Disembarks at Ithaca, New York. They've left the city for trees. A tree Christina wrote on her application is the most beautiful thing in the world.
Abe's there to greet her, they get in his car and playing on the stereo is Christina's favorite piece of music.
Christina Qulin: Claire De Lune by wc,
Charlie Mintz: but this is not the Claire De Lune. Christina knows. This is a warped version created by Odyssey Works. The piece begins normal, but slowly begins to disintegrate like the pages of the book, like [00:52:00] Christina's ordered view of the world. This is confusing. This is scary.
Christina Qulin: It was raining and it was dark and we were walking along the edge of a gorge.
Charlie Mintz: About an hour after her arrival, Christina's invited to go on a walk
Christina Qulin: and it was slippery and dark and I couldn't see anything and I was very afraid.
Charlie Mintz: This is not typical behavior for Christina. This is kind of daring.
Christina Qulin: I've always been very afraid of physical harm and so I think that probably was, was the most terrified I was during the weekend because, you know, I was looking, I was looking at my mortality there, you know, who knows what could have happened?
And there was part of me that said, no, I can't do this. And then there was another voice that ended up being stronger that said, I'm committing to this entirely. So if I die by falling off the edge of this cliff, at least I committed to the moment.
Charlie Mintz: Christina does not die by falling off the cliff, she survives and climbs back out of the gorge, and she gets a breather for dinner.
By now, she's in a completely altered state, totally out of her element, and unsure. Yet at the same time, calm. Ready for what comes next.
Christina Qulin: So it was after dinner that my guide took me outside again. It was a very rainy night. It was completely dark where we headed. And um, we walked for a long time. And one thing I remember during that walk was.
The sound of frogs in the trees and just [00:54:00] that it smelled so good. It just smelled fresh and green and delicious.
Abraham Burickson: And we go up to the top of this lookout and, and you look out over the, over the fields and it's dark and empty
Christina Qulin: and there was a man on a stone fence, uh, holding an umbrella over his head as though you were tight tightrope walking.
And so I stepped up onto the fence next to him and he gave me the umbrella and I stood looking out into the dark over this hill.
Abraham Burickson: And, um. We bang the gong, all these little lights go on. Must have been 50 or so, um, way out, you know, up to, you know, half a mile away.
Christina Qulin: And so looking down, it looked like I was looking down at the sky with the stars lighting everything up. It was beautiful.
Charlie Mintz: When have you felt most understood? Was it when someone said to you, I understand, or was it when someone knew enough? Not to say anything at all.
At dawn, the next morning, one of the actors brought Christina to a sculpture Odyssey Works had made. The sculpture was a loose dome of long curved sticks, about 20 feet wide and 10 feet tall. Standing in the middle of a huge field of grass, a translucent sheet on it flapped in the wind. Inside was a television, a filing cabinet, a printer, a computer, all the detritus of Christina's life.
Abe called it the midden of possibility Here, Christina was [00:56:00] shown her life so she could start it anew.
Pretty soon after that, Christina went home. She says it took her a while to understand what had happened.
Christina Qulin: I think when the performance ended, I was pretty blank. Um, I was happy, I had had a really wonderful time, but I don't think I started processing it until three or four months after it ended to be truthful.
Charlie Mintz: When Christina did sort out her thoughts, she realized the experience had changed her, not by making her into a different person, but by showing her who she was.
Christina Qulin: For me, the experience really was a rite of passage. It was a ceremonial, sacred space that showed me my courage and my strength in the face of absolute uncertainty, not just for a weekend, but for the rest of my life, for months at a time.
And I think it really helped me to know that I have a lot of courage and I embrace uncertainty, and I can embrace the unknown.
Charlie Mintz: Not long after the Odyssey Works performance ended, Christina moved to upstate New York to Saratoga to be closer to her mom. She says Odyssey works didn't make her do it, but it helped.
Christina Qulin: I absolutely feel they gave me a gift, and it's something I've struggled with for almost a year now, since the performance, to find some way to thank them, and maybe it'll happen in 20 years, who knows?
But it's important to me to someday extend a thank a thank you to them. [00:58:00]
Charlie Mintz: Did you feel like it was, it was everything you wanted it to be as a gift?
Abraham Burickson: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's such a difficult concept, the gift. When you say gift, do you think of a package with a bow? You know, but when you receive a gift, it's not the package or the object inside, you could have bought yourself that, but it's the act of the giving. Then when you open it and it's just the right thing, say, you know, the feeling is not, oh, thank God I have the right thing Now. The feeling is somebody, somebody understood me well enough to know exactly what the right thing was.
What do you have to give to somebody? Only your attention to really be attended to, it was like, that's gold. What else do you really want?
We come in with nothing. We leave with nothing. And in between we have this chance to to attend to one another. And so it seems to me that a gift is just a sort of a moment of that.
Charlie Mintz: Odyssey Works continues to put on performances. You can find information about upcoming performances and ways to get involved@odysseyworks.org.
Today's program was produced by me, Charlie Mintz with lots and lots of help from Jonah Willinhganz, Natasha Ruck, Rachel Hamburg, Xandra Clark, Christy Hartman, and Will Rogers. We'd like to thank our contributors today, Mandeep Gill, Nick Hartley jason Sadler, Saundra Schimmelpfennig, Teddy, AKA TMS Rouge, Abraham Burickson, [01:00:00] Christina Kuhlan, and Jen Harmon. For their generous financial support we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Human Writing Center, and Stanford Continuing Studies. Remember that you can find an episode of this in every episode of State of the Human on iTunes and on our website storytelling.stanford.edu.
Tune in next week for stories of nakedness. What do we expose when we're exposed for the Stanford Storytelling Project and State of the Human? I'm Charlie Mintz.