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That's NetSuite, Dotcom, TALF. When Miles and Katie's apartment was robbed, they knew this was not going to be a big case and we got right down to it, they did not have a problem with that. New York City cops arrived after the burglary.

They would probably just come from some sort of situation where, like someone had gotten stabbed in the neck and now they were in these, you know, kind of yuppies apartment. And we were running down this laundry list of things that had been stolen. And the list is like, it's so embarrassing. It's like an iPad, an iPod, an Xbox.

They've got bigger problems. Yeah, they got bigger fish to fry. Surveillance video from the building showed that the culprits were three teenagers who took the elevator to the top floor, probably jumped down onto a balcony and then walked into Katie's amyas apartment through a sliding glass door.

Then there's video of them leaving the building, three teenage guys with three of our backpacks stuffed full. Wow. So they're using your back, our own back.

So they didn't even have any plans on how they're going to carry this thing.

Guess not. It didn't seem like a very well thought out caper. This was more of a let's break into this building and see if someone is dumb enough to leave their sliding glass door open and other things they lost.

The only thing that they actually cared about was their video camera. And they only cared about that because it had their wedding video on it. The only copy kitty, from the wedding show her brother, but hadn't yet. My brother, who I'm really close to, couldn't come to the wedding. And so it's really sentimental. And I really wanted it back. And I was really upset. I was really, really sad about it. So the morning after the burglary, the police were not going to be much help on this one.

Criticized jump into action herself.

She goes on to Craigslist to see if the thieves have put a camera up for sale there.

And boom, she finds it immediately. Same camera in the same bag with all the accessories that she had specially bought for the camera had to be hers.

And she calls the detectives on the case, tells them the good news, like, I can get my camera and I can probably put these guys in jail. And he just immediately shoots me down and says, you know, there's no way of really knowing if that's your camera.

We can't help you with anything. The only way we'd be able to help you is if you got the guy to give you a serial number off the camera. And if you happen to still have the serial number from the camera and they match. And I think he was just thinking like, well, you know, that'll never happen.

Katie, however, saves all her warrantees and a special folder. She does have the serial number.

And to confirm that it's the same as the advertised camera, she calls the guy on Craigslist and she concocts this story that she is a girl who needs to buy the camera for a school project.

She puts on this supposedly tough sounding Brooklyn accent that I would describe as kind of the Brooklyn accent you would hear performed by a kid actor on the Disney Channel, and that I had told them that my boyfriend was going to kick my ass if I spent our last three hundred dollars buying a camera that broke the next day.

And so do you have the warranty for the camera? And he said, no. He was like, I got this camera from my friend. So there was no warranty with it. And I was like, OK, well, do you know, like, is there a way to find out if it's still under warranty?

And he said, well, I think you can find out if the camera's under warranty, if you go online. And I was like, OK, well, what do I need to do? And he was like, well, I think you need to have the serial number.

So you didn't actually just ask him for the serial number. You wanted him to suggest the serial number. Yeah, because I thought if I asked him for the serial number, then he would know right away what I was trying to do. Wow. So I was trying to get him to say it.

Jassam, can you read me the serial number? And he says he doesn't have the camera with them. He'll have to call her back and she figures, oh, that's a jig is up. He knows she's lying. He will never call back.

As Miles points out, this story that she has made up, it really makes no sense at all.

Like if the boyfriend is going to get so mad at her, wouldn't it be for the fact that she spent their last three hundred dollars and spent it on a camera and not for the fact that the camera didn't come with a warranty?

Like who cares about warranties that much? But to both of their surprise, the guy calls back because of the serial number. Of course, it matches calls the detective to let them know. He says, oh, really?

Well, what should we do? I was like, you tell me what we should do. You're the detective.

And he says, of course, would, you know, do a sting, call the guy and arrange to buy the camera from him, set a location, will be there to swoop in, will nab him. 15 minutes later, the police arrive to take Kadian miles to the starting gate. He runs downstairs to meet the detective on the street.

He tells me that there's been a change of plans. He doesn't need my husband to come anymore. He only needs me. I'm not going to meet the burglar face to face anymore because it's not safe.

And so he's got a different plan of how we're going to do this.

At that point, Miles arrives downstairs. I turn around to him and I just say. Change of plans, they don't need us both anymore, they just need me, it's not safe for you to go. I'll call you when it's over.

And he's like, stunned because there's no army at all, Miles.

Watchers who get into the car and drive off inside the car. Katie says the detectives tell her the new plan. She's going to stay in the car and talk to the guy on the cell phone, keep him talking as the cops go and grab him, though they are very skeptical, basically saying, like, the chance of this working out is so small, like this is never going to happen.

Don't get your panties in a bunch.

She and the Craigslist guy agree to meet at a CVS drugstore. Cops go inside, then on the cell phone.

Kadia smoke. What are you wearing? So she can recognize him? She tells him, OK, I'm in the makeup aisle.

I'm like, oh, I'm by the CoverGirl makeup. He starts walking down the aisle, I guess, and he says, I still don't see you. And at that point I hear, hands up, you're under arrest.

And the same detectives who are brushing me off the entire ride out there then are walking over to the car with the video camera and a hand high five on each other. And I hear them say, like that was some real police work, great detective work.

The police could not be more surprised to be making this arrest. And to be fair, as Miles points out, it's crazy that it worked.

There's so many different stages where the criminal should have bailed out, you know, like the fact that she comes up with the story. But I need the warrant. He calls her back. He makes the effort to call her back and said, didn't you need a serial number for the warranty?

It's like, what? Like, I can't believe that he's playing along with it, honestly.

Like, you don't get that level of service from real stores you don't see. But that's the whole thing is that is that she's an amateur sleuth, but he's also an amateur criminal. Right. And this is the moment where they meet up. Right.

So there'd be no way the detective would ever spend the amount of time they would take to concoct this ruse to go after this camera. So the only way that could ever be solved would be if two amateurs met up in Chicago.

It's this American Life. I'm IRA Glass. Today on our program, amateurs, the fact that they are not professionals, that they do not play by the book, that they have, you know, time on their hands to try whatever makes it possible for them to accomplish things. The pros simply never will. We have three stories, including amateurs stepping into one of the most powerful jobs in the world and one of the most commonplace. Stay with us.

Jackline, theater of war. Sometimes a big professional outfit that is great at one thing takes on a task at which it has no experience at all and really no special aptitude for in any way. It is a rank amateur jacket.

As this example, back when the first President Bush was in office, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and for the first time since Vietnam, really, America returned to the battlefield. Derek Brown felt called. And so he wound up at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, one of the largest military bases in the world. Back then, about 40000 soldiers, most famously the eighty second airborne and other ready units that can be deployed in eighteen hours. Fort Bragg is America's waiting room for war.

When Derek first arrived, he was trained as a paratrooper. You know, you'd wake up at five in the morning, then you would deploy out to the field. You do a jump from 800 feet. I was an artillery man so they'd throw the tanks out of the planes, then they'd throw us out of the planes. So you do these mock war exercises where people would try and attack you and kill you and you'd be out in the cold and you'd be digging more foxholes and just seeing how how ground down you could possibly be so that when the time comes for war, your body and mind have been pushed as far as possible.

Every once in a while there'd be something else, a volunteer duty. I remember the captain of our unit, he said he had this strange detail, which was we had to mandatorily send one soldier from our battery to be a part of this musical.

And it would last several weeks, you wouldn't have to do any field duty, but you would have to sing and dance, and everyone thought he was joking.

And I raised my hand and he said, great report to the Fort Bragg Theater today.

Were you the only person who volunteered for this? I was the only person who volunteered. And they had me sit in this room and this director first had everyone audition and he asked me if I knew of any songs that I could sing for many musicals. And I said not at all.

I never sang or danced in my life except while running and singing cadences.

And Jody calls in the military and he said, Well, just sing me something.

And I remember singing Even Flo by Pearl Jam. Can you give me a couple of lines?

Is even even though it's a rave, like I think I was the same person, OK, and somehow they thought it was good enough.

It turns out that no one was turned away. In rehearsals, Derek quickly got a sense that something different was going on here. This was not just your average musical review. What kind of dancing are you doing? It's March dancing.

I don't know if you've seen it, but it is the director's idea to combine the honor and discipline of military movements with the bravado and panache of Broadway movements. But the thing Derek remembers most more than 20 years later was not the song and dance numbers, it was the stuff in between. They were short films projected on a screen above the performers, and they were the opposite of lighthearted entertainment, grim testimonials about soldiers who died not in combat, but drunk driving and in other accidents near the base.

All done in a dark bluntness one rarely sees outside driver's ed.

Movies would go from show tune to a video on the screen of a fellow soldier that they interviewed talking about how one of their fellow soldiers, their friend, died, you know, and then, oh, surprise, we would sing a show tune. And it was this progression of dance, sad video, sing a bit sad video. And then some guys come rappelling out of the ceiling for the closing number at the end of the hour for the final chance to cheer everyone up so they leave feeling inspired.

It was insane. You would have discussions backstage, which is what the what are we doing? Why are we doing this? How did this how did this thing even come to be? Excellent questions. How did one of the most straitlaced, no nonsense institutions in the entire country, the U.S. Army, end up producing this piece of Dadda musical theater? I wanted answers, so I went straight up the chain of command.

Yes. General Carl Stiner, U.S. Army retired, and I was a commander of the 2nd Airborne Division during 1987.

1988, General Stiner was at Fort Bragg and he confirmed that, yes, for a while in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, there was this annual show which the entire base was required to attend. So there were three or four performances a day for a week or so during the Christmas season, which is when accidental deaths spiked.

We realized that we were having more casualties from our off duty activities, mainly motorcycles.

Then from thousands of parachute jumps and heavy equipment drops, you know, we just needed to do something about it, Steiner told me that some years for every death of a soldier during training exercises, there were almost 10 killed getting drunk and driving crazy wartime deaths we all know about and afterward PTSD.

But this was a whole other kind of statistic, pre combat deaths, which come when tens of thousands of teenagers anxiously awaiting war get pumped up, jumping out of planes and firing heavy artillery. How could some beer and say a motorcycle possibly affect them? Originally, the base had ordered mandatory safety lectures, but the soldiers slept through them, so the United States Defense Department, the greatest fighting force ever to march on the planet, decided they would try showtunes.

And that's the origin of what came to be called the Soldier's Safety Show. I interviewed a dozen veterans from this era and they all remember the weird mash up of gut wrenching testimonials and cheery high leg kicks. They all said you had to see it to believe it, and I wanted to believe it.

When I called Stiner, he told me that he had a videotape of one of the shows, you know, I had a VCR of it, but age caused the thing to just self-destruct. You couldn't even tell what it was, the pictures and so on. And so we struck out.

I won't bore you with the details, but finding a videotape literally took months. The public school library had a set of soldiers safety shows, but not long before I called, they went full on digital and junked all their old school audio visual stuff. A Freedom of Information request came up completely dry. Finally, I happened upon Gudrun Blackman, still working at Bragg, who called back to say she had an old box at home and in it a tape.

The label read 1989 Soldier Safety Show Life is Worth Living is brutal love.

We travel. It goes many way.

Early on, we see a folk guitarist seated on stage, plucking out a sad melody of the young soldier that just above him on a screen is a general.

It's actually General Steiner himself entering a cemetery and he starts talking about accidental deaths on base when a soldier is killed.

I feel terrible. I get a sickening feeling, a feeling of failure. We lost 26 this year and it's terrible, Charles.

Adam James, General Steiner occasionally nails down and at one point removes his beret necessary and talks directly to a tombstone.

We tried with you, Tauscher, and we failed. Perhaps we could have done a little better if your friends had been more forthcoming to us with your problems. You are a great soldier. And we all loved you. How many new graves next year? What do I have to do to stop these unnecessary and needless deaths? And the lights come up on a stage packed with 30 or 40 men and women in fancy dress doing some tap dance moves with lots of spirit fingers and jazz hands.

It's a tribute to everyone who fought in World War Two.

And these absurd smash ups just keep happening for the rest of the show, just like all the soldiers tell me. So who came up with this idea? Who was the mastermind of Operation Shock and Awe? His name was Lee Yop and his journey to theater was not one anyone might predict he had.

He had no personal taste. He ate overdone meat. And he wore polyester suits.

I mean, he didn't care what he wore, that's both Thorpe, a local North Carolina actress who was frequently cast in these shows. Yop died back in 2006. I talked to other actors, too, and they all reacted like Reese Brown, a paratrooper from the 90s.

See, everyone laughs when I ask about that, because it's funny because I haven't thought about him in years.

But just to think about just some of the things that he said, every word he used, every enunciation he used, every colorful description he used, was filled with 10 words that didn't need to be there.

He didn't say, I'm going to the store.

I'm I'm traversing down to, you know, it was one of those things.

But he had no room at all for shyness on stage. He made it a point of saying that if you were going to fail, please fail loudly, please fail loudly and sing it as though your life depended on it. It's odd because I've never met anyone like him prior to this point.

It's like, where did this guy come from? He was a high school football coach. That's both Thorpe. Again, this was in Trenton, New Jersey. And the director of the class play died suddenly and Lee inherited the class play. And it also happened that he had just broken his leg so he really couldn't go out on the football field.

So that's how he got into the theater.

And so he took his a personality football coach approach to life into the theater.

This is Steve Curry, who long worked as Yop stage manager and within a very short period of time, turned this little high school theater program into a major competitive organization that won the National Theater Award for high schools across the nation. And and they went on a tour of Germany and Japan with this production you put together. And it just looks like he was a bit, you know, he couldn't get enough of it.

Lee Up wound up as the chief director of the Bucks County Playhouse outside Trenton, New Jersey, which is one of the farm teams for lots of Broadway shows. Yop gave Bucks County his all spending lavishly, even putting his own money into the shows.

Lee had just taken a second mortgage on his house in New Jersey to use as an investment in a show called Smile, Smile, Smile. The reviews came out was smile, smile, smile. It was supposed to be funny. It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't, period. So one of the shortest theater reviews in the history of musical theater, Curry told me that you are bankrupted.

The Bucks County Playhouse and himself, his personal finance is so wrecked he couldn't get a phone in his own name. But then fate stepped in when you bumped into an old army buddy at an airport who was looking for someone who could direct theater at Fort Bragg.

They were thrilled to death with with this man who brought theatricality to the Army. The last place in the world that you would think the one financial backer that that.

Right. That could afford him. Exactly. The Defense Department. That's exactly right.

Steve Curry, the stage manager, told me that with that money, they built waterfalls and a set for a roller skating.

No.

Another time, they planted the entire stage in real grass for a park scene with cops on horseback, or we had people rappelling from rafters with people in parachute rigging, flying in over the stage cannons and machine guns and muskets and horses rearing up to the cannon fire. Thompson submachine guns firing.

And these are all going off inside of a theater. Oh, yeah.

We would also trigger explosions that we'd set into the stage floor and would hook up things like fleshpots. I got a guy with a guy from the Special Forces and he would get me all these what they call squibs, which are these electronic fuses, and we would create these great explosions. You could never do it today. Fire Marshal, it shut you down, but we were the army. And what was impressive about it is how I realized that there was no end up.

He had a special and unique way of making this simple, more complicated than you could ever imagine it.

Let me just take a moment to say how rare this is. I wrote a book about amateurs a few years ago, those dreamers in their garages, fiddling, creating, struggling.

What keeps most of them stuck in the garage is lack of funder's lyrup had hundreds of millions of funder's the taxpayers of the United States.

Everybody I talked to, especially the cast and crew that were in so many of these shows, the regulars all mention this one time, one moment that stood out for them.

It was 1982. There'd been a terrible car accident this time involving one of the cast members, kids. Here's actress Bo Thorpe. My son was nearly killed.

I mean, he was coming home from his first football game. He was 14 years old. It was October the 8th. And the young girl who's driving her father's car decided to see how fast her daddy's car would come down. Sky Drive, which is where we live. He remembers her saying 80. And when she went to put on the brakes, the car went into a skid and then hit a tree. And so he was in a body cast for six months.

She says everyone in the show is heartbroken, of course, including Yapp. But Yop, being yapp, saw an opportunity.

I said, you know what we can do you think, would you let us go up to the hospital and I'll bring a film crew and we'll go up to the hospital and we'll film Clay. And then he can and then he can make testimony on the on the tape. And I said, Lee, I don't know that that's the right thing to do. Oh, yeah, absolutely. They the soldiers will love it. They'll they'll they'll understand it.

It'll mean a lot to them. You know, I was really reluctant about it.

I thought because I thought that, you know, is just not very tasteful.

A few weeks later, there was Bo on stage. My 14 year old son was in a very serious car accident. It happens like that, you know, there's no warning. It just comes boom like that. We went up to Kleiss Hospital Room when he was very sick and he agreed to make this film. I hope you'll pay attention. Then on the big screen, Cleethorpes, 14 years old, lying in a hospital bed flat on his back and a full body cast and Clay jumps right in, looking into the camera as best he can.

Reliving the accident, calling out the miles per hour as if you were once again flying down that hill 10, 20, 30, 40, 50.

I told her to slow down 60, 70. Oh, my God. This is a dream. This can't be happening here I am in this place, I'm not normal now. I wish I could get out and wish I could get out tomorrow. The sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be some.

And then beneath the video screen, a young girl comes out on stage with the day that's gray and lonely.

I just got my chin and. And do you think this had I mean, how how effective was this with the soldiers?

Amazing, absolutely amazing because these are 18 year old boys and when you're 18 years old and you're a butch kind of male, you know, your life is is going to go on forever. And you're you're you're a special. You're going to last forever and you can do whatever you want to do. And and if you do so what?

And Lee had a way of understanding that he would do everything he could to prove to them or to show them the value of life and how short it is and how quickly it goes by.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, you know what this is, it's the lecture I gave my teenage daughter a few nights ago when I handed her the car keys. Drive carefully. Buckle up, please. Don't be an idiot. Every parent tries to come up with some way to say this to their kid. Layup had to crack that code for 40000 of them. And you know what? It worked. After the Soldier Safety Show started, the average number of deaths at the base dropped by a third.

Borrow to borrow. I got to borrow at the end of every show, one of Europe's actors always came out on the stage to give the final safety lecture. We need your help.

And we ask that each and every one of you join with us to make this pledge to always, always wear your safety belts.

The speaker asks everyone who believes in safety to stand and take the pledge. These are soldiers and they follow orders. So naturally up jumps everyone in the audience.

And then the cars floods the stage for the final number. And Yap's last brilliant contribution to musical theater, a guaranteed standing ovation at the end of every show and.

Jacket, he's the author of several books, including the one that he mentioned in this story. It's got a bunch of amateurs. He's also the co-host, along with Chenjerai Communicare or the Peabody Award winning podcast Uncivil. Coming up, babies having babies, robot babies specifically. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Each week on a program, of course, which is a theme of many different kinds of stories on that theme today, show amateur hour stories of how amateurs can accomplish things that the pros cannot.

That is when they are not crashing and burning completely. Today's program was first broadcast a few years ago.

We've arrived at Act two of our program as to what to expect when you're expecting a robot. There's this thing that a lot of kids have to do in health class.

Maybe you did this when you were in high school.

The idea is to give students a taste of what it is like to be responsible for an infant and kind of what a pain in the ass it is, actually. And they do this by making the kids carry around an egg or sometimes it's like a sack of flour for a couple of days. Supposedly this jolt of reality helps prevent teen pregnancies, which, you know, is a lot to ask of an egg.

So before the pandemic, some school switched over. From eggs to robotic babies. These are plastic dolls with electronics inside which make them cry randomly all day and night, they're sleeping, eating and pooping patterns are based on logs kept by real parents about real babies.

The babies cost over 600 dollars each. Hillary Frank went out back then when school was still in person everywhere to find out if your parenthood is more intense and more realistic with these high tech crybabies.

The first time I saw a robotic baby was at my local pharmacy, it's one of those old timey places with a candy counter and surgical supplies and a large selection of scented candles. One day I was in the store and I heard this teenage girl behind me say, oh, my God, this baby is so heavy. She had a car seat slung over her shoulder like a purse. For a second, I thought the plastic baby inside it was real.

The real ones are heavier. I told her, she groaned and with the car seat over to her other shoulder. At the time, I had a three year old and I was dying to know if this girl's experience with the plastic baby was anything remotely like my experience with my flesh and blood baby, the girl told me she went to Glen Ridge High. Glen Ridge is the town next to mine in New Jersey. So I called the school and asked if they'd let me hang out the next time the girls got the baby's.

And don't forget to support her nap when you pick her up out of the car seat.

OK, Miss Hogan, the health teacher, is setting up two girls with their babies. The robot babies are so expensive that the school only has ten of them.

So the students take turns with them for two solid days of pretend parenting in the class. I visited the students on deck where.

Rachel, let's kick it. I'm excited babies here.

And Paige, I don't know why I'm so nervous about this baby, but till we get my producer, Joanna and I followed them with their babies over the next 48 hours, Rachel and Paige are friends, but they're about as different as two 17 year olds can be. We'll start with Paige.

Paige is brimming with maternal affection for her fake baby. She pulls a flowered onesie out of her book bag, shows it to Joanna.

I brought clothes for her. Wait, are these your baby clothes? Oh, I think some of them are. And my mom sees them. And then I use them for when I used to play baby dolls.

Just a note here about Paige's voice. I've never heard anyone talk like her before. She's not whispering or anything. This is just the way she sounds.

You're really like going for the full immersion.

I am, because I was so excited to get a baby. So I know it'll be so much fun. It'll be hard, but it'll it'll be fun.

To be clear, there was no need to bring baby clothes. The doll comes with its own outfit. Paige is a devout Christian. She wears a purity ring.

And I made a promise that I will not ever give myself away before I'm married because I think it's one of the worst mistakes somebody could do.

So that's Paige. Now, here's Rachel.

I don't think that losing your virginity is giving yourself away.

I think Rachel is the quintessential theater kid. She describes herself as liberal and bisexual.

She's never had sex with anyone, but she keeps a good luck condom in her drawer just in case.

It's just in my room. I know it's there. Like I went on a trip somewhere once, like by myself, and I just brought it even though I knew I wouldn't use it. But it's just like for good luck.

Rachel thinks she wants to wait until her thirties to have kids. She did not bring in baby clothes today for her robot baby. She thinks this whole baby thing will just make for a fun story, like the time she joined the boys wrestling team and wound up puking in the locker room.

I've been more excited about the back story than anything else. I need to find who's the father. Figure it out was last on my doorstep.

The girls take their babies. Each is in a car seat. Each looks like a real baby except plastic. The huge speaker on its chest, a vacant stare. Their lips are always pursed for feeding, and somehow they always look a little pissed off.

Paige and Rachel head to class.

Their first big challenge.

You know how much blood you're giving

today is the blood drive at Glenrock high blood.

Rachel is laid out flat on a table with a tourniquet around her arm, her baby is on the floor behind her head in the car seat. The lab tech says you're not allowed to give her the baby. She can't give Rachel the baby.

I don't like this. I want to take care of my baby, I don't like the sound.

If those cries sound disturbingly real, it's because they're recordings of actual babies crying.

Oh, the baby really wanted

and if Rachel could get to her baby, here is how she would get it to stop crying. It has to be her. It can't be someone else. She's being graded on this. So she's wearing a wristband that she swipes over the baby that identifies her as the mother. Next, she'd have to figure out why the baby is crying. It could need one of four things burping, rocking, diapering or feeding to feed it. You hold a fake bottle by the baby's lips. And if she's hungry, she goes like this.

When she's full, she goes like this. You have only two minutes to get it right. If you don't, you lose points. If you don't support the baby's neck, more points off. So all the time, Rachel's on the blood donor table. She's losing points. The lab tech holds Rachel's arm, pushes the needle into her vein.

Oh, it really hurts now. It hurts more now.

OK, then, like any stressed out drama geek, Rachel bursts into song opera.

Are you singing because of the pain or because you don't want to hear the baby crying

A little of both. Mostly because of the pain. I'm sorry, baby.

Meanwhile, Page's baby seems to need attention constantly, so feed it or rocket and it'll stop crying, but then start up again four minutes later, then five minutes after that, then another seven minutes after that.

I think I've kind of learned already - it's only an hour and a half into it! Um, I've definitely learned..

This baby, it's kind of like a normal baby, but not because it - I think a normal baby is not this needy.

Of course, a human baby is way more needy, but, you know, amateur's. Joanna and I follow Paige and Rachel through the rest of their classes.

The babies will through lectures, through debates. So in one class, there are four babies going off.

The most baby full class have gone to so far,

which makes it feel more like a nursery than a school. While taking a test, Rachel discovers a clever workaround, she props the bottle up in the car seat, basically has the baby feed itself. Some teachers are amused, others aren't. The girls are especially nervous about bringing the babies to play rehearsal.

They tell me the director's a little shouty.

Oh, no, we're going to begin.

The show is dead man walking a stage version of the film. Both girls are in the play and they both play mothers. Rachel is the mother of the murderer.

Paige is the mother of the nun. Paige is standing on a raised platform at the back of the stage, she's swaying a little, looking up at the spotlight as she sings.

And then just as she feared from backstage, her baby starts crying.

Paige lunges off the platform and trips on a wooden crate. That's part of the set.

She flies through the air oddly gracefully and lands smack on her knee.

OK, yeah, I'm sorry.

I mean, clearly, she's not fine. She's on the ground hugging her leg. Everyone circles around her. Since it was blood drive day, there's a student volunteer there still in his EMS uniform. He checks her leg to see if it's broken. It's not - just a really bad bruise. Page is crying. Her baby is crying. She's cradling the baby in her arms. Someone turns the spotlight on them.

Paige looks like the Virgin Mary. At this point, Paige decides she's ready to cheat. One of her friends tells her to take off the bracelet.

Paige wriggles it off her wrist and hands the baby and the bracelet to the girl who gets to work triaging

burping, rocking, burping, feeding day to day to be held.

It needs to be held. It needed to be held. The nurses and I burped it, but didn't make the opening noises.

How are you feeling about motherhood now? OK,

I hate it. I just can't get it to relieve stress. Oh, sorry. I'm in so much pain.

I ask the girls to record themselves on their phones at night whenever their babies wake them up. Here's Rachel.

And so it begins.

It's the first time she's woken up. It's eleven thirty pm.

Every diaper changing and the bottle have not worked very. I'm attempting to wrap the baby.

She appears to have stopped. Hopefully she'll be seated for a while. Rachel, over and out. Oh. This is wake up number two about five minutes later. It seems like she doesn't really need anything, she's just lonely, I guess. Oh, and I had a little dog color. It was brown.

I told him for two to sing and. Is 413, the baby was Hendrika.

The tiredness is really sitting in, I've grown strangely, emotionally attached to this lump of plastic and a tiny bit sad to get rid of her.

Records herself every single time the baby wakes her up both nights, a total of nine times. Page was so overwhelmed by the night waking that she didn't wind up recording herself at all like I do.

I'm so, so tired of my whole I don't know why, but I feel like my whole body has just been slammed up against a wall. I just I can barely keep my eyes open. I just feel so exhausted.

And. And how are you feeling while it was going on? Were you feeling mad at the baby?

I'm a little bit tired. I was just like, oh, man, I just want my mom.

I came in and said, Moscovitz, we are. And I remember saying, I already did. And then I like to go try Proff through the diaper, put the diaper back on. And she still was crying. And I looked at my mom and said, Mom. And so I ran.

The third time she woke up, I was like, I just wanted everyone to be quiet and leave me alone.

The next day at school, Rachel was not herself before Kooris.

Katie Schultz, who is actually she plays the nun in the play. She just asked me, how's the baby? And I just what can everyone just shut up?

And in my mind, I was like, she wasn't doing anything.

She was not the person I should be yelling at.

But I was like, Oh. Overnight, Paige and Rachel have become animals I recognize intimately they've become mothers, throwing their minds, bodies and hearts so fully into a tiny being that they can't help but whine and lash out at people who don't deserve it. Even Paige says she's become a jerk or her version of a jerk. She forgot to thank a boy who held the door for her. Plus, she admits to me that she's cheated. A second time.

She forgot to bring her costume for dress rehearsal, so she slipped the bracelet off again and left the baby with a friend while she ran home.

Next morning comes the moment of truth. The girl's hand in their babies and get their grades. The robot baby keeps a minute by minute record of how you did what page goes first.

Seventy one seventy one. Which is what? In letters C minus. And what did she get points deducted for. For she had a missed feeling ahead support and then six forty nine. She had a missed feeling and I had support. Six fifty eight should have missed her and nine twenty nine. Yeah. So yeah.

All right, all right. All right, all right. I'm every time she cried I picked you up immediately. Give her a bottle of. She didn't want that.

I put her type one so I don't know I thought I did ok. I think I get like a seat. So disappointed. Rich, let me get your grade. Oh the big moment for Rachael. She's getting her grade.

94, which translates to in a year, if I were a betting person, I'd have never put money on Rachel doing better than page, especially not this much better for all of her baby clothes and maternal instinct, not to mention wanting to be a young mom. Paige turns out to be a below average mother, at least when it comes to plastic children.

Has this changed the way you feel about becoming a mother and about babies?

I thought, like, I could have a baby at 21, I'll go to ministry school, meet a man of God, a man of my dreams, will get married and have a baby.

But I think maybe maybe I think I may be a little older than I thought. Like I said, I cannot even imagine putting a baby a life into my world. And I think it'd be horrible.

Paige isn't sure how old she wants to be when she starts a family. Now she just knows she can't even picture it.

Her whole life plan has been thrown out of whack by her robot baby.

My response to the baby was almost the opposite of pages in that if I have a baby really young, I feel like I would keep the baby.

I also never would have guessed that Paige and Rachel would flip their positions because I kind of like the feeling of having a baby, like for some reason, like I guess the idea that someone or something like needs you and only you kind of makes you feel like important. It was awful. But at the same time, like I was I kind of liked it. I never really thought that I would want to have a kid younger, but maybe I would.

Rachel called it early onset baby fever and said her mom was freaked out by it. I asked one of Rachel's teachers and the president of the company that makes the babies about this ironic and unintended outcome that the robot baby made a teenage girl want to have a real one. They both said this was rare. They shrugged it off.

The teacher said she was sure. Rachel's the kind of girl who will make a thoughtful decision about when to have her own child.

Overall, the girls had a way more authentic mothering experience with the robot babies than I had expected. But the moments when Rachel and Paige couldn't be available to the babies, when Rachel gave blood, when Paige fell, the girls lost points. In those moments when you're a real parent, those things happen all the time, diagnosing whether your kid needs to be fed or diapered or rocked. That's not what makes you a pro at parenting. It's coping with the stress of getting it wrong, of feeling like an amateur, which is going to happen no matter how much practice you've had.

Hillary Frank, she's the host of the parenting podcast The Longest, Shortest Time, and author several books, including Weird Parenting Wins. Three commando, and we've now had the story of an amateur who for one night gets thrown into a very, very big job, one of the biggest jobs, they basically get thrown in as the substitute teacher for a class they have never taught or never taken.

Specifically, they're supposed to sub for the president of the United States. You may have heard this from a certain Kiefer Sutherland TV show before that TV show existed. Today's program is a rerun.

Stephanie, who did this story about how this thing happens in real life?

If somebody needs to sub for the president, the chain is clear. If the vice president can't do it, it goes to the speaker of the House, then the president pro tempore of the Senate, then the secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, secretary of defense, all the way down the cabinet to energy, education, veteran affairs. It's been this way since the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. But what happens if all of those people are in one room?

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, my fellow Americans.

The State of the Union address, what if someone blows up the building and kills everyone on that list all at once? Well, then the presidency goes to the designated survivor. That is a person chosen every year before the State of the Union speech to survive. That's their whole job, to survive, run the United States government as an amateur president, total beginner whose first day on the job may include wreaking vengeance upon surrendering to whoever killed all our top leaders.

Each year, the designated survivor is assigned a security detail and moved to a safe secret location away from the Capitol. This all began no surprise during the Cold War. Thomas Reed was an assistant to President Reagan for national security policy, and it was his job to figure out what to do if a nuclear weapon hit D.C. He's the one who came up with the idea of the designated survivor.

Washington was targeted with over 300 Soviet nuclear weapons. They had hundreds that were going to lay down on every possible escape route. And to think you could escape that barrage was nonsense.

Well, I was nervous in that. I remember saying, jeez, I know this is not going to happen. What if something does happen?

That's Bill Richardson, former secretary of energy, designated survivor for the 2000 State of the Union. Richardson wasn't sent into a bunker somewhere. He was in a small town in Maryland having dinner at his friend's house, which was surrounded by a security detail and emergency vehicles inside. They had steak.

We had a nice meal, but then we sat in front of the television and I was smoking a cigar. I had a glass of wine after it was all over.

I talked to a couple of designated survivors from the Cold War era who said they were put on planes and flown to undisclosed locations. One of them got training where he got to play war games and the secret Dr. Strangelove esque setting. And they asked him questions like, OK, do you swear in immediately after the president's death, do you launch missiles at the Soviets? Do you hold your fire? He said the training was so helpful, so enlightening that he thought nobody should become a designated survivor without undergoing it first.

But by the end of the Cold War, post Gorbachev pre 9/11, things got a little more lax.

Can you say that I went through any kind of training course about what to do? The answer is no.

That's Dan Glickman, secretary of agriculture, designated survivor during the 1997 State of the Union.

I think I did discuss it with my wife that I could handle it if something terribly happened. She says, well, good luck.

Donna Shalala, who was secretary of Health and Human Services designated Survivor in 1996, didn't get any special training either, and she didn't even leave the neighborhood. She was just two and a half miles away from the Capitol at the White House.

So I took my senior staff to the Roosevelt Room at the White House and we had pizza and watch the State of the Union. And I sort of wandered into the Oval Office and tried out the chair. What did it feel like?

Big. Too big for me. President Clinton's a very large man.

One designated survivor told me that actually attending the State of the Union is a pain, you have to look attentive and interested in improving for a really long time in case the cameras pan to you being designated survivor much easier. One guy who asked I not use his name went on a vacation to the Caribbean when he got the gig, not a government expense.

He was quick to tell me he happened to have plans to go anyway. Another designated survivor took the opportunity to move to a new house. A caravan of Secret Service guarded him as he loaded up his moving van. One thing you might have noticed from the designated survivors I spoke to, none of them had day jobs that had anything to do with national security. Usually it's the nonmarket cabinet members, secretary of the interior, energy, commerce, agriculture, people whose names you probably don't know ever heard of Anthony Fox.

He's our secretary of transportation and this year's designated survivor. And when I heard about that, I kind of thought, well, seriously, the decision to launch nuclear retaliation, kill millions of people, could possibly rest in the hands of the secretary of transportation, Thomas Reed. The guy who designed this program says why not? The secretary of transportation is as good a person as any.

The question in politics and all of other things in life is compared to the question is not is so-and-so authorized or qualified to be president or governor or a successor? The question is, compared to who? Compared to Joseph Stalin, of course, compared to Dwight Eisenhower, probably not.

And that the Cabinet, they're all brilliant people and certainly have the wherewithal to at least make the initial decisions.

Stephani, they're not all brilliant people anymore than you or I are. And they all have problems and some smoke too much and some are overweight and so forth and so on. They're all human beings.

And Reid said the president's been chosen by the American people and the president chooses the designated survivor. So therefore, by proxy, that person is chosen by the American people.

Sometimes they choose. Well, sometimes they don't. That's what politics is all about.

That's a very ominous statement.

Yes. Yes, it is. Here's Dan Glickman again, designated survivor in 1997, secretary of Agriculture.

You know, I mean, I was not really briefed on what to do if something were to happen to the president. But, you know, I have enough confidence in myself that if something were to happen, I would have followed certain basic rules and would have been a good soldier in that.

In that case, when Glickman was a designated survivor, they flew him to LaGuardia Airport and a G3 plane, along with some stern looking guys in suits, one of whom may or may not have been carrying the nuclear football in a fancy briefcase. Then they got Glickman in a three car caravan, drove him to his daughter's modest apartment in Manhattan's West Village and stood guard outside. While he watched the speech on TV, Glickman admitted he did imagine what it would be like.

I did think about it, wouldn't. It was a very interesting thing that here the secretary of agriculture could be United States. And I'd been telling the world all these years that agriculture was the most important part of our government. So, you know, I could reinforce that message.

Certainly all of a sudden that would be our number one national agenda is just agriculture, agriculture, food and agriculture.

Glickman even said that in his regular job, he was so unimportant that immediately after the speech was over, he lost the security detail. They bailed on him and went back to Washington.

In fact, their exact words were, Mr. Glickman, the mission is terminated. And I decided to stay in New York and have dinner with my daughter. And it was cold and raining and sleeting. And once the dinner was over, we went outside of the restaurant and we couldn't find a cab. So we walked back about 12 blocks back to my daughter's apartment and in a sleet storm. And I it struck me that just three or four hours before, I was the most powerful man on the face of the Earth for about an hour.

And now I couldn't even get a cab. And the fact of the matter is, no first term president goes into office knowing how to be president. He learns on the job, everything's new and opening that briefcase and deciding whether to launch a nuclear strike. Nobody could be ready for that. The president might be as likely to make the wrong choice as the secretary of agriculture or the secretary of transportation or the White House intern or you or I. Stephanie Foo, she used to be a producer on our program.

She's not writing a book about healing from complex PTSD. My book was produced by Stephanie Foo with Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Conor Duffy, Walt McDermott, Jonathan to keep our brand with Joe Richman, Robyn Semino leadership, and Nancy Updike, our senior producer for Today Show's Julie Snyder, and getting help from Joe Level, technical director as Matt Tierney production up from Iris Smith and Iris Sapperstein. Research up today from Christopher Satava and Michelle Harris music. Damien Graves and Rob Gettis.

Special thanks to Derek Brown for telling us about the Soldiers Safety Show at Fort Bragg. You can find Eric's work at Brown Poetry dot com, thanks to Lisa Pollock for calling us in by designated survivors. Thanks to Joanna Solotaroff, Alex Koppelman, Maria de Canadiana, Brian Haley, Rusty Hutchinson, Quincy Billons, Victor Hurtado, Evan Middlesworth at Pine Hollow Audio and the teachers and students at Quinn Ridge High School, our website, This American Life Dog, This American Life, is delivered to public radio stations by parks, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks as always, to your program's cofounder, Mr Terry Malatya, who hears his name right here in the credits every single week, every single week. And he asks, what? What are we doing? Why are we doing this? I'm IRA Glass, back next week. More stories of this American life. Next week on the podcast of this American Life Blood, it's not just the stuff coursing through our veins, delivering oxygen to ourselves, keeping us alive.

Now, there's also the politics of blood and the craft of drawing somebody's blood and the art of fake blood and the blood ties that hold families together. Stories of blood and bloody feelings. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.