Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - Everyone & Lost and Found

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

Reporter Shane O'Neill and Emma learn at the Lost and Found not all is lost, then think deep thoughts with an old friend.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, everyone. I'm Emma Choi, and welcome to Everyone and Their Mom, a weekly show from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. This week, we're talking Ubers with the reporter for the Stiles desk of The New York Times and someone I would like to co-parent a spunky one-eyed cat with. It's Shane O'Neill. Hi, Shane. Hi, Emma. What kind of cat do you look for when you're looking for a cat? Hypoallergenic and with a little twinkle of evil in its eyes. Okay. I'm exclusively about looks and that's worked out for me over the years. So I think together we can get a really good cat. I'm putting that in my dream journal. So it's cemented. But Shane, we have a story that we're super into. So Uber published an index of their most lost and found items for this year.

Oh, wow. It's a whole thing. So you know Uber. I know Uber. It's the company that makes you pay a nice stranger in a Kia Soul 120 bucks to drive you five miles back from the airport. Yep. They published their sixth annual Lost and Found Index, which features, quote, the most surprising and the most popular items left behind in Ubers. And at number eight most commonly lost is vapes. And it's good to know that the finance bro community's relationship with Uber is as strong as ever.

I mean, they go together like milk and cookies or, you know, I don't know, finance and shoes I don't like. I don't know. But, you know, the real gems of the index are the quote unquote rare items. I think you saw a couple of these. It was like 40 chicken nuggets. These are real. A bucket of slime, a painting of Kung Fu Panda. And I would also like to add to the list that in one very stinky group Uber ride,

I lost my faith in humanity. And I don't think I can get that back. Well, did you ask the company? I mean, I'm sure they have mechanisms to ask for your dignity. I should ask. Yeah, see if you can get it. I don't know. I feel like losing something in an Uber, it's like especially horrifying, because it's a moving target, you know, like you don't know where it is in the world after you leave it. Because it's a moving target, you know?

Like, you don't know where it is in the world after you leave it. Now, I don't mean to cape for shared ride apps. But I will say that I personally know a drag queen who left her entire trunk of drag, like a lifetime worth of drag, in a cab in the 90s. And the cab just sped off. I'm not trying to say that it's better in all ways. But at least there's a mechanism to retrieve stuff that might be a little more reliable than it was in the old days. My name is Tim Larimer, formerly known as, or sometimes known as Sharon Peters. That's my drag persona.

And I was just going to tell you the story about how I lost Sharon Peters in a cab. Will you tell us that story from the beginning? Yeah, sure. So it was probably about 2002. I think that's where it was. So it sort of set the scene, you know, cell phones were brand new, Uber didn't exist. And I was doing a lot of drag at the time. I'd gotten into drag about 10 years before, more as a performance type of a thing. And I was doing quite a lot of drag at the time. I was kind of performing probably about three times a week.

And I'd been asked to do one of these short plays, and it was an awesome role. It was a really, really great role. I was playing a senator's wife, very conservative wife. And then I was also playing his mistress. So I had basically my entire drag wardrobe at this theater. But throughout the show, I'd had a huge crush on the guy who played my husband. He was so cute. His name was Sean. He was adorable. On the last night of the show, we were super excited. And I was in my dressing room

getting my makeup off and packing up all of the stuff that I had with me. And he knocked on my dressing room door and asked if I wanted to go out for a drink after the show. And I was super excited. But then I realized I had all of my drag with me. So I piled everything into a cab. I mean, there was so much stuff. There were big, huge bags of wigs and shoes and my entire makeup kit, which was essentially a giant tool chest. I had a hand beaded dress that my drag mother had had made for me to my body. And I piled it all into the cab. And I was headed to my friend's house to drop it off. And we were about a block away. And all of a sudden, my phone rang. And this is before the days of screening calls, everybody picked up their phone. So I

picked up my phone. And it was an old friend of mine who I'd lost touch with. I said, you know, oh, I really want to talk and get back in touch, but I'm getting out of a cab right now. And I paid the cab driver the money. And I said, let me call you back in five minutes at this number. And I got out of the cab and she said, okay, great. I'll call you in five minutes. And I closed the door and I hung up the phone and I turned around and the cab was gone. No. And that was the last time I saw Sharon Peters. Well, that iteration of Sharon Peters.

Oh, Tim. Oh my gosh. That's so sad. It was, it was actually awful. It was, I, I, I went on the date. You still went. I still went. I still went. I wasn't going to miss that.

And I still had hope at that point. I thought, well, somebody, they'll turn it to lost and found. I was on the phone with the taxi commission lost and found for every day for the next two weeks until finally I realized it's just not coming back. Oh my gosh. That's so, I mean, like, how did you come to terms with that loss? Like, does it still hurt to talk about? Well, I mean, certainly if that cab driver is out there right now and he hears this, I still want my stuff back. Yeah, I guess it's been 20 years since that happened. Like, looking back, how do you feel like your relationship with drag has evolved or changed after that big incident? Do you think it was like a good thing, a bad thing?

Oh, I think it was a little bit of both. I think now when I do drag, I, you know, I've always been a perfectionist. But when you're doing it three times a week, you don't necessarily have time to really consider what you're doing. You're just sort of, oh, I have to put a look together for tonight. And I, you know, I have to meet, be there at 10 o'clock and do all of those sort of normal things. When I have a gig now, I have the runway and the time to spend like really perfecting my look and really getting something special together. So I spend more time on each event and I really enjoy that. So that's really, I think the biggest change, you know, and I certainly don't do it as often as I did. And I think, who knows, even if I hadn't lost Sharon

Peters in a cab, I probably would be in the same situation, I think, in the end. I guess it's a better story to have lost her in a cab. You know, it's more dramatic. It is. It is. Yeah, I mean, I guess at least Ubers, you can like, like message the driver and they might bring it back and they might not. Yeah, I mean, theoretically, I left a Reba McIntyre baseball cap in an Uber and I or in a Lyft actually, and I texted them immediately and still haven't heard anything. So we'll see. It's been a couple weeks. Oh, come on, Lyft, get it together. Oh my gosh, that's so important. Is that the most important thing you've lost in a ride share?

Oh my gosh, that's so important. Is that the most important thing you've lost in a ride share? No, it is not actually. I also so I don't drink any longer, but I used to drink quite a bit. And that meant that I took a lot of cabs because, you know, I'm like, what's what's 30? Well, I mean, I live in New York, so it was either taking the subway or a cab. So I would argue maybe not responsible. It was more like, I'm a winner but, uh, I did borrow what my boyfriend called his Carmen San Diego jacket, which was a floor length, red leather trench coat. And I, it was a beautiful coat and it fit me like a glove and I left it in Uber.

And, uh, I don't know if he's ever forgiven me for it. It's still a point of contention. It's still something where he, his eyes get misty and he looks far off and, uh, there far off and the anger is contained, but it's still there. I mean, when you lose something, what's the emotional journey you go on? Is there like an arc of loss? So my grandmother taught me that when you lose something, you pray,

St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please please come around something is lost and something is found so i still do that um and then you know there's still shame it's just like you know you want to keep things together you want to hold things together and then it's you know it's wrapped up in like oh my god i'm a slob nothing has a proper home uh you know i'm never going to get my life together and uh then there's the sweet relief of either replacing it or finding it. But otherwise, St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and something needs to be found. Can you introduce yourself? Yo, my name's Chioki Ianson.

Chioki, I'm sure everyone's wondering why you sound so familiar. Do you mind giving our listeners a little taste of what they might have heard from you? Support for NPR comes from NPR stations. Amazing. Yeah, you are one of the voices that says all the NPR sponsorship stuff. Somebody's got to sell the people the mattresses. But Chioki, you're here today because you're also a doctor of philosophy, right? That is unfortunately true. Unfortunately, I think that's awesome.

I think that you don't know how much grad school costs. Well, yeah, we have a story we want your philosophical take on. We've been talking about an index Uber published recently of things people have lost in rides. And we're curious about why losing things affects us so much. Okay. Well, you're familiar, of course, with the works of Soren Kierkegaard. Sure. Yeah.

So then, as you know, in one of his great works, The Sickness Unto Death, he talks a lot about despair. We often think that we're upset because we lost something, right? But Kierkegaard suggests that actually we're not upset because we lost something. We're actually despairing over ourselves. When you lose the thing, you no longer get to be the self that you wanted to be with the thing. So it's like I lost my big gold nail clippers. So I lost the part of myself that was clipping my toenails with the strong toenail clipper. I was clipping my toenails with the strong toenail clipper. You didn't lose a part of yourself.

You lost the whole entire self that you got to be with the nail clippers. I mean, think about how significant this is in terms of where these items are lost. They're lost like an Uber. That means that you chose these things to take with you. These are the things that make it possible for you to be you. And so now there's this split. There is a self that you would have been if you had these objects. And now there's the self that you are, which quite seriously is the self that you did not want to be. Well, can we run you some of the objects on the list from Uber and ask you, you know, maybe what that person has really lost?

All right, let's do it. All right. These are real, by the way. Okay. So first is a bucket of slime. What does that mean? I mean, I think that it says that they had a whole lot of slime. I think that the only way a person can forget a bucket of slime is if they had multiple buckets of slime. Okay.

Okay. How about this one then? Part of my soft serve machine. Oh, no. No, this is the worst case scenario. You have the other bits with you and they're just taunting you for the mistake that you made.

So maybe this person has really lost not only their future of soft serve, but also the identity of another thing, right? They don't get to even claim that they're an ice cream maker now. That's hard. That's an identity right there. Okay, how about this one? One more.

A woman size 20 floor length red leather trench coat, a.k.a. like a Carmen Sandioco jacket. trench coat, a.k.a. like a Carmen Sandiego jacket? I can't imagine a living being who maybe even knows who Carmen Sandiego is losing this jacket and having that have been their only means of making a statement. So what have they lost? I think at the very least, they just lost a covering. And I think that they're simply going to fill that external space now with their personality. Oh, I like that. It's more of an opportunity then. I think that anyone that loses a jacket of that sort welcomes the opportunity to be even louder than their jacket was. Okay, what do you think would happen if that person got a new red jacket that was close, but not exactly the same as the old jacket? Do you think that would fill the hole?

Oh, so now we're talking about proximal fulfillment. Yeah, whatever that means. fulfillment. Yeah, whatever that means. I mean, recently I got a new motorcycle helmet. My new helmet does all the stuff the old helmet does. And yet I am irritated by its presence because it doesn't do the stuff in the way that I remember the stuff being done. And so I think that all new objects are in some sense cursed by the old objects that came before them. Okay. Shioke, can you offer any advice or a way for people to process if they've lost something and how to move on from that? I think that it's a moment not to just think about how you can go about replacing it, but think about what other kind of self can you be in its absence? I think that to lose a thing is a possible moment of growth.

St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. Something is lost. It needs to be. St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and needs to be... St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and something is found. Well, hi Emma, it's good to see you again. Good to see you again. Do you want to tell us who you're with? I'm here with Dusty, my boyfriend slash life partner of 11 years.

And we got a surprise box from npr delivered to my doorstep yeah there's a box in front of you and we're wondering if we can do like a group unboxing and have you talk us through it absolutely yeah all right so dusty is running his scissors through the box the tape of the box right now. It's a slender box. Yes. It is quite slender. It's reduced, reduced, reduced, reused, recycled. It's a reused box. So we've got it open now.

It looks like it's in a beanies bag, the beverage depot place. Okay. All right. So we're here. So we're going to discard this box. All right. The box is gone. Maybe the cat will use it.

I don't know. Oh. Oh. Oh. Maybe the cat will use it. I don't know. Oh. Oh.

Is this a replacement for the red leather jacket that you lost? It's pretty close. It's a size extra large, so it will need to be taken out. But, oh. It was, yeah, the original was double double breasted, but this is very close. It seems like it's the same leather stock. I mean, I know it's not the same, but does this fill does this fill the void that's been festering inside of you since you lost the first one even a little bit? Well, this is the thing.

Ready? So this is very sweet. Well, this is the thing, ready? Oh, no. No, no, this is very sweet. In the 11 years that I have known Shane, I have learned to let go of my obsession with holding on to things that I once deemed irreplaceable. So it's been a great lesson. I've learned it several times.

And that jacket had a beautiful life, and now it lives with someone else. I hope it lives with someone's linebacker-shaped young kid. Oh, that's beautiful. I love that. Yeah, they hopped in the cab after us, and they were like, this is my traveling coat. Yeah, we talked to a philosopher about loss after Shane told us about this story. And Chioki, our philosopher friend, said that he thinks that the person who lost it would now fill the space of the lost item with their personality.

Does that feel accurate? Yeah, I've gained a lot of personality through my loss. Well, let me ask you this. I know you've learned to move on from losing things and processing that kind of possession. And Shioki said there's no such thing as a replacement and it might actually be worse because it reminds you of losing the first thing in the first place.

So do you think this coat will just remind you of the gaping hole the first coat left? No, this coat will remind me of the fact that I'm on a radio show. And, you know, that will live on much longer than the leather that was I mean you know it wasn't ripped it was in great condition that original leather

but this leather is really in pristine condition it's in gorgeous condition yeah and it's got it's got leather covered buttons

and it smells like leather too which I love yeah that's awesome not super strongly but it smells it's got a leather smell I'm stoked to wear it it's got Yeah. I'm stoked to wear it.

It's got, well. I'm stoked to lose it again. Here's the least forgettable part of the podcast, the credits. This show is brought to you by Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. This episode was produced

by Hayley Fager, Zola Ray, and Nancy Seichow. With help from Lillian King, Sophie Hernandez-Simeone, and a bucket of slime. Our supervising producer is Jennifer Mills, and our mother-in-law is Mike Danforth.

Once again, Lorna White, thank you for helping us with our sound. You are amazing, and we love you. Thanks to Tim Larimer for reliving the Greek tragedy that was the loss of Sharon Peters. It's a harrowing tale. And Chioki Ianson, thank you for being the most relatable

and amazing-sounding philosopher we've ever met. Oh no, this is my nightmare. Thank you to my guest this week, reporter for the Styles Desk of the New York Times, and someone who I think would be a dope Dance Dance Revolution partner, Shane O'Neill. Be sure to follow Shane on Twitter and on Instagram, at Shane Island, or in the Times Style section. Have you ever seen a moose? I mean, they are exciting. And also thanks to Shane's boyfriend, Dusty Childers,

for forgiving Shane for forgetting their unforgettable coat. Oh, that sounds sexy. Yeah, I like that. I'm Emma Choi, and you can find me at WaitWaitNPR and measuring out water for cooking rice. Trying to figure out what my mom meant when she says that the water line should come up to your first finger wrinkle? Well, that's it.

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