Return to Childhood

People who try to revisit their childhoods—what they find and what they do not find. Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks with Kayla Hernandez, a seventh-grader who likes to reminisce about when she was a child, back in fifth grade. She visits Room 211 in her school, where her fifth grade class met, and looks at her old books, thinks about what happened there. She says she knows that decades from now, she won't even remember most of what's happening to her this year, in seventh grade, and that makes her sad. (5 minutes) Ich... bin... ein... mophead.: Alex Blumberg sets out to find a woman named Susan Jordan, who babysat him and his sister for a year when he was nine. He discovers that each of them remembered something about the other that the other would just as soon forget. (20 minutes) Punk In A Grey Flannel Suit: A mortgage broker named David Philp discovers that his old punk band from the 1970s is hot in Japan. He decides to leave corporate life and revisit his teenage years by going back on tour, playing music for the first time in two decades. (12 minutes) Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, David Ben Gurion, And Me!: Host Ira Glass talks with contributor Adam Davidson about how Adam's teenage diaries are filled with his dream of someday becoming the prime minister of a country where he does not even reside. (8 minutes) When We Were Angels: The most innocent possible student uprising imaginable...documented by an actual student, Hillary Frank, using the crude tools of a telephone answering machine and a shiny red boom box. (10 minutes)