Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Milestones

They mean something, whether we want them to or not. Prologue: We hear the story of a disastrous birthday party and how it's hard not to see these kinds of moments as symbolic of something bad. (5 minutes) Pilgrim's Progress: Sarah Vowell takes over the family Thanksgiving dinner by bringing everyone to New York. What results is a series of milestones and family firsts. Everyone in the family is the kind of person who prefers to be alone, so the very thing that binds them together as a family actually makes it hard for them to spend time together. (14 minutes) Kodak Moments Of The Dead: The story of Tyler Cassity and how he's trying to remake one of our oldest rituals of commemoration. Tyler is one of the owners of a cemetery called Hollywood Forever, and he's been introducing 20th century technology to American funerals, which haven't changed much since the Civil War. At Hollywood Forever, the cost of a burial includes a video of your life: to be shown at your funeral, to be viewable at kiosks on the cemetery grounds, and to be posted—for eternity—online. (16 minutes) Happy Birthday to Us: Fresh Air host Terry Gross offers her congratulations and some words of wisdom to This American Life to help commemorate the show's fifth anniversary. (2 minutes) Birthday Present: On a commemorative day, it can be hard to feel a real sense of the past and of how time has moved forward. Russell Banks has a story demonstrating what it might take to do just that. He reads "The Moor," from his collection of short fiction The Angel on the Roof. (19 minutes)