Aim Higher

coach are people in a position of weakness. Of course, coaches can make the strong stronger, but the real magic happens when a coach attacks a seemingly hopeless situation like this one. That's it, you do. Oh. My strategy has always been to hide my weaknesses, but it's hard to hide this one. My voice this Yeah, I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules. This season has been all about the rise of coaches. For this final episode, I'm hiring myself a coach. It happens every time I

publish a book. I'll be three days into a speaking tour and poof, I won't be able to speak. Last season, the producers of this show tried to get me to record two episodes in a day, only to find that I was incapable of getting so many words out of my mouth without my voice going. It's kind of funny because my wife and children often say that I never shut up, and I sort of wish that it could be true. So take a deep, silent breath in and

hiss one. Two, he'd been strong, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twelve. All right for maybe a man in his nineties with emphzema. I would say that was pretty good, But I'm not going to allow that with you. You must build that up. That's his name, is Eric Vitro. We're in his house in La. If you were there, you could see that Eric isn't just any old voice coach. His walls are decorated with frame records that went platinum and thank you

notes from the singers who recorded them. I'm standing in front of his piano. Behind it is a wall that's more like a mural. The entire thing is filled with snapshots of this coach, with the world's most famous people, hundreds of them, lots of beautiful people taking on the very spot where I'm standing. These are all SuDS. Yeah, Cuba good. Yeah. Do you know Cuba. I don't know anybody. I didn't know he sang anything. Yeah, he's done Chicago Summertide or London and on Broadway one of the nicest

ariana Grande John Legend, pink Seawan Mendez. And they look not just happy to be here, they look grateful, especially the actors who came to him to learn how to sing in a Broadway musical or a Hollywood movie. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling for La La land Renee Zellweger for Judy, Natalie Portman for Everything. The Wall is an Awards show speech waiting to happen? Well, Ferrell say, oh, wouldn't he sing it? I worked on the movie with the Stuck Brothers where he's saying at the end, all right,

all culminates with him singing time to sing by. I can't believe I had the balls to call you up and ask you to do this. I really can't. On a whim, I'd call the agent who turns my books into movies and asked him, who's the coach for actors who need to fix their voices? Say actors who don't normally sing but suddenly need to the answer came back immediately Eric Vetro. Hollywood agents all know just how vulnerable their clients feel. I was petrified. I didn't like singing

in front of people. I always loved singing, but privately in my call in the shower, my own husband had never heard me sing. Even stars need help to shine, the brightest have a sixth sense of where to find that help, like this actress Emily Blunt. Rob Marshall had asked me to audition for other musicals he was doing, and I'd always said no because I was just frozen with fear about the thought. He eventually called my agent. He said, she's coming in. I know she can sing,

She's perfect for this role. I really want her. Tell her to come and I have to hear everyone sing. What was the song? It was Moments in the Woods. It was her big song. This is ridiculous. What am I doing here? I'm in the wrong story. Into the Woods was the hit Broadway show that was then being turned into a movie. Emily Blunt had no idea if she could do the role, but she had a phone number for Eric Vitro. Eric told her what he tells everybody who calls, come to my house for the first

lesson and we'll see. I mean, Eric's how is always spotless, it always smells heavenly, and he's sort of this weird juxtaposition of someone who's incredibly sort of refined and elegant, and then he wears sort of like rocker jewelry, like real thick chains, and sort of he's sort of an interesting image when you look at him. He's usually got a fabulous shirt on. And I remember thinking how cool this guy was and how how effortless he was sort of be around. So I went into his kitchen walk

me through the first like fifteen minutes. We went into his music room and he I think we did some really embarrassing scales or something something that I was just horrified by the idea of. And I felt embarrassed having to do all of these strange mouth exercises, like he makes you do things like ni like stuff like that. Though You're like, how horrifying if someone were to see me do this in your life? Had you had that experience before it? Anybody ever, any kind of nothing, nothing,

Because I didn't go to drama school. I wasn't put through the ring or of doing sort of trust games or physical sort of warm ups or anything I've never done it and or anything like that. Where did the fear and the inhibition come from in you? I don't know. Is it English? Maybe? Maybe it's like if you aren't the very best, that you're supposed to just kind of hide. Even if you are the very best, you're supposed to hide. You're not supposed to enthuse about your own talents where

I'm from, you know, or try too hard. No, you can't, you can't. So even having a voice coach, that's almost like trying too hard. Well, that's interesting to me. Was there a little part of you that resisted that in any way? No? I feel like I desperately needed it. I mean I really really needed it. Emily Blunt got Eric Vitro's coaching for the next few years, and it had magical effects. I mean she became Mary Poppins. Do you ever lie awake at night just between the dark

and the morning light? Such? My problem is obviously not the same as Emily Blunt's. I have no hidden talents and no one suspects that I do. I don't secretly hope to audition for Rob Marshall's next musical. On the other hand, well, I'd better come clean here. My problem with my voice isn't practical, it's spiritual. A long time ago, I basically decided that the last thing I should ever

do is sing. Standing in Eric Vitro's house, I thought how nice it might be to walk through the world without being unsettled by the national anthem or terrified by karaoke night. As you're gonna put the straw in the bottle, you're gonna hum into the straw, which means air is going to be coming through the straw and it's gonna blow bubbles right into the water. Yes, now go, Yeah,

that's it. You want to send that Eric through the straw? Yeah, sometimes out it's funny you feel like around my belly body, Yeah, exactly, that's what I want. The first lesson at Eric's house was just so that he could see if there was any point in having a second lesson over the phone. He said, I could come over, but then it also might be a great waste of time. Now, by the way, I am the most positive, optimistic and supportive people you

will ever meet. I really am supported with my students. However, I really think that whole phrase you can be anyone you want and achieve anything you put your mind to. I think it should be followed by within reason, because you know, that would be like me saying, all right, I'm gonna quit teaching and I'm going to become the greatest basketball player ever. Well, at my age, with my hype and my body type, I don't think that's gonna happen.

I mean that would And if someone said you can do it, Eric, you can put it in and you put your mind to, they would be steering me down the wrong road, right, It would be ridiculous. I was waiting to hear how this story applied to me. Then he told me about the famous actor, the actor who's picture never quite made it onto the wall behind Eric's piano. He made a movie and made a big splash, and everybody wanted to hear him. You know, everyone's like, ooh,

this guy's us. That's a good looking and a good actor. So he was getting a million offers, and one was a Broadway musical and they said, here's the deal, of the producers will pay for unlimited voice lessons. They just want you to prepare him for this. They trust you. You know, money's no object. How often do you really hear that? You know, money's not you. So I was like, oh, this sounds like a great gig. That was until he got here. And when I met him, he was actually

very nice, So that was ices on the cape. Oh, a great guy and just seemed fun to talk to. Then he started singing, Oh my, I was like, ah, it was a terrible and it's worse than what I just did. As he's telling me this story, I'm wondering what else is he trying to tell me? But here's the thing. You know, what are the qualities that you really need to possess to, you know, to be a successful artist and to have a long career. One of them is some kind of self awareness of who you

are and what you should be doing. I kept waiting for him to elaborate. He didn't, But at the end of the session, Eric looked at his schedule and asked when I wanted to do the next lesson and whether it should be at his house or over FaceTime. So I had myself a coach and a new way to deal with what was a complicated problem. Who you got trouble, my friend? Right here, I say, trouble right here in

River City White, Sure, I'm a billiard glare certainly. The Music Man was a musical turned into a hit movie in nineteen sixty two. There are actually plans right now to revive it on Broadway, and you can see why. It's both from another era and totally of the moment. It tells the story of a con man played in the movie by Robert Preston. He rolls into a small town in Iowa and sells musical instruments to parents by

persuading them that their kids are prodigies. He promises to teach them how to play, only he doesn't know a thing about music. The only person in town he doesn't fool is marrying the librarian played by Shirley Jones. She's a prim and proper beauty who teaches piano and sees through the Khan. But the music Man persuades her that he has this magical system. Oh, I now have a revolutionary new method called a think system. Well, you don't

bother with notes. The music Man has found a new and better way to coach, not how to sing or how to play, how to get yourself into a state of mind in which all you want to do is sing and play. Oddly, this musical had exactly the opposite effect on me. A single song, did it? I tell you my phobia, I tell where it comes from it and it's that the latter Rose song. Oh, I couldn't figure out from your text what you were lucky about.

So here's what happened. When I was in the third and fourth and fifth grade, I had the leads in the school players, and it was just I think it was more willingness to get on stage and sing, but I had them. And in fifth grade they cast me in the leading and without telling me that I was supposed to marry on stage a little girl, and there was this It was this awful sequence of events. Childhood is a fun house mirror. Everything in it gets distorted.

I know a woman who became a meteorologist because a storm dropped a tree onto her house when she was ten years old. That tree kicked a little pebble off the top of a hill in her mind and started an avalanche. That kind of thing happened inside my head. Only my tree was a song called Light a Rose, Light a Rose, I'm home again, Rose, dude, get the side. Our fifth grade class was going to stage a version

of the music Man. I thought I'd been duped into singing the musical's one love song to a girl in front of basically the entire world. But then these extremely ancient teachers told me who the girl was, the new girl. She had a birth effect, no fingers on her hands or toes on her feet. She was also wildly bizarrely aggressive, grabbing it boys, pitching fits. I knew I was meant

to be kind to her, and I tried. A ten year old boy with a better character than mine would have just gone along with the whole thing, but I didn't. I told them that I wouldn't do the song, and instead of telling me that I couldn't sing, they wound up telling that poor little girl she couldn't have the role in the play. The teachers had exposed a weakness in my character. Of course, when I was ten, I wouldn't have put it that way, or anyway at all.

I just suddenly had this ugly new feeling a combination of anger and self loathing. There and then I refused ever again to sing in school plays. I told the music teacher I would never again meet her after school. It's funny how phobias start. It was a short skip from refusing to sing to feeling that I shouldn't sing to almost being afraid to sing. I know it's a very strange story and it's got no happy ending to it, but I'm done telling that story to my new coach.

He has an idea. So it's possible that my voice is so bad that you're not gonna be able to do anything at all. So let's see how it goes. I think conquering that song that gave you such anxiety would be fun, would be buzzing conquer, you know. So what I want to do is I want to have you sing the melody, but instead of on the words, you're going to do it on wah wah wah. And I have known a lot of singing teachers, and some of them are just playing nuts. I talked to a

lot of Eric's students. This is Bette Midler, another famous singer on Eric's wall. And there are a lot of quacks too. So you have to be very careful because you could be led down the garden path by people who say that this is the way to do it. When Bett found Eric, she was in a funk. It was two thousand and eight. She was about to open a new show in Vegas, at Caesar's Palace. The dry air was getting to her. But it wasn't just the air.

Something wasn't quite right. She felt more than usually vulnerable. Her backup singers were called the Harlettes. One of the Harletts told her about Eric, so Bett called him up. He started coming to Vegas to help me, and he would come once a week or so and we would warm up, or he would call me on the phone. We would warm up on the phone, and he gave me the taps to warm up with it. And I was religious about it. She didn't just get through the

show's run. She went two years without missing a single performance. The staff at Caesar's Palace told her that that had never happened, so they invented an award to give her. It's still Bette Midler's favorite award, and it's sort of changed her ideas about the value of a coach. There are some songs when I can hear him in my head, I can hear his voice, I can hear certain things that he said in my head. And if I can keep myself from dismissing it, if I can believe it,

I just thank God for him every day. First of all, He's a sunbeam in the world. And I do think that a coach has to be You can't have someone who's going to be abusive. Yeah, they have. They have to You have to know they care about you. Yes, yes, you have to trust them. And trust is absolutely imperative. If you don't trust your coach, you're not gonna make it ready to take deep breath. Okay, Nope, but that's okay. That's why you're here to improve. So yes, we're not listening.

We're not listening to a friend who was standing in our guest copie and he heard me practicing. He I came a piece that I thought that was the garbage truck. No he didn't. It wasn't just the odd house guest. It was the Amazon delivery lady, the guys on the recycling truck, the neighbors. Anyone who came within about thirty yards of me singing assumed a worried expression. One day, I looked at my office window to see a deer staring back at me with a look of concern. Then

there's my children. In happy families, children don't want their parents to change. They really don't want to see them trying to change. One day, my thirteen year old son Walker wandered in with his skateboard under his arm. He grabbed a tape recorder and supplied a running commentary just out of my earshot, and then I just walked down unless my dad going, and he's just run. Okay, it's going to be a next Michael Jackson. Somebody wants to

steal kids. It's hard at the same time to be both a comic character in the minds of everyone around you and also a slayer of childhood demons. But something about this coach made me want to keep on going, just to see where he might lead. So you figure out what they have, You expanded the best, the best you can try to work, and then you worked all about funny out who you are. Isn't that life in general?

But it's it's really true. But it's and I think it's the key to life, you know, and finding, you know, that combination of what you do best and what you love the most, right, what you enjoy the most, because that's what you're going to want to practice right. If you're doing a style of music that you don't like, you're not going to want to practice it right. So it becomes meaningless, like like they'll tell me, oh, so and so tried to get me to blank blink, Like

I go, that's not what you want to do. Then you're you're really trying to fit up a square pain around the whole. Right, you've got to have some kind of love or passion for it, right has to. This entire season has been mainly about the effects that coaches have. We haven't talked much about why they do what they do. There's lots of reasons someone might decide their passion is to sing, but passion for helping others learn to sing.

It's hard to explain sometimes, but you know, you feel like you are getting as much as you are giving, like to see the improvement, to see people get excited. All of that it comes back at you like a rush, like a rush of adrenaline. Really is what it is. Or to see someone complimented, or if you read a good review. I would never say, oh, I take credit for that. I don't feel that, but I know I had something to do with it. I was a part of it, and that just and it makes me so

happy for that person. One day I asked Eric how he became a coach with a completely straight face. He said that it had all started in the fifth grade. This show can't seem to move on from the fifth grade, but such as life. By the time he got to the fifth grade, Eric loved music but didn't get much encouragement from his parents. Then his class stage of music, just as mine had. The most popular boy in aris class wanted to play the lead, but he didn't know

how to sing. He knew because I was playing the piano in the morning, you know, for the kids to sing the Star Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, And he said, I want to audition. And meanwhile, by the way, we're talking at like a ten minute skit. It wasn't a big thing. But to us, you know, when you're that age and you're in a school, you're surrounded by people who really matter to you, all those classmates, and there's so many hierarchies and levels and all of that going on.

So he was popular, he was athletic, he was, you know, all the positive things you could be for boy in the fifth grade, and or I guess in any grade really, And so he said, can you teach me this song? And I said sure. So we walked home. My house was probably twenty five minutes from the school. He walked home with me and I sat at the piano and I taught him the song and we went over and over and over it. That bonded us forever. You know what.

We didn't sit at the same table and lunch whatever, but whenever I would see him from that time on until graduating high school, we were walking down the hall, he'd give me that nod, I'd give him that nod, like we had that bond. It was amazing. It was a really special thing we had between us. And so Eric just started to help other kids who needed to sing. He didn't really think of it as a job until one day when he was in college, a classmate auditioned

for a Broadway show. She offered to pay Eric to help her. After that, he built an entire career on word of mouth. People just heard about this guy's rare coaching gift and called him up. He never really had to market himself or push himself on others. They found him, what did it feel like You're gonna yawn? Credible space to back your throw all these strange sounds. I spend

an hour every day making them. I ask him why I'm doing them, and he sort of explains but sort of doesn't, or rather all of his explanations boiled down to a single persuasive sentence. Just follow my lead the way everyone else is done, and I'll get you there. Practice really truly, bet Middler again, my fellow singer. This is ther only piece of advice to me. The more you do it, the better you're going to get. There's no question. There is absolutely no question you will improve.

The more you do it, the better you get, and you find the secrets you find. Well, he told me to do it that way. I can't quite do it that way, but I can do it this way, and it's a pretty good sound, So I like him. My question to you is, how do you sound? How do you like yourself singing? That was a good question, and I was still avoiding the answer. Let's start with a tongue, making sure to connect to your breathing muscles. You're gonna take deep ruts in and you're gonna sing that. I

try it. I try everything very good. Now try it with the lip bubbly and see if you can do it. Yeah, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it, I promise. But I kept thinking of Bette Midler's question, how do I like myself singing? The truth is I feel totally disconnected from my own voice. I sing the way people talk when they're trying to get a foreigner to understand them. When it isn't working, I just do it again, louder.

I also sing with the feeling that something's about to go drastically wrong, like I'm a five foot point guard driving for a layup with a pair of seven footers right behind me. So you're gonna go memo, memo, memo, memo, memo, memo, Mimo, memo, Mimo, Mimo, Mimo, memo, memo, Mimo. Now rolling your head, memo, Mima. The music Man is about a con man. He knows he's a fraud, but

he's happy in the role. I'm less. So wow, even though Eric agrees to take me on as a student, I start with one foot out the door, and I think he kind of knows it. Okay. Good. Looking back on all this, I see our relationship had a bunch of stages. I can count five. You've already heard stage one. He was just feeling each other out to decide if there was any point of spending time together. Stage two

was Eric gradually taking control. But I only notice this happening after I went back over the recordings of all our sessions. It sounded better, Yeah, really really noticeably sounded better. Yeah. I mean from a low baseline, but I noticed the difference. No, that's great. I didn't give you the acid reflux diet. Hot to look at you did? He had given me the acid reflux a diet the first session. This long list of stuff I was now encouraged to consume, plus

a longer list of things I shouldn't touch. No spicy foods, no coffee, no alcohol. It seemed excessive. I mean, no carbonated beverages. You did? Then? Why are you drinking carbonated water in front of me? Oh my god? You caught it? So because you know it's all I have. It's I'm drinking up the remains. I hadn't bought any new ones, but it was what, Okay, your family can't drink the perree? Allright? Busting. I'm sorry. It won't happen again. Could always take a

bath in it. Yeah, that's what I'll do. I'll take a back, right, I'll send it to you. Do you have a dog, You could wash the dog with it. I found that once I got my coach talking, I could encourage him to keep going. Please do tell me how to wash a dog in sparkling order. Yes, I do very much want to hear what Joan Rivers once said about her dog. So long as he was talking, I didn't have to sing. I was creating a kind of alibi that crime against music. No way I could

have committed it. I wasn't even present at the scene. Feel like you're sighing. Make sure you support by using your breathing muscles on that first note and put a slight cry so to be more of a mey memai may good. Now, I guarantee you if you start doing it every day, that will get better and better. How could it get worse? That is not true? All right now, I want to do one keeping a nice and forward, keeping your mouth loose and relaxed. Say yum yum, yum,

yum yum yum. Actually, before we go out further. I know you're being funny, but I know there's always a little truth in every little bit of humor. What I want you to do is stop thinking of it as not good, because as long as you do that, you'll kind of keep it there, you know what I mean, You'll always have a little bit of a sense. While I'm not really a singer, I'm not really good. I want you to start just thinking to yourself as a singer.

You're putting in the time, the effort, you're practicing. Why wouldn't you get better? You know right? Anybody will get better is something they put effort in, time and energy, And so I want you to just start thinking to yourself like a singer. He didn't miss much. He was onto me. It's a defense mechanism, I know, but I

want you to drop it, all right. I want to break through that defense because I really do think when someone feels a little bit better and they tell themselves, you know, self affirming thoughts, it really does make a difference. All right, I won't do it anymore. Yeah, I want you to really just think, yeah, this is better. His will was just stronger than mine. At some point I gave up and accepted that he was in charge. And at that point I entered stage three of the coaching relationship.

Buy in actual, honest, buy in very good. And I heard by Groat on that first note, whoa to do that again? Who wa wa? Wa wa wa. Now aim high on that last note, though, don't let it fall back from your throat. I mean, who knows if I'm actually getting better? I can't tell, but he's giving me a feeling of movement. May may May May May may may may May. So far, that's the briant, the best you've sounded. Does it feel good? It feels really good. Yeah,

and I want you to really embrace it. Feel what it feels like, listen to it because it sounds really good. At some point into all of this, like after maybe three months of weekly lessons and almost daily practice, it occurred to me that one anxiety had been replaced by another. I used to be anxious mostly about singing. Now I'm anxious mostly about letting him down. I think we'll call this stage four. So have you ever taken a ballet class? No?

I haven't, but I've been close to one. Okay, So in ballet class quite often, you know, they talk about getting in touch with and what's the word of connecting to your center? Yep. We'll leave your abdominal muscles then, yep. I'm kind of tight and squeezing your butt cheeks together yep, yep, clanking in the back holding it. Ye, so that's why they stand so straight. Yep, yep, Okay, that's clenching in the bus and pulling your abdomino muscles can help you

with support. Now, I prevertical in front of back to support because I don't want to be known as the butt teacher. And I'm not recording it. He wasn't recording it, but I was, Oh no, no no. So I can tell you if I if I was able to sing with my ass muscles, I'd be on Broadway, right, there's ever going to be a Broadway again. Yeah, well that's a that's a good point. Yeah. Anyway, Okay, getting back

to your bus. So I want you to put one end on your abdominal muscles and you're gonna go to a normal hiss pulling your abdomino munz of it, and then you're going to add clenching your butt cheeks together. Okay, so I'll so. But it just hissed and clenched my butt cheeks while I'm doing it. You're going to do normal ping of your abdomino muscles. Then you're gonna okay, gotcha, wow, oh my god, it was like a howitzer. That's what you're gonna do that behind us, You're going to seats

together and pulling your domino was gonna be liker. That was like a nuke. It was also extremely weird, but it was working, and it got us eventually to stage five. I still didn't really like the way I sounded, but I could see how one day I might like the way I sounded. I was starting to have this entirely new feeling because of this coach, and I sort of confessed it directly to Bette Midler. I don't know if you feel this way, but I found that once you

start singing, it's really hard to stop. That's great, you know, do you know? You know you start saying you kind of don't want to stop. So I find myself one undering the streets after I've been doing a lesson singing, and then I realize people are staring at me. Oh really, Oh that's a sweet story. That's fantastic. I'm going to try that. Now. How has your progress been with you mentally thinking of yourself as a singer? Not bad? Good?

So that interference is gone, and I'm trying to talk myself into this great great because I think that, you know, then it becomes I don't want to say, an experiment, maybe an exercise in not just singing in general, but how powerful the mind can be to creating what it is we want to create in our life. I agree. Okay, so, but one hand on your chest, one hand on your abdominal muscles. Take a deep, low breath and a long steady It's not often that someone persuades you that you

can go to a place you've never been. It's intoxicating, even for people who've been on most everywhere. And actually, the most free thing about Eric is that he encourages you to not make it sound beautiful and perfect, just makes sense of it, like Emily Blunt makes sense of the song. Let me hear the story, Tell me a story. This is what's so elusive about coaching. How a gifted coach can get you to shift the focus of your attention so you're no longer singing a song. You're sort

of exploring who you are or might be. It hit Bette Midler right away. You know what I have to tell you this, This is a good story. When I first care to Eric, I would come to Eric and you don't know me, Michael, but I am. I'm a very sad person. I mean, I can be hilarious, but like many comics I am, I am like a tragic soul, and I can be very hard on myself and very hard on people around me. I'm sorry to admit that. People I'm telling I'm letting you in. This coach knows stuff.

Stuff you never know that he knows. He knows what you might be capable of. If you allow him to help, you might already be world famous and headlining a Vegas show. You also, at the same time might be hating yourself and making life miserable for your coach. And he came to my opening night, and you know what he told me, Like years later, he said to me, when that curtain went up and you came up, I didn't reckon you are you were so full of joy as life and

color and fun and you're such a bust. Recognize she's laughing so hard that you might not have heard what her coach said to her. You were so full of joy and life and color and fun, and you're such a bitch. She loved that he said it then and obviously still loves it now. Oh my god, the poor guy, because I am intense and he is he just never let me go? So yes, he helped me over. He helped me, He helped me over an enormous he helped me climb an enormous mountain, an enormous mountain. You've given

me something. That's why I had to come. I don't recall giving oh, yes, something beautiful. That's why I came back. In fifth grade, after Eric Vitro realized he had this gift for helping people learn how to sing, he began to collect voices. They were a gallery in his mind.

He recalls the first acquisition when he saw a movie called The Music Man, Oh B on the huge but I never I didn't see it in the movie theater, but it was on television one night, and I had this little real to real tape recorders before there was VHS tapes or anything, and I recorded the whole thing so I could listen to it again. I thought Shirley Jones had such a beautiful voice. I used to play it over and over, her singing till there was you, the songs she sings at the end and at the footbridge.

I thought it was so beautiful that was you. It may have been Eric's first experience of paying really close attention to someone else's voice, just studying it, and it was ironic that you became It was her teacher for years, for like ten years, you know, and we became very close. That was a rare false note for Eric Vitro. It doesn't feel at all ironic to me that Shirley Jones, star of the Music Man, would one day call Eric and ask for his help. It feels like his destiny

to help her and maybe me too. So before we sing Lyda Rose, You're chosen song to heal the wound of your child? What are you going to think? What am I going to think? Well? I think probably the best spirit to sing it in is a slightly comic seduction. Okay, it's like an ironic seduction. Okay, So that's the tone. That's good, that's the overall tone, and and it's it's it's sort of like, yeah, Light of Rose, I could understand if you don't want to get married at the

end of this, but I'm giving him my best shot. Okay, Great, So it's an irresponsible, uh love song? Great, all right, So let's sing through Light a Rose, Light a Rose, I'm home again Rose to get the sun back in the sky, Light a Rose, I am home again Rose, about a thousand kisses shine ding dong ding. I can hear the chapel bill chime, ding dong ding at the least suggestion, Oh up the question, light a Rose, I'm home again Rose, without a sweetheart to my name, Light

a Rose? How everyone knows that I'm hoping you're the same. So here is my love song, not fancy or fine, Light a Rose. Oh, won't you be mind? I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks for listening to Against the Rules. Against the Rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced by Audrey Dilling and Catherine Girodo, with research assistance from Lydia Jeancott and Zooe Wynn. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mel o'bell is our executive producer. Our theme was composed

by Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by Stellwagen Siphonette. We got fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our show was recorded by tofur Ruth and Trey Schultz at Northgate Studios in Berkeley. As always, thanks to Pushkin's founders, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. So my last question and then we can get onto

the lesson. If you want to get into the lesson, Is any anyone you ever worked with ask you so much about yourself as you Most of the time people are here just to learn, so they don't really ask that much about me. Yeah, the dury, little big You're always the most interesting person in the room, but you're paying attention to everybody else. I don't know if that's true, but I am paying attention, and you know, I'm sure

you find this too. It's really more interesting to be the person listening to the other people because I know my own story. I've gotta feel the same way.