Last Night in the diner at the end of the world
This week the NPR show This American Life rebroadcast a classic episode called “24 hours at the Golden Apple.” It’s set in a greasy spoon in Chicago, one of those always-open joints that becomes a neighbourhood’s centre of gravity. Working in shifts, the show’s producers and reporters went full-court press on the place, from 5am on Friday till 5am Saturday, aiming to interview everyone at every table for that entire stretch. They recorded conversations with dozens and dozens of folks, set off against indistinct background chatter. (Which, as anyone who works in coffee shops knows, is a strangely soothing and reassuring sound; it ought to have been included on the Golden Record sent out aboard the Voyager II Spacecraft as the soundtrack of humanity.)
Mark Twain once said “there is no such thing as an ordinary life.” Everybody has a story, and the TAL team took it as their mission to draw it of every diner patron willing to trust them. And so up from the depths bubble the mini-bios, the quirky claims-to-fame. One customer reveals he was once the youngest butcher in Illinois. Another helped build the Sears Tower – then the tallest skyscraper in the world – but quit after he watched two co-workers plunge to their deaths. Someone’s new life began the day he threw his job and marriage over the side and bought a pub. Another is keeping the band together, keeping romantic options open, postponing adulthood. In the diner, as day becomes night becomes day again, the regulars cycle through. Lonely, cheery, philosophical, drunk, sentimental, horny, aspirational, insecure. Blind to their blind spots and sometimes wiser than they realize. The episode’s unarticulated question: Is there a some invisible thread that connects all of them? That connects all of us?
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It’s an irresistible premise, the Collective Big Day, and it’s one that has driven multiple film and photo projects. One turn of the earth simultaneously experienced by everyone in (your country here).
The aim is to enshrine the lowly average day with a kind of nobility. And prove that tiny gestures often add up to something that reverberates down the eons.
Many years ago, the former Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten hit on the idea that “a single random day, midnight to midnight, is the most irreducible unit of human experience.” He set out to investigate the wild claim that, just maybe, “every single day encompasses the full human condition.” He drew a date out of a hat – Dec 28, 1986 – and spent six years bird-dogging stories that unfolded on that day, from a precarious heart-transplant surgery to an AWOL weather vane. “We are all serving time on death row,” he concluded in the book that resulted, called One Day. “Only the length of our stay is indeterminate… Dead people, walking. If our lives are to be fulfilling, we must be grateful for the experience alone.”
Tuning in again to that TAL episode in the Chicago diner, I thought of Don McKeller’s film Last Night, a Y2K yarn set on the eve of the apocalypse that plants the question, What would you do if you knew this was it, that you’d never see another dawn? Who would you want to flame out with? What secrets would you reveal? What promises would you keep? I got the sense that, for those folks at the Golden Apple, this would be their choice: to lean in, steep in each other’s company and ask Donna to warm their coffee one last time.
Edward Hopper was often told that his famous painting Nighthawks (pictured above)– that near-empty diner with a few straggling regulars passing a nuit blanche together – was the ultimate symbol of urban melancholy and isolation. He himself wasn’t so sure. Hopper started painting it right after Pearl Harbor was bombed and America jumped into the war. Nighttime government-imposed blackouts plunged US metropolises into near-total darkness. Hopper might have imagined a brightly lit diner as an oasis of normalcy amid the chaos. Instead of the lone figure Hopper often marooned in his paintings, this time there were four to keep each other company. Nighthawks, one critic noted, may be speaking “to some inner need for social connection in a time of fear and isolation.”
Maybe that’s why NPR chose to air the Golden Apple episode again now.