From WBEZ Chicago, it's this American Life.
I'm Nancy Updike, filling in for Ira Glass.
Today's show is a rerun, a good one, and I'm going to start with this story that I want to share.
It's a little personal.
I was at Mac, the makeup store, not the computer store.
And I was buying foundation, which I almost never wear.
It's the makeup you put all over your face to give yourself the pretend perfect skin.
And I asked the salesman for help finding the right color.
And he looked at me and he said, almost like he was thinking out loud, he said, your neck, it's so much more yellow than your face.
And then he turned away to start looking for the impossible color that would solve this problem of the yellow right next to the so much more yellow.
And if you're thinking, oh, this was just a sales technique to invent a problem and then offer to fix it with more products, I wish that that had been the case.
But this was not an upsell.
This was a cri de coeur.
The man really just seemed to be expressing his frustration at this stumper of my mismatched face.
And nec, this sort of out of the blue, perfectly sharpened comment stops you cold, because it's not an insult, it's an observation that is true.
You just hadn't thought of it before.
It's shocking because you think, I know myself.
I know what I've got, what I haven't got.
No one's gonna spot something about me that I haven't already seen.
Not true.