Push-Up Contest

Zoe's dad made a bra that changed the world. Will it change her? A feature from my friends over at the audio magazine Signal Hill https://www.signalhill.fm/issue-two/#editors-note Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Avery Trufelman?

  Hey there, it's Avery here. Okay, a little housekeeping. I'm putting the final edits on my book and I'm working on the episodes for 2026. There's going to be one a month this year, and I cannot wait to share them. I actually just got back from China, so I'm writing this at 3:00 in the morning. I'm so jet lagged, but wait until you hear the story that I found there. I'm very excited for that one. I'm also working with some of my favorite minds in fashion to develop new episodes and ideas, including a story about bras and how they work and whether or not we need them. But, oof, I need a little more time to get it all together. So I wanted to share a different podcast that I really like.

• 0:42Avery Trufelman?

  This is also a story about bras, but with a very different perspective. This is a piece from Signal Hill, which is an audio magazine. It's such a smart concept. They publish all kinds of audio documentaries from all different contributors, long-form reported work, short essays, reviews, poems, and it's packaged together in issues that you can subscribe to. But I particularly loved this dispatch from their last issue. It's called "Push-Up Contest" by Zoe Kerland, and it's about how her dad designed a bra that changed the world. It's a delight. I'll have that for you after this little break.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Hey there, it's Robyn from PRX. If you're a longtime listener of Radiotopia, you may know that we had a podcast that ran from 2016 to 2020, discussing every episode of the show The West Wing. Well, I'm excited to tell you The West Wing Weekly is back. Joshua Molina, who starred on The West Wing as Will Bailey, and Rishi Kesh Hirway, creator and host of Song Exploder, have reunited to discuss the hit Netflix political thriller, The Diplomat. Just as they did in their original run, they're discussing each episode of the series in sequence, joined by special guests from the show and from the real world of diplomacy. Rishi and Josh will be wrapping up the first season with a special live taping at Union Chapel in London on November 14th. Subscribe now to The West Wing Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:10Avery Trufelman?

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• 2:53Avery Trufelman?

  Start shopping now at the realreal.com articals. And now, Push Up Contest by Zoe Kerland.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Stop slamming your foot. And also, you might want to just sit on your hands. I mean, the rings are collateral chattery.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  I don't want them off.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Don't, okay.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  I think you just took off 11 rings.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  It should be 13. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. Oh, 14. Thank you very much.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  14 rings. And how many bracelets?

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Well, 1, 2, 3, 4.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  This is my dad, Jeffrey Kerland. He's a costume designer for movies, and he dresses like it. Patterned shirts, elaborate knitwear, scarves and pocket squares, vintage loafers, all of those rings you just heard, and bracelets and chains. He has wavy, shoulder-length hair. His style is luxurious, timeless, and a little genderless, like Tilda Swinton as Orlando or a Renaissance prince.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Eclectic, in a word, I think probably is the best word.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Today, for example, he's wearing a poncho, and I assure you, he's pulling it off.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Probably the first thing that people notice about me is what apparel I happen to be wearing at the time. Shoes, jewelry, it's all there.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  I grew up watching my dad use clothes to transform people into characters. They'd step in front of the trifold mirror under fluorescent fitting room lights. As they moved, the reflective panels multiplied their bodies to infinity, making them into mythical, multi-limbed creatures. And then he would slice them into pieces with his measuring tape, searching for golden ratios: 28, 23, 27, or 41, 35, 40. Finally, he'd reconstruct them via textile, giving them contours they didn't come into the room with. As a kid, sitting in the corner of the fitting room, I witnessed this transformation over

• 5:38Speaker 02

  and over again. My dad designed the costumes for some very iconic movies: My Best Friend's Wedding, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ocean's Eleven, Inception. But of all of his movies, I have one very clear favorite. The movie came out in the year 2000, but I didn't see it until a decade later. I was 15, curled up on the couch at a friend's house. Exavialent chromium can be very harmful. So it kills people? Oh, yeah. You're a lawyer? Hell, no. I hate lawyers, I just work for them. We're going to have to spend a little time filling in the hole.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Don't talk to me like I'm an idiot, okay?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  I think we got off on the wrong foot here.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  That's all you got, lady: two wrong feet and ugly shoes.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  You gotta find a different job or a different guy. Erin Brockovich. For the uninitiated, the movie stars Julia Roberts as Erin, a dogged, whip-smart, foul-mouthed paralegal who helps a small desert town in California take on an energy company that's poisoning their water.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  Why are there medical records and blood samples in real estate files? Would you mind if I investigate this a little further?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  At the end of the movie, Erin handily defeats Pacific Gas and Electric in court and wins a $333 million settlement for the town, all while raising her three kids as a single mom. The whole thing is based on a true story. Erin Brockovich is a real person who really did all that stuff.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Watching the movie at 15, I swooned. Julia as Erin was just it. Her "take no prisoners" attitude, her smile, and notably, her clothes. Erin clomps around the hot, sun-bleached town of Hinckley in high heels, miniskirts, skin-tight vests, leather, laces, gold belts, animal print, red. Her curly blonde hair is gigantic, tossing around in the dry wind.

• 7:38Speaker 05

  Now that you're working here, you may want to rethink your wardrobe a little.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Is that so? Well, it just so happens, I think I look nice. And as long as I have one ass instead of two, I'll wear what I like, if that's all right with you.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  And then, there were her boobs. Whether she's running circles around the dumb men trying to keep her from the truth or deftly scaling the side of a swimming pool to fish out a dead frog, Erin's cleavage is just right there. It's basically a star in its own right, catapulting past the zip-up neckline of a halter top, smashed together at the center of a corset, pole-vaulting over the top button of a sheer leopard blouse. Some people write her off as a bimbo, but that's actually part of her power.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  What makes you think you can just walk in there

• 8:36Speaker 05

  and find what we need?

• 8:40Speaker 04

  They're called boobs, Ed.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  I was a late bloomer. At 15, I still looked 12, pre-alphabet-chested, and I wished for boobs incessantly. Plus, as a teenager, I thought constantly, paranoically, about how to look amazing and also how to look like I didn't care. In the golden glow of my friend's TV, I was mesmerized by Erin. I wanted to know how I could look like that. Be like that?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  I'm 30 now, basically the same age as Julia Roberts was when she played Erin Brockovich. Lately, I feel like I'm going through a new kind of puberty.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  After feeling, for a decade, like I'd largely escaped the fray of adolescence, I'm suddenly, once again, stepping from what feels like one life phase to another. No longer young, but not yet old.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  There's something mushy and liminal about this age. The vague feeling of being at a turning point. Like I'm supposed to be solid, crystallized, in some new identity that I don't quite understand yet.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  In this liminal moment, suggestion is powerful. I'm not immune to the rhythmic push and pull of society/culture/the algorithm, which is telling me I should be ageless, have a baby tomorrow, and adopt a meat-only diet for some reason. I see pictures of my friends getting married, or somehow working from Tahiti, or like, looking really amazing in a hat. And not since I was 15 have I thought this much about how other people might see me. Should I become a hat person?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  When I was a teenager, Erin was a vision of a shining adult future I could look forward to when I reached that point. But now, I'm there, or here, rather. And I guess I'm still wondering, in some way, how to look like that, be like that.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  You see Erin Brockovich, you see Julia Roberts, you have to transform that into that. That's just the job. And if you're good at it, you can do it. And if you're not, you can't. You're either good or you're not. I'm good. I am good.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  It dawns on me, as I enter the Erin chapter of my own life, somehow, I'd never actually asked my dad about the making of Erin Brockovich. I don't know, when you were just saying, like, that you were transforming Julia into Erin, like, where did you start with that?

• 11:37Speaker 03

  The logical place was in The Bust.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  The Bust.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  It's the most noticed, probably noticed, property of Erin when you meet her. She features that, and you see it. It's there. And she's not ashamed of it, nor should she be.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  In 1999, Julia Roberts was known as this statuesque, classic, clean-lines-type-of-beautiful, sexy-in-and-essentially-flat-chested kind of way. To put it bluntly, she didn't really have the boobs for this job. Please note, though, that my dad would never call them that. You're so good at using words that are kind of not crass to describe bodies.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Because I find bodies beautiful. I have no, I have no reason to be crass about them. I don't think anything's crass about them, male or female. And I also have great respect for the actor. I mean, you can't, I would never say, Julia, your boobs. I would just never do that. Because that's, that's just inappropriate. It's a serious business. You know, it was not a joke. We were trying to create something real.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  My dad takes his work extremely seriously. Fake boobs were not on the table. That would be anti-real. But this was the 20th century. Push-up bra technology of the time was not up to the task.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Regular bras didn't work.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  So my dad and his collaborator, seamstress Mary Ellen Fields, got creative.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  We used everything there was out there. They made these little things called cutlets. They would use for people who had to have mastectomies. They had gel in them, so they moved rather like a bosom. And so that was very helpful also. And then it was just the bra itself, just the tightening and the pushing and the pulling and the filling and all of that. So it was pads on the side, pads on the bottom, tight through the back and close in the front.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  After much trial and error, hours in the fitting room, they got it.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  In the end, basically, her bosom sat on a shelf in the bra that lifted it and pushed it together.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Do you remember when people saw Julia for the first time in the outfits? Oh, they loved it. Everyone was like, "Ah, ah, ah." Just they thought it was great, you know, because it was a transformation.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  On screen, the bra did exactly what it was supposed to do.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  It's a wonderful scene when she goes to the Hall of Records.

• 14:14Speaker 06

  What can I do for you, Erin?

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Well, believe it or not, I'm on the prowl for some water records. And there's a guy there, and he doesn't want to show her the books. And she leans into the counter and she pushes her forearms on her bust and she features it, she pushes it forward. You know, it would probably be easiest if I just squeezed back there and poked around myself. Would that be all right with you? And it's just, it looks incredibly ample, large, and it's perfect. Well, I'll call you if I need anything.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  All right.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Okay. Thank you. It's great. And she just used it. She just naturally just did it. And that's what I wanted. I didn't want her to think about it. I wanted it to, I wanted her to feel like that was her.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Growing up, I knew that Erin Brockovich was a capital B big deal movie for my dad. It was a massive hit. Julia Roberts won her first and only Oscar for it. We had my dad's drawings of the costumes framed in our house. But I didn't know how big a deal the bra itself was until I started researching this story. I found lots of footage of Julia Roberts on the Erin Brockovich press tour. She's asked about her cleavage in nearly every interview.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  There was cleavage, there was... Lots of cleavage. Lots of cleavage. Yeah.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Here she is with noted sex pest Charlie Rose.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  Cleavage for days. Cleavage for days.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  There was, of course, a slightly leering tone to a lot of these interviews. But Julia talked a lot about the bra on her own, too, even in more recent interviews, like here on The Graham Norton Show in 2023, when she was asked about how she got into character as Erin.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  I just listened to audio tapes of her being interviewed by the director and got myself a really, really beautifully engineered bra.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  I remember.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  That person saying "I remember" in the background is Cher, as in the mononymous singer-actress extraordinaire. Even Cher noticed the beautifully engineered bra. Everybody did.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Oh, Erin Brockovich. Fabulous. So fabulous.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  The bra was such a sensation that it inspired knockoffs. A British lingerie designer started marketing Brockovich bras. And then she had the gall to claim that she had actually created the bra worn by Julia Roberts in the movie herself. Totally false, of course. My dad defended his honor to the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Was it funny to you that that even... No, that's never funny. When someone tries to steal your thunder, that's not funny. I don't find that funny.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  After the movie, there was a push-up bra wave that took over the world. My dad shouldn't get all the credit for that, but it seems safe to say that he and that highly engineered Frankenbra were part of the upswing, which lasted through the mid-tens, when boobs gave way to butts for a time.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  It was around that time, the peak of the boob era, perhaps, that mine finally arrived. It must be said that they are the most average breasts in the world. Ever since they showed up, I've felt completely ambivalent about them. They can be paraded out like party balloons or put away like socks in a drawer. They're malleable pieces of equipment and they're not quite a part of me. And I've never invested much in bras. For the last few years, I've seen them as a sort of blight on the bust, a sometimes necessary evil. But as Erin Brockovich resurfaces in my life, I'm starting to reconsider that opinion.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Everything worked because that character was created from underneath to feature what was on top.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  The character was created underneath. I love that. The character was created from underneath. I've heard my dad say this before, but this is the first time it really clicked for me. In Erin Brockovich, the bra was more than a bra. It was a place that this amazing performance of confidence, ease, paralegalic badassery could radiate out from. The message is clear. I need to buy a push-up bra.

• 18:53Avery Trufelman?

  How will this push-up bra fit? How will it look? All answers will be revealed after the break. When my husband and I moved to a new apartment earlier this year, it was much smaller than our last apartment. And we suddenly were like, how do we deal with all our stuff? This is where Wayfair came in. Wayfair is the go-to place for affordable, stylish home furnishings. And they have some inventive solutions I never would have thought of on my own, like a bathroom caddy that fits exactly over the toilet to fit all my excess spillover skincare supplies. Wayfair has thousands of products across every single style, every single budget, whether you're simply replacing an appliance or transforming your home from

• 19:36Avery Trufelman?

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• 20:04Avery Trufelman?

  I first heard about The RealReal, I think, a decade ago. Suddenly, it was this place where you could get Prada pumps and Burberry jackets and Gucci handbags for a song. Like, I recently got this vintage 90s Yoji Yamamoto skirt that I wear constantly. The RealReal is adding thousands and thousands of items every single day. So it really does still feel like a treasure hunt, even though it has all the convenience of shopping online. And I periodically use it to clean out my closet. They make it so easy. The RealReal sends a representative to my tiny apartment to pick up my things and assess them for me. And then it's done. Money just appears in my account. The RealReal is the most trusted name in authenticated luxury resale.

• 20:45Avery Trufelman?

  With over 10,000 new arrivals daily, no one does resale like The RealReal. And now, get $25 off your first purchase when you go to therealreal.com slash articles. That's therealreal.com slash articles to get your $25 off. Start shopping now at therealreal.com slash articles. We are back with reporter Zoe Kerlin's story about a bra that her dad designed that changed the world. Zoe is about to try on a push-up bra of her own.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Thankfully, to get this kind of bra now, one does not have to enlist my dad.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh, this looks incredible. So today, I'm trying the new Skims Ultimate Super Push-Up Bra. This is the most flattering bra. And the color? Chef's kiss. This is the before and look at how full and naturally rounded it looks after. Obsessed.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Many thanks to the slew of influencers, mostly Australian for some reason, who turned me on to the latest in bra technology. Kim Kardashian's underwear brand, Skims, has apparently picked up where Jeffrey Kerland left off. I placed my order online, $58 plus shipping. It comes in this kind of chic, frosted, plastic bag. It's like so modest. It's like, ooh, what's inside? What's inside is this sort of pearlescent nude bra. It's very smooth. It's very soft. It looks like Barbie boobs.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  The bra is sort of sexy, but also deeply sanitary, like your skin, but also not. It's pretending to be something essential and corporeal. You, but better, exclamation point. Okay, I'm gonna try it on.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  I will take you with me

• 22:44Speaker 02

  to do so.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm walking over to the mirror. Nope. Or yes, I don't know. The bra did do some kind of job, pushing my flesh together and up. I showed my boyfriend the contraption, breast apparatus. What do you think? By the way, he asked me to pitch shift his voice for anonymity.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  I thought it was gonna make them look big, but they kind of just look long.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Long. Long.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Long!

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Hearing this reaction from totally anonymous focus group participant number one, I had an acute experience of body horror, imagining my long breasts animated like a Looney Tunes cartoon, extending from my chest like headlight beams, further and further, wrapping twice around the circumference of the earth.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  When I was studying film in college, I read a book by the film theorist Mary Ann Duan about femme fatales. She wrote, "If the femme fatale over-represents the body, it's because she's attributed with a body, which is itself given agency, independently of consciousness. In a sense, she has power despite herself." Walking around town with broad-up boobs, I wasn't sure how to harness their power. In a tank top, they were enormous and felt like a malevolent parasite. Sentient puppets affixed to my body with their own thing going on. I felt, on some level, slightly unreal, like I was looking at myself from the outside,

• 24:37Speaker 02

  watching myself like a character in a movie. What was her story? Truth be told, it seemed less like the intrepid exploits of a woman in stilettos fighting the power and more like the tale of a sturdy lass working the barley fields, churning butter. Not exactly what I was going for. When my dad told me the story of making the Erin look, he'd said the hard part was making her feel real. And not just to the people watching the movie, but to Julia herself.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Now, I also had to create an Erin Brockovich that was true to her, but also that Julia Roberts could perform something that she, a skin that she felt comfortable in also.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  I went back to the interviews with Julia, and I felt like I could kind of hear what my dad was talking about, that Julia had to find a place between the real Erin and the real her and get used to it.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  Your costume, I know everyone's talking about the cleavage thing and all that, but the costumes, now, how fun for you to go into wardrobe every day and find out what you're gonna wear? And what kind of comments were you getting from the crew?

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Uh, fun. I don't know, you know, a great...

• 26:01Speaker 04

  There was a great sense of intrigue. I would walk ahead and kind of look at my bed every morning and go, hmm, that's an approach. But then I got used to it after a while. Everybody got used to it.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  I wondered what that process was like for Julia. What had inhabiting that skin actually felt like? How had she done it? And then I thought, I'm a journalist. I could just ask her.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  So I called her agency. Thank you for calling CIA. How can I help? I got in touch with an assistant. My name's Zoe Kurland, and I'm an audio producer. Great. Okay. Can do. What is your email? Okay. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Bye. And then, after weeks of attempting various communiques over email with an orboros of agents and assistant agents... Hey, um, my name's Zoe Kurland. Costume designer Jeffrey Kurland. I was looking to speak to someone about possibly interviewing Julia Roberts. Notably, and basically I wanted to see if she's got an story for an interview. Either over the phone or through email.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  I gave up. Of course Julia Roberts wasn't going to call me back. Maybe, at long last, she was over talking about the boobs.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  I had been foiled in my quest, and I was sitting in my dejection when it hit me. What I really wanted to know wasn't what it felt like to be an actor, to put on a bra that turned me into another person. It was how to inhabit my own, actual body. The Aaron aura I was seeking didn't start with Julia Roberts. She too was copying someone. I realized I was calling the wrong Aaron. And this time, when I called, the right Aaron picked up.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  Hi, it's nice to meet you.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  You too. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  Sure, my pleasure.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  This is Erin Brockovich, the real Erin Brockovich, talking to me on Zoom. Her hair is swept up into a voluminous updo, huge glittering smile, jangly bracelets, a black v-neck top. She's 65 and tanned, coming to me from what looks like a new agey home office. Stone floors, leather furniture, a Buddha head next to her desk.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  It kind of tripped me out to see the real Erin. When I pictured Erin Brockovich, I'd pictured Julia Roberts. Now here was this completely different woman. Erin was, of course, very familiar with this confusion. She told me she was maybe more surprised than anyone when Julia Roberts was chosen to play her.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  I'm fun. I'm crazy. I'm that girl from Kansas. Cute, fun. I'm not statuesque. I was thinking more along the lines of like, maybe Goldie Hawn.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  And I wonder, when you saw her in her costume, what did you think, seeing a weird mirror version of yourself?

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Well, when I first met her on set, I was getting hair and makeup done.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Erin was there to shoot a cameo part in the movie.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  And I saw her in the mirror come in and she went through a door to the right. And she didn't know I was going to be there. So she came back out and walked behind my chair. I'm watching this in a mirror. And she stopped after she passed the chair and she turned around. And she's looking at me and I'm looking at her. She goes, hi, I'm Julia. I go, hi, I'm Erin. And she goes, I'm so embarrassed. I don't even have my boobs in yet. So that actually happened.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Then for the actual cameo. The director, Steven Soderbergh, thought it would be fun to play into this mirror image thing. He'd asked Erin to play a diner waitress, serving Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  I'm like, yeah, no, I don't want to do this. He goes, you're going to do it. You'll be sorry if you don't. Um, I don't always. A light to be seen. I've been that way forever. So generally, if I see a camera, I will turn.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  My dad had stitched a name tag onto Erin's diner waitress costume. I don't know what possessed him to do this. It feels almost diabolical, but it read Julia.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  It was weird because I'm Julia, talking to Julia who's Erin. It was like an out of body experience.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  In the bright lights of the movie diner, caught in a cameo she didn't want to be in, Erin experienced a split between herself and the person that the world would come to see as her. When you saw the costumes, when you saw the movie, did you feel like it was accurate? Do you feel like it, it made sense?

• 30:54Speaker 04

  It felt good to me. The style felt good to me. It felt true to me. And it wasn't always one thing. I'm very eclectic with that.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  I was kind of surprised to hear how blasé Erin was about seeing what I considered to be the most iconic set of outfits in movie history. I had the sense that Erin was really particular about what she wore and that the costumes reflected that. But she told me that back in Hinckley, that hadn't been true at all.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  I wasn't focused on outfits or wardrobes, you know? I'm very comfortable in heels. I just am. Um, I have a high arch. I got a tight calf. And so I am comfortable that way. Now, in many, many, many instances out in Hinckley, it is very hot. Hot is a human blow dryer. So the less I had on, the more comfortable I was. I wasn't in the courtroom. I'm not the attorney. I, I was a person out there that was attached to the people, to the environment, and that's where I was.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  I was collecting hazardous waste. I was just comfortable in my shoes, but I would generally wear short shorts. The cleavage thing I get. The bra kind of conversation surprised me because there would be many days out there, actually, I didn't have on a bra. Uh, it's not like I was wearing see-through shirts, but I'd have on, you know, a T-shirt, a black T-shirt, short sleeved, with shorts because I was hot.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  It sounded like the way Erin dressed had always been natural to her. She wore what she liked, what worked. But she told me that after the movie, things started to change.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  You gotta remember, I was thirty-one years old, thirty-two years old, when I began my work in Hinckley. I was pretty overwhelmed. I felt a shift of you're trying to now make a person into this idea of what you think somebody who's had a film made about him is supposed to look like, walk, talk, and dress and behave.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Not to be totally insane, but it sounds like Erin is talking about a version of the same thing that I'm experiencing. A slightly more dramatic situation than simply exiting young adulthood, obviously. But this idea of feeling like the person you were isn't exactly working anymore. You're suddenly more conscious of the way the world is seeing you, trying to look like a more polished version of yourself, trying to dress for the role you're supposed to be playing.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  I did start trying to adjust my wardrobe, or I became more conscious. Um, okay, maybe I should cover up a little more. Or I became more conscious, well, maybe my skirt is too short. Things like that started to change for me.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  But then Erin told me about when she first saw the movie.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  I remember when I saw the film for the first time. I think it was a matinee. I went by myself and it was packed. And I sat in the back of the room. Nobody knew who I was. And to this day, half the world, you know, if they saw me, they're like, they have no idea who I am. I mean, I'm another person in life. I was amazed at the standing ovation in the theater, but I was listening to people. I was at the back against the wall and their comments, "Oh, my God, do you think she really did that?" And then someone go on, "I think she really did. It's based on a true story."

• 34:43Speaker 02

  I found this really moving, the idea that Erin walked into a movie theater alone, watched her life's story play out, and could appreciate it from afar, sit in the back row, sort of sanguine, and watch the people watch her. In my own life, I'm always trying to figure out if it looks right, if it is right, if it's right for right now. I'm rarely just sitting back, watching the show.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  I'll tell you one thing, I can now, with more confidence than I've ever had back then, because so much was coming at me, I absolutely will not ever feel bad about who I was and how I dressed. It's about the result I got and the lives that it changed.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  I've learned from my dad that in costume design, every single thing on the screen has an intention behind it. You can close read a button if you want to. It'll provide some hidden piece of the story. After a lifetime of watching my dad do his job, I think hard about what I wear, what story it's telling about me. Correct me if I'm wrong, I've always seen, you know, your presentation, who you are, the way you dress, the way that you act, is very authentic to you. But do you ever feel like you get up in the morning and you're like, "I just don't want to be Jeffrey Carlin today, I just don't want to do all this."

• 36:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's interesting you should say that. Because I do, I have those days where I wake up and I'm like, "Do I want to put all the rings on? Do I want to put the jewelry on? Do I want to..." I just don't. Yeah, because they're hot days and I go, "Fuck, I'm just tired. I don't want to slap all this stuff all over the place."

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Nobody I know wears clothes as well as my dad does. If he's wearing it, it works. And he moves with confidence, like he's delighting in being and looking exactly himself. In this way, my dad actually reminds me a lot of Erin, the real one, and also his version of her.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  But most of the time, it's such a natural thing for me to do, just wake up and put everything on. It's just, it's there. Yeah, and I like the choice, that I can or I can't. I don't have to. No one's, you know, like if I don't put anything on and I come to work, it is always at least six people going, "Where are the rings? Where's the stuff?" They just want to know where it is. They want to make sure I didn't lose it or something or other. They're like, "Where is it?" You know, so you don't want to disappoint people either. You know? That's good. If that makes them smile, it makes me smile too.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  I always thought I'd work in the movies like my dad. But I don't. I'm a radio journalist in far west Texas. The light is golden, the wind is dry. In my job, I knock on strangers' doors to ask them about their lives, sometimes even about their water. I sit with them on their couches, at their kitchen tables, follow them out screen doors to their backyards, crackling with dry heat. I have a big head of curly blonde hair, and I have been known to throw on a heel and clomp around in the desert. It occurs to me that if you sat in the last row of the theater, if you squinted, it might

• 38:32Speaker 02

  look a little familiar.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  When my dad and I finish our interview, he puts his rings back on, one at a time.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  The placing of the jewelry ritual is old as time itself.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  It's very elegant.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Aren't you shocked that I know exactly where to put each one?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  That was an anisor.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  I know.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  That's yours. Okay, you can go downstairs.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Fabulous.

• 39:25Avery Trufelman?

  This story was reported, written, and produced by Zoe Kerland, edited by Liza Jaeger, Jackson Roach, Omar Ettman, and Annie Rosenthal. Sound design and additional production by Liza Jaeger. This is just one of the articles in Signal Hill, which is a fantastic audio magazine. The New Yorker actually called them "one of the best podcasts of 2025", along with articles of interest. I couldn't agree with them more. Check it out at signalhill.fm, and I'll see you soon with more regular episodes.