Producer Sarah Koenig's mother lives by a set of rules about conversation. She has an actual list of off-limits topics, including how you slept, your period, your health, your diet and more. You don't talk about these things, she says, because nobody cares. This week we try to find stories on these exact topics that will prove her wrong. Sarah's mom, Mrs. Matthiessen, doubts that the staff of This American Life can find great stories about her conversational no-nos. (7 minutes)Act One: Okay, so we admit, that this story that a woman named Ninon told Sarah at a dinner party isn’t strictly about menstruation, but we're going to beg indulgence because it has all the key ingredients of a good menstruation story. (7 minutes)Act Two: Dr. Steven Bratman has spent a lot of time around people with extreme and unusual diets. He tells Ira Glass that for some of them, it's not about losing weight but about becoming more pure. Dr. Bratman is the author of Health Food Junkies. (7 minutes)Act Three: Deborah Lott comes from a family that obsesses over health. And when they all get together for dinner, their banter goes on overdrive. She recorded their last dinner party, and assures producer Brian Reed that this is a typical dinner for them. Deborah recently completed a memoir, Tell Me I’m Still Breathing: A Memoir of an Anxious Childhood. You can find more of her work at her website. (10 minutes)Act Four: Dr. Cady Coleman is a NASA astronaut who has spent more than 4300 hours in space. Our senior producer Julie Snyder asked her what it's like to sleep while orbiting the earth. (3 minutes)Act Five: A group of people have a dream club that meets twice a month to talk about their dreams. Sarah and her mom join one of their meetings. (7 minutes)Act Six: Chris Garcia and his dad were driving home, listening to oldies, sharing a bag of chips. A totally familiar scene for them. They’d driven this route probably hundreds of time, but something odd was happening in the car, so Chris started recording their conversation on his phone. He tells producer Nancy Updike what happened.Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

Stories of when things go wrong. Really wrong. When you leave the normal realm of human error, fumble, mishap, and mistake and enter the territory of really huge breakdowns. Fiascos. Things go so awry that normal social order collapses. Prologue: Jack Hitt tells the story of a small town production of Peter Pan in which the flying apparatus smacks the actors into the furniture, and Captain Hook's hook flies off his arm and hits an old woman in the stomach. By the end of the evening, firemen have arrived and all the normal boundaries between audience and actors have completely dissolved. (4 minutes)Act One: Jack Hitt's Peter Pan story continues. Jack is the author of several books, including Bunch of Amateurs. (19 minutes)Act Two: A medieval village, a 1900-pound brass kettle, marauding visigoths, and a plan to drench invaders with boiling oil that goes awry. From Ron Carlson's book, The Hotel Eden: Stories, read by actor Jeff Dorchen. Ron Carlson's newest book is Return To Oakpine. (9 minutes)Act Three: The first day on the job inevitably means mistakes, mishaps, and sometimes... fiascos. A true story, told by a former rookie cop. (13 minutes)Act Four: Journalist Margy Rochlin on her first big assigment to do a celebrity interview. It was 1982. The interviewee was Moon Unit Zappa, who'd just released "Valley Girl" with her father Frank. She'd only been interviewed once. Midway through the interview: fiasco! Margy chokes on some coffee, which pumps out of her nose. Moon's mother administers the Heimlich Maneuver. And after that, everyone's so relaxed that Margy gets an interview that becomes her first syndicated article and a big scoop for her paper. When a fiasco destroys social boundaries, it can bring people together. (7 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

A doctor named Benjamin Gilmer gets a job at a rural clinic in North Carolina. He’s replaced another doctor named Gilmer – Dr. Vince Gilmer – who went to prison after killing his own father. But the more Benjamin’s patients tell him about the other Dr. Gilmer, the more confused he becomes. Everyone loved Vince Gilmer. So Benjamin starts digging around, trying to understand how a good man can seemingly turn bad. Sarah Koenig reports. As Benjamin settles in at the clinic, and people got to know him, something interesting happens. Vince’s former patients – who are now Benjamin’s patients – start talking to him about Vince. What he finds out surprises him. (6 minutes)Act One: Benjamin starts to get very curious about the murder Dr Vince Gilmer committed, so he begins asking questions and poking around. Soon he develops his own theories to explain the murder, that never came up at Vince’s trial. (25 minutes)Act Two: Sarah Koenig’s story about the two Dr. Gilmers continues. This question lurked throughout Vince’s initial incarceration and court appearances: Was he crazy? Or was he crazy like a fox? Benjamin decides to visit Vince in prison. (23 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

On a summer day in 1951, two baby girls were born in a hospital in small-town Wisconsin. The infants were accidentally switched, and went home with the wrong families. Host Ira Glass introduces four characters: Kay McDonald, who raised a daughter named Sue, and Mary Miller, who raised a daughter named Marti. In 1994, Mary Miller wrote letters to Sue and Marti, confessing the secret she'd kept for 43 years: The daughters had been switched at birth and raised by the wrong families. This week's entire show is devoted to the story of Mary Miller's secret and what happened when both families finally learned the truth. (6 1/2 minutes)Act One: Reporter Jake Halpern tells the story of Marti Miller and Sue McDonald, the daughters who were switched at birth, and the many complications that came with learning the truth. Jake is a writer of several books and creator of the comic, "Welcome to the New World.” (26 minutes)Act Two: Jake Halpern tells the mothers' sides of the story. At 69, Kay McDonald had to cope not only with the news that her daughter wasn't her own, but that another mother had known the whole time. And Mary Miller explains why she was tormented by her secret but unable for decades to share it. (26 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

What goes on while mom and dad are away, that mom and dad never find out about. Including the story of two teenagers who decide to invent children to babysit, as an excuse to get out of their own house. We listen in on a ritual that happens in millions of families every week: kids getting dropped off at the babysitters. Six-year-old Dylan and nine-year-old Sarah explain what they can and can't get away with when they have a babysitter. After that, host Ira Glass has a few words about Mary Poppins, who is the Gold Standard of all fictional babysitters. The movie Mary Poppins contains the classic modern song about babysitting. We hear several versions of the song over the course of the program. The first is by Chicago girl punk/pop band, the Dishes. (5 minutes)Act One: Lots of babysitting is done by family members. Hillary Frank reports on what can happen when a teenaged son is put in charge of his younger brothers. It's not pretty. (14 minutes)Act Two: The story of several huge companies that accidentally got put into the babysitting business in a big, big way because of snow on December 26, 1988. Every year on the day after Christmas, divorced kids all over America fly from one parent to the other. In 1988, lots of them got snowed in at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Susan Burton and her little sister were among them. (9 minutes)Act Three: Myron Jones and his sister Carol Bove explain what happened when they were teenagers, and they ended up babysitting children who didn't exist. (25 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.