I Did It for Love

December 6, 2021·36 min·3 clips

A mother and daughter sneak out at 2 a.m. armed with syringes filled with skunk toxin for revenge.

Every Little Thing, hosted by Flora Lichtman, airs a listener call-out episode on extreme acts of love. The first caller, Erica, describes her mother as a force who often retaliated against people who underestimated her. After becoming ill and asking her rural-Kansas weight-loss business partners if she could take over the hometown branch, her mother was refused. At 2 a.m. she woke 16-year-old Erica in all-black cat-burglar gear with a headlamp. She produced a fanny pack of hypodermic syringes loaded with skunk toxin, collected from her trapper husband's kills, and injected them through the rubber window seals and door handles of the partners' van. Erica supported the plan because she was privately heartbroken over a female friend she now believes she was in love with. The second story comes from Mario, a trumpeter who in 1997 bought a Monette Ajna trumpet — a lower-tier cousin of Wynton Marsalis's Raja — costing roughly two-thirds of his $15,000 salary as a law-firm courier. A secretary helped arrange a credit union loan, and Mario recounts a transcendent nighttime practice session in pitch darkness. He also slept on the floor so as not to disturb the horn drying on his bed. Beth, calling from outside her dentist, describes her job applying flame retardant to cruise-ship sets during a separation from her first husband. She met pyro technician Jolt at a Transylvanian restaurant near a small Mexican port, spent three hours with him after a crew party, and after his contract eloped at a Pennsylvania courthouse for a green-card marriage. They recently celebrated their sixth anniversary and have a three-year-old. The final story is from Jeremy outside Detroit, whose 79-year-old father Joe worked 35 years at Ford and once owned a white 1968 AMC AMX he had to sell for family reasons. After a September leukemia diagnosis, Jeremy bought a green AMX with matching engine, performance shifter, posi-traction rear and brown interior, planning to drive his father along Rotunda Drive in Dearborn to recreate his old pre-work ritual of listening to side-pipe exhaust bounce off a brick wall.

As heard by us

A call-in episode where devotion turns practical, awkward, and unexpectedly moving.

Every Little Thing turns a simple love story prompt into a chain of lived-in confessions. The best stretch comes from the callers' specific details, especially the trumpet owner who slept on the floor to keep a beloved horn safe.

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Why you'd press play

You want a call-in love story where devotion gets very literal, like sleeping on the floor to keep a trumpet safe.

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