Ep. 229: "Elves with Clipboards"
this episode of rod rock on the line is brought to you by cards against humanity they asked us not to read an ad so hey just enjoy the show hello hi john i'm merlin how's it going oh good
Many joys of the season to you.
Oh, season joys to you, too.
Season joys, joys of the season to you.
Oh, Merlin Man, Merlin Man, Merlin Man.
Who's got a beard that used to be there?
I'm not sure if it is there.
Must be Roderick.
Must be Roderick.
Claws.
Jing, jing, jing, jing, jingle.
Jingle.
What a depressing time of year.
It's cold and we have inner fears.
Jeez.
Jeez.
Psychosomatic sniffles every morning.
Just because it's a thing you feel doesn't mean that it is real.
Sniffing all the way.
Do you sing with your family at Christmas time?
Do you sing?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, we do.
Okay, let's wrap it up.
My daughter sings some things, but she's not a Christmas carol singer.
I don't think you get Christmas carols jammed down your gullet quite like we did as kids.
Not that that's a bad thing, but I don't think... I mean, she knows the tunes and she can hum along, but she's not a Christmas carol person.
Yeah, my kid is into them.
And, you know, I can't explain it.
I was thinking about this just yesterday.
The same thing you're talking about, which is that Christmas was really, really stuffed up our noses.
in the 70s and 80s and i think it was like all it's like even at school even or especially at school yeah at a secular school even like christmas was it for like weeks you made things out of paper plates and you sang the songs and there was there wasn't a winter concert there was a christmas show and you sang christmas and you liked it yes you did and there was a even in even in secular school right a uh
A picture of the one star shining down on the manger.
Wink.
With the little baby.
There's a lot of that.
Wink.
But, you know, we're remembering a time when there were only three television stations.
And, yeah, there was like the newspaper.
I mean, media was really constrained and you couldn't opt out.
But I was realizing this because I was looking at my kid the day before Christmas, and it was like, well, tomorrow's Christmas.
And her reaction was like, oh, tomorrow's Christmas?
What?
Are you kidding me?
No, just sort of like she knew it was coming.
These millenniums today, John.
That's all my daughter's talked about since September.
Well, yeah, I just feel like...
When I thought about it, I realized like, well, you know, I don't have a TV.
Yeah, no, that's a really good point.
If you don't have a TV, there's hardly any Christmas at all.
Well, and, you know, we walk around and there's trees and stuff.
Yeah, trees.
But we haven't really, I didn't take her to see the Nutcracker.
Like some of that stuff that I wanted to do, I just kind of forgot.
Like Christmas sneaks up on you, you know what I'm saying?
Sneaks right up on you.
Sneaking out.
And so I was like, oh, shit, I meant to take her to the Nutcracker.
I meant to be a good dad.
Um, we were at the mall for a completely separate reason early in December.
And, uh, and we're walking along and she's kind of doing her thing where she's like, Oh, look at this.
And you're turning rocks over and like, look, there's a crab.
And I'm like in the mall, but she finds them.
And then I look up and I realized, Holy shit.
Santa's here already.
Um,
And she couldn't see him.
I couldn't see him either.
We were behind him.
He's usually obscured.
Yeah, but there were elves.
There were elves all around.
Oh, sure.
And they were elves.
Well, there's smoke, there's fire, right?
Yeah, right.
They were elves with clipboards in the mall.
And you know that that bodes ill.
Because if there's not a Santa there, then they're taking names for something.
Yeah, it's a different time.
Things have really changed.
So I immediately turned around.
Be careful of an elf making a list.
That's all I'm going to say today.
See, right?
See?
Santa makes the lists when elves are making lists.
Oh.
Judenrot?
What do you call that?
He's the elf who runs the elf ghetto.
He's the go-between.
It's the day the elf cried.
So I flip around.
Just want to bring them joy in their last moments.
All right.
So there's evidence of elves.
The elves have clipboards.
And there's crabs.
I grab her by the shoulders.
She's looking at the crabs.
And I grab her and I say, sweetheart.
Wait, hold it.
Hold it.
Let the crab go.
And the crab skitters off.
I'm like, sweetheart, listen.
Santa's here.
It's like discovering.
You just realized that John Wayne Gacy is there and you're like, honey, I have to explain a lot of things very quickly.
All right.
Okay.
And the thing is, it's like evening at the mall and the mall is kind of empty, right?
There's not like a huge line of people to see Santa.
It's just...
It's kind of an empty mall.
And so I grab her and I'm like, sweetheart, around the corner here, Santa's here.
And she was like, oh, and I said, yes, I know.
Are you ready for this?
Because in the past we've had, you know, typical mixed feelings about mall Santas from her.
Right.
Not exactly 100 percent about sitting on the sitting on the knee.
And so I'm like, you know, let's get collected here.
Let's get organized.
And she thinks about it and she's like, yeah, I'm ready.
I want to see Santa.
What?
I'm like, all right.
She's like five or six?
She's, yeah, five and a half.
So we kind of have a little... That's ballsy, John.
That is a ballsy kid.
And I'm still down on one knee like, we're going to go around this corner and then there's going to be Santa.
She's like, all right.
And I said, listen, I'm going to go reconnoiter.
You stay here.
She's like, cool.
So she's standing there now.
She's not looking at any crabs anymore.
We're a team.
We're working as a team.
And so I go ahead, just looking like a normal everyday mall stroller.
I'm not a guy.
I'm just walking.
I'm looking for a Radio Shack.
I'm not somebody that an elf is going to talk to.
And I walk up and around.
And I circle the Santa, you know, compound.
And a judge...
A, that Santa actually is fairly Santa-looking.
He doesn't look like he's on parole.
He looks like it's actually his beard.
This isn't an embarrassing Santa.
I have some pictures sitting on Santa's lap where the beard is up around his eyes.
These are really fun.
And the elves all look like 24-year-olds who...
who got out of college or, you know, they're, they're on college break and their parents said, you have to get a job while you're on college break.
And you know, they're, they're, they're not professional elves, right?
They are, uh, you get the, you get the sense that they're all living together in a trailer and that they're having a lot of sex, but they don't give a shit about, I mean, they're, they're, they're fun kids, you know, but they're not, they're, their primary thing isn't this.
Okay.
I walk around.
There's no other kids, no other parents.
It's just Santa sitting there.
And there's absolutely definitely a there's a cultural divide, a cultural wall between the kid elves who are chatting with each other and having fun and the lonely old Santa sitting in the chair with no no.
There's no elf hanging out with him.
I was like, OK, all right.
I'm scoping.
But he doesn't seem like a creep.
Just, you know, creep radar.
So I zoomed back around, and I'm like, okay, are you sure about this?
And she's like, I'm sure.
And I said, have you thought about what you want to talk to Santa about?
And she's like, pretty good idea.
And I said, let's go.
So we whip around the corner, and as soon as she sees him, she stops cold.
You think you're ready for Santa.
Right.
And I said, are we good here?
She's like, you know, one curt nod.
And then straight in.
She goes in, and Santa starts talking to her, and Santa is a German.
He's speaking with a pretty heavy German accent.
And I was like, oh, right.
You know, he moved here because his daughter lives here or something, and he, you know, and...
And now he's working as a mall Santa?
Couldn't get passage to Brazil?
RGTV wouldn't have it?
They don't do that anymore.
No, I know.
They don't do that anymore.
As far as we know.
Because Mossad will find you.
That's right.
So she has a little tete-a-tete with him.
They're like chit-chat.
Low-tone chit-chat.
Can I ask, is she enlapped at this point?
She gets up on the lap.
They sit and talk with her on her feet for a while, and then she gets up on the lap.
She takes a couple of halfway decent pictures, which isn't her normal MO.
She likes to ruin pictures.
And then we're in, we're out.
And she's like...
The whole rest of December, she never once says, let's go downtown to the Nordstrom Santa, where the line to see the Nordstrom Santa is four hours long.
The crazy thing is that there's a Macy's Santa also.
There's a Nordstrom Santa and a Macy's Santa downtown.
the wait for the nordstrom santa is seriously four hours long the line goes around the block the customer service of that santa is probably outstanding well you know what you can return anything you bring in snow tires they don't even sell snow tires you can return anything that santa has to santa has to accept anything that you return yeah and i don't know how i don't know how nordstrom gets the top santa uh
I didn't wait in line to see him.
Maybe they got scouts with the majors.
It could be a thing like up in Anchorage.
Anchorage has legendarily good striptease artists because there's so much money.
So much cash money in Alaska that if you are a legendary strip tease performer, you want to go to Alaska because your chances of somebody just coming off of a fishing boat or a gold mine and tipping you like $4,200 in one night, your chances are a lot better than they are in Alaska.
you know, like Boise.
If you're a Lola, Anchorage is where you're headed.
That's what I'm saying.
And so maybe Seattle Nordstrom is like that for Santas.
Okay.
Okay.
You know what?
I buy that.
But crazy.
It's not like Macy's has a bargain basement Santa.
Macy's is a big company.
They have a good Santa.
No line, no waiting at the Macy's Santa.
And everybody I talked to was like, they kind of like wrinkled their nose like Macy's Santa.
You got to go to the Nordstrom Santa.
When I was a kid, you went to the Frederick and Nelson Santa.
But listen, I'm digressing.
The point is that from that early Santa experience to the night before Christmas, she just was like, yeah, I know, it's Christmas.
But she didn't have that completely...
immersive Christmas thing that we did that by the time Christmas got there, you were so hyped up.
I remember sitting in the living room watching the tree twinkle on Christmas Eve, feeling like a wise man was actually going to
come in through the front door riding a camel.
It felt very, very real.
Something I felt, I imagine you felt, I'm trying not to tell too many stories about my kid, but something I definitely felt with her.
I've got to be very careful.
We've been chided about talking too much about this topic, but this was the year for her.
this was the year of discovery and confirmation oh i see um of a certain uh thing right and at first it seemed incredibly like you know oh you know whatever no big deal and but then there were a couple like you know how it is when you're grieving sometimes it takes a while for it to really hit you you have a lot of stages out of nowhere at one point there was like an utter like three like a five-year breakdown
oh wow you like we haven't seen this since she was really young and it was rough she she was obviously really struggling with it but i'm trying to say is that like even past the point that i knew things i still kind of felt something like i still you know i i i remember in particular being well even when i was like like eight i definitely remember we stayed at our my uncle's house i was sleeping in the room with my cousins and i just remember like i could not sleep and i had inklings at that point
But even by the time I was, like, 10 or 11, you still know there's stuff coming.
And there's the magic and the tree and the traditions and all the stuff.
And even when you know the things, there's still this part of you that, like, is like, oh, my God, it's Christmas Eve.
This is it.
Right?
Yes.
God is alive and magic is afoot.
Real quick, do you have, like, a tree set up at your house?
No.
Does she have a treat?
If you can say, or comfortable saying, does she get Christmas stuff?
Was there Christmas stuff around at any point this season, or it just didn't come up?
Well, as you know, as everyone listening knows, my daughter has between three and five houses.
Yeah.
She's got Miralago.
She's got a building in New York.
She does.
She has her apartment at Lake Cuomo.
So my mom has an artificial Christmas tree that she keeps in the attic.
And generally she decorates it exclusively with peach trees.
christmas decorations um because she's an 82 year old woman and the peach decorations and then all of the decorations like all the historic historical decorations that i made as a kid and that are in the family so it's a little bit of a hodgepodge because the the the you know the balls and stuff are all peach and then there's all this other jumble of meaningful decorations
So she put that up and put those little electric candles in the windows a long, long time ago, early December.
She she did all that.
And so the tree's been there with some like dummy presence under it all month.
But but she she didn't go there's no like pine boughs or anything.
She just did the poof and then it was the new normal.
Right.
My daughter's mother actually went and got a real Christmas tree because she's fairly sentimental and moved her furniture and put it in the corner and decorated it and they had that whole thing.
Okay.
So she had it around.
Yeah.
At my house, I found some amazing vintage Christmas lights and
like the big outdoor kind that I intended to put in the blue spruce, the giant blue spruce in my front yard.
And I kept intending to do that every day right up until Christmas.
And that was another thing like,
like the Nutcracker, where I was like, you've got to be kidding me.
It's here already?
The road to Christmas is paved with good intentions.
That was Marx.
Yeah.
I haven't even put up the super good Christmas lights, and now I'm looking at them, and I'm like, well, what if I put them up now?
Yeah, we'll call it a New Year's tree.
Yeah, what if I just leave them up all year?
But they're not white.
They're not decorative.
The old school, like fat bulbs with the bright colors?
Yeah, fat bulbs with bright colors.
I love those.
Love those.
Me too.
I was so glad to get these and so thrilled about like, oh, yeah, but I thought I had another month to go, you know?
So there's no element of Christmas here.
um other than the fact that daddy's house looks like you're living inside of a christmas tree okay because they're just sort of ornaments all around some of them i made as a kid you know so she was a gamer she got up there she talked for a while she got on the lap were you able to eavesdrop on the santa discussion did you feel like you wanted to stay away and let her have her santa privacy so she got into it right away and i didn't there wasn't a way for me it would be like rude to come over and interrupt this
deep, you know, transaction.
So afterwards, I like, you know, we had a debriefing and we're walking down the mall.
She seems pretty happy about it.
I got some good photographs of her.
And so, you know, I'm judging it a success.
That's the second time I've used the word a judging on this podcast.
That's fine.
It's totally fine.
It's the holiday season.
Yeah.
And so I say, so what did you and Santa talk about?
She said, you know, told him what I wanted for Christmas.
I was like, well, you know, what were some of those things?
Just kind of, you know, trying to get in there, sneak a little sneakeroony.
And she said, you know, pretty unselfconsciously, well, I want an Elsa and Anna doll.
And the whole giant souffle just went because I have done so much laborious work to keep Elsa and Anna out.
To keep them out.
Yeah.
Elsa and Anna are like a mustard gas.
It's like the movie Interstellar, which I finally watched.
I have a lot of things to say about it.
It's like the dust, John.
Nobody asks for the dust.
The dust has arrived.
And even when you're very careful, sometimes, of course, Murph is going to forget to close your window.
But you're going to get dust in the house because dust is what we have now.
And I think that's Frozen.
Frozen is a juggernaut.
That movie came out like 16 years ago.
Still,
There's dust everywhere, and it's Elsa and Anna dust.
I am so glad that you've seen Interstellar.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
It was my fourth try.
We can come back to that.
I was going to save it for talking to Syracuse because he kind of likes it, but I might give it to you.
Oh, my God.
I was quivering with anger.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that we talked about it.
You did.
I saw way more of it than I remember having seen.
I think I blocked it out.
I'm not trying to take you away from Elsa and Anna because I know your struggle.
Let's get back to this.
I have been through similar struggles.
I've seen these similar struggles.
You see this with lots of liberals and their struggles of various kinds.
Not to say that you're a liberal, but you see this a lot.
You're a liberal.
And you see this a lot of the whole, like, it could be something as good hard as, like, it's important that my kids, like, again, to mention John Syracuse, he only showed, I think, especially his son, movies that had a female protagonist for most of his childhood, which I think is a super interesting idea.
Look, you're going to get plenty of opportunities to see all guys getting to be always be the heroes.
But that's why, you know, Miyazaki movies, they're great movies.
Plus, it's like usually about a girl and it's not about her trying to find a boyfriend.
And there's things like that.
Right.
There's other things like I don't go out of my way to expose her to sports.
Boo.
Bad on me.
She should probably be into the Giants.
She should like Hunter Pence, whatever that is.
I don't know.
I don't know what that is.
We have a Hunter Pence doll that dances with a solar light, and it's horrifying.
He just sits there and twitches all day.
Hunter Pence.
It was a giveaway at the ballpark.
Now, here's the thing.
But the thing is, now you're fighting the interstellar dust inertia.
Nobody asks for the dust, but it's everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And there's a lot.
I get a lot of pushback.
From moms, let's be honest.
I spend a lot of time with moms, as you know.
Because everyone in your life is a woman, for one thing.
Well, and it's not just because they've long been a general interest of mine, but also because that's my social circle a lot of the time, one thing.
Well, and also just like, you know, I'm not touting myself to be John Lennon, but I have an aspect of care things that I do.
I'm at the school at least five times a week.
Absolutely.
I know all the moms.
We talk a lot.
Moms are huge in my life.
I'm with you.
I'm right there with you.
Yeah, I've got a lot of moms in my life.
Are they excited because Elsa and Anna are good role models?
I think it's a positive movie.
I know there's some controversy amongst people about that, but is it that like, oh, well, you can't be against them.
They're powerful girl models.
You know, you can't be against them is kind of where it stops.
And there's a lot of, I mean, ever since I had a kid, there's a lot of that kind of sort of, we've talked about this before, the conventional understanding that certain things are inevitable.
And partly in their inevitability are also good.
Because since they're inevitable, it maybe is a mental choice to be upset about them.
Since they're inevitable, you may as well think they're good.
And I feel like Elsa and Anna, yeah, are two starring roles of gals in a Disney movie.
And...
They have good songs, apparently.
You know, it's like this feeling, this feeling of like, this is their Lady and the Tramp or something.
Well, and just for folks who haven't heard every single episode, there's an interesting angle to this.
It sounds like it was one of your first challenges with this.
Which is like, if you don't have a kid and you don't know, there's a song from Frozen called Let It Go.
Let it go.
Let it go.
That's everywhere.
If I remember correctly, your daughter has been singing that for something like three years now.
And at a certain point, for perhaps years, she had never heard the actual recording of the song.
It had just come into her like an interstellar dust through the culture.
That's correct.
And a lot of the Elsa Anna stuff came to her just incidentally.
And she had never seen the movie until this year.
And she'd been immersed in these characters without really knowing anything about them because every other little girl has them.
New York Times had a whole article about Star Wars that there's this whole generation of kids that maybe kind of knows Star Wars from ancillary media TV shows, but there is this whole generation of kids that are super into Star Wars and have never seen any of the movies.
I mean, my kid is like that.
She walks around and she's like, Princess Leia, BB-8!
And she's got things to say about them.
Wow, wow, wow.
But she's never seen anything about a Star Wars.
Never seen a Star Wars.
Not a thing.
Not a one single of those wars.
So anyway, so I had been... And so we finally... The initial cave was earlier this year where I was like, all right, let's watch the movie.
Like I...
I it's just a movie.
It's not going to pollute her mind with Elsa and Anna anymore.
And I the thing is, I haven't even seen it.
My primary objection to it is that clearly Elsa and Anna are the greys right there.
This is an episode of our podcast.
For those of you who haven't listened to every episode.
Yes.
So you should be ashamed, first of all.
But second of all, we had this.
Go back.
Start at the beginning and listen.
Listen at normal speed.
Normal speed or slower.
Normal speed.
That's right.
There's currently 6,238 episodes.
Slow way down.
You are not ready for house trotter.
You need to go real slow and understand the appeal of the grays to understand that the grays are in places we had not anticipated doing things we didn't expect.
It's going to take a little bit of homework on your part.
Shame on you.
And one of the things they do is they gradually inoculate us by making our children's dolls look more and more like Grey's every day.
They have bigger and bigger eyes, weirder, shrunken, you know, sort of spindly limbs with giant heads.
I love you.
And if you take an Elsa or Anna doll...
They are almost exactly the dimensions of a Barbie doll.
But if you thought Barbie dolls had weird physical dimensions, put an Anna doll next to one.
Try putting a Barbie hat onto an Anna.
Good luck.
Can't do it.
The Anna doll, her head is fully... They're incompatible heads.
50% larger than a Barbie head.
Easily.
And her body is like even sort of more weirdly shaped than a Barbie.
If she wasn't wearing those drapes, I mean, I think she pretty much looked like a coat rack.
She looked like a coat rack with a giant oversized head that improbably does not just kind of fall over on her body.
Yeah, but like really... Almost like she's from a different gravity.
Narrow waist, like impossibly narrow waist.
In any case...
I objected to the movie just on general principle because I initially... The initial exposure I had to this kind of children's toy was a long time ago, probably 15 years ago, when the children's toy Bratz first arrived on the scene, which was the new Barbie or was touted as the new Barbie.
And they were like completely... They almost had a...
Like a graffiti art quality.
But they were little.
They were basically like little girls meant to appeal to little girls.
And the dolls were just plastered with makeup.
They were wearing mini skirts.
And it was just like, yeah, these are these are and they're and giant heads and tiny bodies.
It was like, these are repulsive sex fetish items.
They look like, like, you remember those old, well, I know you don't on TV, but like almost like in the Steve Madden TV commercials.
Yeah.
The giant head girls?
Exactly.
Yeah.
I'm looking at them right now.
They are improbably narrow looking.
And it looks like their eyes got more and more almondy.
Yeah.
And their heads got bigger and bigger.
So I saw this trend a long time ago and I was like, listen, we're culturally arguing about Barbie's bust or Barbie's dimensions as being unrealistic.
And in the meantime, the door is cracked open and these freaking sex gnomes are pouring in like Mogwai.
And there's nothing we, you know, we're not even thinking about them.
We're still arguing about Barbie.
And Barbie's the least of our worries.
So I objected to Frozen.
Anyway, we all sat down.
We watched Frozen.
And at the end of the movie, and I was sitting there doing the thing that I do, which is like, well, that's, this is irrelevant to the plot.
And this next scene is like incompatible with the plot.
You just can't really communicate.
You know, like, I mean, I know that, and first of all, he's an elk, but, or a reindeer, but he, but I also, I buy his whole act.
I even buy Olaf, the animated snow person.
But like the whole business of
The whole business of Elsa being traumatized by her ability to spoiler alert to create ice with her hands.
You know, she's a little bit like the X-Men character that causes a blood disorder.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
Like leukemia, man.
No, the girl, the girl that touches people in it and it gives them the that's rogue.
Rogue touches them and they get veins.
They get veins.
Even if she can't touch her boyfriend, she's got to wear gloves.
She can't touch her boyfriend because she gets varicose veins or something.
So anyway, I'm sitting there.
I'm not grumbling out loud.
I'm just in my head.
And I'm not doing it as a way to form an argument for her.
I'm just doing it because I can't help myself.
I'm like, this is garbage, though that's not fair.
And then at the very end, the whole message of the sister saves the other sister...
I'm just not buying it that that's the actual plot, right?
I mean, there's always still a prince in this stupid-ass story.
Anyway, we get to the end, and I'm very curious, and I say, darling, we've finally now watched Frozen.
What did you think?
And she went, meh, C-.
Whoa.
She doesn't even get grades.
I don't know where she got the ABCD.
I don't know where she got that as a reference point.
She's like, wow, that is not that is not.
I think I think a lot of your daughter, but that is not what I expected at all.
It wasn't what I expected either.
So I in in like my inner self just rejoiced.
I was like, yes, she sees through the shite.
And then about a week.
And so for about a week, we never heard a word about Elsa and Anna.
And I was like, thank God we're done.
We made it to the other side.
We never passed through it.
Yeah.
And then she started talking about Elsa and Anna again.
And I, I was like, wow, sweetie, why are we talking about them?
This is like C minus these remember C minus.
This is like, you don't even like this movie.
And she said, yeah, but I mean, you know, I like Elsa and Anna.
I like the,
And I realized that she had separated Elsa and Anna from the actual film in which they star.
This is totally normal.
And I mean, like, not to make this gross, but you use that phrase like fetish porn.
I think it's very much like that.
Think about you watching something that could be really, really dumb, but it had airplanes in it.
You know, yeah, I guess it sucked, but I mean, it had lots of airplanes.
Right.
Isn't it kind of similar to that where you're like, yeah, you can you can.
And, you know, she's had time to develop her own like maybe not narratives about this, but she had her own like reckons about them.
She absolutely has narratives about them.
They preexisted in her mind and imagination so much that the movie sort of was irrelevant.
You're absolutely right.
It was just like.
Now they're animated for a while.
And she's like, man, that's and basically what she was saying was that movie is not as good as the stories that I come up with about Elsa and Anna.
Like Elsa and Anna were characters in her life, people she knew.
And so she comes off of this Santa thing and she's like, I just asked him for an Elsa and Anna doll.
And my shoulders slumped because what she was basically saying was, I'm never going to give this up until I get an Elsa and Anna doll.
And I will play with them happily.
Father.
So I'm asking Santa for it now.
And you are cut out of this deal.
Oh, dear.
I see.
I see.
And so I was like, oh.
And then for the rest of Christmas, I kept saying, let's go over your list again.
What did you do?
You're like Columbo.
Sometimes I get real confused.
Let's just go over this one more time.
Let's just go over it.
So you definitely want anything except one of these fucking dolls.
Yeah.
And she said over and over, like, well, I told Santa that I wanted Elsa and Anna doll.
So I feel like that ship has sailed.
And I'm like, oh, God.
So then I'm shopping, and I'm like, you know what?
I cannot fight this.
I'm going to buy an Elsa and Anodal.
And I went and I bought a nice Elsa and Anodal, not one of the crappy ones, of which there are one billion.
You want to really look at them.
I almost bought a Captain America ornament, and then I looked at the painting on it, and I was like, this is –
This is bad.
You've got to be careful because if you pick up everything that matches your exciting brand feeling, you're just going to have lots of crap.
One good one.
Now you feel like you get this one good one and now that's going to clear the pipes.
I've been to little girls' homes on other errands.
generally interacting with moms, where you walk in and you look at the room and there are 700 Elsa and Anna's in various forms.
Dolls of every kind.
Stuffy dolls, Barbie styes, the tall ones that are three feet tall.
I mean, I don't even know where you find these things.
So I said, alright, if you're going to have an Elsa and Anna, it's going to be the only Frozen oriented stuff that we have, but they're going to be nice little dolls.
And
And I wrote from Santa on the package.
Well, we're around the tree.
She's opening the presents.
And she has some nice presents, some other dolls.
The Hodgmans actually sent her an American Girl doll.
That's huge.
Which one did you get?
Did you get Kit?
No, we got the hippie one.
She basically looks like Hillary Clinton.
We got Kit and Rebecca.
I don't know who those are.
You'll find out.
This one looks like Hillary Clinton in 1970.
Just so you know, that's a pretty nice present.
That's a super nice present.
Well, it was an American Girl doll that their daughter had loved and cherished.
But I remember their daughter had something on the order of 9 to 14 American Girl dolls.
Wow.
Thanks, Apple.
She had over the time had disseminated these American Girl dolls to younger girls.
She's a teen now.
And this was the last she had.
She had her main one that she would never get rid of and she'll take to adulthood.
But this was the last of the secondary American Girl dolls.
That lived in their house in Massachusetts and they were like, we're going to get that doll.
We're going to bring it down from Massachusetts and we're going to send it to your daughter.
And she arrived and I was like, this doll is truly beautiful.
I mean, she's wearing some sort of 70s pantsuit.
She's wonderful.
um and so so you know my kid is opening these presents she's getting wonderful things she's she's expressing true gratitude and pleasure she's she opens a package and takes 15 minutes to play with that toy oh that's a really really good sign right before opening the next present she's not that's that's when i am proudest when like there's some there's a good 90 minutes of playing before going to the next thing that's a good feeling
Isn't that good?
Yeah.
And then she gets to this Elsa and she opens it up and she's so thrilled because this is the culmination of three and a half years of her five and a half years of just like hounding her.
me for these dolls and i had gone to everyone else in the family and i'd say ixnay on the uh the girls yeah and so everybody was on board anyway ozenfrey ozenfrey here they arrive
And she she beams at them for a second, just beams at them.
And then she slowly turns her head to look at me and gives me the ultimate
Fuck you.
Oh, you just got pwned by the man with the beard.
I got pwned by Santa.
Pwned by Santa.
And she was like, boom.
How do you like them apples?
How do you like them apples?
I asked Santa for this and Santa brought it.
She ran a Santa hack on you.
Yeah.
And you are outside the game, Dad.
And I was just on the couch just like getting hit with this.
like plasma pulse of boom, like up your nose, dad.
How you like me now?
It was truly a how you like me now look.
And I was like, wow, Santa really did a number on daddy, didn't he?
And she was like, and so I've been continuing to play this like, well, I guess Santa, you know,
Against daddy's wishes brought this Elsa and Anna into my home and she and she's just so gratified just trots around and and she took a necklace that she was wearing around her neck and built it into an Anna sling.
Where she walks around with the Anna around her neck like it's a Mr. T chain.
Oh, yeah.
She just hangs it around her neck now.
She wears the doll.
She wears it.
Kind of like Twiggy in Buck Rogers with Dr. Theophilus.
Dr. Theophilus, yeah.
And so what can I do?
Anyway, all by way of saying she believes in Santa.
And she primarily, I think, believes in Santa as a daddy thwarter.
So it's really, it's at least one and a half gifts.
It's maybe two or three gifts in one because she got the things she wanted.
Yeah.
Despite it all.
And boy, and you know, daddy, let this serve as a lesson to you.
That's right.
Maybe you're not the smart guy you thought you were.
No.
You got Santa hats.
Yeah.
She stuck it to the man hardcore.
Yeah.
And so now I've, you know, and and the fact that they are more or less the dimensions of Barbies and you can get Barbie stuff and apply it to them.
Because she also doesn't have any Barbies, which I also get in trouble with.
Barbies got dive-bombed into our life by relatives.
Oh.
And so the thing is, I mean, she's had exposure to Barbies, but we did not have a super-duper-shmooper-strong POV on this.
But there was mutual assent that of all the kinds of kid shit that's going to be in her life, Barbie was not going to be near the top of the list.
Sure, that's your pov.
But I have to tell you, certain beloved family members thought otherwise.
And the thing is, when you dive-bomb in with not just Barbie, but some Barbie outfits plus a house, they're delivering a whole franchise.
And now you're a Barbie person.
And there's tiny shoes everywhere.
And so I've avoided that also.
Good for you, man.
Except...
Two things.
One, I have, you know, I'm just generating pure consternation from 99% of the other, like...
liberal moms, liberal, progressive, educated moms like me are just like, you can't fight city hall.
And also watching her interact with Elsa and Anna, I realize she's ready to progress from baby dolls where the primary narrative is, okay, baby, like here's your bottle to these are dolls where she can interact with
Complicated narratives with them.
They are sentient dolls.
They represent characters that now she can inhabit with adventure rather than just, I'm caring for you.
Now she can have these dolls.
So they become closer to what we've traditionally for boys called action figures.
These are characters with things to do, and I can enact that.
Yeah, they have agency and she can now talk to them and they can reply.
Whereas, you know, the baby's.
Because I was also getting sick of the baby dolls, let's be honest, because it's just this cycle of baby's hungry, baby's tired, kiss baby.
And I'm like, kiss.
She's like, kiss baby again.
I'm like, kiss.
She's like, puts the baby right in my face.
Baby wants to play.
And I'm like, daddy's reading a book.
And she's like...
So now I feel like the babies are going to go into a box eventually.
They'll come back out at some point.
Yeah.
No, I think, at least in my experience, my daughter has so much stuff and she doesn't see it for a while.
And then when she sees it, it's like junior Christmas.
We recently rediscovered her Thomas train sets, which had been in a box.
And it was totally fun to put those together again.
I mean, that sounds silly because she's nine, but I'm 50 and I loved it.
It's fun to make a train go around a track.
It is.
I still have a giant HO train set in boxes upstairs that I just keep thinking I'm going to set up in the barn.
But the problem with HO trains is that...
The trains themselves are 25% of what is really an old man play set of papier-mâché.
You've told me this before, but remind me, HOs are the pretty big ones, right?
No, those are Lionels.
I've got to look up train scales again.
It's been too long.
HO, like if you had, let's say, you know those, when you go to the fair...
Or you go, you're walking downtown and you go to a hot dog stand and they're like hot dogs and then like the big hot dog and then like the sausage sized hot dog where it's just like a big fat thing.
And they have somehow they have extra size buns that the whole thing is like almost grotesquely oversized.
One of those in the bun is about the size of a HO train car.
I see.
Okay, I found an image that compares Z, N, HO, and G. HO looks like a good size.
HO is the perfect size.
I would say it's the most popular train size.
I always wondered what it would have been like if I had started with an N scale.
Um, cause Z scale is too small for, but N scale makes a lot of sense because you can, in the sense that you can do more, I mean, assuming the availability of stuff for it, you can accomplish more in a smaller amount of space without becoming that guy that has a whole train set in his basement.
It's exactly right.
If you, you could put an entire N scale on your dining room table and make a fairly complete world, um,
Oh, like a Z scale?
If you took up your dining room table with a Z scale, you could basically do all of Switzerland.
They're really cute.
That's close to the size of the Thomas trains.
What is Z?
Yeah.
They're that small?
Yeah, I mean, they fit mostly... Like, if you put James or Percy in the palm of your hand, he'd mostly disappear.
I'd say they're...
Yeah, they're good.
You can get the little engines in them.
And then one thing that's kind of nice is that the track on which those run has become somewhat standardized.
So basically, there's all kinds of different train things that fit that size of track.
It doesn't have to be like Thomas the Train branded.
And you can run different kinds of brands of, you know, licensed train things on the same track.
I see.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Yeah.
That's an advertisement.
Thomas the Train ones are mostly, I think for little kids, you get the little wooden ones that don't have an engine.
We have a few that have an engine.
And those are obviously, to me, a lot more fun.
Sure.
I mean, have a battery-powered way to propel itself around the track rather than going choo-choo-choo with your hand.
Oh, so these are not controlled from a central controller, but they each have a battery within them?
Yeah, you put one AA into – you get yourself a Thomas.
You get yourself a Spencer.
You get – a Lady Train was always our big winner.
You can get a James and a Percy.
And, yeah, and then you run them around.
And they have all kinds of things.
They can go down a little mine shaft.
They can go up a hill.
If you get enough – what you really want to get is a lot of those straight ones that are like 9 or 10 inches long.
You get a ton of those, and then you can make like a double –
Like you could make like a tunnel and a track that runs on top of it.
You get a switcher and you're good to go.
You're not the only one that wants a straight one that's nine inches long.
Am I right?
Boy, oh boy.
Oh, that was such a sad bell.
No, no, it's Christmas.
I'm trying to keep it, you know.
Thanks.
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, the thing about N-scale model railroads is the ones that are made in Germany, the ones that are designed for old men, like you can pay $200 for a locomotive.
Jeez Louise.
You know, it's not a cheap hobby, and you control the trains from an electric controller.
Right.
I had friends.
This was still a thing when I was a kid.
My friend that had a copy of the Blues Brothers album, when we listened to the Blues Brothers album in his basement, he also had a train set down there.
So I always associate the Blues Brothers with the model train.
I had every Blues Brothers on vinyl.
Is that right?
I'm not proud of it now.
Oh, that was fun stuff.
Well, but you know, like the Blues Brothers made a couple, a handful of vinyl records.
You got the John Goodman one?
No, no, come on.
Okay.
I'm talking about, you know, the... It's all with an asterisk.
Blues Brothers fandom ends in the early 80s.
You know, like it doesn't end with Belushi's death because the Blues Brothers Mushroom Cloud continued to bloom.
But 83, 84 was the last time that you could legitimately buy a new Blues Brothers branded product.
But, you know, they made several records and those records were.
All I know is the Rubber Biscuit one.
That's the only one I know.
They were meant to be taken seriously as blues albums or like blues and soul records.
So they're embarrassing just because neither Ackroyd nor Belushi can actually sing.
And they kind of grunt and groan and caterwaul over these blues tracks, but they are serious about it.
Yeah, but their performances were so fun.
And the band, obviously the band, what are you going to say about the band?
But you're listening to it on an album, so you don't get all the action.
You don't get a lot of duck done.
But yeah, they're playing over Booker T and the MGs with every other great player, including Paul Schaefer in America.
The band sounds incredible.
Yeah, Matt Guitar Murphy.
You know, four fried chickens and a Coke.
You've got a thing.
I love that movie so much.
I love it so much.
Without you, Mag-Guitar Murphy.
Without you dry white toast.
You want that I should wipe the dead bugs off the windshield?
Strong stuff.
I hate Illinois Nazis.
No, we're not going there.
We're not doing any more Blues Brothers.
I swear to you, even though I watched, even though for the last two days I have been watching Godfather in increments.
Because my godfather watching partner keeps falling asleep.
Oh, are we back to this?
And when I say, when I give my godfather watching partner an elbow, and I say, are you serious right now?
She says, no, I love it.
It's incredible.
It's just that something.
I'm too hot.
I ate too much popcorn.
Something.
So we're up to... That's hard for me to... Okay, I'm officially old.
That is hard for me to understand.
It's very hard.
I don't know how you make it through without watching it at a sitting and being riveted at every single point.
And then at the end going, wow, I can't believe that was whatever, two and a half hours.
So she's she's she is fairly.
It's the best.
It's the best movie.
But then she just, you know, she just all of a sudden.
She just gets sleepy.
She had too much popcorn.
I'm like, what happened?
What's the last thing you remember?
And she was like, uh, they were talking about, you know, like Luca Brasi was getting strangled or whatever.
I know.
Spoiler alerts, right?
Right.
So, so far we have made it up to Apollonia is, is destroyed in a bomb.
And how many sittings?
Like three, four sittings?
We've got three sittings now.
Okay.
But I was finally able to get myself over the hump of buying this thing for $4.
And so we're enjoying it very much, but I have really been struggling, even in the half hour that we've been talking to one another, and not just talking to you strictly in Godfather quotes.
Not doing it.
I'm not doing it to her because I don't want to spook her.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I know.
Well, I feel your pain.
I feel your pain.
And...
So, I mean, what can a person do?
Right.
I mean, it's it's better than when I showed her E.T.
and she just checked out and was like, this isn't any fun to watch this.
All right.
I can I can handle it.
And then she showed me crazy, stupid love.
I was like, isn't this a great movie?
Crazy stupid.
90s kids will remember.
Oh, you've got to be a 90s kid.
You've got to be a 90s kid to remember.
Crazy stupid love.
Who's in this?
It's not a 90s movie.
It's a Steve Carell movie?
Yeah.
With Ryan Gosling.
We got Gosling.
Apparently Gosling... I got Emma Stone, Kevin Bacon, Marissa Tomei.
Okay.
So Emma... I'm sorry.
Emma Stone is, I think, a charming ingenue.
But what I didn't realize, because Ryan Gosling was a character that I only knew from the cover of magazines at the grocery store.
Have you ever seen The Notebook?
I don't know.
What was The Notebook?
I mean, you'd know if you saw it.
But, you know, he's been very funny in movies, too.
He's done a couple movies.
Did you ever see Drive?
You need to see Drive, my friend.
It's like a gangster movie?
I mean, Drive, without spoiling it, Drive is basically a guy who's a getaway driver, a for-hire getaway driver.
All right, don't say another word.
The aesthetic of the movie is... I don't want to... Yeah, anyway, see it.
Just going to say, see it.
I found surprising, even though Ryan Gosling is basically playing a like a men's rights activist who nags girls in the film, he's doing it.
It's pre it's pre Gamergate.
This movie was made pre Gamergate.
So we're meant to find this character charming or at least like he's a rake, John.
He's a rake.
That's right.
We're meant to envy his his suavity with the ladies.
That's a big part of the plot.
But what what I was surprised at was that I found because I thought Ryan Gosling was going to be one of these actors of his generation where it was just like yawn.
Because they all really underplay.
He seems like one of those actors where I turn to my wife and go, was this person ever on Dawson's Creek?
I've never seen Dawson's Creek.
I don't know what it is.
Was he a Mouseketeer?
Exactly.
It's somebody that was on a TV show I never saw on a channel I didn't get that was for people that weren't me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I thought that too.
But watching this, I was like, I find Ryan Gosling fairly charming and I understand why girls like him.
And if you look at him closely, you realize he has hips.
You know, he's not like a, he's not like one of these impossible, but I mean, he's super buff and cut or whatever.
Uh, but he also, you know, he has a, he has shapely male hips.
He's not, um,
He's not Brad Pitt, right?
Where you look at Brad Pitt and you're like, I could work 18 hours a day for 10 years.
I would never have Brad Pitt's physique because I'm just not born that way.
Right, right.
But Ryan Gosling, you're like, oh, right.
He's a shapely young man.
And my godfather watching partner says that Ryan Gosling is what she imagines River Phoenix would have looked like if he'd grown up.
And I was like, oh, I'm living in a world where River Phoenix is like... Oh, he's like James Dean was for us.
Yeah, he's the James Dean.
James Jacket.
Of the 90s kids.
It's only they who will get this.
Yes.
So, oh, all by... All leading up to the fact that I saw La La Land, which also has... Oh, and it's got the Emma Stone.
I've heard that's good.
And they have a little, you know, they...
They have a rapport that was established in this earlier film.
And so they are kind of the, you know, the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire of their day, even though they can neither sing nor dance.
That's quite a twist.
Right.
I realized as I was watching La La Land, oh, this is an attempt, a fairly sly attempt by these filmmakers to,
To take advantage of this pre-existing understanding that these two are a very, very good on-screen couple.
Oh, it's like a little intertextual thing, like some of the appearances of Robert De Niro in a movie, or even Marlon Brando in The Freshman, where there's a nod to other things that they've done, kind of encompassed in what they're doing now.
Right.
And so now we're looking at a future where I think you really do need to be a 90s kid to understand that.
But but now that you've explained that, I get it.
Yeah, it's like a Gosling Stone picture.
Gosling Stone.
And we're going to see them reoccur.
And it's not that they're playing the same people every time.
They're just taking advantage of the fact that we love to see Gosling and Stone do their do their bits.
Maybe a little bit like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton or something.
Yeah, exactly.
Even though, oh, one of the great signs that my godfather-watching friend gets it is that she said, who's that lady?
And I was like, you mean Diane Keaton?
And she was like, that's Diane Keaton?
And I said, yeah, this is early, early Diane Keaton.
This is early Diane, yeah.
And she said, I don't like her.
And I, oh boy, I rang the tugboat bell.
Because you're not a fan?
I find Diane Keaton to be very, you know, and her Woody Allen period is what it is.
It's an amazing record of our era, of our time.
He didn't like playing The Godfather?
It was an abortion, Michael!
Yeah, she is playing a fairly unlikable character.
I think Kay is unlikable because Kay is presented in the film as the...
agent the primary agent of encouraging Michael to leave the family business even though Michael wants to and even though he promises her he will so it's you know Michael sets the stage but
Imagine if Kay had, over time, just as Michael did, realized that this was, again, inevitable.
She becomes more like Karen in Goodfellas.
Yeah, embraces the role.
She's a fellow traveler.
Right.
She's like, you know what, this is who we are.
And even though I'm a Shiksa, I'm going to become a Sicilian.
mafia wife instead she's like this sort of harpy over time she becomes she becomes a harpy you're gonna get email i'm gonna get a lot but i did not find k to be a powerful uh you know like female role i found her to be you know kind of a nag and ultimately like she she's she's one of the things that presented this conundrum to michael where what's he gonna do he can't
He can't but do what he's doing.
So you feel like he just has to be dishonest with her in order to keep doing what he's doing.
And ultimately he loses his family over it because he's powerless because he, you know, because as he says to his father on his hospital bed, I'm with you now.
I'm with you.
He didn't want that.
There was one thing Vito wanted.
He thought he'd become a senator, right?
Yeah, that's right.
He thought he'd become a senator.
When he found out that Michael killed Salazzo, a tear runs down his cheek.
He doesn't even want to talk to Tom.
I hear my wife downstairs crying.
Yeah, but you needed a drink first.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway, I, I, uh, I, I, I approved of her assessment of Diane Keaton because I have, I, my feeling about it is that the, the Diane Keaton has been in the last 10 years playing roles of like quirky, quirky mom.
She's in a tough position though.
It's hard to get a good role when you're a lady of a certain age.
It's they, they do not.
That's you.
yeah, it's hard.
This whole business of actors of any age or stripe who have had, you know, million, like two dozen million dollar films, I feel like you should all be in retirement.
De Niro should have stopped making movies in 89.
Alright, yeah, maybe.
Anyway, it's, you know, like world's tiniest violin.
And I understand, I understand the argument that it's hard for older women to get
You know, starring roles in films.
But Diane Keaton is just, I just find her unlikable.
You like Helen Mirren?
I love a Helen Mirren.
You know, I realized I was watching, what was I watching last night?
I was watching Richard III on PBS and I was kind of Googling around.
Do you remember the movie The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the Peter Greenway movie?
I remember the book.
It was very famous at the time for being very, very lush, like many Peter Greenway movies.
It's very beautiful and lush, but like super duper violent and very, very, very gross.
And I'm only now catching up on how many people were in that movie that I didn't realize were in that movie.
I think I missed out on this whole... I didn't know Helen Mirren was in that.
I mean, take this in the way I mean it.
She was hot.
She was probably 40, but she's still hot Helen Mirren.
Let me ask you this.
Let me riddle you this.
Have you ever Googled Helen Mirren nudes?
um you and i went through this with judy dench helen mirren and somebody else one time and i did look for a lot of english ladies in the nude yeah yeah and also michael gambon michael gambon the second dumbledore and uh the guy from many other movies michael gambon i didn't realize he was the thief in it that he was the bad guy
Oh, I see.
Well, now you're spoiler alert, because I've never seen The Cook, The Thief, The Wife, and The Lover.
Yeah, you can skip it.
You can skip it.
It's pretty gross.
Is that right?
Richard III was good, though.
That's got Sherlock Holmes in it.
It's got the Benedict Cumberbatch with a hump in it.
It was pretty good.
Yeah, I always try and watch the Shakespeare movies.
There's a whole big run right now, what's called The Hollow Crown, and they're doing, they do like, what's the one before Henry V?
It's like Richard II.
Richard II through Richard III, and they're all, yeah.
So I haven't watched all of them.
It's too much Shakespeare.
You lose your mind.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But Cumberbatch with a hump.
La la la.
He has those alien eyes and those womanly thighs and the hump upon his back.
La la la.
That was the winter of our discontent.
That's how it starts.
And he's got a hump.
He's shirtless with a hump playing chess with himself.
And it's all Cumberbatch.
I mean, this was what embarrassed Richard Dreyfuss so badly that he wanted to give up acting.
Oh, because he had to do Richard?
Well, sure.
Richard does Richard.
This is one of the major themes of the Goodbye Girl, which is one of the classic films.
Still never seen it.
Still never seen it.
You have never seen Goodbye Girl.
And I'm a Marsha Mason fan, so that's a weird thing.
Never seen Goodbye Girl.
I know.
And the thing is, for someone of my age, for a time, it was name checked so often, including on things like Seinfeld, that it's crazy that I didn't know it.
I might have missed my window.
Goodbye, girl.
I don't think so.
Okay.
All right.
I'll cue it up.
Goodbye, girl.
It's like Neil Simon movies where I don't know how you could watch Brighton Beach memoirs at any age at any time and not be charmed.
Oh, yeah.
Those are good.
By Brighton Beach memoirs.
And this is... Goodbye, girl feels like you're watching a Broadway play from the 70s.
Like, almost...
because it all mostly takes place in an apartment it feels a little bit like like uh the odd couple right right i get what you mean it's not stagey but that it feels like a play it feels like a play and and and in that sense like it's a good play and richard dreyfus it's young richard dreyfus it's richard dreyfus like right after jaws and looks like it's right around close to counters 77 it's a it's richard dreyfus from his turkey age you
know yeah we're just like you just chew up the scenery you richard dreyfus go eat eat it eat it and it has a it has a charming uh like nine-year-old girl who's uh who's wise before her years i remember her who reminds me of your daughter quinn cummings she was a child actress i remember her child actress she was in the 90s look at that
She's like, she is the blossom of the 70s.
Is that what you're saying?
Oh, look at that.
She's been on Beretta, Starsky and Hutch, Six Million Dollar Man.
Yeah, all the shows, all the great shows.
Oh, Family.
Family, was that the one with Christy McNichol?
Yeah.
Oh, man, I felt hard for her.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
I'm looking right now, right here in front of me on my desk, which is also right now, at least, my dining room table.
I have a copy of Dynamite Magazine that's...
called the meet christy mcnichol issue of dynamite magazine i can still see the cover and uh yeah right it's a wonderful somewhere in my house i still have a copy i had a subscription i still have a copy in the house somewhere of the bgs uh versus the beatles uh who's better they had a big showdown i think it's still it's still an open question
i remember the final paragraph even in the end even the i remember the sentence begins in the end even the chart topping bgs something something something not as good as the beetles right they gave it to him but it was a there's a squeaker like right to the last yeah yeah made it right through well i mean you remember when squeeze was the new beetle
Squeeze are going to make Badfinger look like Big Star.
Or something.
It's got a picture of Christy McNichol riding a skateboard.
And then further on...
There's an article about the Dynamite Duo.
Do you know who the Dynamite Duo are?
Is that those two girls from that Saturday morning show?
Nope, nope.
Oh, the Dynamite Duo is in the last pages of the cartoon, like a little comic book thing in Dynamite, right?
It is a comic book, but I feel like Dynamite Duo are described as they...
What are they?
Ordinary teenagers.
A strange series of events changed their lives forever.
Attending a carnival, the twins won a weird-looking set of matching rings.
They're twins.
Kind of like the Wonder Twins.
And when they put the rings on, they become...
Dawnstar and Nightglider.
So it's a little bit like Wonder Twin Powers Activate, right?
Shape of an Ice Monkey.
Dawnstar and Nightglider, better known as the Dynamite Duo.
And they're superheroes, so that's why I thought you would know them.
So here's Dynamite, right?
This is whatever it is, 77.
Since many readers missed the exciting origin of the duo and some of their early exploits, we decided to review what's happened so far.
Here are the most frequently asked questions about our favorite superheroes.
And then an entire page of Dynamite duo facts.
Oh, wow.
And it's called the fact sheet.
And then very strangely, the next this this describes better than anything else could our childhood in the 70s, because the next page is a double, no, a triple page article on Lon Chaney.
Oh, it was God.
Our age was weird.
You're right.
You're absolutely right.
And also, I think really typified by things like variety shows where like not just Ed Sullivan, but like Carol Burnett, where like you might you could see something like impossibly modern, super weird, or you might see like Milton Berle.
Yeah, this is this is a big article on on the hunchback of Notre Dame.
And like all these black and white photos of Lon Chaney in between a description of the dynamite duo and Christie McNichol riding a skateboard.
And you're just like, yeah, 1978 meet Christie McNichol.
I guess this is.
And then there's a big, big article on the Muppets.
Where do Muppets come from?
One look at the furry, freaky, fabulous creatures, and you might guess the moon!
So, I mean, how are you supposed to... I mean, you could convince me that I would turn the page and see almost anything.
Right?
Like Marilyn Voss Savant, or like Little Annie Fanny, or... I mean, I have no idea what's in this magazine.
You turn the page...
It's talking about now cool, like this was the era of the original cool t-shirt, iron-on t-shirts.
Yeah, right.
Article about those.
You might see something about cooking, like how to cook something.
You might see some prototypical kind of life hacks things.
I'm also conflating it a little bit in my head with National Geographic World, which I also had a subscription to.
I didn't have it.
Boy, I love that thing.
Like the close-ups of patterns up close to you to try and identify what it was.
Oh, yeah.
I've told you before, my mom got me a subscription to Time Magazine because she felt like that was what I needed.
Lonely Sandwich posted a thing on Instagram the other day where he was like, I took my kid to see something.
You always remember your first movie.
It was a kid's first movie in a theater.
You always remember your first movie.
And you do always remember your first movie.
My first movie was Dr. Zhivago that my mom took me to see at a 99 cent movie theater.
That's so weird.
Back when, you know, like the biggest theater in town, a theater that seats 1,200 people, was running old movies for 99 cents.
And it was completely decrepit, dusty stuff.
The seats were all had, you know, the stuffing was coming out of the seats.
And you could buy this ticket and a popcorn and walk into this cavernous theater that had 11 people in it to see a matinee of Dr. Zhivago, a three-hour film about the Russian Revolution.
A three-hour romantic rendition of the Russian Revolution.
That's an epic.
This was my first movie as a kid, and my mom was like, you're going to love it.
It's one of the great films.
And, you know, I'm just sitting in the theater like...
The entire experience was overwhelming.
Being in the theater was overwhelming.
Like the type of theater as you walk down the aisle, you can hear.
And this was back when everybody wore leather sold shoes, too.
So people are walking down the aisle like clop, clop, clop, like like you're walking through the CIA headquarters.
Yeah.
But you're in this like I mean, it's just the theater was as much a character of the film.
And then I'm watching this completely unintelligible movie to me.
uh and yeah you're blowing sandwiches right stuck in my head that's a weird one it wasn't star wars it wasn't jaws it was and then she took me to see anti-mame which scarred me for life oh really anti-mame is that ethel merman
Uh, no.
No, it's, uh, wait, I know this.
Is it, uh, let me get it, uh, Joan?
Yes.
Uh, is it Jane Russell, maybe?
No.
I'm confused, because there's Mame, and then there's the other one that's like Mame.
Uh, you got the one with Barbra Streisand.
You got the one with Barbra Streisand that's like, let me get this right.
Who's in this?
Rosalind Russell!
Oh, Rosalind Russell.
Rosalind Russell.
That's what it is.
And what am I confusing it with?
What's the other one?
The other one is the one about Joan Crawford being a terrible mom.
Could be.
I remember we had the musical.
We had an 8-track of the musical.
We also had We Need a Little Christmas.
That was Lucille Balls.
That was Lucille Ball's 1974 version.
Oh, you're right.
The musical with Lucille Ball.
The original was a Technicolor comedy from 1958.
Oh, of course.
I see my confusion now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
With Rosalind Russell.
But...
What was the one I was just talking about, the actress that was a terrible mom?
Oh, that would be 1981's probably Mommy Dearest.
Oh, Mommy Dearest, that was it.
Based on the book by her daughter, Christine.
Yeah, so my mom took me to see Mommy Dearest.
What?
That's the one that scarred me for life.
Oh, my goodness.
Mommy Dearest scarred me for life.
Make sure you eat the raw meat.
Not a very good mommy.
Not a good mommy at all.
No, no.
It's complicated.
It's hard to be a parent.
Yeah.
John, how are you going to survive?
How will you move forward with the Anna and Elsa situation?
Are you hypervigilant for more incursions into this?
Are you okay with your role as bad Santa?
How are you going to proceed?
How?
Well, so I don't know.
Are you going to let Santa win this one?
Yeah, Santa gets this one.
All right, one for Santa.
Santa gets this one.
Santa takes it, and I'm going to continue to sulk a little bit in order to really play up the fact that Santa, and by extension, my daughter, like...
made it happen at daddy's expense because I feel like that is, uh, she definitely feels empowered by it.
And I have to, I have to, I have to lose this one.
I have to lose gracefully.
That's a lesson in losing gracefully.
Uh, but I can sulk a little bit because it feels like I, you know, like I lost one fair and square.
I love it when my daughter gets the better of me.
It makes me really happy.
Yeah.
But you know, Oh,
I wanted, like most of us do initially, to raise my daughter in a gender neutral environment.
And I went to great lengths to create a positive gender neutrality in our home, not as an experiment, but just as a way of setting up a kind of freedom.
It also makes things more interesting.
Yeah.
Honestly, if you just feed everybody from the same big spoon that we were fed with, it's not as interesting.
Yeah, you just let her pick.
And from the very earliest moment, if you put a pink car and a blue car, she would pick up the pink car.
I think our friend Dan went through something very similar to this.
Yeah.
And she would pick up the pink car, turn it over on its back, and cradle it and say...
Who's a good baby?
Kiss.
Kiss.
Right?
Kiss the baby.
And I'm like, honey, that is a 1971 Camaro that I went to great lengths to find you.
And she's like, kiss the baby.
So I stopped fighting that a long time ago.
And now I feel like I'm just in it to win it.
What she wants, I'm not going to be in there like, don't you want to play with this truck?
I'm just going to say, like, you want the Barbies?
You want the Anna and Elsa?
Like, here we go.
There's a funny thread through several of the things we're talking about.
I don't know why I'm thinking of this.
But when we talked earlier about, like, being a kid, I consider you a 70s kid, too.
But growing up in the 70s, and, you know, even though we didn't have things like prayer in school, there was a grace note to almost everything we did in winter that it was about Christmas.
Yeah.
And so I'm just thinking, though, like, you know, today, I think we're still struggling with how to handle that setting aside the war on Christmas and all that.
But like, nobody wants to be a dick about it.
You don't want to assume something about somebody, even with something as seemingly innocuous as a greeting.
But I feel like the phrase I think is going through my head is I feel like, for example, being a very observant Jew.
in the 70s must be worse than being a vegan today.
We're like, there's an option for you, but it's really not the best we've got.
Yeah, okay, we'll take that into consideration.
When we make the poster and we have to go look up how to say all these things in different languages, we'll find a way to work in some Hanukkah.
But, you know, Hanukkah is kind of a neutered Christmas for Jews.
You know, we want to acknowledge that.
But, like, you know, how do you do that as a family?
Nobody wants to be a dick about this except for the war on Christmas people.
Like, nobody wants to be a jerk about this.
You don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.
The holidays are already fraught enough without adding all this drama.
Well, that's for sure.
But all of that is part of a thing like we have made it our cultural imperative to presume that everyone wants to be part of the mainstream and that the mainstream needs to be broad enough that it encompasses everyone.
And I think in this up until very, very recently, to whatever degree, like smaller groups of people
were not included at all in the mainstream, also had the advantage of knowing that you were outside the mainstream and that being a thing of its own appeal.
And I think if you were seven years old and in school and everybody was talking about Jesus and you were Jewish, it could have been very uncomfortable and you could have felt like, why am I excluded from Christmas?
But I think within the Jewish community...
of adults, there was absolutely no interest in being included in Christian mainstream.
Nobody cared among adult Jews whether or not they mentioned Hanukkah on the evening news because there was a complete understanding.
We are a separate community.
We have our own traditions.
We are happy, more than happy, to be excluded from the mainstream culture as long as you don't come try and burn our synagogue.
And this was a thing that I personally saw when gay culture went into the mainstream, because when I first was.
And that's changed a lot since then, where it used to be like, hell no, I don't want to be a parent like that.
Don't include me in your family thing.
I got my own thing going on.
Stop trying to turn me into like a version of me that you understand.
Yeah, right.
I mean, the whole notion of, I mean, there were always gay people that just wanted to settle down and be a happy couple and live in a home.
Just people just didn't want to be harassed, you know?
But there was not this.
Like, for God's sake, please don't come to our bars and fuck them up.
Please stop trying to turn us into the sympathetic friend.
Like, just let me be a person and stop.
There was no big push to domesticate and suburbanize.
No.
Or to feel, to make it, even within gay culture, that that is the new norm.
No, exactly.
That really feels like, at least in my exposure, it feels like something in the last 10, 15 years.
And what's been lost is this completely, like, enveloping, separate and other, like, gay culture, which had all its own touchstones, all its own secret language, all its own...
There was no desire to be mainstreamed.
It was part of the appeal.
Not part of the appeal, but it was a wonderful thing.
And the thing is, we all...
know what it's like to have a secret culture.
It's the thing in a lot of our lives that we prize the most.
So the idea that that equality under the law also means which is the thing that we all absolutely desire and equality under the law and freedom from being openly oppressed is
is a thing that is what we call justice, and that's what we're all working toward.
But the idea that mainstream culture should be a thing that is completely inclusive of everybody, it kind of misses the point of mainstream, which is a thing to exclude yourself from or to even be excluded from.
Another word for mainstream...
In some ways is hegemony.
I mean, it's a way of mainstream.
I mean, to me, I think about hegemony and the way I learned it back in the day was the hegemony, cultural hegemony was this idea that like, especially in an authoritarian regime, but really anywhere.
Almost the most radical of ideas can become kind of rounded off and incorporated into the system such that it's very difficult to be outside the system because the system eventually makes everything part of it.
Right.
It absorbs and neuters all difference.
And neuters is a good way to put it, yeah.
Yeah, you remember for many years where mainstream in our culture was synonymous with dull and useless in a way.
And now the opposite is true.
Now we're trying to mainstream every permutation of difference.
Well, mainstream also now is code for dishonest.
Mainstream now is you take this thing that's truthful from my news product and then take all the truth out of it to put it into your news product because you don't tell the truth.
You're not being honest about this story.
But a lot of the gay people I know that are my age, you know, in a way they kind of, I mean, they're glad to have been...
like within the culture taken out of the out of the enforced closet but they also lament all that was lost culturally you know now it's just like oh i guess i'm supposed to get married now right well i mean of course you got to account a little bit for you know aids in the 80s and like i'm still i feel like i'm still as many documentaries and things i've read
And, you know, in some extent lived through.
I mean, I had friends with HIV and AIDS in college, you know, even in the 80s.
But, you know, I'm still getting my head around how much of America was lost over about 8 to 10 years.
I'm still really getting that there are certain, especially in creative things, like, you know, like the dance and theater community in New York just gutted.
I mean, it's still, it's like you've talked about this and like all the lives, you know, the lives of just the people who are just normal people, the soldiers lost in World War II, but then just how many trombone players died in World War II?
When you look at it that way, it's kind of staggering.
And I don't know.
I'm sorry I'm changing the topic here.
Yeah.
Back then, you could come to a place, you could go to Greenwich Village, you could go to the Castro, and you could find this little terrarium to live in.
It wasn't like everybody agreed on the same thing, but there was so much shared cultural DNA about what we were here for, and they weren't interfered with too surpassingly much, and it got to very quickly turn into this thriving culture within fewer than a dozen years.
You've got this really thriving community of something that used to be considered so outre,
It must be kind of a bummer for all those reasons to see that go away.
It's pet stores and dildos, but you can also get baby stuff there.
It's the weirdest thing, because from within American culture...
Right.
It's very easy to look at.
I mean, the vast majority of the people in the world and say they're living on a dollar a day.
Right.
And that amount of crushing poverty is a thing that is a tragedy and that we from our wealthy tower need to address this tragedy for other on behalf of other people.
We need to lift them out of their dollar a day existence.
Right.
And from my perspective, it often takes the form of a kind of do-they-know-it's-Christmas level of condescension.
The only way that I can really feel sympathy for these people is to realize how much I'd miss Christmas if I was starving.
Yeah, right.
Like the people in Africa who don't know it's Christmas, like they don't need to know it's Christmas.
That's not the point.
No.
And so from my experience as a traveler, right, everywhere you go, no matter how much money people have, they are...
They are super glad to be in love.
They love music and dance.
They are glad for the food that they get.
And then the proportion of people that are literally starving is you wish that you could do something for them.
But most people that are living on a dollar a day have a quality of life that maybe surpasses the quality of life that you have if you're making $200,000 a year and live alone in a cold, art-filled place.
condo downtown and have no friends and spend all day on the internet yelling at people behind an egg avatar like to live in a village where your hut has a dirt floor but you're surrounded by people you love just from a strictly human standpoint your quality of life is higher and our rich condescension to those people is pathetic we don't realize how much we have
destroyed our quality of life because of our wealth.
And, you know, you say Greenwich Village and the Castro, but I don't know if I've ever told the story of my first exposure to a gay bar.
And it was in Anchorage in about 1985.
If you have, I don't remember it.
My friend Kel and I were out at night driving around in the call.
Kel and I were up there and we were just looking for trouble.
And in Anchorage in the 80s, the gay bars were all very subdued on the outside.
They didn't, I mean, there was one that everybody knew was the main sort of gay bar that you would drive by and kind of look at like, there's the gay bar.
But there were other gay bars and they were just, you know, they played it pretty subtly.
They weren't called like cuffs or anything.
They were just like, you know, smaller little pubs and taverns.
And Kel and I were driving around downtown.
It was 2 o'clock in the morning.
And, you know, we used to do this all the time, just looking for something, anything, you know, looking for something that isn't nailed down.
We're driving along and we see this bar emptying out.
It's 2 a.m.
and everyone in the bar is coming out at the same time.
And there's probably 50 people pouring out of this bar.
And as we drive by, we see that the people coming out of this bar are – it's a very colorful cast of people.
And so we pull over and we're like, what the hell is going on in that bar?
And we park kind of in the shadows and we see –
It gradually dawns on us like they're gay.
Everyone that's coming out of that bar is gay.
And they're behaving very flamboyant.
A lot of them flamboyantly like, oh, my God.
And the whole you're seeing it all unfold.
And I had a gay friend in high school who was like a lovely guy.
And but I had never experienced.
A whole room of people all coming out.
And it becomes obvious that the conversation is continuing in the parking lot.
And they're making plans to go to a party.
And we're seeing all this from across the street.
And they're all getting in their cars.
And then one by one, their cars all leave the parking lot and all head off together in a convoy.
And, you know, this is like a lower middle class bar.
So they're Pintos and, you know, K cars and stuff.
It's not like a it's not like a glamorous scene, but they all head off in a parade.
And Kel and I just instinctively like start the car, follow the parade.
And so off we go.
It's two in the morning.
There's nobody on the street.
There's a parade of nine cars or something.
And then Kel and I back a quarter of a mile behind following along.
And the parade goes off and off into the suburbs and off all the way to Eagle River, like outside of Anchorage.
And we're just following the whole time.
Like, what is going to happen?
What is going to happen?
And they go into this neighborhood, wend their way and come to a little house.
And everybody parks on the street outside and they all pile out of their cars and into this little house.
And Kel and I park across the street and we watch the whole party and it's very fun.
Everybody's having a good time.
They all know each other pour into this house.
And we're sitting across the street and we're like, what do we do now?
Like, what do we do?
And we both wanted to go to the party.
And so we look at each other and, you know, we're high school kids.
And this is a risky moment because it's like, do you want to go to the party?
Yes, I kind of do.
Do you want to go to the party?
Yes.
But this is in a time and in a culture when it was just commonplace for, you know, the biggest put down you could say to a guy was like, you're a fag.
And now we're sitting here across the street from this party and we're like, let's go.
So we pile out of the car, march across the lawn.
knock on the door and everybody in the party that was invited to the party is already in the party so the party gets quiet you can hear it like who's at the door and they open the door and here are these two high school boys and we said can we come to your party and they said sure and invited us in and we
The party picks back up again.
But everyone in the party is like, who are you?
Where did you come from?
How did you find our party?
And so we just copped to it.
We were parked across the street from your bar.
We saw everybody come out.
And we followed you.
And now we're here.
And we were completely embraced.
And they had so many questions about being a straight high school boy.
And we had so many questions about like who – like she is obviously a boy and she's dressed like a girl.
What is that?
And big laugh and then everybody explains.
And it was Anchorage gay culture in the 80s.
So this was a bar that was like –
It wasn't a drag bar.
It wasn't a dyke bar.
Everybody was there.
Right.
I mean, there were lesbians at this party there.
It was a complete rainbow of of what represented like gay and alternative culture, because there were also straight like friends of gay people at this party.
Was it really like goths?
Yeah.
I mean, the whole I mean, they weren't they were gay goths.
Right.
I mean, it wasn't like also a goth bar.
But it was an incredible night.
And the whole thing was, for me, like also fraught with sexual tension, because it was like, what's going to happen?
I don't know where we were taught that that part of gay culture was that was a promiscuity.
And so is this a promiscuous party?
And I'm 16.
I'm a virgin.
I'm desperate to have sex with somebody.
But is it going to happen tonight?
I don't know.
What would the context be?
Who here am I most attracted to?
Are they attracted to me?
And there was a lot of flirtation.
But it was this for me, like this shattering moment where I realized there were subcultures that weren't just punk because I knew about punk subculture and I was, you know, a reluctant, like scowling adjacent punk.
Because my sister was punk and I was her escort.
And so, you know, I went to every punk show that was ever in Anchorage.
But I always was leaning against the back wall going, this is bullshit.
But I was there, you know, and I loved it.
But here was a subculture that wasn't punk that also felt permanent.
Like it was this was what if it felt like sturdy.
It felt like what?
It felt sturdy.
Yeah, it felt sturdy.
There was a tremendous sense of belonging and inclusiveness within it.
And both Kel and I felt some envy at the amount of love that, you know, a love and acceptance that permeated this small party of very different people.
you know they there wasn't a there wasn't a single gay a single type of gay it was every kind of person at this party right and you know and that was a lightning bolt for me that from then on i you know personally had no um had no prejudice and before that i had the prejudice of ignorance
And after that, I was just like, well, whatever.
I mean, if you say, if you say anything about gays, it's just because you don't know anything about them.
And, you know, my first job when I got to Seattle was in a gay bar.
So it was like, it wasn't just the Castro thing.
Every little town had this going on.
And I think in the Midwest and in the red States now, that's still true.
If you're, you know, if you're in Missouri or you're in Kansas, there are, there still is this bar and there still is that party.
And from the Castro or from Seattle, we look at it and we go, Oh my God.
And because there is violence directed at those populations, um,
we imagine that their whole existence is characterized by fear and violence.
But it isn't.
The violence and the hatred and the exclusion, they don't actually impact what it's like to be in that space.
In a way, all that hostility creates the love and solidarity in that space.
And that's a hard thing to I think for everybody in that room, if they were completely mainstreamed, that would be lost.
And that's and that's a thing that in the pursuit of like total liberation.
And I would never from outside say that that was preferable.
Right.
I can't say that.
I can't know that.
Obviously, you want to be able to walk down the street and be yourself and not be assaulted.
But whatever that small and punk rock used to be like that, too.
You know, you were at risk when you were out in public wearing a mohawk that some rednecks were going to beat your ass.
And that was part of.
You know, that was part of what made punk rock so amazing from within.
And, you know, I'm not at risk of getting my ass beat.
And never was.
But partly I felt envy for the for like the small community that I never would have access to, really, unless I was.
Unless I was faking it, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
On the one hand, it sounds probably kind of odd or ironic for somebody like you or me to say you feel envy for that.
Because one reason people end up finding those little caresses in life is because...
oftentimes they don't have anybody else.
Also, to your point, though, you are right.
Obviously, when you go to a big town, there's going to be gay bars.
There were times where I didn't know bars were gay bars because I didn't know what to look for.
I didn't even know what it really meant.
I think one thing is we were sort of raised, once you knew what a gay bar was, you figured it was a place where just men were having sex in the bathroom.
That's not what it was.
It could be, but it was just a place.
It could just be a safe place.
It could be a fun place.
A safe place.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to infantilize anybody here.
I feel like I'm getting a little dangerous.
I don't want to make anybody adorable to fit my narrative.
They're just people.
And it's nice to be around people where you can do your thing and be who you want to be without, as you say, fear of getting your ass kicked.
I don't think it even has to be that dramatic.
It's just that in any towns, I guess I'm thinking in particular of towns in Florida where I lived.
Where it would be, you know, two years before I figured out, oh, that's a gay bar.
I didn't get that.
You know?
I mean, it wasn't called, like, The Third Knuckle or something.
It was just called Jim's or whatever.
Jim's, right.
Right.
But it wasn't what you thought of from, like, Chick Publications and Quincy.
Like, this is... It's not...
Anyway, I just think it is interesting to think about that everybody wants a place that you didn't even know existed.
I think we've all gotten that.
Even if you're just a little bit of a geek and you find geek friends, or for some kids it could be scouts.
I don't know.
Whatever it is, it could be a Christian church.
But to find some place that feels welcoming and that is not asking you to capitulate...
In fact, not asking you to capitulate on your personality, but saying, hey, tell me more about your personality.
That's okay here.
When you first meet up with somebody who knows this nerd thing and they know it more than you, it's warm and it's humbling and it's weird.
And you're like, where has this been for my whole life?
And it's the best.
And tourists, notwithstanding, it's still a wonderful thing.
Gawkers, notwithstanding, it's still really nice to have a place where you can go and feel like you're more yourself than you were before you found it.
It seems like a more natural human state, and this is why I kind of connect it to this idea that do they know it's Christmas is just so rude, let alone destructive, because cities are unnatural, agglomerations of people.
Yeah, villages and tribes make more sense from a certain standpoint.
Yeah, if any of us—
If any of us in any walk of life could say that we had 50 close friends, 50 people close to us, including family, distant relatives and friends, fellow villagers, like there's nothing any of us want more.
You can't sustain 100 close friends.
50 is maxing out.
And if you live in a 200-person village and you have, let's say, 30 rivals, 50 people that are in your family and are close friends, and then some other people that share the village, but you know every single one of their names.
And at night, everyone gathers around in their respective little compounds, gathers around the fire and tells stories and sings.
That is the natural state of human beings.
And to be living each in our own, you know, in our nuclear family, in our nuclear family, in our closed-door homes where we don't know our neighbors' names, that is the pathology.
And to imagine that freedom means that every one of 300 million people
accepts me utterly and unreservedly is a is a modern
uh, like misapprehension that, that the feeling within your village of 300 people and how it relates to the village of 300 people.
That is a mile and a half down the road.
Like there's friendship there, but also competition.
And in some case, if you go 10 miles down the road, maybe there's a tremendous lack of understanding.
I've told you about it when I walked across Europe and every single village as I headed East, uh,
The villagers and this is in Germany.
This isn't in, you know, Pakistan.
I mean, this is in this is in the center of what you develop the world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what you consider the hyper developed world.
People would say, oh, well, you know, you're headed tomorrow.
You're going to cross into Bavaria and watch out for those people.
Because they are animals.
And everyone in Germany was like, when you get into the Czech Republic, watch out.
Because they are all pickpockets.
And then the Czechs felt that way about the Slovaks.
And the Slovaks felt that way about the Hungarians.
And everyone agreed that the Romanians were all pickpockets.
And it was just incredible the sense that as you moved east...
There was continual suspicion of the people that lived 100 miles east.
Like lasting, thousand-year-old... But they're more primitive and dishonest.
Yeah, like closer to some sort of Slavic agrarianism.
And by that...
By virtue of that, their water is bad, their church is bad, their intentions are bad.
And from one German village to the next, I just found this to be incredible.
The people in the northwest of Germany felt the people in the south.
Yeah, you should hear what the people to the west say about you.
Yeah, and what I don't know is if I had been walking the other way,
They say they're snobs.
Well, no, I found there was never that amount of knowledge.
The knowledge was confined to... Oh, it's not like folk wisdom about what we know about these people.
Not that, because there are enough people from the East who have gone West and come back that what they know is everyone in Germany gets a thousand Deutschmarks a month from the government.
And they say that from the perspective of their own village where 10 Deutschmarks would make a huge difference in their month.
You know, like 10 Deutschmarks would enable them to buy a car or to live in a nicer apartment.
And so they've heard in Germany, everyone gets a thousand Deutschmarks a month free from the government.
And what they don't realize is that
A pack of cigarettes in Romania costs $0.10 and a pack of cigarettes in Germany costs $6.
There's an understanding of how much money there is, but not an understanding that there's a commensurate increase in cost and difficulty.
And so that's the experience you have, I think, moving east to west.
And moving west to east is just like the people there are so poor that they have to resort to stealing and they have no educations.
And as a traveler moving through those spaces at a walking pace, I mean, you do see the changes.
They're enormous.
But you also feel like, I mean, there's a lot more community in Romania than there will ever be in Germany.
And in the end, like, which do you want?
Right.
I am.
I partly I feel like I had a funny side door into gay culture because I did not have a surpassing number.
Hey, I had some in the closet ish friends where we didn't talk about it in high school, but very few.
But I did have gay and by friends in college, but it was not like a big part of my own culture is music that got me into it, because that's where on the one hand.
um for several years when i was most into music in my life it was often gay bars that would have what was then called new wave night um but even if you didn't go on new wave night it was where they would play just really good dance music that's gay bars is where that was happening and you know for me it was not any kind of like oh a furtive gesture against frat culture necessarily it's just that that was a better bar to go to they were pretty tolerant of these dorks coming in and messing up their place on tuesday nights um
But like that was that was for me, that was an early exposure to large numbers of gay people.
And you realize, hey, you know, they're pretty harmless.
They're not.
No, they're not.
They got inside me and changed me forever.
I wouldn't say they were harmless.
You got to stay away from the Anchorage gays.
Can I give you an American Girl hack?
Yeah.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
So you're already, the costly part is taken care of.
You got the doll.
I got the doll.
The American Girl doll store.
She has very soft hair.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
You should brush it, though.
Yeah, you got to brush it.
But, you know, just for what it's worth, the Target stores.
They sell a line, I forget what it's called, but you'll definitely know it when you see it.
They sell a line of accessories and tableau and clothes that just so happen to exactly fit American Girl dolls.
And they are a lot less expensive.
Tell me how are they branded.
I forget the name of it, but you go and you'll see like, you know, you'll instantly recognize it.
I don't know the name of it, but like if you want a less costly option and you want to be a hero or have Santa be a hero, that's a good American Girl hack.
Now the store, you can go and it's fun.
You go to the store, you can have tea with your doll.
Also, the restrooms have a place to put your doll while you're using the bathroom.
Okay.
Wait a minute.
You're saying that there are American Girl doll stores?
Oh, it's a thing.
It's a whole thing.
There's books.
My daughter's read the books.
You can read about your doll.
Her favorite doll, Rebecca, is a Jewish immigrant family.
And they're trying to bring more of their family back from Russia.
And there's a lot of drama.
Monkey breaks his ankle.
No spoilers.
She's very excited about the books.
But yeah, no, it's a whole thing.
And the stores are...
I mean, my daughter gets to go there.
Mom takes her there for her birthday.
And that's like a big event every year.
I'm going to have to research that.
But you don't need to get into their brand.
As long as Target is getting, they're getting away with murder with these things.
Because you can get really cool stuff that just happens to fit an American Girl doll at their stores.
You know, one of our earliest children's books here was about a young girl from a shtetl.
Sort of a 19th century village, I have to assume in Poland, whose rabbi has a certain amount of opportunity to send one person from the village to America.
And in his rabbinical wisdom, he picks this orphan girl who lives with her grandmother and says, her grandmother has taught her how to sew lace.
And he says, I'm going to choose you.
That's so interesting.
Rebecca's family makes doilies.
That's how they can afford to bring people over from Russia.
It costs $30 to bring them from Russia.
It's a lot of money.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And so she's very scared, obviously.
And she makes the trip.
And she gets to America.
And she has a relative there or friend of a friend who puts her to work sewing in some sort of wedding dress capacity.
And she's recognized as a great...
Or, you know, a really good seamstress.
So everyone treats her kindly in that culture.
And she saves up enough money.
And she meets a nice boy on the ship.
across the passage.
And I don't want to ruin the story for you.
But eventually, she saves up enough money to bring her grandmother over to America.
And even though that seems like kind of a wasted effort because her grandmother is a little old lady and is just going to come to America and be a burden and she should have been left in Poland,
It's a wonderful end to the book because it shows you how lovely the girl is.
And we got this book pretty early on.
I was at Powell's Books in Portland, and I saw this book, and I said, you know, I am a Judeophile, and this seems like a fun story, a fun way to introduce Marlo to –
Eastern European history, my particular interest.
And I read this book for her, and I was sobbing by the end.
Wow.
What's the book called?
Let's see, I have it... I'll take you off it, but if you let me know, I'd love to see that.
Yeah, I'm bad at remembering the titles of books.
And then everyone who's ever read the book
also sobs and i've read the book 40 times and i continue to choke up at the end and i don't know what to do about it i shouldn't still be crying about this book um and you know my daughter loves it and wants it read to her uh and i don't know like i don't know where to find other children's books that are of this quality
Because it's a book that she'll be able to read and enjoy when she's 10.
But also I read it to her when she was four.
And she loves the story.
You know, she'll she'll love the story over the course of her life.
And I don't know, you know, like Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Monsbach is not a book.
Maybe she'll love it when she's 19.
I read it to her a couple of times and until she was of the age where she was like, what is that word that you keep skipping over?
I was like, well, this book's going in the closet.
Yeah.
My daughter recently read a good one.
She's reading it after school.
Just finished about a little boy in a Japanese internment camp.
No.
She really enjoyed that.
Uh-huh.
I mean, these are some of the things that we didn't have access to.
Well, they can read these until they're ready for fairy tales.
That shit's too scary.
Right, right.
I have never read her any kind of grim... You gotta read her Rumpelstiltskin.
It's so bad.
He stamps his foot and then he tears himself in two.
Ha!
Just like me.
Happy holidays.