Muse

Hi, my name is Anne from Seattle, and I am really excited for the Cabbage Patch show. My family started getting Cabbage Patch kids one year after the craze, when people were stealing them out of each of their shopping carts. And I had two, Betty and Noelle. My sister had probably 15 or so, Lori, Janet, Beatrice, Laney, Omar. She got one that didn't come with adoption papers, who got named Big Boy, and many others that I don't even remember their names. But anyway, one afternoon, he had them set up on the couch, all lined up, organized to, I don't know, I guess, watch TV. And my dad came home from work, and he would often sit on the couch after work. But I remember he stepped in the door, glanced at the Cabbage Patch Kids, shook his head, and sat on the floor. And that is when I realized that the Cabbage Patch Kids called the shots at my house. Power out.

T-B-T-L.

Guess what day it is. Guess what day it is.

It's Friday, Friday. Gonna get down on Friday. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend. there's nothing classier than boring jazz music was my underwear showing when i was climbing down the tree i wore my thursdays because my saturdays had a case of the mondays if you know what i mean listen please please please if anybody doesn't know the difference between a valance and a jabot I really need you to leave.

I wish I could remember my Cabbage Patch Kid's name. I know, I mean, I can picture him, sort of. I know he had short brown hair, plastic face, I think, of course. I'm pretty sure he was embezzling from my dad's retirement account. Do you believe that? I do if you do. But it's absurd. Hello, everybody. Welcome to a very special Friday edition of TBTL. This is, of course, the show that's too beautiful to live. And my name, of course, is Andrew Walsh. I'll be your host today. I don't use foul language, and I don't like to hear anyone else use it either. So you guys knew this day was coming. You understood the assignment, as they say. You've been sending in emails and voicemails with your Cabbage Patch Kids stories, and we're going to hear more of those soon. But you might be asking yourself, Andrew, why are we doing this again? What's going on? Well, the reason is because, and by the way, this is pretty big news, and I hope you treat it with the respect that it deserves. One of our very favorite TVTL friendos recently adopted her own Cabbage Patch Kid, and I got to tell you, ever since that day, she's just had this certain glow about her.

You're more beautiful than Cinderella. You smell like pine needles and you have a face like sunshine.

That's right. I'm talking about listener Cassie, who's joining us right now from Oakland, California. Hello, Cassie. Congratulations.

Oh, thank you, Andrew. Ahoy, hoy. First of all. Ahoy, hoy. And thank you so much. I'm a proud new mother. How are you feeling? What's the kiddo's name? Well, her name is Beth Debbie. Beth Debbie, classic. She's just a sweetheart. She's a sweetheart. And there's a little bit of resemblance between the two of us, except she got the dimples and I have none.

Oh, that's so sweet, though. You can look and you can see yourself in her face, though.

Absolutely. We have some similarities, you know, and she's got the one tooth. I have many.

Yeah, you have more than one tooth. I know. I'm lucked out in that regard. Beth Debbie, definitely. why does now i gotta be careful here because maybe we have somebody whose name is beth debbie in the audience but why does that seem like those are two names that don't go that well together

i know it for me it feels like the height of 80sness to have beth debbie like beth debbie for instance that girl's going to be getting a perm regardless of whether i'm not yes yes she is

i can smell i can smell her coming home with the chemicals in her hair do perms still smell like

that by the way or was that just an 80s smell of nachos they smell for some nachos they do they have a very weird nacho like smell to them i know because i got i did end up getting one at some

point myself really i don't remember a nacho smell i thought that was and this might be me just misremembering it or i grew up in a place where they um used like tar and asphalt properties to perm the hair but i thought it was like a deep chemical smell it is it is a deep chemical smell

And I still bleach the daylights out of my hair. And my policy with hair stuff, not that we want to get too deep into it, is if it doesn't feel as though you're making a bomb on top of your head, you're liable to go bald.

then you're not doing it right.

If your neighbors aren't calling you ATF, then you're not doing it right.

Yes. If your eyes aren't profusely watering, then it's not going to work.

So this is not your first Cabbage Patch Kid that you recently adopted, or it is?

Thank you for asking. I do have a first, actually. And this was my first Cabbage Patch doll in the probably late 80s, early 90s. My parents got me. I don't remember his name. of course he came with his paperwork as they do um he was a preemie he was a really he was a you know i'm a preemie and i like to blame a lot of my life's uh faux pas on being a preemie at random you know at random moments you know if i forget to email somebody at work or something y'all i'm a preemie okay i'm a preemie y'all so i get preemie paths you're just shouting that out

in the middle of work meetings yeah as a 40 year old woman of course when you're when your deck is missing a slide you're like come on guys do you have any idea what i've been through here okay so you had a cab trash kid growing up you no longer have that though he's actually still at my parents

house and oh okay i'd love to tell you a little bit about about the lad please i'm this is why we're here so my my my sister and i both got preemies and so they're bald and they're they're

little and so i'm sorry i'm already interrupting you but i was gonna let the preemie thing go because i thought you were just riffing but let's get serious here did the cabbage patch organization company whoever made them i can't think off the top of my head right now did they release certain ones that were actually labeled and designed in that way or is this this isn't a story you just imprinted on the doll oh i thought that was just your version of events

No, they actually had a line of dolls that they referred to as like the preemie dolls. And most of them, as you know, most of them have like yarn hair.

Yeah.

You know, pigtails, et cetera. These ones were significantly smaller and they were all bald.

Okay. No teeth.

No teeth. Just that cute little plastic face of theirs.

It was a plastic face, though.

Yeah. Plastic face. The spongy body. Their buff little bodies. Yeah.

So, OK, now I interrupted you. So go ahead and tell me more about this lad whose name we've forgotten.

Whose name we've forgotten. And I need to do some digging. And maybe my mom has this paperwork somewhere in a safety deposit box or something. But so my sister and I both had the preemies. And as children of the 80s, we would take baths together with our preemie babies and then, you know, try to squeeze out the fabric of the doll, but then hang them in the bathroom like on the towel rack and they would just you know drip and eventually eventually dry and there came a time where my sister and i were like isn't this lovely the babies are developing freckles they're getting freckles our darlings you know and it was i'm not even joking for decades it was like oh they got freckles this is so sweet and then it wasn't dead serious i must I was probably on the bus or something in Seattle years later in my mid-20s. And I was like, God, it's so cute how they had those freckles. And I go, those were not freckles. That was mold growing inside their little heads.

You thought you had the dolls that actually grew and changed with time. But no, you were just festering something inside them. I was going to say, even before you got to the mold part, I was thinking, are they distended? I mean, hanging them and then being just heavy. Because that material, you mentioned them being very squishy. It was almost like a woman's tights material, sort of.

It was synthetic, too. It was not meant to go in the tub.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boy, weird for me to be so gender binary there, too. I should just say tights. Anybody can wear tights. And I'm sorry. And I'm sorry for setting it up that way. But yeah, it was that sort of material. So I'm picturing you like just hanging these things and then sort of like just stretching over the line.

I mean, it was not a good look. My parents' house was probably totally bedlam with like all these little girls like toys just strewn about. But I do remember, you know, you'd walk into the bathroom and there would be the dolls. And oh, God, it was just an idea. And of course, we had all the accoutrement. We were not wealthy by any means. But, you know, there's an old stroller somewhere and you stick your preemies in there and then go downtown for some candy.

Do you think that you actually had like Cabbage Patch branded stuff or were you just grabbing a stroller that you could grab and you'd put the dolls in them?

Just grabbing a stroller that like my brother was not using that day or something.

Man, I'm also – and I'm sorry to be obsessed with this, but I'm obsessed with just like sort of cleanliness, which is maybe one of the reasons why like parenthood would not be for me because of the chaos that goes along with that. Like I'm getting –

Najita just thinking about the the pool of water that is accumulating underneath these goddamn things as they're drip drying in the in the bathroom. And I'm just like trying to go to the bathroom or something, just drip, drip.

I know it's it's a form of torture. It's disgusting. And as my mom would use this term, that is some foul.

That is some foul. Your mom seems like a wonderful character, by the way. You guys seem like best friends and I'm always envious of your relationship. You often will post stories together because she doesn't live here in the West Coast.

Right. So you go visit her. Eastern Washington. Yeah. She's like way out there. Eastern Washington.

Oh, OK. Gotcha. For some reason, I was having for some reason, I thought it was out in the Midwest of the United States. But so not not quite as far away. But still, yeah, you guys seem to have a great relationship. And she seems like such a card. I love it. I'm glad that she was game for all of this. I want to well I want to set the scene let's do this right now I have so much I want to get to today I want to hear more about this new Cabbage Patch kid that is in your life but before we get into that in case I mean I think most people listening are pretty familiar with the Cabbage Patch doll craze of the 1980s but I wanted to share this tape or at least some of this tape from a news story from 1983 that's the year that everything really broke with these Cabbage Patch kids and you use the word bedlam before i think that's the perfect word to describe what was going on in stores across the country people were just out of their goddamn minds we talk about like black friday sales now what has society gone to people are fighting to get flat screen tv so i'm telling you people were fighting to get plastic faced dolls back in the 80s we've always been animals we are animals people were out for blood back this piece which let's see it looks like this is me i can't tell what uh news source this is from but it's from 1983 it's archival footage and um i am not exaggerating when i tell the listeners that the opening shot of this is a store it's a packed store people are going crazy there's apparently a certain number of cabbage patch kids that are being sold at the store but there's clearly not enough and there's a mob in the store and above the mob there's a guy who's about a half a body taller than everybody else I can't tell what he's standing on but he's standing on a bunch of boxes or a table or something Cassie he is holding an aluminum baseball bat in his hand lean on me style and he's screaming at the crowd to settle down

welcome to another holiday shopping season when the doors opened at this wilkes-barry pennsylvania store the pushing and shoving began one woman was knocked to the floor and suffered a broken leg this scene has been repeated in hundreds of stores across the country that advertise the cabbage patch kids the cabbage patch kids are dolls about 16 inches high they don't walk talk wet their pants or grow hair they don't or freckles cassie apparently they should have put that disclaimer do much of anything but they have upset the supply and demand cycle to an astonishing degree there has never been such a first year demand for a new doll as far as i'm concerned they're the worst looking things i've ever seen i mean they are pathetic looking they're

Homely. I don't know what exactly the attachment is. I think they're cute, but kind of

funny looking. I believe those are drops that will live forever in TBTL.

Strawberry shortcake this year, cabbage

vegetables. The dolls originated here in rural Georgia about five years ago. The brainchild of 27-year-old Xavier Roberts. The original sold for $125, but when Coleco Industries took over the marketing of the dolls, they made copies and priced them at about $25, and the company couldn't make them fast enough.

Now, I would like to tell people what i'm seeing now we're now seeing sort of like b-roll footage if that's what you would call it i'm assuming it's from a promotional video or something but we're seeing like a full-on nursery like a nursery and this is where my conversations with you cassie recently has brought all this to light to me i didn't realize how deep the lore went with these things huge this footage from 1983 shows what is his name Xavier Roberts what's the name of the guy who invented these things Xavier something Xavier something and I've never

seen this guy I don't know if he even exists but wow did he start something yes he did and we're

seeing and I'm assuming it's him he goes into this nursery where there's all these little bald baby dolls and they're actually sitting in little cabbage like rolls or something and he's Like, he's wearing a doctor's...

like jacket or like you know like a research jacket or whatever he's got a stethoscope he's got a mask on it's 1983 he's wearing like a surgical mask and he's coming in here these might even be your preemies i'm not sure and he's wiggling one very gently out of the cabbage like

he's like he's actually delivering the baby they're manufacturing about 200,000 a week in asia and chartering planes to get them to stores in the united states but demand exceeds supply and there is only one reason um i i like them that's about it that's about as good as any

place to to stop it they go into talking about how these things were um resold like people were buying them for 25 then flipping them for 45 and another store would sell them for like 75 or

whatever this is like 1983 yes paid away for the beanie baby craze kind of this was og and i guess

the whole thing was as you alluded to before like the whole thing was the the built-in uniqueness of it this idea that everyone had its own name and its own paperwork and like they really apparently there didn't you tell me that they're well i know you told me because i went on the website they still have something called like what is it babyland or something oh andrew babyland

general it's it's about an hour from atlanta i think and it's the the hospital my friend devin told me about this and he lives he lives in nashville he made a trip he made an actual trip out there and exactly they've got the nurses the entire staff like you would at a hospital and the babies are set up kind of on this on this gorgeous like mountainous range with the cabbages and the little heads popping out um you know and they explain all the lore i do find it a little demented that the guy was there you know in a full um nurse's uniform delivering the babies

yes and so it's the idea that you just you pick i guess you pick out your baby there like from the nursery and then they have what i liked and i saw this on the website i don't know if i don't know if this is relatable or not or if i'm describing it the right way but like the room where so a bench i guess you go into the nursery you choose your baby i'm assuming most of the customers are children um maybe that's a bad assumption and then you go into this little room where you take like an oath of adoption and sign the paperwork so like if you were just like back in the day if you're getting these through the mail or whatever or if you were buying them at a store you would then mail in the paperwork and get your birth but here it's you go you pick your baby and then they take you in this little room and there was something so perfectly quasi depressing about this room not that adoption is depressing but there's like this like sort of it's both like sort of clinical but very administrative but they have like just a couple of pictures on the wall to make it seem homey but the pictures are hung a little bit too high it's almost like it's kind of like a kid's bedroom that wasn't quite finished or something and there's like this picture of these little kids signing the paperwork. And it just kind of gave me like kind of almost the exact feeling I had when I was signing like my living will paperwork 20 years ago.

Why the bureaucracy, though? It's like these are children going in for babies. Why the bureaucracy,

folks? Yes. Well, but I mean, again, that must be what that must be where the value was.

Yeah, it felt very real at the time. I know I took it extremely seriously when I was a kid. I mean, It was a big deal. It was my first baby. And my dad would even call it his granddaughter.

Oh, my gosh. I love that he was down for that.

You know, I put the baby on the ground. He said, you know, you're not being mean to my granddaughter, are you?

I love that so much. Well, tell us about the new addition to your family.

My darling Beth Debbie. So this came about because and I kind of sent you a little picture. But I got these kind of athletic socks that look like they're from the 80s, you know, with a couple of stripes. And then these weird little shoes that I have, they're kind of puffy and they're new balances, but they look like doll shoes. They look like doll shoes. And not to brag, but I do have like weirdly small feet. And so when I put them on.

It's one of my favorite things about you.

Fun fact. Hey, come on, guys. she was a preemie i was a preemie y'all not to put my side hustle of foot fetishism on the show but um and so when i wear these shoes i crack up and i sent a picture to my friend anna uh who lives up in oregon and i was like look at these i look like a freaking cabbage patch doll man and so she and i got on this tear of talking all about cabbage patch lore together i of course told her about my preemie she told me about her first cabbage patch doll um who might have been premium because he was bald and get this she wanted one with hair and her mom was like you know sorry i got this one so her mom went to like the craft store michael's got a pelt and fashioned a hairline out of this glued it on the baby's head and it was like gray it was like a gray fur fur like that is so far away from what their hair was like i know i cracked up i would kill if she still had that

thing and and what was what was your friend's reaction as a kid did she love the fact that

her doll had hair or was she embarrassed none too pleased yeah she she must have rolled with it for a while i mean kudos to her mom for giving it the old college try it was horrifying and weird like her mom honestly missed the mark but it's hysterical she tried she sure tried and so as far as my my newest baby my friend anna because we were just talking cabbage patches all the time for my birthday which was in july she she sent me a surprise care package and there was my new baby beth debbie and um and it's been spectacular uh she has a little dress and everything i put some uh she's got pigtails i put bows in her hair and now my friend anna and i will talk incessantly about she has one um Gus Tony she got one for herself again I don't know and no offense of

that but why do those names well first of all it's because they're both like the nickname version right like it should be like August Anthony or something yeah but there's something about it being Gus Tony it just falls like a dead weight off the tongue it's absurd as all hell so me and

Anna send each other voice memos all the time and you know I'll be making the other day I was making dinner i was i was doing what i call a party pizza pizza party uh-huh is you know those party pizzas from the gas station they're like yeah like a totino's frozen one totally you know yes yes look at me i know hey and so i was you know sending a voice message to anna going you know i'm doing a party pizza pizza party and i don't even like these things man it's just debbie she insists i was screaming at her from across the room see what i do for you

as you're shoving frozen pizza in your mouth by the way those are not bad at all they're little squares right or little rectangles absolutely if you get those and you doctor them up a little bit chef's kiss what are you doctoring them with are you talking like the dry herbs and seasoning that i'll sprinkle on are you putting actual like little produce on there

i'll put a few things on there so i of course do the italian seasoning the kind you get here It's like the prepack, whatever, a little garlic salt because I'm a salt fiend, saltful. And I like now here's this is controversial, but I do like pineapple on my pizza. So I'll do pineapple and black olives.

That's interesting. I am not one of those people who has like I if you roll up with a Hawaiian pizza, I'll definitely have it. It's not like my go to. I think if I'm ordering a whole pizza for just like me and Genevieve or something like that's just too much Hawaiian pizza for us. But certainly, like, if it's a pizza smorgasbord and that's one of the options, I will probably grab a slice of that. So I'm not, like, going to – having said that, it's never occurred to me to add pineapple post-production. Like, it doesn't – like, olives, I could sort of see a little bit of extra pepperoni or something. But the pineapple is cooking into the frozen pizza properly?

It kind of rolls off. It does. It rolls off. like and they're they're always kind of like too large of chunks and so it is weird like the one

will clunk down on upon you yeah one will you will be clunked down upon by the pineapple so i clunk i have a um well it's probably a somewhat i mean i guess it's a delicate question um because obviously this is an adoption process and i don't want to cheapen that in any way but beth debbie was this directly was this a new Cabbage Patch kid? I'm just going to ask you that. Or was this somebody like a used one from eBay? It was a

used one from eBay. My friend Anna got it from eBay. And Anna, I love you girl but her face was filthy when I got her.

Wait, did it pass through? Did Anna just have it shipped directly to you? Could Anna have taken it and wiped the face

herself? He could have wiped it down. Anna. Treat our girl right. Treat our girl right. I don't even tell Anna when i'm looking over i'm like oh this poor girl her back looks uncomfortable let's straighten her

out you know maybe she did that maybe she wanted like the first sort of motherly touches to come from you a little clorox bleach wipe oh god right around the eyes yeah just be a little bit careful there um and so were you able to go through i i take it that you can't write to the company and get your official

official paperwork or anything or can you? I went through such a rabbit hole with this and I was trying to find her name online incessantly and I think I need the official adoption papers and I think you might be able to look at the tags specifically and there's numbers etc and you can

do that but what an ordeal. So there's you you believe that somewhere on the kid is a tag with a certain like not a model number but a very specific like item number that you can cross reference to a database that would have her given name from the cabbage patch baby land yes that's

what i was kind of discovering and i hope that's true but it did seem like quite the process that

i gotta find the tag do you even know where the tag is yeah i i've got the tag it's on her it's like on her like rib cage kind of oh okay and there's a there's a series of numbers on there This is more and more like Blade Runner.

Like Blade Runner where it's like Blade Runner kind of thing?

Yeah, exactly, with their own little numbers. Well, I definitely – so you have not – so there's a chance that you could write to the company and say, hey, I have re-adopted this Cabbage Patch Kid and I would like to know her first name and officially fill out the paperwork. You could maybe still do that. I hope. Or better yet, you could – you and Beth Debbie – Beth Debbie, right?

She seems like Beth Debbie to me. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. You and Beth. Oh, you assigned Beth Debbie.

I assigned Beth Debbie because I have this list, which I'd love to get into with you at some point.

Oh, yeah. Okay. What's going on here?

Third list, by the way, of hundreds of Cabbage Patch doll names. And, you know, we came across Beth Debbie and she is such a Beth Debbie.

So, well, you just know. You just know when you have a Beth Debbie on your hands. So, okay. Yeah. I think I might. Did I mention this? Maybe in last week's newsletter, I mentioned that you sent me an absurdly long list of Cabbage Patch doll names. So you get this doll. You don't know her official name. You still may or may not write to the company. Or as I was going to say, you and Beth Debbie could get in the car together and drive down to Georgia and just make it a whole thing.

I'm not even above that. I'm not joking. I might go for my birthday next year and make it a whole trip.

That would be so fun. And you said you have a buddy who lives in the south somewhere.

Maybe he could go with you. in nashville hang out go to atlanta hang and then visit babyland general i love this idea

of course by that point beth debbie will have been beth debbie for an entire year and then

you'll have a kind of a tough choice to make i know how do people navigate that i

yeah i don't know it's her life to live but you got the name beth debbie from so did you and your buddy who got you the the the doll you went online you found a list and these are all so is it true I mean, could it be true that there's never been a Cabbage Patch Kid with the same name as another Cabbage Patch Kid officially?

I feel like they probably have duplicates. They must. Because there's hundreds of thousands of these things. There's got to be. You know? I mean, everybody seemed to have one in the 80s. Hey, y'all. Everybody had one. Get with it. Like, you had one. I feel like there's far too many dolls to everybody have just a unique name. But this list is robust. All right. Lay some on us here. Lay some on us. Okay, let's go. So it's alphabetical. We, of course, won't go through the whole thing. But I did select a few of my favorites.

Okay.

Starting in the A's, of course, Abby Gwenda. Abby Gwenda.

Okay.

So you got that?

Uh-huh.

This one, the first name, you'll see this in any kindergarten classroom. There's got to be 20 of them. But the second name cracks me up. Aiden Keith.

Aiden Keith. That's the first one that actually does feel like a real name to me.

Yeah. I wrote a little note to myself. the keith of it all kind of crap sure the keith of it all you're gonna like this one alan ferdinand

oh okay yeah i like that that is a that's an artistic soul i feel that's a good guy who's this guy alden rubin alden rude oh smarty thinks in lives in his head a little bit too much

probably totally started going gray a little early but just around but just around the temples Yeah, absolutely. He had professorial vibes when he was like 16.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm getting.

How do you feel about this? Alto Archibald.

Alto Archibald. I feel like it's in the wrong order is how I feel about that.

Yeah, that's a regal dude. Oh, so first name, pretty standard here. Middle name, hilarious. Amanda Wilhelmina. Oh, I like that.

I feel like I knew a Wilhelmina. Cool. But again, it's just, it's just too, too much. Whatever. I'm not, I don't have kids. I don't want to, I really detest judging people's names, but like Wilhelmina is such a bold name.

That is.

I feel like that's gotta be, that's gotta be the first name and it's, and you want to pair that with something that is pared down. Right. Don't you?

Yeah. Like Wilhelmina Ann. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. That's how people talk. Right. That is so outrageous. But you're right. Wilhelmina, that's big shoes to fill. If somebody said, Cassie, you're going to go meet Wilhelmina this weekend, I feel I'd say she's going to be wearing some interesting earrings.

You know, she is. And maybe a brooch.

Is she going to be wearing a brooch? Like this girl is on it, on it. I'll try to go through these, but there's just a few. we're still in the A's I got excited with your A's Angus Joel Angus Joel

kind of getting kind of gutter at no offense to Angus's out there but I'm sort of getting like somebody who was a little bit too into the sex pistols

I was going to say steals his grandmother's cigarettes

yes absolutely

who else okay Barry Burt

Barry Burt I like both those names. I feel like we could spread them out and use them in separate names.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. Okay, and I'll try to go through this because I'm only at B. Bartholomew Daryl.

Those names don't go together, Cassie. Oh, God, right? What's that? It's a little audacious. It is audacious, and it just feels like it's a clash of cultures.

Yeah, I know. It's so weird. Oh, here, you'll like this. Basil Remus.

Definitely. I swear to God, I got that at the Thai restaurant last night.

I'll have a side of crab rangoon.

All right. Give me one more. And then if you don't mind, I want to share with you a very moving story that we got from listener and producer extraordinaire Amina Alsadi. She has a Cabbage Patch story she wants to share with us. But let's hear a couple more names before I get into that.

OK, a couple more. Constance Donna. Mm-hmm, again. Now, there's one I really want to share with you because it reminded me of, oh, here we go, Jenny Ramona.

Jenny Ramona, do you know that while I do not have kids and never intended on having kids, I would sometimes imagine what would I name my kids? And then Genevieve and I would talk about that as well. yeah vives and i i think we're both on the same page that if we ever had a little girl we would ramona would be a very strong candidate for a name spectacular i'm glad it's a good name isn't it and

i was thinking you could even go with jenny because genevieve jenny that's true yes you can i would get another call jenny ramona has got to be your name but again i would swap those though

i would do ramona jennifer probably yeah for starters um but did you want you must have read

the Ramona books growing up right oh yeah my sister and I used to read those Ramona and Beatrix was

it yes Beatrix yes you're right I was gonna say Beatrice but you're right it was Beatrix I loved those books so much I think they were my sisters my sister was a bit older than me and so I she would get the books and then I would read them later um and I loved those books so much and Genevieve is such a Ramona man she's so there's this I don't know how much you remember like actual specific scenes from those books there's just one specific one that sticks in my head and i don't know if i'll get all the details of this right but i did track down like the little illustration that goes along with this story at one point so i know that i know there's a kernel of truth to this retelling that i'm going to attempt here but there was in one of the ramona books i don't know if it was ramona the grade or whatever that one was um there is a scene where ramona's family for some reason has a whole bunch of apples like they went to a farmer's market or orchard or something and they have all these apples and they put it down in the cellar and then one day everybody's like where's where's Ramona we can't find Ramona and they go into the cellar and there's Ramona and she is surrounded by apples that all have one bite taken out of them does this ring a bell to you and Ramona Ramona says well yeah because the first bite of the apple is always the best bite so she just goes into the cellar just takes one bite of all the apples and litters them around and that uh that to me I don't know why I mean I hope I say this lovingly but i don't know why that reminds me of genevieve but it does i think it's extremely

endearing although the part about ramona having explosive diarrhea hours later because one bite of 37 apples well that also is very much like genevieve

all right here i'm going to play for you this story um you can tell that amina is a public radio producer because this story has all the beats of a public radio story take a listen to

this hello andrew and cassie this is amina in dc and i'm calling because i too was a child of the 80s um if you consider being born in november of 89 the 80s um and i had a beloved savage patch It was my first ever

baby doll that i can remember and i remember it very clearly it was bald just like me and it had blue eyes not like me um and i named the doll baby sponge that was like my name that i came up with i was maybe like one or two and so i was like barely talking um and my mom's friend would say Like, oh, I can't wait until she starts talking because if she's naming her doll Baby's son, she'll probably have clever things to say. And it kind of became like family lore about me. It was like, you know, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And, you know, it was kind of my first real creative choice, maybe last. And I had other dolls growing up. But as I got older, the fact that it was a Cabbage Patch doll made it so special for some reason. I think it's because it was, like, this identity marker. Like, it said that I was of a culture and a time and a place because I had a Cabbage Patch doll. but recently I was talking about my baby sponge and my mom goes oh you didn't have a cabbage patch doll and I was like excuse me and she goes yeah we just told you you did because you really wanted one but they were so popular we couldn't find them and even if we could find them they were too expensive so we just told you you had one and this was crushing news to me because I thought I had like learned all the lies I was told as a child already like I had discovered them and this was just like another one band hit me out of nowhere and I was so sad to learn that Baby Sponge was not a Cabbage Patch doll. She was, in fact, just some random doll. I will say that I did eventually get an American Girl doll when I turned nine and so I was old enough to, you know, scope out whether it was a fake or not and it was, in fact, real.

I went into an American Have you ever been into one of those American Girl doll shops

by the way? I have and that is way too rich for my blood

It is, I went into, I was with Genevieve there was one in, I think it was in the Grove like a fancy mall in Los Angeles and I remember seeing it and V was like oh you don't know this whole thing, like you can take your dolls in there and they give them blow ups or something

Yeah, a full blow out, ringlets

it's unbelievable It is bananas But yeah, I feel like a lot of the stories I'm hearing from listeners are sort of similar to that, like, well, I wanted a Cabbage Patch doll, but I had something close to it. Or like you mentioned your friend, I'm already blanking on her name, but how she got a pelt haircut.

The glue pelt haircut.

Yes, exactly. Because like there was so much pressure on parents to fulfill the kids' dreams here.

This is what is astonishing. And that's why the listener had such an amazing point, which is like there was so much pressure and how extremely touching of her parents to kind of take that route. And I was actually touched by thinking about my parents getting us our preemies because we were not, you know, we were by no means in a financial position to be having like dolls that were all the rage. but somehow they pulled it off and it's just so heartwarming it is now here's one thing that i

i have been sort of shocked to sort of realize in my own life so i mentioned at the top of the show that i did have a uh who's who are we talking to here who's who's in the background we've got i'm

sorry about that we've got tough and dagmar with me and i mentioned earlier toughy likes to occasionally just scream out yeah um my two very i've got two other babies baby dogs um so toughy like three four times a day she just loves to scream out and she's in no pain she's five years old but i'm like tough now is not the time sister and dagmar's younger though right dagmar's younger he's a year old and he has such a great energy it's unbelievable they get along though they get along dagmar is obsessed with toughy and toughy he's like toughy's kind of like you know i could take or leave the guy but it works out was toughy jealous when dagmar came into the house you know it's funny because dagmar was significantly smaller than her because he was a baby puppy and she you know toughy is smaller than a cat toughy weighs like and she was kind of toughy was

Thank you.

kind of bullying him a little bit like she was she was not none too pleased uh and now dagmar's significantly bigger and i think the tables have turned where it's like tough see what you get you don't bully people because they might actually end up being bigger than you and how did they do

when you brought debbie beth into the house yeah they're jealous they are dead i believe that i

I mean, if I pick up Beth Debbie, Dagmar gets all kinds of weird.

I believe it.

You know, circle around and jump on me.

From their perspective, you only have a certain amount of affection that you can give out. And this it's all competition, you know?

Yeah, I know. Like if I start to, you know, hold her and like go, oh, oh, isn't she cute? Oh, he'll lose it.

so um i think i was telling my boring story about the cabbage patch uh paths that that that my family went on i remember here i'm gonna start by telling you what i remembered as of like a week ago if you asked me like about cabbage patch kids i'd say i had one that i got that was like a boy cabbage patch kid and i was really obsessed with stuffed animals like i had all these stuffed animals that had all their names like oh fleagle the beagle i mean i had a pluto i had henry i had big henry i had little henry we played board games like up until a pretty late age like a pretty embarrassingly late age double digits but for some reason i think i wanted a cabbage patch kid because my sister already had one and um but i think i by the i guess i just don't remember its name and I don't remember much about him. So I'm thinking that I must have gotten him pretty late or there was something that once I got him, I was maybe sort of transitioning maybe out of that period or I just like my stuffed animals more. I had a pound puppy. I love that guy. I can't remember his name.

Pound puppy for sure. Me too. I still have it at my folks house.

A friend of mine just pointed out recently that they were sort of the same deal. Like you had to like kind of fill out adoption papers. Everybody was trying to like sort of draft off of this uniqueness thing that the Cabbage Patch Stiles did.

That may be. I don't recall adoption papers, but it was a big deal for sure.

Yeah. They were very squishy. Loved those things. So anyway, that was it. All I remembered was that I had one later on, that my sister had one. And here was the real key. And I was wrong about some of these details, which are just blowing my goddamn mind, to be honest with you. All I remembered was, so my name is Andrew Lewis Walsh. Those are my initials, ALW, right? My sister has the same exact initials. Her name is Amy. And so we were both ALWs. We thought that was cool. We have a cousin named Annette. And I don't know Annette's middle name, but she was also an ALW. So we sort of felt like we're like the ALWs, right? Totally. And then my sister gets a Cabbage Patch doll and her name, and I couldn't remember the name off the top of my head, but it was also an ALW. No. And I remember being blown away by the serendipity of this and that there was another ALW. That's nuts. And I mean, the universe bringing that into our home so that there were three kids and they were all ALWs, right? That was my memory of it.

That is spectacular. That's the kind of thing that makes me believe in a higher power.

Well, I'm about to disabuse you of that higher power because I texted my sister last week. I'm like, what was the name of your Cabbage Patch kid? Cause I'm like, I remember the initials were ALW. That's, that's all I know. And I don't have the text in front of me right now, but she essentially said, well, the first one I got, the fake one was named Amanda Lynn, but I think Amanda Lynn. No, it wouldn't have been, uh, no, Annabelle Lee. Oh, that sounds so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was Annabelle Lee. She's like, well, it was named Annabelle Lee, but mom named it that. And it was made by a neighbor. And I'm like, well, slow down. So the idea that the serendipity of bringing another ALW in the house was not serendipity at all. It was my mom naming this thing, which, by the way, my sister then said, yeah, Annabelle Lee is apparently a Poe poem, an Edgar Allan Poe poem, which I don't know if my mom is into Poe. I don't know. This whole conversation is really like unspooled a whole bunch of things about my family and my past that I was unaware of, including were there kits to make your own cabbage patch kits? I remember this thing had a plastic face and looked like I said to my sister, did they have a plastic face? She's like, yeah, a plastic face. So was the rage so fervent that people were like selling make your own cabbage patch kid kits?

I have never heard of such a thing in my life. The kids, that's outrageous. But I think it's also another special story about parenthood where Annabelle Lee and then just like the listeners, the parents.

are making do here folks yep exactly they're finding a way although my sister clearly had not forgotten i could tell i could feel the eye roll coming off of this text message there is

something about this though that is a little depressing because it's kind of like that moment that we all get to where it's like wait a second that dog didn't go live on a farm yeah right yes wait a minute i was told this uh as a child and that's pretty untrue like my dad actually told us he wrestled alligators and he had a knife that was covered in guts that i told my friends all about and everything oh my god it was just a knife he took fishing yeah right you know i mean it

probably did have guts on it there were guts there were guts yeah there were definitely guts i had my grand this is this was a shocker to me i remember feeling really betrayed by this and i even as an adult of all of the things that that bother me and i don't think i kind of realized this until somewhat recently but like i hate being lied to like i really have a thing about it and i remember like growing up we were not allowed to lie in the house like my parents i remember the way my parents said the word liar they would spit it out my dad said liar like when he was the most and it would be like if we were caught doing something bad that's one thing but if we were

caught lying that was the worst that i i can totally relate because my parents were super relax with the rules we we had never been grounded before our we had a pretty good in that regard I remember getting spanked one time and it's because I had lied and I had done something and I said my sister did it and kids do stuff my parents weren't concerned about that it was that I had lied and I told my sister did it I'll never forget it and um so I my folks were the same way

yeah and so that must have put something in me because now as an adult like if somebody does them or whatever like i just don't lie to me about it but i remember my grandfather gave me he said he went to gettysburg and he came back and he had some souvenirs for me and one of them was like a little kind of a an old-fashioned musket bullet that looked i mean i still to this day assume that it maybe really was an old musket bullet that was found somewhere at gettysburg but my grandfather told me that like yeah he was taking the tour and i i've never even taken that tour so i can as a kid i'm just imagining what that tour looks like and they're walking across the field or something like that he's like i just looked down and and i just found this and he gave it to me and i believed that story for the longest time until somebody you know maybe i'm like now i'm 14 years old let's say he gave that to me maybe when i was 10 or something like that and i had it and i would look at it it was heavy it was like stone it was chipped up or whatever and and then And I swear it even, I swear it smelled, maybe it didn't smell like it, but I swear if I took a pencil and stuck it sort of in the hollow middle of it from beneath, I swear it, my memory was I could like, I could like kind of pull out gunpowder or something. I could be making that part up. In fact, I probably am. But it wasn't until like maybe I'm 13 or 14 that somebody's like, well, of course grandpa didn't find that. He just bought it at the gift store in Gettysburg. It was probably just buckets of those things. And I just remember being like, oh. and like actually like kind of being mad that I felt I think that's the thing about it it's not just like I think I don't like being lied to because I feel I'm being made a fool of and I really was made a fool of there like I would have still loved it if grandpa had said hey I went to Gettysburg and then I bought this at the gift store it's it would have meant a lot to me but the fact that I spent however many years just believing this then you're like oh of course that's just the shit you tell a kid when you want to impress him and you're the grandparent

Absolutely. And maybe it is real. Who knows? Like you said, it's this total mystery. But exactly like I you just look back and you're like, I feel so embarrassed because, yeah, you're telling people like my dad wrestling alligators. I mean, I was like, people must have thought of me like, look at this kid. She's lying about it. And I'm like, in my mind, I wasn't.

this one, we're getting off topic here but really quickly, this was not born of ill will but it sort of reminds me one of Genevieve's favorite movies is Silence of the Lambs and we were first dating, and I'd seen it before but Genevieve was more obsessed with it and had read the books and everything, and at one point she had just mentioned to me like, oh yeah, you know Jonathan Demme, the director of that movie, plays Wild Bill or whatever the guy who's in the basement yeah, the reason you didn't know that is because it's not true Cassie, but the thing is, I was like, oh okay And Genevieve was just mistaken. I don't know at what point in her life she had heard that or something. She didn't know what Jonathan Demme looks like. But I swear to God, she told me that. She told other people that. We told other people that as a trivia thing. And we were years later, still probably in our 20s, watching an episode of Monk. And suddenly we're like.

Wait a second. Stottlemyre, Monk's boss, is Wild Bill. And I guarantee you, Jonathan Demme is not one of the main characters in Monk. And we had this realization that we'd just been going around spreading this wonderfully wrong lie and a trivia about Silence of the Lambs.

Like in your next Christmas card with Genevieve the next year, you probably had to send out a formal apology to family.

We really did. we were asked to send out a formal apology um let's see here i uh have this email i want to share this is from listener jen in west seattle she says my sister and i each had two cabbage patch kids thanks to our mom and neighbor tag teaming a few very early morning epically long situations at the tacoma mall toys are us were you a toys r us kid no again too rich for my blood man i was a rural kid i couldn't get there i think i was more of a kb toys like my parents would go to the mall and then maybe i would split off like i'll see you at kb anyway uh she says this was starting christmas of 1983 for those who remember they each came with their own adoption paperwork that you would sign and mail in and each kid had the originator's signature tattooed right on their little butts yeah xavier roberts looking back on that now really kind of weird my sister's My sister's girl doll was named Fanny and had curly brown hair just like her, while my girl doll was named Priscilla and had long flowing red locks and glasses like me. The boy dolls for whom we shared joint custody were clearly the favored ones because we had them in our possession much longer and I can actually remember their full given names. Vance Marv how does that name begin and end with the letter V Vance Marv was the little bald headed white baby and Cy Bailey was the little bald headed black baby being biracial kids ourselves my sister and I often received toys that reflected that while the girl dolls stayed in their boxes for quite a while after we got them The boy dolls mostly hung around the house in just their diapers, which were regularly half hanging off. I wonder where those little trash babies ended up after we lost custody. And that does sound like a bit of a sad scene.

So classic. Yes. I remember that we always try to put like pampers on.

What is this? Were you putting were you putting real diapers on fake kids?

Absolutely weird. Yes. And, you know, at a point the diapers get, like, just filthy from just being around the house. Like, oh, my God.

Oh, God. Like, little sticky parts. I got this voicemail here from our friend Anna. This also, I think, sort of plays to the idea that, like, there was such demand for Cabbage Patch Kids, but people were finding ways to, like, sort of off-brand it.

Hi, Andrew and Cassie. This is Anna from the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle. And, yes, I had not a Cabbage Patch Kid, but a little people or, as we call them, adoption babies. I was eight years old. It was 1980. And I was kind of too old for dolls. But I had always been the youngest of my family, cousins and all. And my cousin had just had a baby named Meg. And I was so excited because I was no longer the youngest. And a bunch of people my age still were getting them because Cabbage Patch Kids slash these little people were made in Cleveland, Georgia, which was about a half hour up the road from Gainesville, Georgia, where I lived. and you would go to Babyland General and these dolls when I got them they weren't they didn't have the plastic face they had a cloth face like the same material of the arms and legs and they were made by Xavier Roberts and his signature was on their butt and so there was a whole you got your shirt you got your birth certificate there was a little tiny ceremony where you said you'd take care of them and mine's name was Patience Meg because my cousin's daughter had been named meg so i went in meg and she had blonde hair and green eyes and yeah that was my cabbage patch story i think um well adoption baby they they were bought in 1982 by coleco i remember that and that's when they changed the plastic faces anyway power out i'm sorry you know i sort

of messed that up as i got into that story because so little people wasn't a competing off brand it was the original it was the og cabbage patch kids they were little people and

then they became rebranded as cabbage patch and that's where the cloth faces were original because i saw a couple photos of the cloth faces okay i see the more you know the more you know yeah i'm

looking it up here yeah they were inspired by the little people soft sculptured dolls sold by xavier robert as collectors the brand is collectibles the brand was renamed couch kids by roger schlafer when he acquired the exclusive worldwide licensing i wonder if we even heard that in that news story we played earlier and i sort of maybe um uh glossed over that part but um yeah that that's something too like there are those parents i don't know exactly you know how an ended up with that one but like growing up everybody had legos now this is before the huge Lego craze that would kick off and like the, I guess, the Lego craze as it is today is different than the Lego craze as it was when we were kids. It's just, yeah.

I think they're even building like houses out of Legos now. I mean, it's absolutely nuts.

And kids got into it, you know, younger kids got into it because of all the YouTube Star Wars stuff and like there's the connection between those worlds. But even me growing up, we just had Legos and you had your Lego kits, but mostly you'd go to somebody's house and they just had their whole bucket of Legos, right? and you would just build whatever the hell you wanted to. You weren't, like, following instructions. And I wanted those, but my parents, and by the way, like, I was a pretty privileged and in some ways spoiled when it came to sort of material goods kid. Like, we had very lavish Christmases. We would get, like, really fun toys and stuff. But my parents didn't get me Legos. They got me Lock Blocks. Now, Lock Blocks started, you know, the ones for babies were really big, right? But then the brand lock blocks started making Lego esque toys, you know, like they were basically the same. They did. They weren't interchangeable. They were slightly different, but small little pieces, intricate designs. You could get sets that even had motorized stuff like they were really cool, but they weren't Legos. And for me, it wasn't like like I'm a poor kid story and I can't get the brand name. It's just that my parents thought they were better. And like they're just like, no, no, these are better than Legos. like the trust me like i've been reading about these things they're so great i'm just like yeah but everybody's got legos like i just i don't want legos i don't care if they're quite same with like i had matchbox cars when everybody else had hot wheels it's not the structural integrity you were concerned with right right right exactly um let's see here where are you going from here with your doll are we planning a trip next year to cleveland georgia to i really would like to i can't guarantee

But I think it would actually be a straight up blast. It would probably be one of those things where you plan for it. You think it's going to be a blast, but it's like profoundly disappointing. But that's life, baby. I'm ready. I'm ready.

I feel like you're going to need to be prepared for like a real postpartum sort of feeling after you leave that building.

Full experience, man. Bring on the depression.

Well, honestly, congratulations again. I mean, we couldn't be happier for you and your growing family.

Thank you so much, Andrew. Proud new mother. And I hope one day you can reunite with your childhood baby or maybe adopt. You've got some great names in the in the hatch already.

I do. You've sent me a hell of a list. Oh, you also sent me a video. I can't play it now because I don't have it dialed up. But you sent me a you said, oh, this song is a banger. And it was like a Cabbage Patch Kids song. but it came in the package of like a cabbage patch kid animation was there a cartoon that i didn't

know about i don't think anyone knew about this i didn't know about this until i was i was like googling it a while ago and apparently maybe in the 90s there was a cabbage patch animated show or a like claymation kind of show it's very weird i never watched it i knew no one who watched it But I will say, guys, I looked at this song, legitimately a banger. I have played this song at my house, just like, you know, getting ready to go out, like getting pumped up. This song is spectacular. I genuinely mean that.

Okay. You know what? Let me see if I can. If you're setting it up like that, I can't not play it to get out of here. Let's see here. There's the ridiculously long list of names that you sent me. Oh, there. Here it is. And you said this song is a banger. We'll go out with this.

It does start out, I will say, with like a whole skit, but the song itself is like halfway through the vid.

Yeah, I'm going to try to find the song here. So do you remember what the what the scenario is here? Like there are some kids and they're all Cabbage Patch Kids. You're right. This is stop motion. It's actually quite well done. And there's a group of these Cabbage Patch Kids and they're building a treehouse. Right. Do you remember this narrative?

I looked at they're building a treehouse or something. And then there's one girl who's kind of on the outskirts. Like she's not fitting with the kids and she's, and can't we all relate to this? She's like, I think, you know, they think I'm, they think I'm crazy. They think I'm crazy. We can all relate to this now. I'm telling you, this could, this should hit the charts. Move over Taylor Swift. There's a new it girl in town.

I think the conch, not the controversy, but I think the conflict here is that these kids want to build a tree.

house and they're just gonna like do it their way like we don't need plans or whatever and then this girl she has glasses on and so that's code for being a smarty pants probably yeah and so she's like well look i'm drawing up the plans i'm drawing a blueprint so that we can all build this house it's gonna be good they're like oh you're being stupid like we can just like throw some boards together it's fine and um they think she's crazy because she wants to plan this out and so i believe that is the setup yes for this song that we're gonna go out with here um but in the meantime i want to say thank you so much for doing this thank you for giving us the inspiration for this

congratulations again thank you so much i'm thrilled to be here as a 10 as like a forever 10 i love love love you guys and this this was so much fun oh so much fun to have you we'll have

you back on soon we can get uh all three of us together when luke is back and do you mind i i put um i put navia our guest yesterday on the spot to close out the show with me if i if i if i set you up for the end of the show can you do the tagline i most certainly can it's one of those things where you've heard it a million times and then i put you on the spot and then it's like wait what are the words i mean luke literally forgot the words i think it was last week we're wrapping up yeah he just stopped he said all right goodbye and i'm like are you forgetting something so yeah it was a it was a long day anyway all right so uh i will say to all of our listeners thank you for putting up with me this week i appreciate while luke was away but um luke is coming back Monday and I will be here as well so we will have a whole new show for you, hear about Luke's adventures overseas as he's been traversing the European continent and we'll hear about that and really looking forward to having him back and thanks for all the nice emails you guys have sent me saying hey Andrew you're not doing so bad, really appreciate that so we will talk to you all on Monday and in the meantime please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

As a matter of fact, I usually find A little forward thinking saves a whole lot of time As a general rule, I think you could say That a little preparation goes a long, long way And they think I'm crazy, I know they think I'm crazy And maybe we'll never agree They think I'm crazy, I know they think I'm crazy How I wish I could make them see When it comes to the test, I must do my best A little preparation will do it for me Hi, Norma! How are you doing?

Okay, I guess

Power out!