Muse

Charlie Brown! Oh, Charlie Brown! Come on, Charlie Brown. I'll hold the ball and you kick it. Hold it? Ha! You'll pull it away and I'll land flat on my back and kill myself. But, Charlie Brown, it's Thanksgiving. She wouldn't try to trick me on a traditional holiday. This time I'm going to kick that football player to the moon.

I mean, come on, is there anything more relaxing than a young child hurting themselves trying to play football? And then the sounds of Vince Giraldi, that could only mean, dear friends, that you are tuned in to a special Thanksgiving Day edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host right over there. Number one Thanksgiving appreciator. And he's going to hate me for this, but birthday boy is my co-bro, Andrew Walsh. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy birthday, buddy.

The fact that you are playing the audio music on your end this time means that I am freed up to play the turkey gobble as much as I want. And if it's my birthday, you can't yell at me.

That is true. You've lucked out, my friend.

I mean, think about it. We don't get to use this that often. I was going to use it more leading up to Thanksgiving. And I kind of forgot to do that. But somebody went out, Luke, with a field recording kit, probably one of those really long microphones, maybe even a parabolic microphone, to get close to a wild turkey in order to grab that sandwich.

Sure, you're going to get close to some wild turkey today?

I certainly hope so. That's my plan. What's your plan?

Well, by the time this is going out to the internet, I'm guessing that Addie and I will both be a couple of cups of coffee in. we'll have roasted all that needs roasting in the macy's day parade uh as is our tradition we love to watch that in the morning on thanksgiving and kind of make fun of what a truly silly idea the whole thing is and yet it's our tradition and then i you know what actually is probably happening at about the time that folks might be hearing this is the ever dwindling number of people in my life who are agreeing to go on the Burbank Family Fun Run were queuing up there in my parents' driveway. I think we're hitting a little bit of a lull here. The kids used to be, my nieces and nephews and my own child, in fact, they were young enough that they liked being part of something. They looked up to their old unk, Luke, and I could get them out on the road running in the Burbank Family Fun Run. They've all moved now into either full adulthood, like their 20s, or, uh, or just kind of like doing their own thing. So I don't know. It might just, this might be me and Jack, my nephew, Jack, if I'm looking at the problem with your brother, David, David will, David may humor me depending on when he, I think, Oh, is he? Okay. Yeah. I think they're going to get there. They'll get there the night before. So we'll be good to go schedule wise. I'm sure David will, we'll get out there and shake a leg. Jack probably will. Although the thing is jack is a extremely elite cross-country athlete now like you know just smoked me last year like a turkey and um so if he wants to run with his old uncle luke he can but otherwise he'll probably just you know lap me and so i may just be by myself in the drizzle huffing and puffing on the burbank family fun run andrew as as your three fingers of wild turkey and on your birthday just having a wonderful time there in seattle what are what are you're going somewhere actually for

you're eating out this time yeah i guess we're going to a brazilian steakhouse with some friends and their family and it sounds like it's going to be a big crowd this is our friends and they do this every year it's their tradition do i know these friends yes this is a camaro kevin family i was picturing them but you weren't saying their name so i didn't know oh did i wasn't sure if i said that or not um you mean last time we talked about this what i'm looking i figured it seemed

like their move they like to go to like they they kind of alternate or don't they go to ruth's chris

sometimes you know i'm a little confused about how we ended up here you might be asking yourself how did we end up here and i don't have an answer to that question what i am remembering though is you mentioned the macy's thanksgiving day parade is it still macy's they still yeah why would you give up that it's not it's not like bitcoin thanksgiving day parade it's not it's the

gronk yeah the grok the grok actually no unfortunately it's now gronk actually i'd be

down with that. That's fine. I'd be more down with that than Grok. Do you know that that was not a big tradition for me growing up to watch that? Or if it was on in the house, I just didn't pay it. Let me put it this way. I don't have specific memories of like, hey, the parade is on. I mean, I have vague recollection of...

There being some excitement around it, but I don't remember me personally being super into it. But then I became an adult, and then I became a middle-aged adult. And something that happens with middle age is something they like to call a midlife crisis, where you start trying to recapture your youth. And that must have been what happened to me maybe, I don't know, six years or something ago on Thanksgiving. I didn't start watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade day of. I started looking up Thanksgiving Day parades from the late 80s and early 90s when I would have been a child. And I've got one here. I'm looking because it was my understanding that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dancers appeared in the 1990 Thanksgiving Day Parade. And so I've got the full, you can find these things online, the full two hour plus Thanksgiving Day Parade here from 1990 is on YouTube. And this is something that I started doing. And we would have friends over for Thanksgiving, and I would just have this kind of stuff on in the background.

Your version of everything you ever saw in that American institution, the Ed Sullivan shoe, a really big shoe folk.

So we have some sort of a barbershop quartet or something holding up a picture of a car and singing. This is just how we're getting things rolling. it is great even if you keep the volume down it's and again if you're kind of of our generation this is a fun thing just to have on in the background you'll see commercials for toys that you coveted when you were a kid i remember he-man was a big one of these for one of them that i watched so i also love i think that's willard scott is voicing oh probably that would that would line up wouldn't it 1990 that was a big time for willard scott the thing that we always

like point out addy and i is just the the crass the the crass commercialism combined with the insatiable and these by the way were the original these were the original foundations of thanksgiving crass commercialism and the insatiable need for more attention or more power and what you have is like a float that's sponsored by monsanto but that for some reason has a kind of mid-level boy band on it sure but they're singing either if they're lucky they get to sing their song because the idea is that that will promote their new song sometimes they get stuck singing hark the herald angels or something but like they're on the float because their management says well putting these kids on this float will help move some units uh the uh monsanto has paid for the float because they're you know trying to greenwash their name or whatever and none of it works because first of all the lip-syncing is obvious there's no way that you're actually singing the song and it's it's often very difficult because of the way that the i think that the monitor is set up and the speakers like it's an unconvincing lip-syncing of a song you will never listen to by four people who couldn't spell monsanto if you spotted them the m and the santo right right and the whole thing just it's just it's it's both what's great about this country which is i guess what maybe people enjoying things that is me and addie watching it and everything else what's terrible about the country and it's all happening as a lead into football which also by the way satisfies both of those

characteristics yeah and here yeah i'm gonna play just a little i want to respond to what you just said and it actually it gets close to something that i wanted to say when we're talking about like just commercialism earlier this week on the show but honestly maybe that's not the best exploration uh to take on this thanksgiving i don't want to get too much into it but even lately i've been sort of just watching holiday commercials and this might just be my state of mind and where things are in the world right now and in this country and it's not like this is some new phenomenon this commercialism that you talk about has been going on you know even in the in these videos that warm my heart because they remember they remind me of my youth even then it was like the big he-man float is coming out and what happens is you have a million he-man toy commercials leading up to it and afterwards it's all just like a giant like release of a commercial for some new product right and i've been thinking about like all the holiday commercials we've already been seeing already and again nothing new here but just maybe my take on it is just like the holidays i mean the whole point of a tv commercial is to sell something so it's not like what do i expect them to take airtime just to say hey don't buy anything this year just love your family that doesn't make any sense but i've been more like kind of acutely aware of how the holidays really can man these commercials really must make you feel like crap if you're sorry happy thanksgiving if you're broke you know like there's something that it's not just like hey celebrate the season by you know spending a lot of money but also if you don't have money to spend and you just see all like the in tv right now the connection between happiness during the holidays and the ability to put a bow on a car or, you know, make sure that your kid has a million toys under the Christmas tree. And I was very lucky. that way when I was a kid. Well, it's like Trump said, maybe we should ask how many dolls does

somebody need? Right, exactly. So I don't know, that's been pretty, I don't know, kind of on my mind just sort of thinking about, man, a lot of people with the furloughs and just there's a lot of economic insecurity right now. And I keep on seeing these very glossy depictions of the holidays, which for a moment make you feel good, but you're like, oh, well, this is only if you can

buy into the experience sort of yeah no you're you're very right about that it's it's it's like and i think you use the perfect analogy it's like as long as you can throw a big red bow on a lexus yeah and park it in a snowy driveway outside of a beautiful modernist home as long as you can do all of those things then this is going to be another christmas to remember now andrew would you feel a little bit better about the state of the world if i told you about a recent w for tbtl when it comes to AI.

Oh, my God. I thought you were going to say we have balloons in this year's float. I'm sorry, balloons in this year's parade is what I meant to say.

I hadn't even thought about that in the parade of TBTL.

That would be amazing if you pulled that off behind my back.

Would you authorize $300,000 of the TBTB budget to go towards an inflated Johnny and Bobo?

That would be the versions, too, wouldn't it? It would be like those puppy dolls we have.

our luck though actually those would make you know what those would actually make those would be really great yeah our luck would be one of those years where it's too windy so they either can't fly them or they have to hold them really low that's happened in the last couple of years no uh this is um in some this is in fact free we also don't have three hundred thousand dollars no unfortunately in case you didn't know andrew there'll be no bow on that lexus for you this year yeah i was trying to remember how the thanksgiving day shows tend to start i knew that you know like to play little charlie brown something a little vince garaldi a little whatnot and so i went into my um my music kind of catalog on my computer and i just put in like tbtl thanksgiving and i wasn't finding anything right away so then i decided to just literally go on the internet and go tbtl thanksgiving to try to find an old episode of our show yeah so that i could like just listen to how the show began or how the show historically has begun on Thanksgiving Day shows, and the AI Overview said, TBTL likely refers to the podcast Too Beautiful to Live. This is the first result, which has released many Thanksgiving-themed episodes over the years, including those titled The Bernie Madoff of Thanksgiving, 2020, and Happy Thanksgiving, 2011.

Huh. I don't remember the Bernie Madoff. I remember you had a good one. There's something about the inside of a turkey that warms the outside of a man.

I like to make that joke about every six months. So, yeah, I don't know what the Bernie Madoff of Thanksgiving 2020 was about, but we apparently did one of those. Also, again, Happy Thanksgiving 2011. Another possibility is the Food Network show Throwdown with Bobby Flay, which had a Thanksgiving-themed episode in 2010 starring Reed Drummond. So we don't have total and complete stranglehold on the search term TBTL Thanksgiving, but we're at least the top result.

We're doing okay. We're doing okay, and that's pretty good.

It's not the theater by the lake. No, exactly. Or that photography behind the lens podcast. It's like we are the dominant player in the TBTL Thanksgiving space, and I, for one, am thankful for that.

Who is the host? You just said his name, and I just am now whiffing on it. Bobby Flay? No, the host of the old Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Willard Scott. Willard Scott. I think I have some really good pure Willard here. Can we take a listen to that? I hope I'm uncut Willard Scott. Yes.

Live on NBC. Welcome back. 64th Macy's Parade. Thank you for the finest police department in the world for doing a brilliant job in New York City. that new rap sensation Kid and Play. Now these guys really know how to celebrate the good times and they practice what they preach. So listen up and get a load of all that hair. Maybe they could help somebody that I know very well. Kid and Play, folks. They've got energy.

Here we go. Here we go.

Willard Scott introducing Kid and Play after lauding the police.

It's timeless. This could be from any era. so they're not as you are probably aware luke this is one of those performances that's on the ground it's not on a float you know what i mean and that's the other one by the way yeah they

will have broadway productions will come in and do like the world's this is again i keep coming back to this i'm thankful for negativity today andrew um and uh but like the thing that's funny about the sort of like like there will be the some of the performers that are not on floats and a lot of those are broadway um like a broadway show that's trying to get more attention and they're going to do like a number from their from their show but the problem is they can't do a full song it's like way too long so they're trying to figure out how to sort of like boil down like what's a 20 second version of this song which again it's it's it's sort of not possible to do anything that's compelling or meaningful In the time that is allotted And again often it's raining Or there's like just And again these Broadway shows What's cool about them generally is You're in the audience you're not like Up next to them you're a little further away from them Like I remember seeing the like Beetlejuice I think a couple years ago the Beetlejuice On Broadway was a big you know It was a big hit and so then of course they have the Beetlejuice Cast doing something and it's like It's way too close up on the makeup Of the person who's playing Beetlejuice

Uh huh

you know what I mean like the costume is not convincing because it's bright daylight and the cameras are 4k it's like you know and you can just see like that one backup dancer who's just not really keeping up with the rest of them make a bad hoof or something and they're like it's just like it's somehow all of it this parade which again I actually love watching it but I love watching it for how unsuccessful it is at most of the things it's attempt of the small talk I don't know who it is now these days it's probably like Savannah if you're watching it on NBC because each network covers it themselves but even though i work for cbs somehow we seem to be an nbc family when it comes to watching this so it's like savannah guthrie and you know what wait this is

on oh all the networks carry this yes i literally did not realize that luke that that tells you how much of like out of the loop i am on this particular tradition i always thought that one entity like kind of has the main broadcast no there are like if i remember right i think you can

And you at least, I know NBC and CBS do it, or at least last year, because we checked over on CBS and they were also covering it. So, yeah, I don't think it's exclusive to one network. I mean, watch me be wrong. I'm thankful for being okay with being wrong, Andrew. That's another thing I'm thankful for.

You know what my gift is to you? I'm not Googling it. We don't have to Google this. Just let it be. You said something. I might be right. It might be wrong. It doesn't really matter. And I'm not going to fact check you live on the air. How about that? Thank you.

That's your birthday present to me.

That's right. Thank you, baby.

Andrew, I am very thankful for these donors. Me too. I love that our music today, Thank You, Baby, is very on brand for the day. But I could not resist. I had to Google, is CBS playing the Macy's Day Parade? And what I'm learning is that apparently CBS does an unauthorized, unofficial broadcast of the Macy's Day Parade that they're not allowed to call the Macy's Day Parade.

This is what CBS does?

Yeah. NBC. So here's what AI says. You know AI, the thing that knows about TBTL. Yeah. Uh, it says, uh, CBS. Let's see here. Um, the Thanksgiving Day Parade on CBS. Thanksgiving Day Parade on CBS is an unofficial broadcast of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade that aired on CBS up until 2023. It was originally billed as the Thanksgiving Day Jubilee and later the CBS All-American Thanksgiving Day Parade and featured segments from other holiday parades across North America. huh so they've never had you so you're right your instinct was right that um it's an nbc exclusive makes sense which yeah it does make sense there were there so what must have happened in years past although it couldn't have been last year but in the year before that i do have a very specific memory of of wondering that myself and bopping over to cbs and seeing them covering a parade but what i think i was watching was the final year of their off-brand ass oh wow their thing of trying to trick their jubilee and by the way it worked it worked on one of their own employees one of their own skydance paramount employees sure yeah who didn't even put it together that they're showing me other parade stuff and hoping that i'm not going to be looking carefully enough

to realize it ain't macy's so no no okay yes yes very briefly did you hear that the president of the united states is because of all of this stuff with paramount and cbs and all the trying to bring back rush hour to rush hour it's like i think it's rush hour rush hour four rather sorry rush hour four yeah that i of all of the bizarre headlines of the year i did not have president of the united states pushes to bring back rush hour four because he's leaning on my boss yeah right ellison yeah

And I wish them well. I wish them the very best with that. I'd love to see Chris Tucker and Jackie Chad, what's left of those two fellers, drive it around in a convertible or whatever happens in the other Rush Hour movies. But yes, here's what I'll say about that one. At least it's relatively harmless.

No, it's just bizarre. I'm not rallying or railing against anything here. It's just, yeah, insane, I guess. It's like, I never expected this to be the result of government-run media.

By the way, it also does involve suppressing free speech, in case you were wondering. But yeah, you figured there'd be less Chris Tucker.

Yeah, I did, certainly. And you make a good point about Jackie Chan. He really, I mean, obviously, his physical prowess, right, and his skills in that regard is what made him famous. And then he was able to, it's not like he was an actor first, right? but i would have thought that he would have entrenched himself into our culture so strongly that once he became an older man which i assume he is now and maybe can't still do all those stunts that he would still be a mainstay of american cinema but you're right we have not seen right

he didn't schwarzenegger you know like he didn't schwarzenegger like schwarzenegger went from conan where the entire thing was the muscles to being kindergarten cop is not etuma like he he moved into many roles where it wasn't purely about his physicality anymore. Yeah. You know, where he could kind of be he could be an everyman, kindergarten

cop. Yeah, exactly. Genevieve loves watching any movie where he plays just almost any kind of character and nobody ever asks or acknowledges his accent. The accent. Nobody ever acknowledges it. Not that we should live in a world where if you don't have a typical American accent that people should be questioning you about it all the time that would be highly annoying but you would think that like oh oh that's interesting where are you from just at one point somebody acknowledged the fact that you talk that way when nobody else in the movie does yeah i absolutely i mean that was to me

always the thing about schwarzenegger that i found so i was you know i was never i wasn't the kid who was real super into conan or the predator or terminator none of that stuff was really for me very much anyway so i was always i felt like the person going like are we not talking about the accent yeah like we all we all this isn't how this ended last week have you all gone insane like it always just seemed to be like it's a heavily accented version of english that is again it's being in it's it's it's being placed in a lot of different cinematic contexts where it would bear

comment in the movie yeah or at least or or if not comment like just explanation explanation way like oh well when i got to the states as a young man right exactly like and again not to other when i was growing up in chicago and all of that yeah wait what part of chicago were you in that was not that was not bad but i'm not great i tried to go as fast no that was pretty good jackie chan um has been working hold on let me do my jackie chan okay wait hold on let me lay out for this wait i'm thankful for editing you have all of the space in the world go ahead no um no he's working consistently he's got like he's got movies on his filmography for every year it's just not stuff that you it's like voices and you know that kind of stuff that you and i are not like really following that closely but he is already listing rush hour four so i guess it's

already in production huh he's doing just fine for himself and is an international star but you're He's just not, he's not playing the like sort of father-in-law in a movie where, again, there's no stunting involved. And, and it's like, and we're not even, we're just like, there's no backstory about, you know, about any of the sort of like, you know, maybe cultural differences, et cetera. But I'll tell you who's, who cannot wait to hear me do my Jackie Chan impression. It's Don Tyler. Yes. Seattle, Washington. Well, I'm getting an email here from Don who says, please don't.

Oh, okay.

I had that backwards. I can't tell you anyone who is less excited to hear my Jackie Chan impression than Don Tyler of Seattle, Washington. Thank you, Don. Thank you, Don. Don is one of our donors, by the way, making this show possible today. Also, Becky Collier is in McMinnville, Tennessee.

Hey.

With the time difference, I feel like Becky may already be taking an afternoon nap now. Yes.

I'll try to get this up online as early as possible for everybody who's doing their Thanksgiving plans and cooking and prep today.

Absolutely. And the Nappers, we exist. Folks like maybe Michael Guerrero, who's out there in Jersey City, New Jersey. I'm skipping to the East Coast contingent today, Andrew, because of the time difference. See what I did there? Now, last time I tried to do this. I ran into some real problems. Now, is this Michael the Michael that came to the picnic from New Jersey, or do we have two Michaels in New Jersey? I don't remember Michael's last name.

I don't either. I'm going to start asking that of every person at a TVChel event. But I think the Michael that we talk to in Wisconsin is in Brooklyn.

Oh, is that Brooklyn and I'm confusing New York and New Jersey? Do people ever do that, confuse New York and New Jersey? Are people pretty chill about that? Are people pretty chill about that?

No, unchill. Very unchill. Although I think, Michael, if anybody's going to take it in stride, it's probably Michael. And also, by the way, this could be the same Michael. How about Chase Wiseman? Chase is in Los Angeles, California, and is just waking up as this show hits the airwaves because of that West Coast, East Coast thing. Also, Chase is just not a stressed person. Chase is not somebody who's up like Joan Didion, who we had meant to talk about today on the show and may or may not get to. He does not have pages and pages and pages of his rules about Thanksgiving food that keep him getting up super early in the morning. Chase is getting up, he's listening to TBTL, and really enjoying things. As is Danny Sandoval in South El Monte, California. Do Chase and Danny know each other? Possible. They're both very chill, though. Very West Coast attitude. West Coast, California.

They do this thing a lot. Or wait, is this Hawaiian? They do the surf-on thing with their thumb and their pinky.

I feel like that's anywhere near the ocean you can do that. Yeah, okay, yeah. Maybe not Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It feels un-Delaware to me.

Maybe in Delaware City. That's a really good point. They don't do that in Maine. They don't do that on the coast of Maine.

No, I don't see that being a Maine thing. Is it hang loose?

Is that the word I'm... Is it hang loose? That's hang loose. Okay, yeah, that's this thing. That's that thing, okay.

Yeah. Gotcha. And then Colby Blanton is in Seattle, Washington. Hey, Colby. Where they hang the loosest. Yes, they do. You know that. You're in Seattle. You're hanging loose in Seattle right now. I am so loose right now. It's almost a medical condition. Thank you to all of our doters. We absolutely could not do this without you. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. In a very Thanksgiving-appropriate Top Story today, Andrew, which you sent to me like a week ago or something, because you knew when you saw the headline and I think the accompanying photo that it kind of brought together all the stuff in the world that I tend to obsess over or at least think about a lot. It was from the New York Times, Patrick Farrell writing the headline, Joan Didion's Thanksgiving, dinner for 75, reams of notes. And it's kind of, what basically happened was a new trove of Joan Didion's papers has been released by the New York City Public Library and in that trove of papers just happens to be all of her thanksgiving day notes the notes about the food that she was serving the people that would come to her thanksgiving get-togethers the people who wouldn't come to them the people who what got eaten what was not eaten like copious notes around the topic of these thanksgivings that joan didion and her husband john gregory done would throw at their place in manhattan basically the new york times saying before there was something called friendsgiving joan didion was inviting together a you know a huge collection of the kind of literary and artistic and creative class in new york city for thanksgiving including jimmy breslin jan winner philip roth um nora efron would come to them there was one at one At one point, they were talking about some of the people who showed up, and I thought of you, because, oh, it was in 1993, the invitation list for her largest Thanksgiving buffet in 1993 was a mixed salad with writer Susan Sontag, Brett Easton Ellis, and Donna Tartt, plus Detective Thomas Hyland from the New York Police Department. I thought they'd meet him at a law enforcement conference.

Yeah, probably, yeah. And he has an Austrian accent for some reason.

That's right.

Nobody acknowledges it.

Give me some of the cranberry relish and all of that. As long as you end everything with and all of that. Did you ever read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt? I didn't, and in fact, reading this mention of Donna Tartt in 1993 being invited to this reframed my sense of The Goldfinch, which I've never read. Let me explain. When I saw The Goldfinch and the name Donna Tartt, I assumed that Donna Tartt was like a young up-and-coming writer, maybe in her 20s who had written some kind of breakout hit called the goldfinch that everybody was talking about but now i see that donna tart was there with brett easton ellis and uh detective thomas highland of the nypd and many other at susan sontag in 1993 and now i'm like oh donna tart was an established writer who uh because the goldfinch

came out well after 1993 right i think i just looked it up but it's not in front of me right now but i think it said 2013 and you're right i don't know if i had any uh knowledge or at least i don't think donna tart was a name that was at the forefront of my brain before the goldfinch but somehow i did get swept into goldfinch fury and read that book is that pretty good yeah i remember liking it it's one of those book it's it's a pretty sprawling story it covers a lot of ground and so because of that i almost remember it as like almost different sections you know like of as as i think one of the main characters has very different sort of phases of their life and i will say it takes some pretty big swings plot wise but i remember being gripping now the thing

that this article also makes clear is that joan didion was dissimilar to a lot of the people of her generation particularly a lot of the women of her generation who were sort of rejecting a lot of the assumptions around like domesticity and you know uh sort of quote-unquote keeping a home like there was a bohemian movement that that hit a lot of the particularly women of joan didion's time and she was not one of them even though she was in the cool club she was you know writing about interesting topics she was living a life of the mind but she also really loved cooking and being in the kitchen and it was kind of her uh like a sort of a as they say happy place for her she called it a room of her own she just was really really into it and she became in this group of people that she knew many of whom were much less kind of tied into these traditional ideas around the kitchen and cooking she became kind of the food knower of their social group and and therefore whenever you're dealing with someone who's the knower of something in your group and then you do a thing that's in that category you become very like self-conscious about their read on it so in other words it sounds like her friends when she would come to dinner at their house would feel self-conscious about their cooking because she was the person who knew how to cook in the friend group and i love this note first of all i i'm never going to do this myself because it takes work but i love the idea of people writing each other handwritten thank you notes for like how the dinner went the other night one because then it can be in your letters your papers that the new york library can release um here's from this new york times piece friends hung on her culinary judgment. Here's the quote. When you looked into the parched and smoking parody of scalloped potatoes I produced on Friday night and said, well, it's potatoes, Anna. I was struck by a fresh avalanche of love for you, the journalist Barry Farrell wrote in a 1973 letter. You are the kindest person I know. So Barry Farrell makes scalloped potatoes that he does not think have turned out well. Joan Didion plays along and says, hey, they're potatoes. Joan Didion is nice about it. And then Barry Farrell writes a thank you note that ends up in her personal effects. The line, when you looked into the parched and smoking parody of scalloped potatoes I produced on Friday night, we just don't talk to each other that way anymore. Yeah, that's pretty great. I mean,

did you go through that phase? I mean, that was a big part of my life as a young person was even when it became electronic mail some people call it email but you know what I mean I write the E smaller than the rest of the word electronic communications that still didn't take it away a huge part of Genevieve and I sort of I don't know if you would call it courting but like after we had met and already hit a spark but then moved back to our corners of the country and we weren't at the time it did not look like I'd be moving to the east coast where she lived so we did not realize that we had much of a future but we were still writing these very elaborate long emails and we were both consider ourselves kind of like writers so like we were and again i'm not trying to put us like joan didion obviously but it the story also gives me sort of the warm feeling of those days we're doing a year of magical stinking yeah there's your can that be a show title for that the ai next year will be like yes tbtl has had many who brought you the Barry Madoff of Thanksgiving and a year of magical thinking um but anyway like yeah that just reminds me also of like when we were like young and writing letters to each other and in some way like trying to impress or at least trying to entertain each other I mean my friends did that all the time writing these long letters and I do sort of miss that I think you were more

inclined that way toward more inclined towards that than I was but I can remember I will tell you this that like the text message if i were to go back in relationships in in the like the sort of sedimentary record of my relationships i would say that

definitely one comes to mind that was at about that time when we still weren't texting each other everything but i was long distance from this person for significant portions and there was a healthy number of like emails just kind of like long emails and you know discussing my feelings and things um uh whereas now like if you looked at becca and i's like sort of you know history of communication outside of face-to-face conversations or whatever it's all text you know Yeah. As opposed to like an email that was really, you know, thoughtfully considered and stuff. But but even just the like, man, a handwritten note goes so far. And yet and it's so not that hard to do. And yet I just struggle to. In fact, even in this one of the coolest things about this New York Times article is all the photographs. And these are, again, I think they're photographs and then just papers that are from Joan Didion's papers. and one of them is she has written some recipe to herself in her sort of scrawl but it's and i don't have it in front of me because i printed out the article so i kind of changed the i took out the photos basically but it was the letterhead was from time life and it must have been and it was like time life but it was clearly like a you know a piece of letterhead that i'm guessing either joan didion or john gregory dunn i believe they were both writers um had like probably at some point done some project for time life somehow they had and it was but it was from their beverly hills office but then it had the phone number for it but the phone number was one of those like only five numbers kind of a thing you know it was like three dash something something something yeah and it's just so frozen in the amber of that moment of life and i love that she hand wrote this recipe and i love that she just grabbed the piece of paper that was nearby and it was this letterhead that was from the time life corporation which was still a going concern at the time and that the phone number is not even a kind of phone number we would use now like the archivalness of it all is uh is really another kind of really you know in the you and I already discussed that the um the main the top photo with this article is a Joan Didion a younger Joan Didion in Malibu and she's standing uh in front of a stove and and I was commenting on the Le Creuset. There's a Le Creuset pot, I think, there. I guess her used Le Creuset pots were sold for $8,000 at auction, I think to raise money maybe for the documentary film that her, I think it might have been her son made called The Center Will Not Hold. And I think he also auctioned off some of her recipes to raise money for the documentary

project. I mean, that'd be a pretty amazing thing to have one of her... Yeah, that'd be a

conversation piece. Can I

Going back to this idea of things being handwritten or even typewritten, and I'm wedging this anecdote in because I want to share this with you, but I'm mad at myself for not knowing more details. But when we were kids, my mom had these two little wire puzzles, if that makes any sense. Small, like you could hold it in your hand. And one of them was like kind of a wire that was shaped like a bicycle. and the handlebars could kind of come off. It was like literally a puzzle where you'd have to wind it around. You had to figure out how can I take the handlebars off of this thing and then how can you get it back on. But it was small, right? It was like a few inches big or something. And that's one of those. And then there was another. There was a companion piece, too, that I don't think represented any real object. It was just another wire puzzle where you had to take one piece off. But how do you wind this thing off and on? And I remember as a kid. Now, first of all, this is one of those objects from my youth that was around all the time in our family room, but I totally forgot about it until I visited my mom, I don't know, like 10 years ago or something when she had moved into a new care facility and it was sitting on her shelf. And I had a lot of these things kind of pop up over the course of the last several years as she sort of downsized. And then when she passed away, we were going through her stuff and just like finding like kind of in some cases, very mundane things. But being like, oh, my God, I literally have not thought about this stool in 35 years or whatever. But I used to play with my matchbox cars on it or whatever. You know, it's just like it's just kind of sometimes, especially with objects and me, nostalgia, it just bowls me over. So I'm visiting my mom a while back, and I noticed that little bicycle puzzle. I'm like, man, I forgot about this. Now, the irony is when we were kids, we weren't allowed to touch it because if we got the handlebars off and we couldn't get it back on, nobody knew how to fix the damn thing, right? It was so tough to do. So I saw this on my mom's shelf, I don't know, five, ten years ago. I visited her. I literally was like, oh, my God, I forgot about this thing. I took the handlebars kind of partially off, could not get them back on. Literally, I'm 42 years old and I'm sweating, sweating it in my mom. But then I just put it back on the shelf, still like kind of half deconstructed. But my mom didn't get around very well by this point. So I don't think she. ever even knew so i did not get hollered at for that but it was just so ironic that's like oh we were never allowed to touch these things and then i took it i broke it this is why this is why this is all coming back to a hand type thing i promise when my mom passed away recently it was one of the very few things that i took was this little this little toy wire bicycle and still with the the handlebars kind of janky on it because i still hadn't put it back from a few years back and i brought it back home and i showed views but one thing that i did not realize and i don't know where this came from but when i told my sister oh i'm going to take this little bicycle home she said

well here are the instructions and she handed me a piece of paper that's like a full eight and a half by 11 piece of paper but folded several times over so it's like the size of almost a business card or maybe a little bit bigger and it was hand typed it background and instructions of what this thing was with then on the back side hand drawn instructions in somebody's hand that was a little bit like shaky you could tell that this was made and maybe photocopied but certainly hand typed by the person who made this in somewhere in southern california maybe my parents got it on a trip or something like that and i'm unfolding this piece of paper it is like it feels like a treasure map from the goonies and to see and then genevieve ended up fixing it like she's not she always says i'm not a good spatial reasoner when it comes to the with these puzzles but she's also somebody who can't stand to not have something fixed sort of so i knew if i just left it with genevieve or in her orbit long enough she would eventually get the handlebars back on and she did by like reverse engineering these hand-drawn instructions but this is from i want to say 1968 or something like that and there's this guy who was just making and then i i because he signed the type written thing and i'm sorry i don't have it in front of me right now i can't give you his name i googled it i'm like maybe this guy was big in this realm of these types of puzzles and i did find some like i don't know if they were reddit threads or what they were but he was mentioned his puzzles were mentioned in some people's like sort of collections and stuff it was it really blew me away i really of something so absolutely insignificant it really felt like i was holding a piece of history that is completely that you can't recreate you know if you want to know

as if we need more evidence of the just fundamental difference in your family's tendencies behaviors etc the fact that those instructions yeah survived and rode along as it were with that puzzle that bicycle puzzle yes and then we're able to be uh produced at the critical moment yes is a miracle i mean a miracle of organization archiving etc yeah and think about

all the different life changes you know that that means that my you know my mom probably got this when you know before i was born but you know living in ohio but probably on vacation somewhere and then and then through all of the family tumult of a divorce and then her moving across the country to arizona at some point and then like living in several different places and then downsizing several times and then eventually you know staying in this particular care facility after being in a couple, but somehow not only did this thing arrive with her, but with the instructions right in tow. And I think maybe now that you point that out, you see where I get some of my tendencies.

Yeah. I mean, in my family, like, I mean, forget the instructions. There may be the handlebars.

Yeah, right. If you're lucky. And it's because it's stuck in somebody's nose for 30 years. It's in my knuckle.

And they wouldn't take me to the doctor because we didn't have insurance so it's just the handlebars are just in my knuckles for the rest of my life yeah

but there you go anyway sorry to steal the joan didion ness of it all no that was physical that something about those physical letters that were you know handwritten yeah no that's cool yeah

that's it's amazing how physical objects really are i mean are so uh sort of nostalgic and and and can really like i mean that's the whole thing you know even being in my parents house where i am again today as this is playing like my parents moved there i was already in college but now it's been so long since then you know it's been 30 more years of my life that now all of the weird crap in that house and in that my parents i think of it as their new house they've been in it for 30 years that's all now like infused with with history for me and do it like doilies and this you know we're weird you know book what have you it's like that's just been sitting on this man you know on this particular shelf for however long it's like yeah it it's very very very uh memory um sort of what It really jogs your memory and really takes you to a certain place. Well, I think that we should probably go ahead and wrap it on up today since it is a holiday. Oh, yeah. You've probably got...

Do you want to play the Vince Guaraldi from your end instead of the usual words by Doves? Or let me see if I have a copy of it here. We hadn't talked this through.

Yeah, I've got that Guaraldi. Why don't we do that?

Oh, you've got that Guaraldi in you?

Oh, boy. He's got that Guaraldi in him. But you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to play the long version, which I like because it starts with Vince Guaraldi counting it off, I think. It's one of those little studio things where he kind of goes, I think he says, like, all right, I don't know if he says take 13 or something like that, but he does a little studio move here. So we'll play that, and we'll let the music go for a little bit. We'll get banned in Romania, and then we'll duck it out. But anyway, so that's going to do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening, everybody. Hope you're having a great Thanksgiving wherever you are, that you are surrounded by the folks you love, if that's something that can be happening for you. We're going to be back here tomorrow because you know what? TBTL never takes a weekday off. We'll be back here tomorrow with more original imaginary radio for you, so please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Thanksgiving. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Q13.

Here we go. 1, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3.

Power out.