In this episode of Life Will Be The Death Of Me, host Chelsea Handler first reads a chapter of her book by the same name, advising everyone that marijuana can solve most of their problems and expressing the hope that the term “pharmacological intuitive” will take off, before being joined by her friend Natasha Lyonne, star of Orange Is the New Black and Russian Doll. Natasha takes her co-host duties very seriously, saying, “So Chelsea - I’m saying that right?” (Chelsea chuckles and replies, “No, it’s Tracy.”) The two have plenty of laughs but also get a little serious, talking about privilege, parenting, funeral DJs, Africa, Natasha’s readiness for a Mafia role, and more.
Natasha wants to know about the $250,000 Chelsea set aside for her own funeral a few years ago: “I want a big blowout,” Chelsea says. But she admits that that money would probably be better used if given to a charity or the NAACP. Natasha suggests that, alternatively, they have a joint funeral; the timing might be tricky, but it would be a lot of fun. And Natasha plans to get married on her deathbed, she says, so “it’s going to be very romantic,” she promises. “And there will be a DJ.”
But Chelsea is serious about realizing the privilege she’s been surrounded with, saying she always thought “white privilege” referred to rich people. “You had trust funds, and you were from the Rockefeller family, and you went to Harvard,” she says. “It wasn’t until after the election that I really just started to think about my own privilege in a way that I hadn’t understood before.” She points to a relationship she had in high school with a black student named Tyshawn. “We got arrested three times while we were together,” she says, for having a small amount of pot. “Each time, the police officer said, ‘Okay, miss, you get out of this neighborhood and go home.’ And [Tyshawn] was arrested.” He lost a full scholarship to a university and ended up incarcerated for fourteen years. “A white person gets away with that. I got away with it...and his whole life was ruined....I never thought about that,” Chelsea continues. “I woke up...and I was embarrassed that it took me this long to get here, but I'm happy to be late to the party than to never show up at all.”
Natasha understands this awakening that Chelsea had, because she had a similar experience thinking about inequality in America when she visited Nigeria and Ghana with fellow Orange is the New Black star Uzo Oduba, and they visited slave castles in Accra. “This is a very, very heavy journey to go down, and really understand, in the ways you’re talking about, about the weight of the world that we’re actually living in,” she says. “You see the way in which America, the world at large, time and time again just f**king shut it down, and it’s harrowing...it almost feels like the idea of the ongoing crime that is our current prison system.”
They both love Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search For Meaning, and reading it also made them think about privilege in a new way. “There was a line in the book....it made me, like, look up at the sky and think, ‘Whoa, what the f**k am I doing with my life?’” Chelsea remembers. “And it was, stop asking what you expect out of life and start asking what life expects out of you...I had to read that to think it.”
“Which I think is fair and normal and kind of like happens for each of us in its right time,” Natasha says. “The truth is, there's even an underlying sort of lucky stroke to having the opportunity to kind of investigate self.”
Join Chelsea and Natasha as they get more into privilege, the terrible food in Iceland, and how they feel about having kids (“I was like, ‘F**k, Delia, do you think I need to make embryos, or what should I do,’” Natasha remembers saying to a friend, “and she was like, ‘Not everybody has to do everything’”), on this episode of Life Will Be The Death Of Me.
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