Behind the Scenes Minis: Greetings and Context

Holly and Tracy commiserate about sending greeting cards. Tracy talks about how she shifted away from an episode exclusively about Frances Thompson.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Frye
and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about greeting cards
this week. We did when you said it, like the

(00:22):
outline of the episode just said something to the effect of, like,
I'm working through my feelings on greeting cards, and I
thought that meant something very different than what you actually
talked about on Yeah, in the introduction to the episode,
I thought your feelings about greeting cards was going to
be about I don't know their content, or anytime I

(00:44):
go to buy one, I can't find one with a
sentiment that I like, so I always wind up getting
blank ones. I thought it was going to be something
along those lines and not what you were actually talking about. Yeah,
trying to make space in my life. Yeah, it kind
of did help me make some rules about what stays
and what goes. I also think I might make myself

(01:06):
a rule that they have to get integrated into some
kind of art. They can't just be sitting in a
drawer somewhere. But that's weird too. One of the things
that really struck me. I didn't mention it. But it
was in that report we talked about the at the
end about the current status of the greeting card industry,
and one of the people from the Greeting Card Association

(01:27):
made this very good point of like, you can send
electronic greetings as much as you want, but you can't
in the same way hold like a text from a
loved one that has passed in your hand, the way
you can a card that they've sent you and like
keep it as a memento, and like the sentimental value
of them is I think also a part of what's

(01:48):
driving new interest among younger purchasers, which is really interesting.
That has been a factor. And ones that I have
kept that I might not have kept. Other one I
mentioned in that Duke d'orleon poem translation that I translated
part of it because here is why there are a
lot of translations I see of it that translate a

(02:13):
section of it literally. And the way it conveys to
the English ear, the English speaking ear, is not really
in line with what he is saying, and that is
instead of saying I am love sick, it says I
am sick of love, and that makes it sound more negative.

(02:35):
And I switched it, but I didn't. I'm like, no,
he's obviously like very sad to not be with her.
It makes it sound like he's like down time for it.
So that's if you go looking for a translation and
you're like, that's not what this says. That's what's going
on there, Yeah, because you would say in French it

(02:58):
would be madame or sick of love, but it's like
sick from love, not tired of it. Here was another
cool thing that I didn't get into and debated about
getting into that I really really liked about the Egyptian
use of scaubs as a greeting and as a way

(03:20):
to show people you cared about them, Which is that
unlike we talked about the development of greetings in China
and in the US and England, really where it starts
out as something that like rich people are doing and
eventually becomes affordable for everybody else, it appears have always
been something that like, we're used this way across all

(03:43):
of the social and economic strata of that culture, Like
it was something that was available to everyone as a
means of showing other people that you love them, which
I really really like. Just cool. Okay, I read a
listener mail about figure drawing. Yeah, yeah, and how ballet

(04:05):
dancers are perfect for it, which is a really good idea.
Thank you again, kieren So. JC Horseley. John Calcott Horseley,
who designed what is often called the first Christmas card.
I didn't know until I was looking up information on him,
was sometimes called mister J. Clothes Horseley. Okay, not for

(04:26):
the reason you might think, because I read that and
I was like, oh, was he a dandy? No. Apparently
he was a little bit of a Puritan and he
didn't he refused to do life drawing with nudes, okay,
And as a consequence, like throughout his career, that's one
of the things that gets criticism is like he didn't
really know how the human body works. He's not very

(04:47):
good at proportions on human body because he was like
so worried about seeing somebody without clothes on that he
would never do a new drawing class or a new
drawing study, which is so fascinating to me. Right, you
think about all of the great artists in history who
are known for their understanding of how the human body works. M. M.

(05:08):
Michelangelo pops to mind, of course, and it's because they
did so many nude studies, like m even a thin
layer of clothing is gonna change your perception of like
how the muscles and tendons and everything are connecting to
one another. And I'm like, hoarsely, oh baby, you could
have been even better. Yeah, it just made me laugh.

(05:29):
The only other thing I wanted to talk about was
end of year letters. Oh sure, I can't even get
my act together to send cards. Yeah, I don't know
how people do it. And yet the people in my
life that do it, I love those letters every year,
Like they're often super funny, and I'm like, oh, that's

(05:49):
such a great thing. And then I'm like, I know,
I'm sure it would only take a couple hours at most. Yeah,
but like my brain is so resistant to the idea.
I feel like there's been a year of my adult
life when I sent Christmas cards, not letters, just cards

(06:12):
to a lot of friends and relatives. Yeah. And I
managed to do that once when we bought our house,
I ahead of time of actually buying the house and moving,
used one of those you know services we can design
your own cards to put together a change of address card,

(06:34):
and I already had those printed and if I recall correctly,
They also had an addressing service, and so I might
have had them address it for me, largely based on
the address list that I had developed for our wedding,
which was a few years before. Like, I went and
updated that list, and I sent those cards out so

(06:55):
quickly after I moved that a friend of mine said
it made her angry. She because she could not imagine
having been that on the ball in the middle of
a move. And that's the only time that I've managed
to be that on the ball. I have much more
often done things like bought Christmas cards with the intent
of sending them and not sending them. Oh yeah, still

(07:17):
in a stillim a thing. Yeah. Once I bought a
variety pack of those love pop pop up cards. Oh
they're beautiful. I love them so much. I think they
were flowers. It was like twelve months of flowers. And
my intention was that I was gonna send my mom
a flower card every month. And that's how much I

(07:38):
didn't have my act together. I didn't get it together
to send a card every month to my mom. And
then the pandemic started and everything shut down, and I
was like, I have this dozen cards, and so I
sent greeting cards to like a lot of friends and
family that like when everything shut down. And then, because
it was at that time of the pandemic, when we

(07:59):
really didn't know what was happening and we didn't know
how it spread and people were washing their groceries and whatever,
I sealed it with a wet paper towel and I
wrote across the seal, sealed with a wet paper towel.
So careful, so careful, and good, I mean in a
good way. Yeah, I am the only time I've ever
been even moderately okay at it. Some years back, we

(08:25):
had a sponsor that printed custom cards, and I had
New Year's cards that had my wonderful and horrible cat,
mister Burns on them. And then this is a little sad,
but mister Burns died kind of early that year, and
I had not sent a lot of the cards and

(08:46):
they are still in a drawer somewhere because I can't
the don't have it in me to toss them. Yeah again,
maybe they'll become an art project. Maybe we can draw
something halloweeny on it and make it like ghost mister Burns.
I don't know, we'll do something mister Burn's. Mister Burns,
this also did kind of inspire me to think about, like,

(09:07):
is there a way I can make the card thing happen?
Because here's my hold up. I think I would be
okay with it, except this sounds so cocky made me
when I say it, It's like, how lazy are you?
Getting to the post office from our house is weird.
We have a post office that's quite close, less than

(09:27):
half a mile away, but it's not walkable and it's
in like a shopping center that getting into and out
of it is a real pain. In the next I
was like, I want to do that, and then we
have another one. The next closest one is actually where
my PO box is, but I don't go there super often.
It's kind of like one of those things where I'm like, oh, yeah,
I'm having dinner over there, I'll stop by there. I'm

(09:50):
just terrible at going to the post office. That's the
biggest problem. One day, You've suddenly reminded me that I'm
pretty sure I got an email about my PO box renewal,
and I'm like that, I handle that. I'm on top
of it. I'm on top. Yeah, I'm not actually on
top of things. Yeah yeah, And then I actually feel

(10:13):
especially having listened to this and it being inspired by
me trying to clear out my house. There's also part
of me that's like, do I want to dump more
things in other people's lives? What if they don't want cards? Yeah, treachery.
Maybe I'll ask everybody do you want cards? This year?
I don't want to give you things you don't want
to deal with. We have a number of friends that
tend to send either letters or cards, and a lot

(10:35):
of our friends who have kids have been sending like
little pictures of their kids. And I had done some
tidying and I had discarded like the envelopes things that
came in that the envelopes that the things had come in,
the things that were not actually necessary. So I had
the pictures and the cards, but the pictures had become

(10:57):
separated from the cards. Uh huh. And there was a
moment where Patrick came and looked at a picture of
a child and was like, who is this? Whose baby
is this? We had to like macked it up figure
out who was Yeah, I'm pretty lucky in that regard.

(11:17):
I'm trying to think through like my good friends that
would send me pictures of their kids, and one couple
in particular, their kids look so much like either one
or the other of them that I could easily go, oh,
I know whose kid that is? Well, and in our defense,
this particular picture did not look as much like the
other pictures of the child or the child. Yeah, yeah,

(11:40):
it happens. For whatever reason, it was just an angle
that didn't look the same. I guess. We talked about
the Memphis massacre, Yeah, we did. We have several similar
massacres and the archive. We're going to have a related

(12:04):
Saturday Classic coming up, and several of them are episodes
I wrote. And I got to this point that I
felt like we were telling essentially the same story over
and over, but that it wasn't adding anything new or
additional to what we were talking about. It just sort

(12:25):
of felt like we were revisiting the same trauma repeatedly.
Right with this one, my intent had been to have
an episode that was about Francis Thompson, because I thought
there was more information about her than there was Gotcha,
and I sort of understood that to do the episode,

(12:46):
I would need to talk about the massacre as part
of the context, and so I was thinking between what
we know about her and the massacre there's probably a
whole episode there. But then I realized that, apart from
her testimony she gave before the House Select Committee, what
we know about her is basically entirely in horrifying, incredibly

(13:10):
disrespectful news articles. If the episode had been about her,
since our show is on Netflix now and we need
some visual things to go on Netflix, we probably would
have needed to use those illustrations of her, which were
not things like she was not in control of her

(13:31):
own right depiction there, it was something that she was
forced to do. And then these are pictures that were
being printed to make her look bad, And I just
felt like there was not a way to really focus
the episode on her without having to draw from this
incredibly disrespectful and offensive source material. And I, like we

(13:55):
have said before, it is incredibly important to acknowledge the
reality that for all of history there have been people
who have lived in whatever way outside of their society
standards for things like sex and gender. But it's also
really important to do that in a way that doesn't

(14:16):
feel like we are disrespecting the people of the past
or trans people living today. Yeah, and so like, as
I read just a series of awful articles, I was like,
I think the focus here needs to be about the massacre,
because this massacre does have some aspects that don't feel

(14:38):
like we're just repeating the same trauma. When we get
into the part about the influence on things like the
fourteenth Amendment, and then also spend some time talking about
her and what happened to her. That's how we sort
of arrived at the episode that we wound up doing.
A sort of bit of information that I could not
find a good place in the structure of the episode

(15:00):
to include. Is Mary Church Terrell, who was a journalist
and a suffrage advocate, a civil rights activist. Also, she
wrote a memoir that was published in nineteen forty and
she talks about this massacre in that memoir because her
father was there and her father was shot and left

(15:21):
for dead, and in her description of this she refers
to it as the Irish Riot. And that's something that
she wrote in nineteen forty, so decades later after it
had happened, which to me was just an illustration of
how tightly it was still connected to the idea of

(15:43):
the Irish community and not former Confederates or the white
community more broadly, even though at that point it was
not in public memory much anymore beyond people who had
some kind of direct connection to it, like she did
through her father. I marvel and don't marvel at how

(16:03):
quickly this did fall out of public memory. Yeah, And
I wonder because we're watching the same thing happen to
a lot of things today, right, the difference being that
today were like inundated with a constant, wildflow of information
and news all the time, so it's kind of easy
for your brain to like cycle to the next thing,

(16:23):
whereas with this, you know, presumably there were not as
many huge violent outbreaks going on on the daily being
reported in papers. So I find myself being like, how
much of this was sort of a purposeful and how
much of it? I mean, there's no one there's no

(16:45):
one answer either, right, like how much of it is
people just being like that was so horrific And this
incredibly horrifying reminder of the capacity for human cruelty and
violence is something that like we almost deal with and
process emotionally or intellectually. So let's put it aside versus

(17:06):
people just like not caring, Like those are all elements
of the the ways that people I don't even know
if they forget, but they just kind of don't engage
with that information anymore, and I I it's terrifying. Yeah,
there have been there have been some episodes on other

(17:28):
especially very traumatic incidents, incidents of racist violence, where we
have gotten more into like the how of how it
fell out of public memory. Yeah, and sometimes there's been
an aspect of the incident becoming a taboo among the
people that it happened to, and people not wanting to

(17:49):
talk about it among their family members, not wanting to
talk about it among their descendants, right, not really like
wanting to revisit that trauma. But then there have also
been times that the focus was a lot more one
intentionally burying the history of what happened, often on the
part of whoever perpetrated the violence. But that's been part

(18:10):
of a lot of these episodes that we have done before.
Like I grew up in North Carolina, never heard about
the Wilmington Coup until I was an adult, if I
remember correctly, what our episode about the Tulsa massacre. Similarly,
like the Tulsa massacre kind of was not in the
public consciousness until it was resurrected by historians and activists

(18:34):
and people trying to make sure that it continued to
be part of the history, became re became part of
the history that was talked about, and then with the
Tulsa massacre specifically, like the TV show Watchmen. Ye, it
was part of that TV show, and like that became
how a lot of people heard about it, And like
I remember when that show was on, seeing a lot

(18:57):
of people on social media discovering for the first time
that that had happened, and not really realizing that it
wasn't just one thing. It was part of this pattern, right,
that has happened over and over and over again all
around the country at points over you know, decades slash centuries.

(19:20):
I really appreciated the fact that there was, you know,
a conscious effort leading up to the one hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the Memphis massacre that say, Okay, we
are going to have all of these events, We're going
to hold a symposium, We're going to like they made
a website and a blog and a lot of stuff

(19:40):
to just try to like make people aware that this
had happened who might not have been aware of it before. Yeah.
The other thing I couldn't help but think about, which

(20:00):
might be a weird line to draw between two things.
Is you know, we talked about Francis Thompson and her
horrific treatment, which was in the mid to late eighteen seventies,
right by the time she passed, and then just you know,
forty five years later, you get Gladys being famous as

(20:27):
a person who is bucking gender and sexuality norms, right,
And I'm like, on the one hand, if you're a
single person living through that, that feels like a very
long time. But in the arc of history, that's a
pretty short time. Branted, there are a lot of other variables, right,
not the same place, et cetera. But it is kind

(20:48):
of an interesting thing to think about. When we talked
about Gladys's story, Gladys Bentley, I wasn't really thinking about
it in terms of like just a few decades earlier. Yeah,
these things we're still playing out, and the really like
direct ramifications of you know, the ways that particularly people

(21:08):
of color that we're seen as outside of any of
those norms were treated was very different and could be
much harsher. Granted, we continue to see you know, violence today.
I don't want to act like it rings fine, but
it is an interesting way that we look at the
ebbs and flows of how things shift forward. We talked
in this episode about like the wave that happens after

(21:30):
that when progress is made and then there's like a
knee job towards a less less fruitful and less tolerant
you know environment. Yeah. I mean my hope always, which
might be naive, is that like each progressive step forward
gets us a little farther, but who knows, who knows?
Trying to be hopeful today on in a world where

(21:52):
it's very hard, Yeah, which makes me feel bad for
the next thing that I wanted to I was going
to say, which is that one of the things that
struck me about the news reporting around Francis Thompson was
how similar some of it felt to news reporting now,

(22:15):
where newspapers were basically manufacturing the idea that there was
this epidemic sort of of cross dressing black people who
were sexually deviant and like dangerous deviants, Yeah, manufacturing an
emergency over it, which just feels like the same thing

(22:39):
happening today. Oh yeah, how like maybe with fewer slurs
and fewer fewer like intentionally incorrect pronouns, not saying that
people are never called the wrong pronouns in reporting. Obviously
that still happens, but like that was one of the
things that was in a lot of these articles was

(23:01):
like intentionally wrong pronouns and putting the pronouns in a
way that to make it sound deviant. But like we're
still living through a time in which reporting has like
manufactured made up an emergency about trans people that just
like it's not real. No, I mean, I would say

(23:26):
that the difference, if you want to keep it hopeful,
is that more people recognize now that that is below knee. Yeah,
and we'll say so than probably would have during Francis
Thompson's time. Yeah, for sure, that's true, same dance, just
different faces. It's like this is I feel like I'm

(23:47):
reading an article about the need for bathroom laws, but
it's no story time. Ago. Don't let drag queens read
books to kids, except you should. You will never have
a more fun day in your life. Those kids will
have a great time. Yeah, I feel so strongly about this. Listen,
I want a drag queen tosried read to me all

(24:08):
the time and read me anything you want. It's great,
it'll be fun. We'll all have a great time. I
will tip you. Yeah, love it, love it. You've never
been to a drag show. Get your to a drag show.
You'll never have more fun in your life. Joy in abundance, Yeah,
we all need it. I agree. I agree, we do
need more joy. We need more joy, just across the

(24:32):
whole spectrum of everything. Yeah. I'm somehow reminded of like
having recently watched a live stream of an all trans
table read of Ocean's eleven. So much fun, love it,
love it anyway, whatever's coming up on your weekend, I

(24:52):
hope there's joy there, And if you're having trouble finding
that joy, I hope you have an eye opportunity to
make a little of it for yourself. And if joy
is not possible, then maybe peace or some kind of
little treat. And I hope everyone is kind to each other.
What in my head it made a flow chart that

(25:13):
was like joy piece ice cream. I mean that could work.
If you can't get to joy, at least get to chill.
And if you can't get to chill, make yourself a
dish of ice cream, then get some ice cream. We
will be back on Monday with a brand new episode,
and we'll have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. Stuff you Missed

(25:40):
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.