January 3, 2025 • 28 mins
Holly and Tracy talk about sewing machines in their lives. Tracy talks about how she thought hangover research would be easy, but it turned out to be quite challenging.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We talked about Helen Blanchard and sewing this week. Yeah,
she made my little heart happy. And also while I
was researching this, I got super nostalgic about sewing things
over the years. One of the things I wanted to mention,
because we talked about it somewhat in the show, was searchers.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And like, we didn't.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Specify in this in the course of the show, but
like she uses the term overlock sometimes when she's referring
to a zigzag stitch because it overlocks the edge of
the fabric. But today an overlock machine is a searcher, right.
But it made me wistful for when the idea of
having a surger in your home was a brand new concept.
(01:01):
And the first home model of searger was the Babylock
EF two five, and that came out in nineteen sixty eight,
which is before I was born.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
But I remember.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
So distinctly when I was about nine or ten, and
I had really started in earnest to read my mother's
copies of threads magazine, and there was an ad in
the back of one of them for a babylock searger,
just the description of how it would sow your seam
and trim away the excess fabrics simultaneously. To me, a
(01:40):
stitching kid sounded about as thrilling and drool and inducing,
as like if an ad for ice cream Sundays. I
was just like, we need this, we need to buy that,
and my mom was just like, no. To be clear,
they were very expensive at that point. Yeah, like now
you can get a pretty good overlock for home use
for a couple hundred bucks, but at the time you
(02:02):
were looking at probably over one thousand dollars in the
nineteen seventy so late. It was a lot of money.
But I wanted one so bad. I mean I harangued
my parents. They did eventually get one, but not until
I was a fully grown adult, right, because here is
why I got a searger. Okay, my mom got a
(02:24):
surger when I was a teenager, so I used hers.
But then when I got to college, I sewed in
the costume shop at the theater there at school because
my work study job was there in the costume shop,
which was great. But then when I graduated from college
(02:47):
and I got my first job job. There was a
little problem, which was that I did not have job.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Job closed. Oh sure, and I was poor as dirt.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So for the first two weeks that I worked as
a receptionist in a hair salon, every night when I
got home from work, I would sew my outfit for
the next day. Wow. And then that's how I built
up my professional wardrobe. And my parents were like, I
don't remember if it fell around my birthday or a
(03:20):
Christmas or something, but they got me a surger kind
of as all of that was happening, because they were
just like, oh, dear Lord, because I needed clothes. Yeah.
I had that surger for exactly how long do you think?
Forty years?
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Thirty?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Okay, because last year it made me a lot of clothes.
And last year, early in the year, I just did
a thing that I think was mathematically impossible. You would
have been if I had gotten it when I was
a teenager thirteen.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I turned it on.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
It had been you know, declining, I knew, and I
turned it on and I hit the pedal and instead
of stitches coming out, smoke came out. Oh no, And
I was like, this is a thirty year old searcher.
No one's gonna want to fix this. Like the one
of the needle hooks was a little bit bent.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I was just like, go with god. Search. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
The sewing machine that I have is probably about that old.
At least it has to be a little older than that.
My mom had a singer, one of those like metal bodied,
very sturdy singers, which is what I learned to sew on.
(04:46):
And at the time she was doing a lot of
sewing and a lot of crafts, and she got an
Elma Nice, which had little cartridges that could do all
kinds of little fancy stitches. Yeah, And so she gave
me the singer and she worked on the Elna. And
then as I got to the age of like moving
(05:07):
out on my own, she wasn't really sewing anymore, and
so we traded sewing machines so that she had the
singer and that she or my dad would use to
do stuff like so my brother's boy Scout patches on,
and then I had this Elena. I still have the
Elna and it still does get some use, like it
(05:30):
needs a tune up at this point and the figuring
out of like where can I take an Elna that's
thirty five years old to get it tuned up. Is
its own thing, and at this point it is mostly
being used to like repair things like Patrick Sew's patches
onto things that he wears at the game conventions that
(05:52):
he works at and stuff. So it's not getting a
ton of use. But it does still work and can
do a number of fancy stitches. I say fancy, and
that they are just not straight line chained wages, the
kinds of things that Blanchard was working on. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(06:14):
I still love sewing. I still sew quite a bit,
not as much as I used to lately just because
I've been too busy. But I have a situation brewing
in the sewing room which is like I need to
start working through the fabric because we're reaching like a
hoarding level of giant towers of fabric.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Oh shab yeah, me, don't work on.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Also, I'm using my platform for personal benefit. Maybe in
thinking about those old Dreads magazines and my mother's various
stitching magazines, I had a flashback to what has become
a little bit of a white whale for me. One year,
in one of those magazines, I thought it was threads,
but I'm not confident so any of my stitchers in
(06:58):
the crowd. You know a lot about old sewing magazines.
There was probably around nineteen eighty or eighty one a
how to thing one year at Christmas that was two
tiny plush koalas and their entire Christmas wardrobe and their
little tiny Duffel bags you could put their wardrobes in.
(07:21):
And I was discussed with it, and I would love
to find a copy of it again. I have searched
and searched and have not found it. YEA, if you
happen to be that one person who's like, oh, I
know what that is, give me a yill, because that
would be amazing. I could talk about sewing forever.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
I feel like there have been big moments in my
life that I associate with what I was sewing at
the time. Like my senior year of high school. I
sewed a lot before that. I made a lot of
my clothes for school, but my senior year I just
decided I wanted to make all retro and vintage fashions
for my school warde that year. And what was probably
(08:03):
the one time my mother ever showed me a ton
of trust. She gave me her credit card and let
me go to the fabric store and just pick out
whatever I wanted or needed for that. Oh wow, that's cool.
And I did, and I stitched up all that stuff,
and I wore a lot of fifties clothes that year.
I love it was very weird in nineteen eighty nine.
(08:23):
I'm into it though, but it was also coming off
of me doing a lot of like very sort of
more punk referencing wardrobe. So one, I think my parents
were probably happy that. They were like, you want a
plaid pinafore?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
What is this about?
Speaker 1 (08:38):
But what they didn't realize is like those could easily
be styled in your direction. Yeah, I had a great time.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
I love those.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
I still think about those clothes and how much I
loved them. Yeah, that's one of the big times. I
had a pretty good wardrobe that year. I just sew
a lot. Anyway, I told you while I was working
on this that I had something funny to tell you.
Oh yeah, I wasn't sure if your funny thing was
about your episode or about my episode. No, it's about mine, okay, Tracy, Yes,
(09:08):
the curse continues.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Because right after Blanchard in Notable Women Encyclopedias comes Helen Blovotsky.
She jump scaring me every time I opened something that's
so funny, didn't even think about it. Was like looking
at one of these encyclopedias that I have like a
(09:32):
physical copy of, and in.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Bold are the words Hellen Blovotsky.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I was a guy there jumping out so funny I
almost dropped the book.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I was like both startled and laughing at the same time.
I love it.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
It's like, good, I'm ready for a poltergeist experience to
happen at my house and it will be Madam Blovotsky
walk in.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
The door being like, why are you try to shocking me?
What is going on?
Speaker 1 (09:59):
He to at the top of the stairs. Yeah, I'm ready,
I'm ready. I feel like she's the curse of all
of my research. Yeah, if she comes up, no matter
what I'm looking at, it'll be like some weird licorice
made in the eighteen hundreds, and it will be like
this was Helen Blelovotski's favorite candy. Like there's no way
(10:19):
to mistave her. She keeps arriving.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Anyway. Funny.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
That is my curse, which I'm actually fine with. I
think she'd be quite interesting if I've ever met her ghost.
I'm down with it. Come on, Helen, come on, we
canna hang out. Helen and Madame Blelovotsky and I are
gonna sew out ghost outfits together. It's gonna be great.
(10:51):
Our New Year's Day episode was about hangovers. Yes, indeed, Well,
let me tell you. Working on this episode gave me
a hangover talk about something I thought was going to
be easy that turned out to be ridiculously hard. I
did not know going into it that the word hangover
to mean the you know, the day after drinking feeling bad,
(11:17):
not knowing that that had not been coined until I
think nineteen oh four is what we said, nineteen oh four,
nineteen oh six, something like that.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Which meant I would not just be able.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
To go into historical sources and put the word hangover
in there and come up with some kind of, you know,
delightful historical treatise on hangovers. I took all of these notes,
but then when I went through all the notes, I
was like, these notes are a mess. And then as
I was trying to make the notes into an episode,
I was like, this episode is a mess. And it
(11:49):
never felt like it was soup yet if that makes
sense in the context of this. And I finally got
to a point where I was like, this is the
length of an episodsode, and I'm not fully satisfied with
where it has arrived, but it's not going to get
any better. So it's things about about hangovers in history,
(12:12):
which I feel like kind of add up to a
fun assortment of stuff. Fun in some context, maybe not
in all of them, but not like the unified overview
of history that I thought it would be going into it, right,
because there isn't one.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
No, it's really like the I mean, that's it.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I mean, I think it's delightful, but you are essentially
trying to make solid matter out of like clouds.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, really true.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
So there were two different books that I read that
is as part of this, and one of them was
the one we specifically mentioned, which was The Hangover, A
Literary and Cultural History, and the other was one that,
like I did not mention because I didn't ultimately end
up using any information from it at all, and both
of them were less concrete than I would have actually
(13:09):
found very helpful. The one that was The Hangover, A
Literary and Cultural History was really interesting, but I wound
up taking almost no notes from it. I think that
was where I where I learned about that. You and
I did a dramatic reading from that seventeenth century the
(13:33):
Contented Cuckold or a Woman's Advocate, like that is where
I first saw reference.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
To that was in this book.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
But yeah, I was like, wow, this is the multi
hundred page book that isn't really approaching the topic in
a way.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
I'm not saying it's bad in any way.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Again, it was very interesting, but like it wasn't approaching
the topic in a way that led to productive research
for me doing on this topic. Right. I think part
of the problem there, right, is that any book that's
kind of ostensibly tackling hangovers really becomes about drinking culture
(14:09):
more than science.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Just it's tricky because then you are doing exactly what
you know where we landed where it's like, okay, well,
so there's this apocryphal thing.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
We might know about, yeah, oh hangovers.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
And since it really seems like, at least based on
everything that I read, that it was kind of in
terms of Europe, it was the early modern period by
the time people were sort of thinking of this as
like a phenomenon that specifically follows drinking.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
In a way that it was like it.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Was an entity now, not just writing to your sister,
to I drank wine last night and now I feel terrible. Anyway,
it was an episode that I went into thinking it
was going to be easy, and it turned out to
be very hard. You accidentally stumbled into a thing in
(15:19):
this episode that was on one of my lists that
I had thought would be an episode that was easy
and turned out to be very hard. Oh yeah, which
was I was going to do some years back, the
history of Brunchy other than that one article, which is
very charming. After that, it just then is like, and
then there were restaurants that started offering brunch, and I'm like, well,
(15:40):
bless the end of that story.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
I buy eggs for nineteen dollars.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah, boy, I do love brunch. I love brunch as well.
This made me think of so many things. One I
had a sudden flash too, if I'm remembering correctly, not
got the book at hand to look it up. PJ
or Roorke's Hangover Cure, which may disgusted you.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Probably some of them really do you to me?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I mean this one isn't as disgusting as many other things.
I do think it's funny that I will drink a
flip without hesitation put the whole egg in my drink.
But I don't want the drink in Tabasco sauce or
the egg in Tabasco sauce, right, Like, I don't know
why if you mixed all of that with brandy, I'd.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Be like, oh, yeah, let's have that, but not just
the egg.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
But no, his if I'm remember incorrectly, was to dump
an entire like one pound package of bacon into a
frying pan, cook the bacon, pull out the bacon, and
then you kind of poach your eggs in the bacon grease,
and then you eat the eggs and bacon, which to
me just sounds like a pretty yummy breakfast, although very
heavy and not super helpful. But yeah, I don't, I don't. Yeah,
(16:58):
I've never had to test it. That does seem a
little heavy. There's like the various hangover cures. I didn't
put this into the episode, but a lot of it
are things that just to me are inherently kind of
gross or extremely pungent. So like, I am definitely not
(17:21):
into a shot glass that has raw egg and Tabasco
sauce and Worcester sure in it, I'm like, no, thanks,
that does not sound like that sounds like it's gonna
make my situation worse. And while I do really like
pickled things and briny things, there are a number of
like pickled fish kind of things. Yes, like we talked
(17:42):
about with like the German hangover breakfast and some of
that like if I wake up in the morning and
I am not feeling good, U pickled herring is not
gonna make me feel any better, and so there some
of them are like is the goal here to make
you feel a lot worse and maybe even be sick,
(18:04):
and then maybe by comparison you might feel better.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Maybe I don't know. I am one of those jerks
that is very lucky that doesn't get hangovers. Well, that
is amazing for it. It's unfair, I understand. Sometimes to
my husband's complete consternation and almost fear, we're on the
rare occasion because I love to drink. I don't like
(18:28):
to get drunk right and like, but there have certainly
been rare occasions where I have overindulged or I started
drinking when I didn't eat and got intoxicated, and he's
convinced the next morning is going to be rough. And
then I wake up chirpy as a bird, and he's
just like, I'm afraid.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I always just chalk it up to hydration, maybe because
I always am drinking a lot of beverages, not just my.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Cocktails.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Even if I'm having a long evening of drinking or
at a party or something, I usually also am having
a soda and more often, even though I hate it,
water yeah, et cetera. So that might just be it.
I've just been staving it off because I'm so thirsty
all the time. I always want many beverages at hand.
(19:24):
My experiences are usually like some kind of accidental miscalculation, like,
for example, when I first moved to Massachusetts, you could
not ship alcohol to Massachusetts, much like now. Well, this
is something I think they're wound up being court cases
about it, because, as I recall, and this is my memory,
(19:47):
so it might not be correct, Massachusetts distilleries and whatnot
were allowed to ship out of Massachusetts, but Massachusetts would
not allow you to ship into Massachusetts. And this is
a matter of interstate commerce, so it wound up in
federal court and the ruling was, no, you can't do
it that way. Before that changed, though, if I wanted
(20:08):
something that could not be gotten locally, I would have
to ship it to friends in Connecticut and get it
from them. And one time what I specifically wanted was
cathead honeysuckle vodka. Yes, not something It's possible that maybe
you can get it in New England. Now, it was
not something that could be procured in New England at
the time, so I had ordered it. My friends who
(20:30):
live in Connecticut had we had connected so that I
could get it, and we made some some cocktails with it,
and then later the same evening another friend started making
champagne cocktails with it. And the next morning I woke
up and was like, why do I feel bad? And
I was like, the amount that I had consumed felt
(20:55):
like a normal, responsible amount to me, and I'd also had,
you know, the amount of other water and other like
I had done the things that I normally do, because
I also like, I don't like to feel bad and
I don't like to be drunk either, And it took
me a minute to be like that other cocktail was
(21:16):
made with champagne and vodka. Right, not with like vodka
and something not an alcohol. And the worst part of
that was it was a day that I needed to
get up and get on an airplane and fly to
Atlanta for work reasons. And I remember being at the
airport and I had gotten through security, and I was like,
(21:37):
my head hurts and my body feels bad, and I
feel very anxious. And I went to one of the
newsstands and I bought one of those little little things
of cheerios that comes in a little plastic thing.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
I did not get milk.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
I just had like dry cheerios and ginger ale, and
then I felt somewhat better before I had to get
on the airplane. So yeah, yeah, I know what I
would do if I gotta hangover.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
I like that you brought up Furnett. Yeah, you said
you had lots of thoughts about Fornette. I do, and
it's mostly because nowadays Furnet is like a kind of
jokingly referred to as it's one of the things that
gets referred to as the bartender's handshake, like that bar
staff loves to do shots of Fornett together. Fine, and
(22:35):
I don't I don't know if it's because of its
connotations as a hangover cure, or if it's just one
of those things that it is a very uniquely flavored drink.
And Amorrow's in general, right, are a little bitie they
have They're not necessarily super palatable to everyone because they
are not even though it's technically a liquor, They're not
(22:58):
sweet the way you would think of like fruity liquor.
They have that herbal bite to them, and so I
think some of it is a little bit of a
dare factor, right, like, yeah, oh I can do three
shots of fur net, no problem. I love this, right,
but it just makes me chuckle. Yeah, I keep it
on the back bar. I don't use it all that much.
Perhaps I should, Yeah, you never know. I was just
(23:20):
happy that you wanted to look at the ABC's of
uh right. I love old cocktail books. I love them.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I so when I asked you if you had that,
because I U there's a lot of stuff you can
just find old scans of and I could not find
a scan of that when I was looking, and I
thought that you might have it, and so the first
thing that I looked for, because it's in alphabetical order,
I looked under Bee for bloody, and it was there
was no thing there, and so then I looked. I
(23:52):
was like, maybe it's under Mary Kamma bloody. So I
looked under em not there, and I think I found
it under Red Mary searching the book for tomato.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Those are always weird. It's always funny. One of the
things I love about old cocktail books specifically like the
ones that are now famous in the cocktail world, right
like Jerry Thomas's book that we've talked about on the
show before, and like h Harry CRATIXX Savoy Cocktail book.
Those are like the heavy hitters, right, Like those are
like the godfathers of modern cocktail culture. And it always
(24:26):
tickles me now that I have put a cocktail book
into the world, which is very, very nerve wracking for me,
and I'm like, everybody's gonna think I sting and I
don't know what I'm doing. It's always good to go
back and look at these and find cocktails that are
literally like, I don't know, throw whiskey and cream in
a glass and it's like, wait a minute, You're like,
(24:49):
you're like the Apex dude, Like some of them are
really abysmal. That is an actual drink that's in the
Savoy Cocktail Book. I actually came up on an episode
criminally recently called a Cowboy, and it's literally two thirds
whiskey one third cream. That doesn't sound the least bit
delightful to me.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
What is that?
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yeah, it also seems like it wouldn't incorporate Well, it
sounds gross. Yeah, it sounds icky.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
I mean that.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Being said, sometimes those weird simple things will actually be
not too bad. But I have made a lot of
these older cocktails. Yeah, just to be like, that doesn't
have a lot of stuff we'd included in a cocktail today,
I wonder what this tastes. Nope, it's not so great
or surprisingly good going all over the map. But I'm like, well,
I guess if these guys would do throw a whiskey
(25:40):
and cream in a glass, I don't have to feel
too guilty if somebody doesn't like something. They're not over
there doing this, you know, being like, let's infuse a
vodka with a tea bag like, which is one of
the one of my favorite things to do on the planet.
I was also gonna say, for people like me that
don't like bloody Mary's because we don't enjoy tomato. I
(26:04):
will occasionally. I did it one of our early seasons
of Criminalia, but I now occasionally will make it. I
do a bloody Mary with beat juice instead of tomato juice.
Very different flavor profile. Obviously, it's a good bit sweeter.
It doesn't have that like acid note. I quite like it.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, but if you don't like beats, you're also out
of luck.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, I don't know. I initially did not like the
tomato juice aspect, and so the first couple of times
that I tried a bloody Mary, I was like, no,
no thanks.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
And then I had one that was made with like.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Really really fresh, like it might have been made with
tomatoes there at the bar lemon or a tomato juice,
and I was like, oh, this is actually is a
different situation, damn. And so yeah, that's uh. They grew
on me in that way. I guess we didn't put
(27:04):
a please drink responsibly note at the end of the
hangover episode because I felt like it was obvious. We've
been talking about feeling terrible and various negative health effects
of alcohol, but since this episode has been more about
the things we enjoyed drinking.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yea, yeah, I always drink responsibly.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
Yeah. And don't don't drink and drive, don't do that
all of that. Don't rub dog hair in a wound. Yeah,
don't don't burn a dog hair and think you're gonna
prevent Rabi's.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
That's definitely it's not how that works. No, it does.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
I'll also just say I don't know if the next
time that New Year's Day rolls around is a day
that we have a podcast episode coming out, if we'll
have a fun, contextually relevant episode to do uh, because
I Uh, one year we did Day Planners. That was
your episode, and I thought that was a masterful stroke
(28:01):
of something to do on New Year's Day, and then
hangovers turned out to be really difficult. We'll think of something,
we may think of something, or there may just be
a random thing that has nothing to do with anything.
We'll see. It's in the future. Who knows, who knows
what will happen in the future. Happy New Year, everybody,
(28:23):
whatever's coming your way tomorrow, I hope it is great.
We will have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We'll have something
brand new on Monday. And if you haven't, you can
subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever
else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
(28:44):
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.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We talked about Helen Blanchard and sewing this week. Yeah,
she made my little heart happy. And also while I
was researching this, I got super nostalgic about sewing things
over the years. One of the things I wanted to mention,
because we talked about it somewhat in the show, was searchers.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And like, we didn't.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Specify in this in the course of the show, but
like she uses the term overlock sometimes when she's referring
to a zigzag stitch because it overlocks the edge of
the fabric. But today an overlock machine is a searcher, right.
But it made me wistful for when the idea of
having a surger in your home was a brand new concept.
(01:01):
And the first home model of searger was the Babylock
EF two five, and that came out in nineteen sixty eight,
which is before I was born.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
But I remember.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
So distinctly when I was about nine or ten, and
I had really started in earnest to read my mother's
copies of threads magazine, and there was an ad in
the back of one of them for a babylock searger,
just the description of how it would sow your seam
and trim away the excess fabrics simultaneously. To me, a
(01:40):
stitching kid sounded about as thrilling and drool and inducing,
as like if an ad for ice cream Sundays. I
was just like, we need this, we need to buy that,
and my mom was just like, no. To be clear,
they were very expensive at that point. Yeah, like now
you can get a pretty good overlock for home use
for a couple hundred bucks, but at the time you
(02:02):
were looking at probably over one thousand dollars in the
nineteen seventy so late. It was a lot of money.
But I wanted one so bad. I mean I harangued
my parents. They did eventually get one, but not until
I was a fully grown adult, right, because here is
why I got a searger. Okay, my mom got a
(02:24):
surger when I was a teenager, so I used hers.
But then when I got to college, I sewed in
the costume shop at the theater there at school because
my work study job was there in the costume shop,
which was great. But then when I graduated from college
(02:47):
and I got my first job job. There was a
little problem, which was that I did not have job.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Job closed. Oh sure, and I was poor as dirt.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
So for the first two weeks that I worked as
a receptionist in a hair salon, every night when I
got home from work, I would sew my outfit for
the next day. Wow. And then that's how I built
up my professional wardrobe. And my parents were like, I
don't remember if it fell around my birthday or a
(03:20):
Christmas or something, but they got me a surger kind
of as all of that was happening, because they were
just like, oh, dear Lord, because I needed clothes. Yeah.
I had that surger for exactly how long do you think?
Forty years?
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Thirty?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Okay, because last year it made me a lot of clothes.
And last year, early in the year, I just did
a thing that I think was mathematically impossible. You would
have been if I had gotten it when I was
a teenager thirteen.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I turned it on.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
It had been you know, declining, I knew, and I
turned it on and I hit the pedal and instead
of stitches coming out, smoke came out. Oh no, And
I was like, this is a thirty year old searcher.
No one's gonna want to fix this. Like the one
of the needle hooks was a little bit bent.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I was just like, go with god. Search. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
The sewing machine that I have is probably about that old.
At least it has to be a little older than that.
My mom had a singer, one of those like metal bodied,
very sturdy singers, which is what I learned to sew on.
(04:46):
And at the time she was doing a lot of
sewing and a lot of crafts, and she got an
Elma Nice, which had little cartridges that could do all
kinds of little fancy stitches. Yeah, And so she gave
me the singer and she worked on the Elna. And
then as I got to the age of like moving
(05:07):
out on my own, she wasn't really sewing anymore, and
so we traded sewing machines so that she had the
singer and that she or my dad would use to
do stuff like so my brother's boy Scout patches on,
and then I had this Elena. I still have the
Elna and it still does get some use, like it
(05:30):
needs a tune up at this point and the figuring
out of like where can I take an Elna that's
thirty five years old to get it tuned up. Is
its own thing, and at this point it is mostly
being used to like repair things like Patrick Sew's patches
onto things that he wears at the game conventions that
(05:52):
he works at and stuff. So it's not getting a
ton of use. But it does still work and can
do a number of fancy stitches. I say fancy, and
that they are just not straight line chained wages, the
kinds of things that Blanchard was working on. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(06:14):
I still love sewing. I still sew quite a bit,
not as much as I used to lately just because
I've been too busy. But I have a situation brewing
in the sewing room which is like I need to
start working through the fabric because we're reaching like a
hoarding level of giant towers of fabric.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Oh shab yeah, me, don't work on.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Also, I'm using my platform for personal benefit. Maybe in
thinking about those old Dreads magazines and my mother's various
stitching magazines, I had a flashback to what has become
a little bit of a white whale for me. One year,
in one of those magazines, I thought it was threads,
but I'm not confident so any of my stitchers in
(06:58):
the crowd. You know a lot about old sewing magazines.
There was probably around nineteen eighty or eighty one a
how to thing one year at Christmas that was two
tiny plush koalas and their entire Christmas wardrobe and their
little tiny Duffel bags you could put their wardrobes in.
(07:21):
And I was discussed with it, and I would love
to find a copy of it again. I have searched
and searched and have not found it. YEA, if you
happen to be that one person who's like, oh, I
know what that is, give me a yill, because that
would be amazing. I could talk about sewing forever.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
I feel like there have been big moments in my
life that I associate with what I was sewing at
the time. Like my senior year of high school. I
sewed a lot before that. I made a lot of
my clothes for school, but my senior year I just
decided I wanted to make all retro and vintage fashions
for my school warde that year. And what was probably
(08:03):
the one time my mother ever showed me a ton
of trust. She gave me her credit card and let
me go to the fabric store and just pick out
whatever I wanted or needed for that. Oh wow, that's cool.
And I did, and I stitched up all that stuff,
and I wore a lot of fifties clothes that year.
I love it was very weird in nineteen eighty nine.
(08:23):
I'm into it though, but it was also coming off
of me doing a lot of like very sort of
more punk referencing wardrobe. So one, I think my parents
were probably happy that. They were like, you want a
plaid pinafore?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
What is this about?
Speaker 1 (08:38):
But what they didn't realize is like those could easily
be styled in your direction. Yeah, I had a great time.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
I love those.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
I still think about those clothes and how much I
loved them. Yeah, that's one of the big times. I
had a pretty good wardrobe that year. I just sew
a lot. Anyway, I told you while I was working
on this that I had something funny to tell you.
Oh yeah, I wasn't sure if your funny thing was
about your episode or about my episode. No, it's about mine, okay, Tracy, Yes,
(09:08):
the curse continues.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Because right after Blanchard in Notable Women Encyclopedias comes Helen Blovotsky.
She jump scaring me every time I opened something that's
so funny, didn't even think about it. Was like looking
at one of these encyclopedias that I have like a
(09:32):
physical copy of, and in.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Bold are the words Hellen Blovotsky.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I was a guy there jumping out so funny I
almost dropped the book.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I was like both startled and laughing at the same time.
I love it.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
It's like, good, I'm ready for a poltergeist experience to
happen at my house and it will be Madam Blovotsky
walk in.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
The door being like, why are you try to shocking me?
What is going on?
Speaker 1 (09:59):
He to at the top of the stairs. Yeah, I'm ready,
I'm ready. I feel like she's the curse of all
of my research. Yeah, if she comes up, no matter
what I'm looking at, it'll be like some weird licorice
made in the eighteen hundreds, and it will be like
this was Helen Blelovotski's favorite candy. Like there's no way
(10:19):
to mistave her. She keeps arriving.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Anyway. Funny.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
That is my curse, which I'm actually fine with. I
think she'd be quite interesting if I've ever met her ghost.
I'm down with it. Come on, Helen, come on, we
canna hang out. Helen and Madame Blelovotsky and I are
gonna sew out ghost outfits together. It's gonna be great.
(10:51):
Our New Year's Day episode was about hangovers. Yes, indeed, Well,
let me tell you. Working on this episode gave me
a hangover talk about something I thought was going to
be easy that turned out to be ridiculously hard. I
did not know going into it that the word hangover
to mean the you know, the day after drinking feeling bad,
(11:17):
not knowing that that had not been coined until I
think nineteen oh four is what we said, nineteen oh four,
nineteen oh six, something like that.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Which meant I would not just be able.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
To go into historical sources and put the word hangover
in there and come up with some kind of, you know,
delightful historical treatise on hangovers. I took all of these notes,
but then when I went through all the notes, I
was like, these notes are a mess. And then as
I was trying to make the notes into an episode,
I was like, this episode is a mess. And it
(11:49):
never felt like it was soup yet if that makes
sense in the context of this. And I finally got
to a point where I was like, this is the
length of an episodsode, and I'm not fully satisfied with
where it has arrived, but it's not going to get
any better. So it's things about about hangovers in history,
(12:12):
which I feel like kind of add up to a
fun assortment of stuff. Fun in some context, maybe not
in all of them, but not like the unified overview
of history that I thought it would be going into it, right,
because there isn't one.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
No, it's really like the I mean, that's it.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I mean, I think it's delightful, but you are essentially
trying to make solid matter out of like clouds.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, really true.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
So there were two different books that I read that
is as part of this, and one of them was
the one we specifically mentioned, which was The Hangover, A
Literary and Cultural History, and the other was one that,
like I did not mention because I didn't ultimately end
up using any information from it at all, and both
of them were less concrete than I would have actually
(13:09):
found very helpful. The one that was The Hangover, A
Literary and Cultural History was really interesting, but I wound
up taking almost no notes from it. I think that
was where I where I learned about that. You and
I did a dramatic reading from that seventeenth century the
(13:33):
Contented Cuckold or a Woman's Advocate, like that is where
I first saw reference.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
To that was in this book.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
But yeah, I was like, wow, this is the multi
hundred page book that isn't really approaching the topic in
a way.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
I'm not saying it's bad in any way.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Again, it was very interesting, but like it wasn't approaching
the topic in a way that led to productive research
for me doing on this topic. Right. I think part
of the problem there, right, is that any book that's
kind of ostensibly tackling hangovers really becomes about drinking culture
(14:09):
more than science.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Just it's tricky because then you are doing exactly what
you know where we landed where it's like, okay, well,
so there's this apocryphal thing.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
We might know about, yeah, oh hangovers.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
And since it really seems like, at least based on
everything that I read, that it was kind of in
terms of Europe, it was the early modern period by
the time people were sort of thinking of this as
like a phenomenon that specifically follows drinking.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
In a way that it was like it.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Was an entity now, not just writing to your sister,
to I drank wine last night and now I feel terrible. Anyway,
it was an episode that I went into thinking it
was going to be easy, and it turned out to
be very hard. You accidentally stumbled into a thing in
(15:19):
this episode that was on one of my lists that
I had thought would be an episode that was easy
and turned out to be very hard. Oh yeah, which
was I was going to do some years back, the
history of Brunchy other than that one article, which is
very charming. After that, it just then is like, and
then there were restaurants that started offering brunch, and I'm like, well,
(15:40):
bless the end of that story.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
I buy eggs for nineteen dollars.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah, boy, I do love brunch. I love brunch as well.
This made me think of so many things. One I
had a sudden flash too, if I'm remembering correctly, not
got the book at hand to look it up. PJ
or Roorke's Hangover Cure, which may disgusted you.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Probably some of them really do you to me?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I mean this one isn't as disgusting as many other things.
I do think it's funny that I will drink a
flip without hesitation put the whole egg in my drink.
But I don't want the drink in Tabasco sauce or
the egg in Tabasco sauce, right, Like, I don't know
why if you mixed all of that with brandy, I'd.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Be like, oh, yeah, let's have that, but not just
the egg.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
But no, his if I'm remember incorrectly, was to dump
an entire like one pound package of bacon into a
frying pan, cook the bacon, pull out the bacon, and
then you kind of poach your eggs in the bacon grease,
and then you eat the eggs and bacon, which to
me just sounds like a pretty yummy breakfast, although very
heavy and not super helpful. But yeah, I don't, I don't. Yeah,
(16:58):
I've never had to test it. That does seem a
little heavy. There's like the various hangover cures. I didn't
put this into the episode, but a lot of it
are things that just to me are inherently kind of
gross or extremely pungent. So like, I am definitely not
(17:21):
into a shot glass that has raw egg and Tabasco
sauce and Worcester sure in it, I'm like, no, thanks,
that does not sound like that sounds like it's gonna
make my situation worse. And while I do really like
pickled things and briny things, there are a number of
like pickled fish kind of things. Yes, like we talked
(17:42):
about with like the German hangover breakfast and some of
that like if I wake up in the morning and
I am not feeling good, U pickled herring is not
gonna make me feel any better, and so there some
of them are like is the goal here to make
you feel a lot worse and maybe even be sick,
(18:04):
and then maybe by comparison you might feel better.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Maybe I don't know. I am one of those jerks
that is very lucky that doesn't get hangovers. Well, that
is amazing for it. It's unfair, I understand. Sometimes to
my husband's complete consternation and almost fear, we're on the
rare occasion because I love to drink. I don't like
(18:28):
to get drunk right and like, but there have certainly
been rare occasions where I have overindulged or I started
drinking when I didn't eat and got intoxicated, and he's
convinced the next morning is going to be rough. And
then I wake up chirpy as a bird, and he's
just like, I'm afraid.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I always just chalk it up to hydration, maybe because
I always am drinking a lot of beverages, not just my.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Cocktails.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Even if I'm having a long evening of drinking or
at a party or something, I usually also am having
a soda and more often, even though I hate it,
water yeah, et cetera. So that might just be it.
I've just been staving it off because I'm so thirsty
all the time. I always want many beverages at hand.
(19:24):
My experiences are usually like some kind of accidental miscalculation, like,
for example, when I first moved to Massachusetts, you could
not ship alcohol to Massachusetts, much like now. Well, this
is something I think they're wound up being court cases
about it, because, as I recall, and this is my memory,
(19:47):
so it might not be correct, Massachusetts distilleries and whatnot
were allowed to ship out of Massachusetts, but Massachusetts would
not allow you to ship into Massachusetts. And this is
a matter of interstate commerce, so it wound up in
federal court and the ruling was, no, you can't do
it that way. Before that changed, though, if I wanted
(20:08):
something that could not be gotten locally, I would have
to ship it to friends in Connecticut and get it
from them. And one time what I specifically wanted was
cathead honeysuckle vodka. Yes, not something It's possible that maybe
you can get it in New England. Now, it was
not something that could be procured in New England at
the time, so I had ordered it. My friends who
(20:30):
live in Connecticut had we had connected so that I
could get it, and we made some some cocktails with it,
and then later the same evening another friend started making
champagne cocktails with it. And the next morning I woke
up and was like, why do I feel bad? And
I was like, the amount that I had consumed felt
(20:55):
like a normal, responsible amount to me, and I'd also had,
you know, the amount of other water and other like
I had done the things that I normally do, because
I also like, I don't like to feel bad and
I don't like to be drunk either, And it took
me a minute to be like that other cocktail was
(21:16):
made with champagne and vodka. Right, not with like vodka
and something not an alcohol. And the worst part of
that was it was a day that I needed to
get up and get on an airplane and fly to
Atlanta for work reasons. And I remember being at the
airport and I had gotten through security, and I was like,
(21:37):
my head hurts and my body feels bad, and I
feel very anxious. And I went to one of the
newsstands and I bought one of those little little things
of cheerios that comes in a little plastic thing.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
I did not get milk.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
I just had like dry cheerios and ginger ale, and
then I felt somewhat better before I had to get
on the airplane. So yeah, yeah, I know what I
would do if I gotta hangover.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
I like that you brought up Furnett. Yeah, you said
you had lots of thoughts about Fornette. I do, and
it's mostly because nowadays Furnet is like a kind of
jokingly referred to as it's one of the things that
gets referred to as the bartender's handshake, like that bar
staff loves to do shots of Fornett together. Fine, and
(22:35):
I don't I don't know if it's because of its
connotations as a hangover cure, or if it's just one
of those things that it is a very uniquely flavored drink.
And Amorrow's in general, right, are a little bitie they
have They're not necessarily super palatable to everyone because they
are not even though it's technically a liquor, They're not
(22:58):
sweet the way you would think of like fruity liquor.
They have that herbal bite to them, and so I
think some of it is a little bit of a
dare factor, right, like, yeah, oh I can do three
shots of fur net, no problem. I love this, right,
but it just makes me chuckle. Yeah, I keep it
on the back bar. I don't use it all that much.
Perhaps I should, Yeah, you never know. I was just
(23:20):
happy that you wanted to look at the ABC's of
uh right. I love old cocktail books. I love them.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I so when I asked you if you had that,
because I U there's a lot of stuff you can
just find old scans of and I could not find
a scan of that when I was looking, and I
thought that you might have it, and so the first
thing that I looked for, because it's in alphabetical order,
I looked under Bee for bloody, and it was there
was no thing there, and so then I looked. I
(23:52):
was like, maybe it's under Mary Kamma bloody. So I
looked under em not there, and I think I found
it under Red Mary searching the book for tomato.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Those are always weird. It's always funny. One of the
things I love about old cocktail books specifically like the
ones that are now famous in the cocktail world, right
like Jerry Thomas's book that we've talked about on the
show before, and like h Harry CRATIXX Savoy Cocktail book.
Those are like the heavy hitters, right, Like those are
like the godfathers of modern cocktail culture. And it always
(24:26):
tickles me now that I have put a cocktail book
into the world, which is very, very nerve wracking for me,
and I'm like, everybody's gonna think I sting and I
don't know what I'm doing. It's always good to go
back and look at these and find cocktails that are
literally like, I don't know, throw whiskey and cream in
a glass and it's like, wait a minute, You're like,
(24:49):
you're like the Apex dude, Like some of them are
really abysmal. That is an actual drink that's in the
Savoy Cocktail Book. I actually came up on an episode
criminally recently called a Cowboy, and it's literally two thirds
whiskey one third cream. That doesn't sound the least bit
delightful to me.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
What is that?
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yeah, it also seems like it wouldn't incorporate Well, it
sounds gross. Yeah, it sounds icky.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
I mean that.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Being said, sometimes those weird simple things will actually be
not too bad. But I have made a lot of
these older cocktails. Yeah, just to be like, that doesn't
have a lot of stuff we'd included in a cocktail today,
I wonder what this tastes. Nope, it's not so great
or surprisingly good going all over the map. But I'm like, well,
I guess if these guys would do throw a whiskey
(25:40):
and cream in a glass, I don't have to feel
too guilty if somebody doesn't like something. They're not over
there doing this, you know, being like, let's infuse a
vodka with a tea bag like, which is one of
the one of my favorite things to do on the planet.
I was also gonna say, for people like me that
don't like bloody Mary's because we don't enjoy tomato. I
(26:04):
will occasionally. I did it one of our early seasons
of Criminalia, but I now occasionally will make it. I
do a bloody Mary with beat juice instead of tomato juice.
Very different flavor profile. Obviously, it's a good bit sweeter.
It doesn't have that like acid note. I quite like it.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, but if you don't like beats, you're also out
of luck.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, I don't know. I initially did not like the
tomato juice aspect, and so the first couple of times
that I tried a bloody Mary, I was like, no,
no thanks.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
And then I had one that was made with like.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Really really fresh, like it might have been made with
tomatoes there at the bar lemon or a tomato juice,
and I was like, oh, this is actually is a
different situation, damn. And so yeah, that's uh. They grew
on me in that way. I guess we didn't put
(27:04):
a please drink responsibly note at the end of the
hangover episode because I felt like it was obvious. We've
been talking about feeling terrible and various negative health effects
of alcohol, but since this episode has been more about
the things we enjoyed drinking.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yea, yeah, I always drink responsibly.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
Yeah. And don't don't drink and drive, don't do that
all of that. Don't rub dog hair in a wound. Yeah,
don't don't burn a dog hair and think you're gonna
prevent Rabi's.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
That's definitely it's not how that works. No, it does.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
I'll also just say I don't know if the next
time that New Year's Day rolls around is a day
that we have a podcast episode coming out, if we'll
have a fun, contextually relevant episode to do uh, because
I Uh, one year we did Day Planners. That was
your episode, and I thought that was a masterful stroke
(28:01):
of something to do on New Year's Day, and then
hangovers turned out to be really difficult. We'll think of something,
we may think of something, or there may just be
a random thing that has nothing to do with anything.
We'll see. It's in the future. Who knows, who knows
what will happen in the future. Happy New Year, everybody,
(28:23):
whatever's coming your way tomorrow, I hope it is great.
We will have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We'll have something
brand new on Monday. And if you haven't, you can
subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever
else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
(28:44):
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.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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